The Worst Ingredient in the World: Interview with Dr. Chris Knobbe

today we have DrChris Kenobi he's an opthalmologist and we are going to talk about some fascinating information relating to seed oils we have this trend of Omega 6 fatty acid seed oils and it's been trending like crazy high can you tell us the relationship between the trend of the consumption of seed oils compared to Sugar because people think that no Sugar's trending going up and that's the culprit but I I don't think that's true first of all thanks for having me on Eric um and yes so this is the work that I've been that been been doing for the last uh about 13 years deeply investigating seed oil the industrial seed oils and their connection to O overweight obesity diabetes and almost all this chronic disease and this is uh what you just mentioned I'm so glad you brought this up first um I'm I'm looking here because I'm going to try to give you exact data uh on this to answer this question so people say yes they think sugar is the driver of all of this and I am entirely convinced of the that the opposite is true not that sugar is healthy it's definitely a a nutrient deficient food but let me get right to this data so I don't waste anybody's time so I want to give you the most compelling evidence right off the bat is um so most of our sugar consumption and everything I will say or mention will be will come from published evidence so most all of our sugar consumption in the United States which we've published and Stefan Guan has published um the increase came before 1922 so by 1922 we were already at 473 calories worth of sugar and up to 1987 that barely changed it went up to 497 calories so right 24 calories difference I think that from 1920 to 19 1922 to 1987 yeah sugar consumption was a flat line and we'll you'll see the data if you bring this in in this graph that I'll send you but during that time so we've we've looked at obesity and obesity was 1. 1% in men age 18 to 80 in the N late 19th century that's Scott Allen Carson's work so and then the next data was 1960 for obesity which was 13% 13. 4 basically and so we interpolate the data between those so that's done through Excel anyway so the n in obesity was 2.

95% in 1922 but it increased to 18. 6% in 1987 so obesity increased over sixfold while the sugar changed virtually not at all it went up 5% um so that's this is a 65 year period of time so if you're going to say sugar is the driver of this how do you account for this because this is a 65y year period of time in history where we know sugar basically didn't change um now it's gone up on either end of those years some somewhat um we can get to into more detail about that so let's talk about the vegetable oil so the vegetable oil introduced in the United States in 1866 has climbed all the way through 2010 so went from Z to 80 grams per person per day by 2010 um and in 1922 the the vegetable oil consumption was 78 calories per person per day and that increased but to 1987 to 497 calories so so just to kind of recap that data we're talking about you know if you if you type in with chat GPT about seed oils it says oh yeah the average person has about 20 grams no it's 80 grams which is basically about uh you know onethird of our calories isn't it we're almost like 20 25 onethird of our calories which is about a half of a cup no is it a third of a cup it's it's a lot of seed off yes it is it's not this 20 grams between 1922 and 1987 sugar went up 5% vegetable oils went up 65% obesity increased 6. 3 fold or 532 per.

this is a 65y year period And if you want I could mention the evidence on uh diabetes it's even more compelling that the increase in diabetes during this period do you want me to mention that yeah because people uh I don't think people realize the um how a fat an oil can cause diabetes because they're always thinking blood sugars but right I'm sure you can tell us like what's going on there right we can get to that um so the evidence on Diabetes so diabetes was um so it's incredibly rare in 1890 this is p published by Sir William Osler diabetes affected 0. 28% of the population now it Rose all the way to 13% of the population by 2016 that is a 4,643 fold increase in diabetes but let's just talk about let's go back to 1922 to 1987 so we're looking at the exact same time frame we were looking before diabetes increased from about 0. 09% in 1922 to 2.

6% in 1987 it's gone up way you know a whole lot more since then how big of increase is this 2800% increase in diabetes a 29-fold increase during this 65e period so obesity went up six-fold diabetes went up 29 fold During the 65-year period when sugar did not change so you just th and I've got this evidence all over many other countries all over the world it is everywhere I look so far I'm seeing evidence like this where you've got sugar um and even carbohydrates flat or going down even and the data gets more interesting if you look more recently since 1999 that Sugar's a bit on the decline while our obesity and diabetes rates have escalated exponentially it stay coincidence I mean when you analyze uh data you want a trend you want to look at comparison from one date to another and you um it's a Smoking Gun and this is it wow yeah so um so basically um when someone consumes seed oils um and of course you know they call them vegetable oils they even have pictures of vegetables right so you have these wonderful vegetables but those are not in here and uh it's heart they actually can put heart healthy we'll get into that what's the mechanism causing diabetes in a kind of a simple way how would you explain that yeah this the very simple simple one sentence answer is that they're driving mitochondrial dysfunction okay so the way that if you know if we get to into a little bit more detail is that the seed oils that are rich in omega-6 fats um accumulate in our body fat and these omega-6 fats and omega-3 they're they're polyunsaturated so they're they're prone to oxidation and so when so when these fats they accumulate in your body fat then they're they're PR to oxidation which inside the body as you always say it's very equivalent to rusting and um inside the mitochondria which is the PowerHouse of our cells um there is damage to what's called a cardiol lipin molecule which ultimately is an important um part of the electron transport chain there's something that it targets specifically in the mitochondria um as the this fat is being turned into energy and into you know the storage of ATP um are you saying that um so well first of all can can we use uh this oil as as energy yes absolutely we can we burn it yes okay so but in the process because it's it is the way it is um it's basically damages something in our mitochondria which then doesn't allow us to make the final produ of energy well it's not in the process of burning the the the omega-6's it's the fact that they're incorporated into these structures these uh molecules okay and in the cardiolipin and then they become oxidized because they're prone to be you know they're subject to attack by R free radicals so do they go into the membrane yes and then that membrane becomes leaky and that that inner mitochondrial membrane and it leaks the the hydrogen protons which have to create a gradient in order let me just unpack that a little bit because that's a little complex so if you take the membranes uh around uh I have a cell we have a membrane around the cell it's this outer Co cutting and then on the inside the cell where there's a mitochondria there are these uh little things right here and they have membranes around them little uh San wrap type things you know if you even stretched out I don't know if you've ever calculated the surface area of just the cell membrane um if you take the number of cells and you stretch them out uh the surface area comes to 90 Acres which is like what so there this huge surface area and this is how um the the mitochondria makes energy because it starts to uh creates this difference with certain things on one side versus another kind of like a battery and then you have voltage and this whole thing so that membrane is essential for creating electricity and Power to be able to store energy so so in other words this fat gets into that membrane and now we kind of starts leaking and then starts now we lose the power it's kind of like having a car and you loosen one side of the bolt on the frame it's like now we don't have that stability right it's just like flying all over the place yeah okay great an interesting right interesting and then I'll just mention too that so these the accumulation of these omega-6 fatty acids in our uh in our bodies they um ultimately drive not only this prooxidative environment but it's also pro-inflammatory it's directly toxic through what are called Advanced lipid oxidation in products and it's nutrient deficient you you don't get any vitamins a d or K2 in the vegetable oils no matter even the good ones you don't get any vitamins a d or K2 so I always say these are the four pillars of Hazard put these together and you just have the recipe for metabolic disaster and physical degeneration so this so that so you know back to what's driving obesity well you know part of it is is is that that you've disabled or cause dysfunction in the mitochondria and you can't burn fuel properly and so then your energy you know your energy uh consumption that your energy production in your own body goes down and at the same time you want to eat more when you consume the the vegetable oils um you're probably getting trying to get more energy because you're not making energy absolutely to talk about the um this mitoch condra we have um a little assembly line of taking this food um and you know you have the the glucose the fats and the pro amino acids it's going through this uh assembly line This Factory and it's extracting energy or electrons right from there and then other things it's extracting but um you know in school They Don't Really teach you they there's like eight different steps but they don't really tell you or emphasize that the co-actors to allow from one enzyme to go to the next so those are all vitamins and minerals and things like that so I think what you're saying is that when you consume something in a refined form like this you're not going to get the nutrients so now the body has to pull from Reserve from creating deficiencies as you consume this same thing with like even if you did Sugar but you know you're creating deficiencies as you're burning the fuel and then when you run out now we have a problem because now you can't these enzymes can't work and then you but this actually lodges into the membranes right they it actually gets stuck in there for exactly some time that is such a great Point Eric because so many people just overlooking the fact that that um especially we're so efficient in minerals and these minerals as you said they're the co-actors of all these enzymes if you can't run these enzymes just like as you you know you use analogy about a car well if you know if parts of your engine are not functioning there's going to be you know an overall um problem with power output and then all sorts of things start failing and in our bodies this is where we start gaining weight we start becoming insulin resistant which means that your body doesn't respond Bond insulin then your glucose goes up and you're just poisoning yourself with these These are what I call chronic metabolic biological poisons short answer is these are poisons when uh seed oils were first uh introduced um into the diet I think weren't they they I think in the book if I remember correctly there were kind of like what are we going to do with these this waste product because we're they're using for something else oh yeah let's put it in the food supply I mean what happened at that point yeah so um well cotton seed oil was the first manufactured seed oil in the United States we didn't up up through 1865 there wasn't uh any seed oils in the food supply there was a fraction of a gram of olive oil available almost no one had access to olive oil in the United States most some in California but anyway so so the the the cotton seed oil was initially um before it was in the food supply it was used as machine oil and lamp oil primarily then it was used as fertilizer and then as as cattle feed but right in there as they started using it as fertilizer and cattle feed they decided that they wanted to sell it as food and Americans didn't want any part of that because they knew it as machine oil and lamp oil I mean it'd be like you know giving us motor oil says food and saying here you go eat this and they didn't want to be part of it so manufacturers were not deterred they just decided to um start adulterating well well first they um they they mixed the seed oils the cotton seed oil with butter to make margarine they called oo margarine back in that day and then that began to work so then they began to adulterate olive oil with it and sent huge amount I think it was 55,000 barrels of so-called olive oil to uh Europe and the French made complaint in 1880 because they knew just by the taste it was not olive oil and that it was like half or something like that uh uh vegetable oil and then eventually you know by 1909 or in the early 1900s um Proctor and Gamble began to produce Crisco trans fats which is created by bubbling hydrogen gas through this cotton seed oil at that time in the presence of a nickel Catalyst and so they produced this the you know this uh product that looked kind of like lard and that's what the goal was so the whole goal with these was to make money it wasn't because they were healthy the goal was to make money it was to outsell butter and lard with these oils somehow and that's what they did and they were extremely successful and there was a lot of money it so so we got cotton seed oil initially and then in 1909 soybean oil enter entered the food supply and we got all the rest so now today we've got soybean corn canola cotton seed rape seed grape seed sunflower safflower rice brand Sesame and peanut oils those are the the my list of sort of the worst of the worst that um now account for as of 2010 anyway 80 grams per person per day which we talked about earlier was is uh 720 calories worth 32% of us caloric consumption so even if you take there's going to be a little bit of plate loss there um so it's at least a fourth if not a third of the American diets coming out of these gigantic factories that look like petroleum refineries and then parallel to that campaign they have to invalidate the saturated fats yes and I think it's fascinating to me uh when you look at any type of junk food right whether it's this or the Goldfish yeah or or even used to be my favorite um if you look at these you know I said well well saturated fats are junk Foods they're in the junk no they're not I actually looked at all these and there's very little saturated fats it's all unsaturated fats which is fascinating to me because U that's kind of like a a downplayed point that alter processed food calories are just a tremendous amount of um unsaturated fats and people think oh that's must be healthier but no it's just the yeah exactly it's just the opposite they're very very unhealthy um and yes all of the processed foods are using seed oils they're you try to find a processed food that has butter or lard or beef Tallow in it you just will hardly ever find any so there's I don't know how many tens of thousands if not maybe hundreds of thousands of processed foods um and restaurant foods that are all uh laced with they're just loaded with vegetable oils so so when I um my wife uh uh she cooked something like shrimp and there was olives in there and FedEd cheese and I ate it I didn't sleep that night and next morning I'm like I normally sleep good what's going on so I went to see where she got those olives and that feted cheese it was in a container filled with uh I think it was canola oil I'm like not even olive oil I'm like canola I I just basically consumed probably a half a cup of canola oil and I'm like wow I I can my body does not do well on that stuff yeah but they hide it in so many different products even in you would think there'd be olive oil in there but there's not and even like when you buy feta cheese in these little glass bottles and you like wow look at see so in other words you have to read the labels you have to restaurants you can't really you'd have to ask them what what oils but you got people need to start you know reading labels yeah you have to be extremely Vigilant in order to get seed oils out of your diet so if you eat in restaurants or you eat processed foods it's all danger zone because they're generally just loaded with the vegetable oils and people are very confused that they so many people will say well I don't put any vegetable oils in my food and you don't need to you can get your 80 grams a day without ever ever buying a bottle of vegetable oil you just eat processed foods and you eat restaurant foods and you'll have it you'll you'll get that much I was at the health hacking event uh a couple weeks ago and uh someone said let's go to this restaurant that's pretty good and I noticed that they emphasize they don't use seed oil so I'm like I have to get their business card to find out wow I'm like you know tell people to go there but I think what I want to do is um start um promoting or recommending restaurants that don't give these seed oils because I think that would be a completely new thing that I would love to go to and um and you could go there and know that everything all on the menu is no seed oils because it's so Insidious in our food supply this is crazy and there's there's actually a couple of apps or at least one I think there's two apps now that um will'll direct people to restaurants that do not use seed oils and really unfortunately Eric I don't know the name of those apps um I'll find them and put them in the description yeah th those are those would be excellent for people to to find some of those restaurants there's precious few restaurants restaurants that don't use seed oils but there are there are it's they they are learning this from us they're getting it from people like me and you so I guess I I I didn't know this but you clarified something I you know in in the fat cell there's a lot of saturated fat there's cholesterol I did not know that these polyunsaturated fats um went into the fat cells and I didn't know that we can actually even burn them I guess yes MH we can but with a package with a with a price to yes yes wow I mean ultimately with these fats from the Omega 6 and and omega3 they're they they're meant to be in very specific places in our body but if you just eat them in overload which we do when we're consuming seed oils um they do as I mentioned they accumulate in our body fat and in our cell membranes and in mitoch membranes they're accumulating everywhere that you have fat u in proportion to the amount that you ate and the halflife of uh these fatty acids in your body is 600 to 680 days so you can round it off it's about two years so when people quit consuming vegetable oils it will take about three years to get those entirely out of your body that's how long it'll take well you talk maybe three years before it turns into half of what it right well incredibly yeah the I you know because of pharmacology I was under the impression when I first learned this that that it would take five Half Lives to get them out of your body but there is a paper that showed that if you do all the math it the the the authors figured this out this was decades ago they figured out that you can ex you can overturn all of your fatty acids in three years even though the half-life is uh 600 to 680 days of these fatty acids so so that's kind of good and bad news the the good news is is that you'll eventually get there the bad news is it might take you three years you know to completely get your your uh fats in your body down to ancestral levels was what I call it because they're extremely high today incredible incredible um you know it's um right now um what I'm doing is I'm trying to trying to broaden my educational uh materials to the average person on the street to get them aware of what they're eating so we have a whole simple campaign to um uh get people to start reading labels so we go in their Pantry we go in their their refrigerator and we get them first of all we teach them you know how identify the at least three things this junk food you know the synthetic sugars synthetic starches and the seed oils and then we go to the grocery store and then uh we start reading labels and it's interesting it takes you know quite a few of those labels before they all of a sudden they get it and they go wow I've never even read a label before and they're just looking around amazed for the first time they're recognizing that it's it's hard to find quality food in the grocery store which is a huge step up um because they didn't even know that they didn't even know um but then a month later we just come back and we interview them um once they have some key knowledge on that um it's like they're not going back because they feel so much better the inflammation goes down exactly you start cutting out the seed oils right I mean and you know um I hadn't really thought about this till till this moment but um one of the easiest ways to get seed oils out of your diet is just not to buy anything that has a label I mean if you just if you buy meats eggs essentially um I guess you know Dairy cheese and but all the fruits and vegetables all those a whole lot of those things don't come with labels right and so those are things that really wouldn't have any vegetable oils because they're not processed that would be an easy way I like that that's real simple yeah that would it might make it pretty simple for most if they just think you know first of all you know all natural foods are never going to have seed oils this is why the uh all of the hunter gatherer type populations who never have seed oils uh in their diet of course they also don't have sugar or refined flowers but they never have obesity they have no diabetes no heart disease almost no cancer right that their health is just extraordinary now you now you brought up another question I have so if you're let's just take I don't know one teaspoon of this how much how many seeds does it take to make one teaspoon I mean I'm sure it's not one to one there's not a lot of oil in these seats yeah U unfortunately Eric I can't remember those numbers but it would yeah it would be um I I know people maybe you've even done it um talked about how many um ears of corn it takes to make uh a couple a tablespoon or so of uh of corn oil and it's extraordinary I'm going to do a video on that I think that would be an interesting topic you know I um I did recently um search out how much it costs to buy a metric ton of Dent corn which is inedible a field corn oh and that's basically what ends up in all of our food um you can right now actually of as of last month anyway you could buy it for $198 a metric ton of corn W which then can produce um I think it was up almost 7,000 boxes of corn flakes so the profitability on corn because it's subsidized is so great I mean what a great business to get into if you have an evil purpose um because it's so bad and I think also I mean they can make also starches and then oil you know it's like you could just turn that into anything but I I don't know when I when I look at corn and I just even envisioning chewing corn I don't I don't see a lot of oil coming out of there I mean I don't know maybe I'm wrong but no you wouldn't in 2014 I looked at the data on um the cost of seed oils globally and it averaged exactly $1 us per th per kilo per a th000 grams of seed oil so did I did the math so again we since we were consuming 80 of seed oils in 2010 and it's really similar since then it's really close to that um that 80 grams would cost if it's soybean oil which is the most popular oil in the United States by far that would cost uh processed food manufacturers 5.