Vegetable oils: Friend or foe?

[00:00:00] Cate Shanahan: This is what everybody used to be, you know, a hundred years ago. So it’s not like this rarefied state of impossibility that, you know, nobody can achieve. And, you know, the thing is that the fear of cholesterol keeps us away from some of the most convenient foods.

[00:00:22] Peter Bowes: Confusion over which diet is the best for us and what to eat as part of that diet never seems to go away. Vegetables are good for us, right? But vegetable oils? Not so much? In fact, what are vegetable oils and why are they, for better or worse, such a significant part of what we eat? Doctor Cate Shanahan is a physician and scientist and the author of the new book, Dark Calories How Vegetable Oils Destroy Our Health and How We Get It Back. Hello again, I’m Peter Bowes. Welcome to the Live Long and Master Aging podcast, where we explore the science and stories behind Human longevity. Doctor Shanahan, it’s good to talk to you.

[00:01:09] Cate Shanahan: Good to talk to you. Thank you for inviting me, Peter.

[00:01:11] Peter Bowes: It’s my pleasure. Is that a fair assessment? We are, it seems, constantly in this sea of confusion when trying to figure out what diet is best for us. We hear conflicting views on one food type from one so-called expert, and then we think, well, we shouldn’t eat that. But then, lo and behold, the next day you hear that it’s actually quite good for you. So I think, as a general thought, there’s a lot of confusion out there, isn’t there? 

[00:01:39] Cate Shanahan: Absolutely. And I’m sure from the beginning of time people have been arguing about which food is better. But for the past 70 years, the confusion has been accelerated by the intentional injection of some falsehoods. And that’s one of the reasons that I call my book ‘Dark Calories’dark, because there are truths and realities that have been hidden from us, and more importantly, hidden from medical science that will help make everything very crystal clear.

[00:02:11] Peter Bowes: Well, you’ve just preempted my next question, which is going to be about the title of the book, Dark Calories. When I first saw the title, I was thinking, hmm, never quite heard that expression, that description of calories, but it is almost the the sinister side of calories, the use of the word dark that you’re trying to highlight.

[00:02:28] Cate Shanahan: Absolutely. Because, you know, I want to share that emotion that I’ve had since I first discovered this disinformation that was fed to me. I discovered it about 20 years ago, and I have been writing books since then because it is outrageous and there’s no excuse for it. It’s making people sick, it’s injecting confusion, and I want to start fixing it today.

[00:02:55] Peter Bowes: Well, before we dive into that, let’s just talk a little bit about you and your background. You’ve referred to at least your thoughts behind this. You’re a physician. You’re a scientist as well. You’re a prolific writer. Could you just encapsulate your career to date, maybe without going through the full biography and just essentially tell me what brought you to this point?

[00:03:15] Cate Shanahan: Yeah. Well, a key part of it is that before I went to medical school, I studied biochemistry at Cornell. But I had thought I left all that behind me when I went to medical school in order to understand the root cause of, of basically conditions that my doctors couldn’t explain what was wrong with me when as an athlete, I kept having all these recurring injuries and the hip pain and shin splints and problems with my feet. A lot of itises, no one could explain it. Hopefully my hope was I would get to the root of it in medical school. Those hopes were dashed because, well, if you’ve been to the doctor, you probably know that your doctor doesn’t really talk about what causes problems, recurring chronic problems. They just name it, identify it, and then say, here, do these stretches, do this procedure, take these drugs for it. So as an early practicing physician, I was very upset. Dissatisfied because a third of my practice was composed pretty much of just almost mindless but certainly monotonous refilling drugs for high blood pressure and high cholesterol, and managing people’s problems with more drugs like migraine medications, antidepressants, not really being able to make them feel better, and in many cases, wondering if the drugs were helping at all because blood pressure meds, cholesterol meds, it didn’t have the promised effect of keeping people from getting heart attack strokes, staying out of the hospital and port and stuff like that. So I was I was a seeker at that point in my career. I was I felt like something was missing And then I had no idea where to look for it. Of course, because you don’t know what you don’t know. And so it wasn’t until kind of the worst moment in the worst thing that ever happened to me happened, but it turned out to be a blessing in disguise. And that was I got really sick. So sick, and was a medical mystery myself that I got to the point where since medicine had also failed me, I was looking around for new sources of new thoughts, new information, and thanks to my husband’s, strong opinions about the amount of sugar I was eating. He suggested I start looking into nutrition and diet, and that was where I found this whole world of information that had been hidden from from me and was hidden from from all my fellow practitioners and continues to be hidden to this day about the truth, about fats. It really hinges around fats. There’s a lot of like you mentioned, confusion in general, but it all started with this idea that saturated fat was going to clog our arteries and give us heart attacks. And that’s another reason why I call it dark calories, because the, the the calories that were actually that causing most harm and that still are, are unknown to most doctors. We don’t know what our patients are eating. Most people themselves have no idea that 30% of their daily calories are coming from these collections of vegetable oils that I call The Hateful Eight.

[00:06:30] Peter Bowes: It’s interesting to me that you have gone on a very similar journey to, I think that what we all experience, and that is a realization at some point in our lives that what we once thought was was incorrect, and that the diet that we were eating was probably doing us a lot of harm where we actually thought we were doing the right things. I remember back to the days in the 1970s of margarine and and butter and that debate that we went through. But I suppose the advantage you have, of course, is your training, your medical training, your scientific training to try to make sense of this. And that’s exactly what you’re trying to do in this book. So let’s dive into it. Let’s talk. You mentioned vegetable oils. I mentioned the idea that we think, well, vegetables are healthy. So well, vegetable oils, they can’t be too bad for us. Can you. Maybe just start by breaking it all down. What are vegetable oils and what is, in your view, so bad about them?

[00:07:28] Cate Shanahan: So the term just dates back to the historical comparison between animal versus plant based lamp oil. Right? It was whale oil versus new coming into new usages like cottonseed oil and oils that were basically industrial byproducts that had a low cost. So cotton seeds were of no use to the textile industry. There were heaps of cotton seeds just piling up and rotting around mills and chemists knew that there was some fat in there that would that would probably burn if they could figure out how to get it out. And they, you know, started using the oil for candles. They did a few more chemical things to it, turned it into soap and so that was the beginning of the term vegetable, just as a contrast to plant. It wasn’t really intentionally designed to, you know, make us think they were healthy, but they didn’t change the term, because it kind of has that little glow. They pump up the confusion by putting pictures of, like, tomatoes and string beans and broccoli. That’s certainly not what’s in vegetable oil. So what is it really? Well, a more proper term would be seed oil because it really comes from seeds. And that itself doesn’t explain why it’s bad, because it’s not like seeds are bad for us. And it’s not like there haven’t been healthy oils made from seeds like sesame. So it really comes down to the chemistry. That’s why the term I had to create a term to describe the problematic oils. So I call them The Hateful Eight because they’re not good for us. And there’s eight of them, and I should probably list them out right now. How’s that?

[00:09:17] Peter Bowes: I was about to ask you. Yes. Give me some examples.

[00:09:20] Cate Shanahan: So there’s corn, canola or rapeseed in the UK and cotton seed, soy, sunflower, safflower those are the most common in the grocery store. Then the next two are mostly in restaurants. And that’s rice bran and grapeseed. And if you memorize those eight and start avoiding them, that is truly the one step that’s going to get you 80% of the way to health. And I say this not lightly, you know. You know, this is these are these. And we’re going to get into this. But the, the they’re going to we’re going to get into why I’m about to make this claim, but the claim I’m making is that they are the most toxic thing that that has ever been considered food, that has ever been called food. It should not be called food. And yet it is. And 80% of our fat calories are coming from these things. So that’s why I say it’s the most important first step, because, goodness gracious, we should not be ingesting toxins. These things are poison. They should not be considered food, and they only are considered food because they were never subjected to testing because of their history dating back to usage in the food supply prior to the creation of any food standards whatsoever. We had zero food standards in this country anyway. Around the 1900s, I mean, literally people were putting arsenic and borax in our food supply because it made it look better. They made it taste better in some cases. And that was also literal poison.

[00:10:55] Peter Bowes: So how widely are these oils being used right now in the – and I appreciate, by the way, the British American translations that you’ve just given me. I’m actually in Los Angeles, but it doesn’t sound like that. I appreciate that, but I know we have a lot of people watching and listening to this in, in not only in the UK but around Europe as well. So it is good. It’s a problem we all face these days, isn’t it, in terms of the language that we use, because one thing means one thing in the United States and something else to the rest of the world. But let me ask you, where are we experiencing these oils? I suppose common sense would tell me that this is obviously the food that generally were not preparing for ourselves.

[00:11:36] Cate Shanahan: Correct and of course, you know, a lot of people, when I have this conversations with folks, they’ll tell me, oh, don’t worry, Doctor Cate, I only cook with olive oil or something like that. And you know, that’s great that you’re doing that. But that is a tiny portion of the way that these oils seep into our bodies. So for starters, it’s the junk food, all things that you would consider junk food, like chips and crackers and many candies you know, and sweet tasting muffins and donuts, stuff like that. We often hear that those are bad for us because they, you know, they do have fat. But we often hear health experts claiming that they are high in saturated fat and animal fat, and that is simply not true. You look on the label yourself and you’ll see vegetable oil. They often will say one or more of the following vegetable oils, right? So vegetable oil itself is not a specific oil, but it’s another term to watch out for because if you see it, it means you got to look for The Hateful Eight. But yeah. So there’s all that, what you would consider junk food. But then beyond that stuff that’s billed as healthy, like you can go to what is considered a healthy grocery store, you know, the upscale grocery stores that charge you more and all of their frozen foods and ready to eat foods and soups and even salad dressings and sauces and so on, will contain these oils. And then, of course, the restaurants, the vast, vast majority of restaurants now are not using olive oil. They’re not even using butter. They’re using things like butter, oil or, you know, soy oil, or they’ll tell you they’re using olive oil because they’re using an olive oil blend. And what’s in a blend? Maybe 1% olive oil, 99% soy. And they’re sneaking it everywhere. 

[00:13:28] Peter Bowes: Right. And so why are they doing this? Is it out of ignorance about what these oils are potentially doing to us, or is there an economic factor to it?

[00:13:37] Cate Shanahan: There’s both. I mean, they’re so pervasive, right? This is kind of like a health disaster. And like any disaster, say, the Titanic. It wasn’t just one thing. You know, it wasn’t just that they didn’t have enough lifeboats. It wasn’t just that the guy didn’t have his binoculars. There were lots of things. So here the drivers, there’s so many drivers. So just to list a few cost, it’s cheaper. Second, it has a higher smoke point. What does that mean? Nothing to your health, but it doesn’t really mean anything to your health. It means that you can set it in a deep fryer at a high temperature. Get the food cooked fast in a busy restaurant. Very important to deep fryers, not important to health. It also doesn’t contain allergens. Nobody’s allergic to it. It suits the vegans and vegetarians just fine, unlike tallow and butter. And it has a neutral flavor, so you can use it in any cuisine. If you’re an Indian restaurant or an Italian restaurant, it’s subsidized by the government, so the production of it is ridiculously cheap, and it’s unlike tallow and butter which need to be refrigerated. This doesn’t. So it stores forever. So there’s so many reasons.

[00:14:44] Peter Bowes: So let’s dive into a little bit more about what you believe these oils are doing to us. It’s fairly obvious that a huge number of people are consuming these oils, because a lot of people eat fast food. A lot of people go out to restaurants. What is it doing to us, maybe doing to us that we can’t see? But it all happens internally, of course.

[00:15:06] Cate Shanahan: Yeah. So so it’s causing accelerated aging, right. So I know your podcast, probably your audience has an interest in longevity. A long time ago, there was a man who maybe you’ve brought up before, but he actually is the father of the longevity movement, the anti-aging, anti-aging biology. And he discovered that he discovered the reason that we die. And he found that it had to do with these dangerous things in our body called free radicals that cause oxidative stress. And he thought that antioxidants were the answer to longevity. So just hang on to the term antioxidants and oxidation. Those are the only terms. I’m going to try and keep it to those two terms. So we’ve all heard of antioxidants, right? Lots of supplements claim to fight oxidation. Well, what these oils do, and the reason that he never really got to this holy grail of a cocktail of antioxidants, that prolonged life, is because these vegetable oils, they deplete your body’s antioxidant systems, which are way more complicated than anything we could supplement with. So they accelerate aging and disease. They promote oxidative stress, which is the root of inflammation. So they’re the root cause of inflammatory disease. They’re the root cause of degenerative disease. They’re also the root cause of sugar cravings that for most people, most people have a sweet tooth that is driven by the downstream metabolic damage that these oils do. They totally change the way our cells work and our cells end up needing more sugar. And when your cells need sugar, you crave it. So what? What do they do? They do everything bad. They they’re not the only thing out there that does this. Cigarette smoking causes similar, you know, problems in terms of the antioxidants depleting them, excessive alcohol consumption, similar problems in terms of depleting our antioxidants, and excessive sugar consumption. Like truly excessive, can do the same thing, but these vegetable oils are the most powerful driver of this metabolic damage that is inducing all of these diseases, including obesity.

[00:17:36] Peter Bowes: This is a metabolic syndrome that we often hear about this multiple conditions, especially as people grow older, that result in debilitating chronic diseases over 50, 60 years old for most people?

[00:17:51] Cate Shanahan: Well, yes, it used to be. And that was the case actually, that type two diabetes, which is kind of like the epitome of metabolic syndrome that was considered an age related disease when I was in medical school. But now we’re seeing it in three year olds. And so, you know, the paradigm of explanatory, you know, ideas in medicine has not included vegetable oils or oxidative stress, but that is the only thing that makes perfect logical sense to explain. How does a three year old get an age related type two diabetes? How do you see. We’re seeing five year olds getting heart attacks and strokes now, and we’re seeing a huge increase in the number of young adults in their 30s and 40s being diagnosed with cancer, also thought to be just an age inevitability of aging kind of disease.

[00:18:44] Peter Bowes: So why is it that I mean, you’re you’re making a lot of noise about this in very strong terms. You’ve written this book in a tremendous amount of detail. It’s an extremely well sourced book, and you’ve clearly spent well, you’ve spent your entire career looking into this. But why isn’t it something that we’re hearing about every day? Why aren’t politicians here in the United States or indeed elsewhere, running for office, crying from the rooftops about this situation if it is so detrimental to our health?

[00:19:15] Cate Shanahan: I think people are at this point a little bit jaded because they’ve heard so many different nutrition experts making opposite claims, right? Like, you have people saying you should never eat an animal product? Now we have the carnivore diet where people are saying you should never eat a plant and we have all the spectrum in between. And you know, you can lose weight on a bazillion different types of diets. I mean, anything from the grapefruit diet to the cabbage diet to, you know, the there was a martini diet in the 1950s. And people, you know, so it’s so confusing. Right. And, it’s confusing because we’ve left it to. Well, because we’ve all been misled. Right. And so this is where we have to kind of turn into, sort of the dark chapters of the book, I think, and talk about this subject, the reality that we are living in, which is, a little bit disturbing. It’s very disturbing. I mean, it’s been driving me doing this for 20 years because I need to we need to fix this or we will all die before our time. .

[00:20:20] Peter Bowes: Well let’s delve into that a little bit more deeply then than the the really dark side of this you call the book Dark Calories. Can you encapsulate what you mean and what you think the consequences are going to be, not only in the long term, but in the short term, in our lifespan? In the next decade?

[00:20:38] Cate Shanahan: Yeah, so let’s tell you, let me tell you the story of how this all started. And Dark Calories tells the story, and it’s truly the biggest scandal ever perpetrated on the American public by a medical organization. Because it’s a scandal that has affected every single American and increasingly, people around the globe now, because it’s changed what we eat, it’s changed what every doctor learns about diet and it’s changed it for the worse. And it began 70 years ago when a medical organization called the American Heart Association took money from a company called Procter and Gamble that sold soy oil and cottonseed oil. They took a lot of money. It was $1.75 million back then, which equates to about $30 million today. And a short while after that, lo and behold, they started promoting these oils as a way to prevent heart attacks. And they had all kinds of like, sciency sounding things. They said, well, they’ll lower your cholesterol and cholesterol builds up in your arteries and causes plaque and, you know, bamboozled people with sciency sounding words that, you know, made sense. Now, at the time, doctors weren’t buying it, but, they you know that. Then the story gets even darker. Because what did they do with that money? Well, what they did was they spent the next few decades, about 20 years, creating a huge pile of research data that they called evidence to support their theory that cholesterol clogs arteries. But this was it’s not there isn’t evidence there. There’s a lot of data, but many independent organizations have looked through it and combed through it and said, this is just a house of cards. This is all nonsense. This does not indict in any way. Saturated fat. It does not in any way support the idea that vegetable oils, which are full of a different kind of fat called polyunsaturated, that those are going to help prevent heart attacks, no way does it support that. But to this day, the American Heart Association leans on those studies as their source of evidence that it is true that what they said 70 years ago is still true today.

[00:23:15] Peter Bowes: This goes the debate over cholesterol really goes to the heart of what you’re talking about. And maybe we should backtrack a little bit and perhaps leave the the history to one side and talk about cholesterol and what it is. And again, we come back to this confusion that reigns. And you’ve just given one explanation as to why it could well be reining today as an area which people simply don’t understand. I think the gut reaction of most people still is that cholesterol is bad for me, and that I can control it by looking in my fridge and looking on the labels and looking at the cholesterol content of food. And that is how I’m going to avoid having too much cholesterol that might clog my arteries, that might give me a heart attack. So what is the situation as you see it?

[00:24:01] Cate Shanahan: Yeah. So the situation is we’ve just become so afraid of this word cholesterol. And I myself, I’ve put myself in this category. You know, when I graduated, I was happy to see my patients have low cholesterol, and I was afraid when I saw those little flags on my patient’s cholesterol reports that indicated their cholesterol was high, and I was afraid that they were going to have a heart attack if I didn’t, lickety split, get them on a drug to lower their cholesterol. And so they would beg me, oh, can I just try with diet first? And I, you know, we’d negotiate, of course. and, you know, it didn’t really work. And so then most people would end up on a drug. And the truth is that that’s exactly what the American Heart Association did in during this scandalous period. The first 20 years after they accepted that money. Well, they they just continually chuffed out media, and studies that I have to put in scare quotes here because there when you look at it, it’s nonsensical. It’s just musings and just claims over and over repetition of the idea that cholesterol is harmful without science to support it up to to back it up. And what is cholesterol? What is it? So for many years I tried just helping people understand what you know what cholesterol doesn’t really cause heart attacks. And that didn’t do it. I had to help them understand what cholesterol really is. And that is it’s a nutrient. Cholesterol is absolutely essential for the structure of this thing called the cell membrane, which is the lining that encapsulates every single one of our cells. And within our cells there are many more little membranes, and they’re all made with cholesterol. Cholesterol is so important to cellular health that the cell will not divide, you know, when it’s time to divide. If you’re a skin cell, say we have to. Or a gut cell. These cells in our body, certain cells divide very rapidly, but they won’t be able to if they don’t have enough cholesterol. So cholesterol is a nutrient. And we’ve all been so kind of like trained to hear the word and think heart attack or just bad, right? Like we think it’s this chemical out to get us, but it is not. It’s something that our bodies make gobs of it. And if we have more in our diet, then our bodies don’t need to make quite so many. But we’re always our bodies always need the same amount, and they need quite a lot of it. They need several grams a day, which is a lot for a chemical. That’s what they need more of it than they need calcium to put it in perspective.

[00:26:56] Peter Bowes: So when we have those annual blood tests and we get the results and we see the H high for our what’s known as bad cholesterol, we might see high triglycerides. How do you say we should interpret those numbers? We’re generally given a range which is supposedly the normal range high, normal and low. What should we think when we see those numbers and what should we do in response to them?

[00:27:26] Cate Shanahan: Yeah. So I mean what I look at is the HDL cholesterol, which doctors have taken to calling the good cholesterol. But the reality is cholesterol is good. So HDL that should be about equal to your triglycerides. And they both should be above 50. So triglycerides are the fats. A lot of people don’t realize that. But triglycerides are fats. And fat and cholesterol are very different. So you know, this gets technical. But really the thing to know is that doctors do not understand what causes heart attacks and strokes. And that’s why in my first book, Deep Nutrition I explained that it’s oxidative stress. It’s this state of chemical imbalance. And it took me 6 or 7 years to write that first book, because I basically had to comb through the literature and put this hypothesis together. And I found that other people were saying very similar things in terms of one piece of the puzzle after the other, after the other, fitting together into place to piece it all together, that cholesterol doesn’t cause heart attacks, and this thing called oxidative stress does. And that’s what vegetable oil does to us. That’s so bad. And if oxidative stress sounds like a scary chemical term, you I’m going to tell you and remind you that you already know something about it because, you know, smoking causes heart attacks and strokes. And why is smoking bad? Well, the same reason vegetable oil is they both cause oxidative stress. They both deplete our body’s Antioxidants, and they both can cause all kinds of diseases and accelerate the aging process.

[00:29:12] Peter Bowes: Now, I just want to say that might be people watching, listening to this who are experiencing medical issues at the moment. Maybe they’ve just had their annual blood tests. They’re looking at the results. What I don’t want to do here and never do here is, is give advice to individuals, because I think you would agree with this. We are all individuals. We’re all very different. We all have issues that in some cases are very specific to ourselves and our lifestyles. And my advice, my only advice is you need to see your own health professional to get any advice in terms of what you should do for yourself. If you’re considering a new diet, a new exercise regime, let’s talk about what we can, in a positive sense, do for ourselves. Let’s talk about olive oil. Let’s talk about the the ways of cooking that you say are the the better ways to cook and also address this issue of, look, people are always going to go out to eat. People are going to go to restaurants. People are not always going to cook their own meals. So how do we navigate that situation?

[00:30:15] Cate Shanahan: Yeah.So what you want to do is become more self-sufficient in terms of your own meal preparation because let’s face it, the golden arches and lots of these drive thrus, they have extremely unhealthy food because not only are they using the vegetable oils, they’re using them in the deep fryers. And we haven’t talked about this, but the deep fried food is the worst of the worst because of the heat and the reactions with oxygen and the chemical changes that make French fries actually so toxic that a world renowned toxicologist compared them to cigarette smoking on a 1 to 1 basis. One cigarette equals one French fry in terms of the toxic aldehydes it contains. So, you know, the fast food is is a lot of people’s solution. So what I do in the last third of the book, I devote quite a lot of pages in the book to helping people sort out what they’re going to do to become junk food independent.

[00:31:31] Peter Bowes: It is a big book.

[00:31:31] Cate Shanahan: Big book. I don’t know how they crammed it all into that small. It was a huge manuscript. But yeah. So you have to become fast food independent and some of the easiest meals to make in the world. I put those ideas in the book, like just to give you a simple example instead of, you know, having fries and a burger and chips, you know, um, soda at the drive-thru, bring yourself a lunch to work or put it in a cooler in your car. They have little bags you can keep things cool in, but what you put in there is just get some celery sticks and some peanut butter that doesn’t have added sugar or vegetable oils, and maybe put a few little raisins on there. Make that ants on a log thing that you probably make for your kids. Or maybe when you were a kid, and then a thermos of a couple of cups of milk. Right? Just so easy. So much more nutritious than fries and a soda.

[00:32:35] Peter Bowes: And what do you say? And I experience this. I see it, I hear it a lot from those people who will say, well, wow, that celery and raisin diet that you’ve just described. that sounds really boring. I just want to live a little bit and okay, if I don’t get to 100, so be it. But I, you know, I want to have some tasty food that I mean, you could call it denial. I don’t know what you call it, but that sort of attitude that you could say belligerent attitude that. Yeah, okay, I hear what you’re saying, but it’s not for me.

[00:33:07] Cate Shanahan: Yeah. I mean. You know, people are not at a point where they want to make healthy changes or they want to be. There’s nothing I can say, but if they are, then the simple thing to say is you can have everything because vegetable oil, you know, everything. Every food out there. We made it before vegetable oil existed. It was only about, in 1980, something that McDonald’s switched their fryer from tallow and sesame oil to to vegetable oil based frying oil. Right. So you can have everything. It’s just that you’re going to have to either make it yourself, or find one of the few restaurants in your area that use a healthier oil or a healthier fat. And there’s there’s resources in the back of the book that will help you to do that, because more and more people are waking up to the toxicity of these oils and helping. You know, creating apps and websites like myself, I have a whole shopping list, by the way. You can find any product that you want in a healthy oil form crackers, chips, you name it. But of course, you know the idea isn’t to live on crackers and chips. The idea is to really, fall in love with food. And, you know, this happened. You will experience a radical change in your taste cravings. I know this because I experienced it myself. And vegetable oils. Like I mentioned, I touched on this real briefly just Peter a while back, and I don’t know if you caught it from the book, but they they do drive us to sugar, right? So vegetable oils make people crave sugar and carbohydrates because of what they do to our metabolism. And when you crave sugar and carbohydrates, you are not in control. And no matter how much willpower you muster up. It’s going to give way eventually. But when you address that metabolic damage by getting out the vegetable oils and eating healthy and taking just a two week challenge that I propose and walk you through in dark calories, then you’re going to start noticing, even after the short time, that you don’t crave sugar and starchy foods quite so much, because you’re now your cells are getting energy from healthy fats. And that’s really what our bodies are designed for. We’re not designed to live from meal to meal, craving carbs and sugar. We’re designed to live on healthy fats that are stored in our body fat, so we have to eat them.

[00:35:41] Peter Bowes: Could you just briefly run through for us what the healthy oils are, which ones they are.

[00:35:48] Cate Shanahan: So any oil that is unrefined or virgin. Okay. now in the book I list out what I call the Delightful Dozen. so you don’t have to memorize these. But just to get you started, I’ll tell you my favorite five, because they’re indispensable for me. That is butter. Technically a fat, not an oil. Olive oil, coconut oil, peanut oil and sesame oil. Those are like they. That’s what I use most of the time. The other oils that are healthier are things like unrefined, avocado oil. That’s very popular these days. and a few others like you might have heard of if you’re a chef or really into cooking macadamia nut oil or almond oil. Tree nut oils. Right. Those are any unrefined oil is actually going to be healthy for you. And we didn’t talk about why these things are so unhealthy, but that’s all explained in the book, like the refining process is what kind of destroys.

[00:36:48] Peter Bowes: Yeah, exactly. And just to make the point that it is a large book. There’s a tremendous amount of detail in there that we haven’t. We just don’t have the time in this podcast to get into that detail. But it is there and the references are there as well, which is always something that I like to see in books like this. Let me ask you, in closing a more general question, as you indicated, this is a podcast about longevity. It’s about the aging process aspiring to a healthy aging process where healthspan is is the most important, perhaps more important than than lifespan, at least the number of years that we can continue living without those chronic diseases. Based on your lifetime of research, how do you live your life every day? Do you have you settled into a routine that I guess lives by? The rules that you have come to understand are the best for you?

[00:37:40] Cate Shanahan: Yeah, basically I just am food self-sufficient, right? This is what everybody used to be, you know, 100 years ago. So it’s not like this rarefied state of impossible impossibility that nobody can achieve. And, you know, the thing is that the fear of cholesterol keeps us away from some of the most convenient foods. Like, sometimes I would just have cheese and nuts for lunch, but I wouldn’t have done that before because I would have been afraid of cheese raising my cholesterol. So you see. But yeah. So I mean, if you want to know specifics for for breakfast, I have a whole bunch of milk with cream and it’s flavored with coffee. Lots of cream in there. So it actually sustains me all day. I no longer even eat lunch, which is really freed up a lot of time. You know, gave me a whole hour where I did not have to think about what I was going to eat for lunch, packing my lunch, and then also, like, I am somebody who gets tired after I eat, uh, because of the digestive process. It does draw blood into the digestive system. Drop your blood pressure. And it used to make me tired so I don’t have to deal with that anymore. And now I just have a big, big, delicious dinner with about 4 or 5 courses. Well over a thousand calories for dinner. But I make it all from scratch. And, you know, so I’ve just got always have. The way to pull it off is to always have good food in your fridge and in your, you know, your your cabinets. It’s mostly going to be in the fridge. I see him, you do need a sizable fridge or two little ones.

[00:39:21] Peter Bowes: And I guess eating out involves a bit of research, maybe quite a lot of research before you head out and choose your restaurant. 

[00:39:28] Cate Shanahan: Yes so where I live.You know, that’s, I’m kind of more in the middle of nowhere, so, like, I don’t it’s not a big temptation for me. It’s not like socialization means going out to eat. I can have people over, right? The way people used to socialize. They would share food. Or like have tea. Right. I think that’s a really health. I wish we could bring that back, because it’s kind of a little healthier to have a no calorie drink than to have snacks every time you meet people. But yeah. So with restaurants, you do have to do research. And there are apps now. And just a shout out to one of them called Seed Oil Scout. I think it’s like $2.99 either a month or a year. It’s not very expensive.

[00:40:10] Peter Bowes: Ive seen it. Yes.

[00:40:11] Cate Shanahan: and it’ll help you find what’s in your area.  and another thing you can do, and this is what I do. And those rare times when I go out, I just say, do you have anything in the back that you can cook for me right now in butter so that we don’t have to do this exercise of, like, what oil do you use? You know, that’s pointless. They don’t know.

[00:40:31] Peter Bowes: Exactly. Well, you know, this is a fascinating subject. I’ve really enjoyed talking to you, Doctor Cate. And there is a link to your book in the show notes for this episode. There’s also a transcript, a full transcript of this conversation. And as we’ve referred to a couple of times, it is a kind of subject you need to delve into deeply, perhaps read chapters that interest you the most several times to really begin to to digest, no pun intended, but to digest the real detail of this subject. Doctor Cate Shanahan, thank you very much indeed.

[00:41:07] Cate Shanahan: It’s been a pleasure, Peter. Thank you.