in the grocery store we really only have to think about six and that's um just real quick corn canola cotton seed soy sunflower safflower in the United States we have canola overseas there's instead of canola R seed but memorize those six and if you can turn the package around and scan for those six ingredients then you can turn your health [Music] around well this is going to be fun uh cuz I was very impressed with your first book and I'm just delighted that you've come out with a new one I had the opportunity to read
it and we're going to have a great discussion so you've highlighted a fascinating point in your book that vegetable oils unlike anything our ancestors ever consumed require extensive processing to be even considered edible and I want you to take people through this because it seems very obvious that well gosh um soybean oil don't you just have to press on a soybean and out comes the oil and there you go so it's a lot more complicated than that right it's quite a bit more complicated than that it's unimaginably complicated people have to get degrees in you
know from technical schools with huge backgrounds in Biochemistry to be able to do it so that the oils don't come out being absolutely inedible and just smelling bad and outright h toxic there's many factories involved not just steps in a factory but there's many factories and even just the first one to get the oil out they use intense heat 600 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than you know a pizza oven which is a really hot oven if you've ever made pizza uh and intense pressure and the vast majority they also need to use solvents like hexane gas
which is toxic too to get the oil out and that crude oil that they extract truly is crude and rude it is stinky it is vial smelling it looks it's black blackish Brown and thick and sludgy and if you eat it it would you you know you would probably throw up it's that immediately instantaneously toxic now I'm going to stop you right there because I want everybody to know that you're not just saying this as a whim or as an MD you trained as a biochemist so you know of which you speak in these processes
correct yes I went to Cornell before I went to medical school to get a degree in Biochemistry and that's actually the reason that when I started learning about what I was really eating back more than 20 years ago now these oils caught my eye because when I looked up what their chemistry was I recognized a fingerprint signature that signaled these things could be dangerous and that's double bonds and and I do talk about that in chapter one of the book with pictures you really need pictures to visualize some of this I think so it's uh
it can you know it can be technical to understand it but I go into those technicals so people can see that it's real it's truly we're generating toxins here in these factories yeah and I I like that you actually do use pictures and visuals throughout the book because a lot of this is fairly Technical and just seeing it visually uh good for you for doing that yeah you know it's uh we're actually fighting a different visual here I'm fighting this battle uh to get people to understand how toxic these oils are and how they just
destroy everyone's metabolism everyone is eating them um but I'm fighting against another vision and and you probably have heard about this and talked about it maybe because the idea of saturated fat being he healthy or unhealthy I mean rests on a visual too it was originally like put out there as these saturated fats turn solid just like butter turns solid in your fridge so it'll solidify in your arteries and clog them up like grease in a pipe and that visual is so powerful that even though it was created in the 1950s and 60s it's still
in our Mind's Eye these days that saturated fat literally clogs up like a pipe it's not true never was true it's overly simplistic has nothing to do with chemistry it's just a dangerous visual so I want to replace that with real visuals in the book and I I mention a replacement visual too like in addition to providing those chemical pictures so you can see how toxins are forming the thinking that we can have is these oils corrode Our arteries like dumping some sort of toxin into your arteries right and it will weaken them and they
will they will bleed and clut and that's more it's a more true valid image because we treat heart attacks with clot Busters don't we y we don't treat it with fat dissolvers if it really truly were just fat then we would put some sort of enzyme or something in there to dissolve that fat building up but that's that's not what we do at all you know uh I think one of the nice things about the book is kind of explaining where all of this idea of vegetable oils came from and just take us through the
industrial byproduct of cotton seeds which were useless after taking them out of cotton and take us through how in the world we got from a you know a byproduct of making cotton to IDE that Chrisco was really good for you yeah it was chemistry it came from chemist uh the brothers Proctor and Gamble were chemists who founded a a soap and candle wax company and this was way back in the 19th century in like in the 1860s 7s and 80s and they saw they were looking into the future of their business which was you know
mostly candles and they saw electricity and electric lights as a huge threat so they wanted to diversify and devest and they were already already using this byproduct of the textile industry I mean the cotton seed oil they were already using that to make candles and candle wax so they wanted to find a different use for it and what they did was hire a different chemist to Tinker with it some more so that it would remove one of the toxic agents that grows in the plant that the plant uses like the plant cotton seed protects its
little seeds from being eaten by Birds by putting in a toxin called gossip Hol um that makes you know that makes it immediately toxic to to people cows that's why they couldn't use it as animal feed the chemist had to remove that Toxin and then it was kind of like a sludgy somewhat thick liquid and they're like huh if we it kind of looks like lard a little bit let's t with the recipe a little more and poof they invented Crisco shortening the first one of the first vegetable shortenings and it was truly a byproduct
of the a byproduct of a byproduct basically because it was no longer even useful for candles anymore that was a third rate kind of level of use selling it to people who couldn't afford the real thing and in advertising you speak a great deal about using uh and I'm I'm blanking on his name a a great advertising Genius of the mid 1900s who uh really knew how to sell things that people really didn't need or didn't want and yeah this man was Ed Bern there you go and he's considered the father of modern advertising because
unlike previous advertising psychology which just like spelled out oh this is a better product it's more durable it was like all based on logic he knew how to pull people's heartstrings and uh pull our levers and make us afraid or make us uh you know want to look cool with different products and so one of us first campaigns was actually to help sell cigarettes to women so this just kind of gives you an idea of the kinds of Industries was working with right and and he did that um in a way that still like is
being used today it was kind of like the precursor for Vi Virginia Slims the woman who is um independent and can you know bring home the bacon and fry it up in a pan kind of thing he called he called uh cigarettes torches of freedom and what it did was it elevated women who smoke from being seen as trashy to being seen as liberated and independent and free thinkers so it was it was incredibly successful and like that really helped sell cigarettes really quick it was it was it like sales quadrupled uh in just a
few years after after Ed Bern so he knew how to help proctoring Gamble and he had kind of a devilish strategy if uh if you want should I go into that now sure yeah let's do let's go right there so his strategy he knew that people would all everybody every doctor had had like a different thought on what was healthy and what was not healthy and you know doctors had their own ideas so he knew that he if he dangled the dollar bill in front of a bunch of doctors that somebody would show up to
grab it and that that would benefit his client Proctor and Gamble because that's just how it works like he he knew psychology he knows that if a man's salary depends on him believing in something well gosh darn it it's going to be impossible next to impossible to get him to not believe in it so the person who stepped up well the organization who um who he donated the money to is a organization that you I'm sure as a cardiologist are very familiar with the American Heart Association and that's how they got started they got 1.7
million from Proctor and Gamble and shortly after that they started funding research that showed that or that would show that vegetable oils lower cholesterol and therefore that meant that they were heart healthy and guess what none of those two statements are true they do lower cholesterol but that doesn't mean their heart healthy right corre that's the disconnect that's the disconnect that uh doctors of the day like they tried to regail against it they they tried to say look this isn't true we don't have any evidence of this but all of those folks are no longer
with us and the lie that was created back in the 1940s by the American Heart Association has gotten stronger and stronger and stronger and the American Heart Association is now the dominant source of nutrition thought in the entire world and they're still telling us this lie 70 years later and we're still getting sick and dying from the idea that cholesterol clogs arteries and vegetable oils are healthy because they can lower cholesterol yeah the and you spend actually quite a bit of time in the book talking about anel Keys who is legendary in so many ways
in nutrition and anel keys for those of you who haven't followed you or me was a Minnesota trained nutritionist who actually designed the K ration in World War II that fed our troops and that's where the word K came from K ration and when Dwight Eisenhower had his heart heart attack in the mid-50s they couldn't figure out how this vigorous General healthy you you know how in the world did Dwight Eisenhower have a heart attack so who would they bring in to advise them but anel keys and anel keys as you and I know had
a very interesting agenda that he was absolutely convinced that saturated fat was the cause of heart disease and you go into the whole story of how he had 21 countries that he studied right after World War II looking the association of saturated fat and the diet and heart disease but chose to only choose six or seven of those countries to finally make his case because the other countries didn't fit his model and in my last couple books I've gone into how in fact he excluded France from his model even though he had countries on either
side like Italy or England in his model and why in the world would he exclude them well cuz they huge saturated fat eating in in France but we digress he U he was a great salesman and he uh he sold on the McGovern Commission on this he sold the American Heart Association but I want to since you brought up the American Heart Association we were talking off camera I was a president of the American Heart Association ation desert Southern California chapter for 2 years and I learned firsthand where the heart healthy symbol came from and
how it was acquired and people I don't think know and you do bring it up that this the American Heart Association endorses things not based on research but basically on how much money they're paid one of my fa favorite since um the desert in Southern California grows large amounts of citrus and grapefruit as does Arizona and you're in Florida and you know that you grow a lot of citrus in Florida and isn't it surprising that the American Heart Association heart healthy seal is on Florida grapefruit but it's not on California or Arizona grapefruit you know
why because the Florida grapefruit commission paid the American Heart Association $400,000 for that seal when the get with the guidelines campaign came out to get people to basically lower their cholesterol with the use of statin drugs the educational program was actually sponsored not by the American Heart Association but it was sponsored by one of the Staten companies through a generous Grant to the American heartest Association to get with the guidelines well that is some great Insight or information and you know I've been dying to ask you how it's it was as a cardiologist working with
your peers like I I I think it's um a rare person who is able to like think outside the box to question what we learned to see these connections these larger connections um that are like running things like what's really going on behind the scenes and as a doctor myself when I kind of went through the rabbit hole or Through The Looking Alice In Wonderland's Looking Glass and came out on the other side and realized I'd been I was living in the backward backwards worlds my colleagues were still back there and I tried to reach
in and pull them out like oh cholesterol was never was framed basically for uh hard attacks never really found guilty just framed for crimes committed originally by cigarette smoking and right at back in the 1950s and 60s the number one people were smoking like chimneys why did Eisenhower president Eisenhower have a heart attack when he was so healthy well he was a four-pack per day smoker and at the same time that anel Keys was pushing his anti-s saturated fat agenda he was covering up the reality that there was so much data at that time already
that cigarette smoking was causing heart attacks and the American Heart Association said nothing about that relationship they said nothing against cigarettes for decades they didn't say anything until after the surgeon general's warning and after a decade after that they finally said they finally got behind the campaign to stop cigarette smoking on airplanes and why why does it matter well because cigarette smoking causes heart attacks not because it raises cholesterol if you're a one pack per day smoker you don't have higher cholesterol than a zero pack per day smoker if you're a four pack per day
smoker you don't have even higher cholesterol so it it causes heart attacks by a completely different mechanism that has to do with exactly what vegetable oils do to Our arteries which is promote oxidation oxidative stress that is the chemical cause of arteriosclerosis of metabolic disease it even drives obesity it's the cause of cellular death it's the cause of death at the cellular level this concept called oxidative stress and it's it sounds abstract but it's just a a term that really helps you understand how your body manages and controls energy and the key that I want
people to come away with is that life and health depend on our metabolism ability to generate energy because you know how do you feel when you wake up and had a good night's sleep and you're full of energy you you know versus you had no sleep or you know you kind of overdid it with something in your diet you felt you wake up feeling tired and inflamed that has to do with energy and vegetable oils they promote this deadly condition called oxidative stress and the chemistry has to do with free radicals that affect our cells
very much the way radiation does so it's directly damaging and immensely difficult for our cells to survive under this onslaught of oxid stress and basically oxidative stress I mean basically vegetable oils are oxidative stress in a bottle which is to say they're accelerated aging in a bottle because oxidative stress is the thing that ages us and kills us and that is the root cause of all these mysterious diseases people are now suffering from that when they go to their doctor their doctor can't really get to the root cause they'll say oh you know you're overweight
well that's because of genetics or you know too lazy or you know maybe uh you just need better willpower so that you don't eat so much sugar but the key to understanding how oxidative stress is making you feel physically different on a daily basis has to do with hunger and I talk about that in chapter 4 of Dark calories which I think is maybe one of the most important chapters in there because you know how many people today Dr gundry do you hear talking about how they feel hand hangry compared to you know just 20
30 40 years ago I know when I was a kid it wasn't even a thing no right so hangry is a new phenomena and hangry is really the same kind of uh hangry is a sign that your brain isn't getting energy when it it it feels actually like our blood sugar is dropping and so we we instinctively reach for food we reach for snacks and if we keep doing that we're going to gain weight so that's how oxidative stress is actually the root cause of weight gain and the entire obesity and metabolic disease epidemic that
is the biggest problem we are facing today so let me um people I was recently on a podcast with a with cardiologist who was adamant that um pufas polyunsaturated fatty acids are number one essential for the construction of membranes and mitochondrial membranes and I think both you and I would agree that they are yes okay but that they are essential in our dietary control of cholesterol and that you know to be adamant that these things because they are essential in small amounts for the functioning of our mitochondria and our cell membranes that to villainize them
is really a horrible thing and you know how dare you tell people that you know poly unsat ated fatty acids which do lower cholesterol that are called essential because they are essential how can you take these away from us everyone knows the American Heart Association knows how important these things are what say you well I would say that person is lying because I'm not taking away polyunsaturated fatty acids I'm taking away vegetable oils that are Industrial Products that are insanely and unnaturally produced and so high in polyunsaturated fatty acids s that they cannot be properly
stabilized for use in Heating and cooking applications by all the king's horses and all the king's men who have tried to do so for the past hundreds of years I'm talking about the chemist who I cite in the first chapter of Dark calories as warning us that when we fry with these things for you know high heat pan frying at home in our kitchen to make something like a fried chicken to give it that Wess ity I don't know if you remember those commercials of make your fried chicken and polyunsaturated corn oil when we do
that at home or when restaurants do that uh then like if a restaurant does it a single fry has as much toxic chemical called uh aldhy Alpha Beta unsaturated alahh known to cause cancer known to harm energy generating mitochondria known to be directly toxic to the nervous system chemists have been warning that these oils contain these toxins and so I would say to someone who says that not only are you know to argu against me saying you can't take away polyunsaturated fatty acids I am certainly not doing that and don't don't try to put words
in my mouth right that is a lie I never said that polyunsaturated fatty acids we were as a human species we got plenty of them before vegetable oils were ever invented so we don't need to rely on these unnatural toxic toxin Rich products that well that they're toxic when they leave the factory and they're even more toxic after we cook with them and we don't need to rely on them and in fact in toxicology there's the saying the dose makes the poison anything in too high of a quantity can be toxic directly even without the
formation of these toxins during Heating and cooking so the medical industry right now is completely ignoring that fact those realities those are hard cold realities but people that within the industry the vegetable oil industry the people who work for companies like Unilever and Monsanto that sell these oils they're the ones saying that they're the ones where who taught me that these oils contain toxins and so the it's disgusting to me that the American Heart Association and doctors like the ones you were talking to are less interested in the truth about these oils than the food
industry whose entire Financial Empires depend on selling more of these oils because that's the world we live in right now where we're hearing more truth from the people selling the oils than the supposed healers out there like those at the American Heart Association and you know those are kind of like the priests the American Heart Association is like the Pope um of this religion that cholesterol clogs Our arteries and guys that are like dariush Moosa farian maybe you know him guys that run um The deans of the nutrition schools at Harvard and toughs and I'm
sure you've run into these characters they're like the Bishops and then you know then doctors who haven't gone through the rabbit rabbit hole we are the unfortunately the priests and we are selling this false religion to people that cholesterol oil that cholesterol is clogging Our arteries and we need these cholesterol lowering oils it's a religion and it's a bad religion it's a dangerous religion it is not a science that's my point that nutrition science is a religion it is no longer a science all right I want to jump ahead you made a good case and
you make a very good case in the book Thank you but you've designed a twow we jump start plan because you spent a lot time saying this stuff is in you and it's hard to get out of you and it's a process uh as you and I both know how do we jump start all this take us through it uh give somebody hope that this is reversible yes it's it is totally reversible in fact there is no sort of metabolic damage that can't be fixed with better diet true it comes down to getting more energy
for yourselves and that comes down to recovering from the oxy oxidative damage and preparing your body to deal with oxidative stress so in the two-e challenge I teach you the foods that are going to not only like substitute for vegetable oils the healthy fats but also the vitamins you need the minerals you need the other nutrients that you need the high protein foods the right kind of carbohydrate containing foods because you know not all carbohydrate containing foods are bad for us it's really just the processed highly refined stuff so I teach you all of that
because that the the you can actually build a a meal that gives you energy versus another meal it's based on our choice that steals our energy so that's what the twoe challenge does in the entire last part of the book which is four chapters full chock full of information that helps you understand how to maximize your body's energy and turn around whatever metabolic disease you might be suffering from with a healthy balanced diet and it all begins of course with a simple habit of just picking up every single thing that you buy and turning that
package around to scan for one of the I call them the Sinister Six that are going to be in ingredients there's actually eight altogether so I call it those the hateful eight but but in the grocery store we really only have to think about six and that's um just real quick corn canola cotton seed soy sunflower safflower in the United States we have canola overseas theirs instead of canola rap seed but memorize those six and if you can turn the package around and scan for those six ingredients then you can turn your health around and
get more energy starting on day one that's my goal for you is to feel physically better that's how you know it's working you don't have to go to the doctor and get any tests done I mean you can but that's another issue because they're going to tell you high cholesterol is a problem that's going to lead to arguments so you have it's really important we do have to learn how to recognize when we are healing ourselves and it's very simple because I do teach you how to track your energy improvements in the book too and
that's the key instead of focusing on weight that is another one of the lies that metabolic health comes down to our body fat you know our body composition having too much fat it comes down to our ability to generate energy and avoid inflammation and that's what this book is all about helping you do I also noticed uh you uh like myself come down on protein powders good for you I feel like I'm you know crying out in the wilderness that uh the protein powders talk about man-made these things also didn't exist up until a few
years years ago that's so true I'm so glad you noticed that you are the first person to notice that and I'm so glad to hear that you are that we are no longer the lone voice in the wilderness you know thinking of that we have we're like the Wonder Twins of protein powders don't e them right they do also promote oxidative stress yeah they're yeah they do yeah but that's another subject all right well congratulations on this book uh yeah it's a it's a good read I wantan to I want to do make a mention
that you know you're talking in general about seed oils but I want to make a pitch that you're not against all seed oils um for instance flax seeds flax seed oil is incredibly good for you if you use it right you come quite positive on sesame oil which I was intrigued to see I want to tell you about perilla oil which is mostly alphal linolenic acid it's almost pure alphal linolenic acid Which is my darling of the vegetable oils and I'm a huge fan of it I use it in my patience to stop them having
lipopolysaccharides in their blood which I measure and anyhow so good for you not all seed oils are the evil empire right just the hateful eight we always do an audience question and we've got a good one so if you don't mind I'll let you take a shot and then I'll take a shot Peter darling 1965 writes Dr Gendry how can one find out if the oil is oxidized or not are there any brands that third party certify non oxidations I have read that pufas and mufas that's monounsaturated fatty acids that's like olive oil oxidize very
quickly and most likely become rancid by the time the oil is in the supermarket what are your thoughts regarding this your feedback would be very helpful indeed all right what say you anything you're going to buy in the grocery store that's made out of a one of the hateful eight vegetable seed oils is going to be oxidized because uh the while they could in theory like take soy oil and manufacture it in such a way that it does not oxidize that is going to cost probably a thousand times more so it just is cost prohibitive
and therefore it's not going to be in the grocery store unless you know you're we're talking about a supplement and if you're going to buy a supplement you're not going to cook with it and yes the supplements should say something about what they do to mitigate oxidation and if they are doing that they will say so but stuff you're going to find in the restaurants doesn't matter like a lot of folks feel like if they're shopping at Whole Foods right or more sitting down in a very expensive restaurant they must be using a better quality
oil but the fact is that the hateful eight oils simply cannot be produced at scale in a way that makes them safe I think about it with just like even olive oil olive oil is much more stable it doesn't have so much polyunsaturated fatty acid it's got you know healthy saturated and monounsaturated fat and even that has grades and only the most expensive olive oil is the best and it's the least oxidized right there's the lower grade olive oils that more oxidized and you know even olive oil once you open the top it begins to
oxidize once you you know enter put air in there I always tell people look buy olive oil in dark bottles buy it in small bottles and use it up quickly more amazing episodes just like this one watch now you got to be careful with MC or if you start too quickly many women get feelings of nause you get loose bowel movements even diarrhea so work your way up