Dr. Cate is second to none as a health resource, period. Does anyone else blend her disparate interests of hands-on patient care during her long career as a family physician, a deep interest in scientific research, and an ability to communicate practical tips to a broad audience through her books, videos and podcast appearances? Clearly, Dr. Cate is exceptional.
In this show, we learn about her background and wild journey across the continent to pursue an assortment of career roles. In particular, her nine years serving a rural native population on the island of Kauai served as inspiration for her groundbreaking book, Deep Nutrition. This book was initially self-published in 2009 and became a runaway bestseller. It was expanded and updated in 2017 to become an absolute must-have resource on your bookshelf.
While on the island, Dr. Cate and Luke were exposed by longtime native Hawaiians to forgotten cooking traditions featuring nose-to-tail consumption of naturally raised animals and a devotion to fermented foods in honor of their ancestry. Dr. Cate noticed in her medical clinic that the elderly natives who had preserved these ancestral traditions were healthier than the more westernized younger generations. This led to the research and development of Dr. Cate’s trademarked “Four Pillars of the Human Diet”: Fresh foods (e.g. fruit and vegetables), fermented foods (e.g., sauerkraut, yogurt), organ meats (hey if you can’t stand liver, try the legit supplements from AncestralSupplements.com that package the purest sourced organ meats and bone broth into convenient capsules), and meat on the bone (bone broth is one of the most nutritious foods on the planet, yet often completely overlooked even by devoted primal/paleo eaters).
The diet Dr. Cate follows now completely contradicts what she learned in medical school, which can be summarized as: “Fat makes you fat, cholesterol clogs your arteries, and salt gives you hypertension.” Unfortunately, Dr. Cate admits that: “As a doctor, I paid a lot for my medical education, and I did not learn anything true or worthwhile about nutrition or what people are supposed to eat.” And she’s hardly the only doctor to experience this – everyone who went to medical school during her time was fed the same incorrect information. Fortunately, she is a passionate advocate and spokesperson for living a natural, healthy, ancestral lifestyle, and her wealth of knowledge is truly boundless. Enjoy this show with the supremely well-informed, intelligent, and humorous Dr. Cate, as she shares so much of the invaluable knowledge she has accumulated over years of dedicated research and study – and before you start listening, you might want to take out a pen and paper – you will want to keep track of everything you learn from this radical conversation with one of the leading experts on nutrition and the history of human health.
TIMESTAMPS:
Cate talks about how she has lived in many different places and what it teaches her. [09:11]
Dr. Cate describes how her work with traditional Hawaiian diet brought her to the ancestral diet. [14:52]
In medical school, Cate didn’t learn true information about nutrition. [16:02]
Cookbooks that came out before the 1950s were the real nutrition science. [19:12]
The four pillars of traditional diet are (1) fresh (umbrella for variety, local, and seasonal), (2) fermented & sprouted, (3) meat on the bone, and (4) organs. [25:47]
Dogs are prehumen. What else came before us humans? [28:62]
How did our ancestors manage their food? How do we know what tastes good? [30:34]
It is almost impossible to not become addicted to sugar. [33:34]
Learn how to use the bones in your diet to strengthen your joints and skin. [37:02]
In order to take advantage of what the bones provide, it’s better to use chicken on bone rather than boneless breast for example. [40:21]
It’s hard to buy natural fats any more. [43:06]
The fourth pillar is organ meats. Liver is especially good for anemia. [45:06]
Try to train yourself when you are hungry to try these new healthy meats. [51:52]
Energy emergency crisis is a result from craving sugar. [55:29]
We have radically altered the composition of our bodies by consuming vegetable oils. [56:05]
Dr. Cate acknowledges that sugar is important in this discussion, but she believes that the problem of the vegetables oils is way more important. {59:28]
When we decide to give up vegetable oils to clean up our diet, what happens then? [01:22:20]
Many people get headaches when their brain is needing energy. [01:07:00]
People trying to lose weight get into this vicious cycle when they have to work so hard. It’s because their cells are dependent on sugar. [01:10:56]
LINKS:
QUOTES:
- “I paid a lot for medical school and I did not learn anything true or worthwhile about nutrition.” (Dr. Cate)
- “Children born today have a shorter life expectancy than their parents for the first time in a long time. We’ve really screwed up.” (Dr. Cate)
- “It’s pretty much impossible to raise a well-developed, truly healthy child if you’re not giving them foods from all four pillars.”
- “You’re getting 80% of fat calories from these nasty seed oils, unless you make a point to avoid them.”
LISTEN:
Get Over Yourself Podcast
Brad: 00:00:08 Welcome to the get over yourself podcast. This is author, an athlete, Brad Kearns, discovering ways to be healthy, fit and happy in hectic, high-stress, modern life. So let’s slow down and take a deep breath. Take a cold plunge and expertly balanced that competitive intensity with an appreciation of the journey. That’s the theme of the show. Here we go.
Brad: 00:05:49 Hey listeners, I’m so excited to bring you the first of two shows recorded in the beautiful Connecticut home of the wise and powerful Dr Cate Shanahan. I rank Cate at the very, very top of the charts for health authority and broad based experience and interests and background that brings her message to the forefront of anything you will ever learn and hear about health.She has the most refined and wonderful bullshit meter of anybody out there. So I consult with her all the time about what’s and what’s real. And we have a whole show focused on that theme. But this show, I just want you to get to know her, find out about her extremely interesting background, especially all the places that she’s lived and especially what Cate brings to the table that I think is so unique and powerful is her disparate talents and interests. So she’s a longtime family physician actually caring for real humans on a day to day basis and consulting for companies to help their entire employee base be healthy, along with being a prominent author and speaker and frequent podcast guest in the ancestral health movement. And then at the third point of the Golden Triangle of broad experience, Cate is an enthusiastic researcher and scientist at heart. So she’s up on all the research studies.
Brad: 00:06:48 She actually reads them besides just summarizing them and doing the talking points. And, in conclusion, consequently most refreshing of all, she is a straight shooter. So when she smells bullshit, she will have no problem calling out Harvard University as a bunch of liars and information concealers Oh yes. It’s getting a little spicy these days, especially in the diet health fitness industries. So Cate is our beacon of reasonability and critical thinking. That’s why I know you’re going to love the show and many more. So go look for her@drCate.com learn more, especially get her magnificent book, “Deep Nutrition”, why your genes need traditional food. Featuring the four pillars of the human diet. And Oh my gosh, what a wonderful revelation. This was for me, a healthy, extremely devoted primal eater, but when I was exposed to Cate’s four pillars, I realized that I was almost entirely missing two of them and then I needed to broaden my perspective about what healthy eating really is, honoring the ancestral traditions rather than just plugging them into food choices and macronutrient calculations.
Brad: 00:08:12 You know, when I first heard Dr Cate was on a random podcast probably six years ago, and I was just listening to another health show and she was on there making so much sense and talking with such enthusiasm and clarity that I actually tracked her down and she was working in Napa, California at the time. I called her office. I thought I was just going to leave a message or find out the customer service email to send a random inquiry to, and they’re like, hold on a second. Then she got on the phone. I’m like, what? I’m talking to the all powerful Dr Cate herself. She’s like, ah, yeah. So I said, you know what? You make the most sense of anybody I’ve heard in this whole game and we gotta do some work together. So we had the start of long, wonderful relationships used to have a physician consulting service that we ran through. Primal, primal aligned physician, if you will. And now she’s doing all kinds of wonderful things. We’ll learn all about what she’s been up to. Thank you for listening. Dr Cate Shanahan.
Brad: 00:09:11 Dr Cate Shanahan, we’re here in your home in Connecticut. Thank you for having us. Great to visit. Apparently you’re not long for this place, which is your routine. Since I’ve known you, can we get the entire guided tour from uh, let’s say you took off from the east coast. What more than 10 years ago now? And where’d you go?
Cate: 00:09:34 All right. So, um, get a globe.
Brad: 00:09:37 Those of you listening at home, get a pen and paper out.
Cate: 00:09:41 and so let’s see, um, left from Syracuse for, that’s your home. That’s it’s your hood. That’s where my parents live. Okay. Then went to, um, residency in Tucson where I met Luke or married in Tucson. What the heck is he doing there? Um, he was being a poet. So in other words, he was hanging out wearing leather jackets and, you know, saying things that people thought were cool.. Yeah. So, um, and then from there we went up to a little town called clay Elum in the cascades where they actually filmed northern exposure, supposed to be in Alaska. It was actually in this clay Elum Washington and the cascade mountains stayed there for a year. Then we went to Everett Washington. So that was a very short move for us. It was only two hours away. Then Luke got into law school. So we went to Minneapolis, Minnesota. Stayed there for a year because he had had eye surgery and uh, it was causing problems and so he couldn’t finish law school. So we went to Hawaii, stayed there for 11 years.
New Speaker: 00:10:46 11. Wow. What island, that was Kauai.
Cate: 00:10:50 Then we went to New Hampshire and stayed there for a year and a half. Then we went to Napa, stayed there for three years. Then we went to Denver, Colorado, uh, area, a little town called Morrison in the foothills of the rocky mountains. Um, and then we came here and to us, Port Connecticut,.
Brad: 00:11:12 Home of Martha Stewart and other celebs, right?
Cate: 00:11:15 Yeah, yeah. There’s a celebrities running around here. They all, uh, congregate around a little grocery store that sells grass fed meat for $900 an ounce and uh, it’s called double l market. And um, then, um, I’m probably gonna have to leave this little house that I really like this house. Um, but go to a town called Mount Dora, Florida. So like, cause I have a job in Orlando, Florida, so I’ll probably be going down there and hopefully that’ll be it. Like everybody, you know, I mean I can just, I feel like I could just be like, okay, so many people go here to die. That’s my goal. My goal is to drop dead in Florida.
Brad: 00:11:57 someday.
Cate: 00:11:59 I don’t want to have to move again. Right. Yeah. Like hopefully I can enjoy living in Florida for awhile.
Brad: 00:12:07 Oh, it’s southern California now in northern California. And my whole life. Right. I, I don’t understand how if you experience decent weather, how you could ever, uh, tolerate, you know, these, these winters of slipping on the ice and breaking your elbow and all the things people deal with are unimaginable to me having, having born and raised in decent weather, I mean, I can understand people moving to California or Florida, but the other way around and being like, wait a sec,
Cate: 00:12:35 it’s a different psychic state. You just get ready for um, suffering, but you also have the pleasure of, yeah. You also have the pleasure of scenery changing and um, and peace and quiet. You know, like California, if you’re camping and trying to sleep in the side of the road somewhere, there’s going to be a cop that tells you, you know, get outta here. But if you’re doing that in New Hampshire or Vermont or some back roads and Connecticut, no one cares. It’s not, you know, the land is not really worth anything. But in, in, in California, it’s all worth so much that the cops keep a close eye on.
Brad: 00:13:15 Yeah. Among other things, I mean the, the weather and the attraction brings with a high expense and the crowds in the, in the traffic. And I like reading about those quality of life magazine articles where they say the number one city to live in in America is St Louis because people spend only 11% of their income on housing. And in the Bay Area they spend 46%. It’s like wow, that’s pretty heavy. I mean, I don’t know anybody. I know a few people in St Louis. Thank you. The primal Paleo group out there that hosted me a couple of years ago. It’s an awesome town with the big giant gateway arch. I love that thing. But there’s a lot of considerations like that that you don’t realize unless you, uh, move around like you guys have.
Cate: 00:13:54 That’s so, yeah. What we like about here is that there’s a Italians here and Italians make great meat. I mean, we don’t eat them for their meat. They make, they sell it in case you’re from the west coast, you may not know that. So I just want to make sure that’s clear. Don’t eat the Italians, let them make your deli meat.
Brad: 00:14:16 Keep them alive.
Cate: 00:14:16 Yes. And um, and they’ll make fantastic deli meat. It is so worth living here just for the Pastrami.
Brad: 00:14:23 I can’t wait. I’m going to try some later. So your wonderful book, “Deep Nutrition”, which has had a long life being that you rewrote it, had it republished in the larger format and one of the big uh, elements of that which was so cool was this, you know, ancestral experience and your, your time in Kauai that gave you these epiphanies these insights about the traditional diet, especially in that area. Can you tell us a little about that?
Cate: 00:14:52 Yeah, so, well I guess you like the, um, what a traditional diet is in Hawaii. So, um, what is, uh, you know, there weren’t actually a lot of Hawaiians in Hawaii when we were there. They, um, Captain Cook, um, kind of saw the last of them really. And they, they’re wiped out 90% or so within, I think it was like 10 years of.
Brad: 00:15:22 Captain Cook and his rifle?
Cate: 00:15:22 Yeah.
Brad: 00:15:23 Mercy. That was what the late 17 hundreds or something?
Cate: 00:15:26 Yeah,.
Brad: 00:15:27 they wiped out 90% of the population.
Cate: 00:15:30 We brought a lot of germs with us.
Brad: 00:15:32 Why does he have big ass statues around Hawaii then? That’s terrible news.
Cate: 00:15:35 Well, they really didn’t like him. Exactly. Yes it was. It’s a controversial thing even to put on those statues, but, um, but uh, so the culture in Hawaii now is a melting pot of Asia and um, and, and the seafaring parts of Europe, so Portuguese and German and um, and uh, all over China, Korea. Um, and it turns out that even though they came from all over the world, they all agreed that, um, you know, beef is good food and so is pork and they do a lot of stuff in common. And so while I was at, my husband and I were living in Hawaii, that’s when we wrote our first book, “Deep Nutrition”. why your genes need traditional food. And what we were doing was trying to figure out what, you know, what people should eat, right. Basic question. And, and this is, this is a basic question that, um, doesn’t get the respect it deserves. Most of the time when people answer it, you know, um, and as a doctor, I paid a lot for my medical education, um, in the 90s, so a long time ago, I paid a lot at even more now, I did not learn anything true or worthwhile about nutrition, what people are supposed to eat,.
Brad: 00:16:56 Oh, pull quote for the show.! So as a doctor, you did not learn much about nutrition, right?
Cate: 00:17:03 What I learned was mostly not true. I mean, I can summarize everything I learned. Um, that fat makes you fat, cholesterol clogs your arteries and salt gives you hypertension. Um, and, and that’s pretty much it. And I, I, I knew that going in because as a student of the Cheerios cereal box, you know, I picked that up when I was about eight or so. So that’s, you know, what doctors learn. Um, but the thing is, and this is something that a lot of folks, um, you know, if you think about it in terms of history, um, it’s, it’s so important to understand this because the history of nutrition education, um, is such that they basically pretend we don’t have any science. They pretend there was no science, no nutrition science prior to 1950 or so.
Cate: 00:17:54 Right. Cause like all the rules and everything, this stuff about fat and cholesterol comes from 1950 with the diet heart hypothesis and all that is all spawn from there. And they, they use a statistical analysis to try to figure out, you know, what correlates with longevity or what correlates with heart attacks or what correlates with Alzheimer’s or whatever. And so it is an absolutely worthless science that way because I mean, over a lifetime, uh, you know, are you going to remember how much baloney you ate? You know, when you’re being surveyed at 82 and now you have dementia, are you going to be able to, this is how they do it. I mean, I’m serious that they, they, they do recall studies. Well, what did you eat, you know, or.
Brad: 00:18:44 The official term is a recall study. That’s one of the way asking for subjective answers.
Cate: 00:18:50 Correct.
Brad: 00:18:50 How frequently do you eat French fries or whatever?
Cate: 00:18:54 Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s one of the common ways of doing it. It’s all based. Most of the studies are based on recall. There’s very few prospective studies that go forward with you in time and you write down what you’re doing as you do it.
Brad: 00:19:05 The Framingham study being one.
Cate: 00:19:07 Yes.
Brad: 00:19:07 They track the people since 1948.
Cate: 00:19:09 Yes.
Brad: 00:19:10 That’s why it’s highly respected.
Cate: 00:19:12 Yes, it is a very good body of data, but the questions that you can answer are only as good as the thought process behind those questions. And because everybody’s pretending that we don’t have a real nutrition science. Um, we’re starting from scratch. And this is the point I want to make is that it’s not true. We do have nutrition science. We have the best, um most ancient, uh, biggest body of nutrition science out there is the collective world of cookbooks that were published, you know, before 1950 when, when it was all tainted with this idea that saturated fat was bad and so on.
Cate: 00:19:54 Um, and, and so, um, that the cookbooks contain recipes and these recipes are instructions on how to feed and grow healthy human beings because this is what was done.If we couldn’t produce healthy children. If we couldn’t produce healthy human bodies that were sturdy, robust, um, we would have died out and the right, because, you know, we didn’t have safety nets a hundred years, more than a hundred years ago. That was pretty much almost no safe social safety net. If you were elderly and your teeth were falling out, well someone was going to have to cut up your food for you or chew it for you if you couldn’t breastfeed, right? If you are a mother and you couldn’t breastfeed, well, if you were rich and you could afford a wet nurse, your baby would live. But if you weren’t, you know, your baby would die. Um, and so, you know, people had to be extraordinarily healthy to be able to make it to reproductive age and then even more so to be able to become elderly.
Cate: 00:21:00 And people did. People did that and they did that by eating traditional cuisine, not by restricting their salt because they thought it was going to cause hypertension. So the idea that we need a new, a new nutrition science is complete bologna. What we need to do is respect the reality that cookbooks are essentially nutrition science. They are a diary, they are the food diary of what people who were healthier than us by every measure. And now we have the stats to prove it right? Because children born today have a shorter life expectancy than their parents for the first time in a long time. We’ve really screwed up. Um, and um, so if we want to look and see the food recall diary that was actually written down, that’s very accurate. We just look at cookbooks, millions of pages, millions of recipes from all over the world.
Cate: 00:21:54 So that’s what my husband and I did. If you don’t want, if you don’t want to spend the time flipping through millions of pages, you can just flip through four or 500 or so of “Deep Nutrition”. Because when we wrote our book, we analyzed all of that and we broke it down into what the four common elements were. Every cuisine, every people everywhere, all over the world. And, um, and so that’s a long answer to your question that you asked like of five hours ago about what did you learn about nutrition on Hawaii? So that that’s, you know, that’s the melting pot, um, of culture of the, the Asian cultures there and the, the um, creativity with which they would just use everything. Like they would hunt for goat or hunt for pig or fish or raise goats in their backyard or raise cows or whatever. But they would use all of it, you know, and it had never occurred to me as a white person from Connecticut that you could eat things like goat leg or, you know, um, lungs, you know, it just, it was that what you can eat that stuff.
Brad: 00:23:00 Weren’t you guys invited to a potluck in the neighborhood or something like that and you, you show up and there’s some, there’s some eyeballs over here and brains over here. Some kind of thing like that?
Cate: 00:23:10 I didn’t know it at the time, but that was really a defining moment in my life, you know, because it was what opened my eyes to this whole world of there’s more to meat than meat, than muscle meat. Right? It’s the meats.
Brad: 00:23:22 We want to make sure it’s a 90% lean instead of 85. All that complete backward stuff. Yeah. So the Hawaii culture there, I mean if you call yourself a native Hawaiian or a multi-generation Hawaiian, you’re really talking about possibly a European settler or someone from the Asian areas because the, the actual traditional population was wiped out. So we’re just doing the best we can to identify people that have been going for numerous generations with, with a lot of traditional influence as opposed to the shave diet and the, uh, the, the Modern Day United States of America, Hawaii.
Cate: 00:23:58 Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So I mean, there’s definitely some people with Hawaiian heritage there. Um, but it’s, it’s totally a tiny minority. And even that is somewhat, you know, diluted with cultural influence from, um, uh, from, you know, the fact that the majority of the people that were not Hawaiian anymore. But, um, but you know, in terms of nutrition and cuisine and culinarily it, it, it almost doesn’t matter that much because they all do the same things, right? Like even the Hawaiians, um, they talk about the canoe plants that the Hawaiians brought like a banana than a coconut and a couple other plants that they use to, um, to like make clothing and housing out of and tools, equipment and stuff like that. But, um, it, there’s a, a very good chance that they also brought some animals with them, some potbelly pigs. Uh, cause certainly, um, the, the, the folks that came later from Asia did.
Cate: 00:24:56 Um, and what they do is they basically bring animals that they like to eat and let them roam loose in Hawaii. And then they, you know, figure out how to survive. And those that do become, their hunting, you know, animals that they, now they go hunt. So that very much the way I think native Americans here on the continent probably worked. It was you just kind of support the animal and plant populations that are of use to you. And that’s kind of what they did on Hawaii. And, um, and you know, people do that. It seems like, like everywhere, if you look at traditional cultures, you see them, you know, using instead of, um, cows, they’ll use camels, right to milk the camels. And instead of riding horses while they’ll ride the camels or whatever they got, you know, they, they kind of do the same things.
Cate: 00:25:47 They use the animals and the plants in very similar ways to get by. And that includes, um, feeding themselves. And so when it comes to the rules on feeding themselves, we broke it down into four rules, which is people would eat fresh food, they would eat, um, the, the, all the organs, you know, of the animal. They would, including even in do stuff with the, like boiling bones to use the bones in the skin and joint material. And then they would ferment and sprout, um, whatever they could to preserve it or to, to make it edible. In the case of seeds to sprout those than they have to ferment like extra stuff because there’s no freezer to store stuff in. You can’t can things, you don’t have cans. So, um, so you ferment it and that’s a great way to preserve your extra. So, um, those are the four pillars of world cuisine and those are the four pillars of the human diet. That’s what we all need.
Brad: 00:26:37 Fresh food, let’s define them a little more slowly. So we have fresh, which would be fruits, vegetables,
Cate: 00:26:45 Stuff that hasn’t been cooked basically. So eating it the way, uh, you get it right. So, and that includes even, um, you know, dairy, like fresh milk, you don’t pasteurize modularize, how could they have done that? Um, and, and people have been consuming dairy probably for 40,000 years, cause that’s about how long we’ve been, um, domesticating goats. And so, you know, chances are really good that s once we started domesticating goats, we use them for every bit that we possibly could. And you know, w we do have this practice, this ancient practice of using wet nurses. And so I’m sure there was a similar thing where babies, you know, who didn’t, whose parents died or whatever, you need to get some milk into the infant, you would milk the animal. And so folks who talk about it, like it’s just also unnatural and bizarre for us to be milking other animal.
Brad: 00:27:33 It’s not Paleo dairy, isn’t Paleo wait a sec. The first. If Dr Cate many shout downs during the show, oh my gosh, we’re teeing up teeing up the ball for you.
Cate: 00:27:44 Yeah. I mean, 40,000 years ago, that’s pretty much Paleo and so
Brad: 00:27:48 pretty legit, man. Yeah. I have some goat milk and some goat cheese. Goats came first before cows.
Cate: 00:27:55 That’s the thinking. I mean, that’s the best you know, records that we have right now. And if you think about it, it makes sense. They’re smaller, they’re more versatile, they’re more, you know, diverse than what they can eat. Um, and um, you can manage them right? It’s very important to be able to push around your animals if they have got a river to cross while you’ve got a migraine. Right? Yeah.
Brad: 00:28:14 Well you’ve got a migraine. Yes. Damn, go. You’re driving me crazy. Come here. Don’t you know, you heard me a little rat. Those guys are a little, they’re a little naughty. Yeah. There’s uh, neighbors have some goats and you see them knocking stuff over and making noise and they got personality.
Cate: 00:28:32 Yeah. They got mine for their rounds. Right. They’re smart. So, um, so yeah, so I think it probably goats and dogs, right? I think, you know, some folks say it was dogs that we domesticated first because they helped us hunt, but I, you know, it’s whatever we, we didn’t milk the dogs
Brad: 00:28:48 nor eat them, generally speaking. Right. I thought they were helping us. I thought there was a give and take there where the dogs kind of kept the safe or the, the descendants of the wolves and then they got our scraps. That’s what I understand. And that’s going back a hundred thousand years or more.
Cate: 00:29:03 Yes. And fire goes back, beat a prehuman. Right. 1.5 million years. There’s no real human.
Brad: 00:29:08 Yeah. Who Lit the fires? The wolves?
Cate: 00:29:15 Yeah. That’s what my, that’s what my dog would say.
Brad: 00:29:17 She laughing listeners. So it was a legit question. My dog can put his two paws together and like play with a ball, work through like a sock if, if he wants to chew it.
Cate: 00:29:28 Never underestimate your pets. Um, but um, no, it was like some sort of Hominid type thing. I, you know, I don’t know. Whatever we were of homo before erectus or something. Habel is there’s something rather us. Yeah. Um, yeah. Yeah. And people were making boats 700,000 years ago. I mean, before we were people. So before we were, no, wait, no, it was more than some long time ago. That’s how they got to the continent of India.
Brad: 00:29:55 Um, so through boats?
Cate: 00:29:57 Yeah. Yeah.
Brad: 00:29:58 That was how long ago?
New Speaker: 00:30:00 I think it was somewhere around 700,000. But I may have, I may be way off.
Brad: 00:30:04 So this human evolution timeline, we’re familiar with the, the modern homosapiens appeared 160 to 200,000 years ago in east Africa. And then they left there around 60,000 years ago and colonize the globe gradually. But we’re talking about pre, pre homosapiens.
Cate: 00:30:20 Some good stuff was done before that. Right. Cause that’s what fire came from. You know, we, we might’ve, you know, been using that. We didn’t maybe come up with that ourselves. We maybe didn’t even invent the wheel. I don’t know. So, but we’re getting off topic. Yeah.
Brad: 00:30:34 Okay. Yeah. So we had fresh foods, right? That stuff that’s fresh, pretty obvious to understand. The second one was organ meats.
Cate: 00:30:42 Um, yeah. So actually let me do it in this order. So fresh foods and fermented and sprouted. Yeah.
Brad: 00:30:48 So we got the first F, the second F fresh, then fermented and sprouted, right
Cate: 00:30:52 when you got too much fresh stuff to eat all at once, you got to store the extra. So the great way to do that is to ferment it. Um, so Sushi even actually was a fermented food traditionally because fish would run up river, right and big runs and you catch all these fish all at once more than you needed to eat. So there was a, a need to preserve them. And what was done was they actually packed the fish and rice and there was some kind of a, um, bacillus bacteria species in the rice that helped to, um, control the, the rotting were fermentation is controlled writing. And so the, the fish were preserved in a way that, um, was not poisonous. Right? So, so that’s all, that’s all that fermented food really is. It’s rotten food that isn’t poisonous and when you eat it, um, and you’re told by your parents from a really young age that it’s good for you and it has all these good feelings associated with it, then it will taste good.
Cate: 00:31:49 And that is really what, you know, taste is defined by as, it’s supposed to be a lot of cultural definition, right? We’re supposed to have happy, good thoughts and feel good and all this kind of stuff. That’s how our tastebuds get in trained to learn what is a good thing for us to eat. And so that’s how, you know, that’s how come these days since we don’t grow up being very sophisticated flavors, we grew up eating mostly sugar. Um, that’s how come a lot of folks don’t really enjoy organ meats the way people used to because we just didn’t grow up eating. We never learned to taste them properly.
Brad: 00:32:26 So you’re saying there’s a psychological component where it’s a little kid and we say if, if, if you, if you clean up your room and do your chores, I’ll take you out for ice cream. Ice cream. It’s going to be the greatest treat and reward. And so we start there. There’s a socializing aspect besides the taste buds?
Cate: 00:32:43 Yeah. Right. I thought you were going to say, oh, I’ll take you out for some fermented liver paste or something. Yes, it’s exactly right. It is. Um, it’s the associated emotions and everything around it, right? So we’re, we’re using something as a reward these days. Sugar that has a sweet taste, that is its own reward. So it’s a waste, right? It’s a waste of that rewards system. All these complex things in our brain that Oh, the appetite regulation chemicals and our hypothalamus there, they’re there to help us eat what our parents want us to eat. And nowadays our parents don’t know what to tell us to eat. So we grow up eating sugar.
Brad: 00:33:26 Is Sugar overriding the more uh, nuanced tastes that we’re capable of?
Cate: 00:33:32 That’s such a good question. Yes.
Brad: 00:33:34 It is. Cause it’s just powerful and it has the addictive properties as well, like rewiring the, I mean this is from the “Keto Reset Diet”. I quoted a PR prominent expert, Dr Cate Shanahan in there about the neural reward system of the brain is getting rewired. And so you literally are addicted to sugar. And that’s why it’s so difficult to drop out of the diet because it’s just short circuiting our true six tastes on our taste buds and the all the, the, the four categories of human nutrition.
Cate: 00:34:05 Well, what it does is it tells, um, it tells us to eat more of it, right? So sugar uniquely is something that says, no matter what the, you know, the environmental stimuli, no matter what emotional state sugar is, something that is going to give you pleasure, um, and it’s going to reinforce more sugar. So you’re going to want more. So it’s almost impossible, um, to not become addicted to sugar if you get it at a young enough age with, you know, the right emotional, you know, like as a reward and all this kind of stuff that children are now brought up with. And so it’s a very tough addiction to break. But you, I actually have a protocol for doing it, for breaking that,
Brad: 00:34:50 Right? You yell at your kid when you serve them an ice cream. Here you go, you little rat eat this thing. I hope you hate it as they’re crying. Mother eating their ice cream illegal than that.
Cate: 00:35:05 But that’ll be in then the next book that’s being written right now. Right? What’s it called? “The fat burn” fat. Oh Man, you gave me some teasers last night. It was extremely compelling.
Brad: 00:35:14 We’ll get into that in a second. I don’t want to break the storyline, but, um, so we, we had that fresh foods for men and then we had the fermented and sprouted and great for those people that didn’t have refrigerators. But today the importance of consuming those foods goes beyond that.
Cate: 00:35:29 Probiotics,.
Brad: 00:35:31 probiotics, live gut health. Exactly.
Cate: 00:35:34 So there’s all kinds of people selling and stuff these days and what they don’t really know what to put, what kind of species of the 5,000 that we have in our intestines. There’s 5,000 different species. A lot to choose from when you’re trying to create a supplement. So what do you do? You just guess and that’s what they’re doing. They’re really just guessing for all probiotic products. Yeah, and there are some educated guesses, but I would rather just do what people used to do because we know that worked and that is just eat fermented food. And So, you know, yogurt and fermented pickles, lacto fermented, um, uh, pickles and Sauerkraut and Kimchi, those are some of the most popular and accessible fermented foods that’ll they really make a difference for me. I know like when I’m working, um, in a clinical setting during cold and flu season and people are counting on me, if I every day get just like an ounce or two of some kind of cultured Kimchi or Sauerkraut or something with those live bacteria in there, I, I don’t get sick.
Cate: 00:36:33 And if I don’t have it for a few days in a row and people continue coughing and sneezing on me, um, I, I often get sick. So those things really, really help your immune system and your immune system starts in your gut, right? So you have a healthy gut, you can have a much healthier immune system. And so, um, those kinds of sour and um, salty foods are so essential to healthy immune system.
Brad: 00:37:02 That brings us to number three.
Cate: 00:37:04 That would be meat on the bone. So this is one that is extremely tasty and, um, we’re talking about like chicken stock, beef stock that’s been made with bone material and not the bone marrow, but the joint material. Um, so the cartilage at the end of the bone, the white shiny stuff that, um, is, um, lubricating the joints and the tendons and ligaments are made out of and even skin is made out of.
Cate: 00:37:33 And when you, uh, break that down in, um, a boiling pot with some vegetables, uh, turns into these compounds called glycosaminoglycans and pretty glycans and they have really long names, but they’re very special molecules. They don’t get digested. Their digestive system doesn’t break them down. They actually enter your bloodstream and head directly to your own joint tissue, your connective tissue, your skin, and they support the health of your, um, your joints and your skin. And they, so they, I mean, you can really get healthy looking skin from eating this stuff and it makes a huge difference on your joints, especially like my fingers, cause like fingers are, um, very loaded. Uh, they’re, they’re, they’re like, um, long tendons, you know, your fingers basically are operated by super long tendons and a very long tendon sheets. So your fingers are like the longest skinniest joints. You can imagine. Um, sort of, you kind of think of it that way. The whole thing needs to be lubricated with joint fluid and um, your body’s going to be better able to make more healthy joint fluid if you’ve been getting these glycosaminoglycans. And I mean, the good news is that they taste really good. The bad news is if you’re a Vegan, there’s not any known substitute. Like you might be able to substitute with some forms of seaweeds. [inaudible]
Brad: 00:38:54 can’t even take their collagen powder. Is that against the Vegan rules?
Cate: 00:38:58 Well, if it’s made from bone, it could be against their roots. Everybody to find their own Vegan, no rules. I guess.
Brad: 00:39:05 What if they, I’m the rototiller of the wheat field catches a mouse in the blades and then it’s dispersed molecularly into their bread. Is that against the rules? So just to ask in peeps, just looking out for you Vegan peeps,
Cate: 00:39:20 right? Yeah, I guess, you know, that would be hard to avoid.
Brad: 00:39:24 Uh, so you heard about this, uh, is it called the heliotropic effect where if you ingest the college and it’s going to go to the joints that need it the most? Cause I have a sore left elbow. Is it going to target that? Is there anything to that?
Cate: 00:39:36 Yes, it does. Yes.
Brad: 00:39:37 Oh, it’s a miracle.
Cate: 00:39:38 I.
New Speaker: 00:39:38 t is totally a miracle. Wait a second. You’re our BS meter and you’re saying it actually is true?
Cate: 00:39:43 Yes, it is. Actually, I believe they’ve done studies where they radio label this, uh, this, uh, these kind of molecules. They feed them to mice with injured joints.
Brad: 00:39:51 So the mice are eating the green, the yellow glowing fluorescent yogurt. Okay. There you go. A little mouse,
Cate: 00:39:57 some with some collagen hydrolysate in it or a cartilage hydrolysate in it. And then they just take a little x-ray picture of their joints and it lights up in the joints that were, that they had injured.
Brad: 00:40:10 All right, fine. The poor mouse here, let me break a finger for ya. Okay.
Cate: 00:40:17 But it’s all right. You’re going to get some tasty broth. Oh, goody. I’m glad I’m in this study.
Brad: 00:40:21 So if you’re consuming a drumstick meat on the bone and you’re just nibbling away and you’re eating the meat off and then you throw the, throw the bone in the garbage, are you getting a bit of joint material such that that’s a better choice than the chicken breast without any bone present?
Cate: 00:40:39 Well, yeah, yeah. I mean you should actually not throw the bones in the garbage
Brad: 00:40:43 You put them in your crock pot, your instant pot.
Cate: 00:40:47 Um, and, and you know, if you don’t want to bother doing that, you could do what my two year old sister did. She just like gnaw on the joint. Like she would just, you know, like a dog with a bone. She was like that. And she’s actually the tallest beefiest of, of everyone, the four children. Cause she was really into that stuff. And we have like photographs of her chewing on bones. She looks extremely primal and she’s two and, um, and she’s like, uh, five 11 or something like that. And, um, you know, she’s got shoulders out to like a linebacker and her hands are, uh, they, she can palm a basketball and she’s, you know, sturdy, right? She’s got, she’s got big thick bones and everything. So she’s the tough, um, tough guy. And, um, that’s, you know, guys, they’re supposed to also be able to grow up like that. And nowadays a lot of children are just not getting anywhere near the nutrition they need. And so they’re not developing properly and it’s, it’s pretty much impossible to raise a well developed, truly healthy child if you’re not giving them all these four pillars. And also not keeping them away from vegetable oils, which is one of the, one of the things we also talk about in “Deep Nutrition” and explain why it’s also bad and what all the horrible things that’s gonna do to Ya.
Brad: 00:42:03 Okay. So we were, we’re going to talk about the, the bs of the nutritional supplements, much of it, but I mentioned my ancestral supplements where I’m consuming in a capsule form, a bone broth or beef heart, beef, liver, those kinds of things. So you’ll, you’re cool with that. Dispensing, uh, the, the, the ultimate goal of eating this meat on the bone. And if I can get it in a capsule, I can short circuit the, I did that. Maybe I’m not consuming enough bone broth or making it enough in my daily diet.?
Cate: 00:42:33 There’s are a few nutrients that can handle all love that kind of processing and the nutrients in bone broth are in that sense.
Brad: 00:42:44 So glycens can survive in the whole journey into the capsule.
Cate: 00:42:49 Exactly. Uh,.
Brad: 00:42:50 but generally speaking, this notion of finding your leaner cuts of meat and we’re so used to having the chicken breast cause I’m healthy, I don’t eat red meat. I eat chicken. Oh, good for you. And the leanest possible meats is again, narrowing that slice of what we should be eating.
Cate: 00:43:06 Yeah, I mean it’s a great way to get your protein, your essential amino acids, but you’re missing out on a lot of other stuff that you also need. And um, I mean the problem iswhat we’ve we’ve done is we’ve taken away, what we’ve done is we’ve taken away like the natural fats. It’s actually hard to buy natural fats anymore. And um, you know, cause they, the most of the chicken, a lot of the chicken, the cheapest chicken, it’s very often the skinless boneless and the, the cuts of the beef and the pork have been, um, trimmed so much. That’s very little fat, almost no bones. When you buy dairy, uh, it’s hard to find, you know, full fat yogurt. There’s no such thing as full fat flavored yogurt. There’s no such thing as, um, full fat chocolate milk. So it’s very rare that you actually purchase fat anymore. And 80% of the fat that the average American gets is not natural. It comes from these vegetable oils that have taken over our diets and truly ate. They have theirs. You know, the average American is 30% of their calories, total calories in 80% of their fat calories from these polyunsaturated vegetable oils. And, and I mean, I, I bring this up on every podcast I’m on because it, because it is the most important thing to understand about diet and, and there’s, um,
Brad: 00:44:26 if you have to go to work now and they’re calling you, hey, what’s that guy doing in his cubicle? He’s listening to podcasts all day. Why? Why ask? Uh, Thanks Rudy for listening to this podcast all day long. I met someone who listens to podcasts for eight hours a day cause he’s doing data entry. It’s like, all right, awesome. Now, now I get it. Uh, we’ll talk about that after we hit the fourth. Um, the fourth pillar of human nutrition. Uh, but that’s some, that’s some shocking stuff. There’s a pull quote right there that you’re getting these 80% of your fats and 30 per 20% of your calories is coming from nasty vegetable oil.
Cate: 00:45:00 Yes. And no one’s talking about it and it is completely irresponsible for,
Brad: 00:45:06 I know that’s your crusade right here. That’s what you’re saying. Okay, give me the fourth one and then we’ll graduate from the four pillars and then go deep. But we’ll plunge into a vat of a steaming hot vegetable oil. Delicious.
Cate: 00:45:17 So, um, uh, the fourth is the organ meats. And so these are really the, um, the original supplements because every different organ in the animal’s body has a different nutritional profile that, um, is going to make it be rich in something very important for us to get. So, um, like for example, liver is a fantastic source of bioavailable, B vitamins and, and minerals, particularly iron. Um, and, uh, just as an example of the power of a little bit of liver to to supplement with iron and reverse the anemia. Um, I’ve had patients where they’ve been taking 325 milligrams of elemental iron and the, the usual form that doctors recommend, um, when somebody is iron deficient, like a lot of women have really heavy periods and they lose too much iron and they need to supplement. So we tell them to take 325 milligrams of iron every day, but that gives them constipation and gut aches and they can’t do it.
Cate: 00:46:14 So I have, um, uh, or even if they can do it, sometimes it doesn’t quite work because possibly there’s not, uh, it’s not either by available enough or there’s more that they need for their bone marrow to be able to produce red blood cells than just iron. Um, cause red blood cells are made a lot of stuff. So when you ha I have had patients who were not getting the results from actually taking that 325 milligrams of iron and taking, um, just some liver pills that amount to maybe six milligrams of iron. So, you know, like one 20th, whatever the math is there and, um, and that will correct their anemia. So the effect and, um, like, you know, maybe it’s the bioavailability, maybe it’s the, um, fact that it’s a whole spectrum of nutrients, but the, the effect of supplementing with liver, or you could just eat liver.
Cate: 00:47:08 So I tell them to take dehydrated liver pills because a lot of people think liver is disgusting, so they can’t eat it. So we just swallow some pills. Um, but the effect is more powerful than 20 times the amount of elemental iron in a normal supplement.
Brad: 00:47:22 Wow.
Cate: 00:47:22 So that’s what the, so that we’re missing out on stuff like that because we don’t eat liver, we don’t eat bone marrow, we don’t eat. Um, you know, most of the parts of the animal that are available to us, we just wasted or it’s made into carpet backing and different kinds of glues and pet food. Um, yeah.
Brad: 00:47:41 Good for the pets. Right. Someone’s getting healthy. I.
Cate: 00:47:44 you know, if there’s ever an apocalypse head for the pet food aisle and get the canned dog food and cat food cause that’s the best stuff in the store that’s gonna last during an apocalypse
Brad: 00:47:54 better than the lean chicken breasts. You just bought with the organic label on them.
Cate: 00:47:58 Yeah. Well it’s good that it’s going to go bad anyway. You know, the Cam stuffs pocalypse ready.
Brad: 00:48:03 So just curious if we had the, uh, the, um, the Vegan opposition that says, I mean, you seem pretty credible. Dr Cate seems pretty credible, doesn’t see listeners, viewers, uh, but what would they say in response that, uh, that would give them a, a counter argument if they’re completely eliminating, what does that, three of the four categories? I mean, are they think they can do some fermented stuff that’s vegetable-based but they’re there. They’re limiting themselves. So they’re cutting the human nutrition optimization and half out of the gate do too much respect to their moral belief system and all that. But what do you say? What would they say?
Cate: 00:48:47 They w they wouldn’t like me, but, um, but that, I mean, you know, I can’t do anything about that. I can’t [inaudible] everybody to, but you know what, I’ve, I what I like to do it for people who are truly searching for the answers rather than, you know, people who’ve already decided they know the answers is, I like to point out that right now in the nutrition world, we have a, um, complete a spectrum of people who are sure that they’re right, including people saying literally the opposite things, right? So there’s people who say you need to eat nothing but plants and you should only eat plants. And there’s people on the other side saying you should eat nothing but animals and you need to only eat animals, right? That’s the carnivore diet. And um, and we have this spectrum of confusion because Harvard and the, you know, the medical industry is pretending that nutrition science began in 1950 and you have to use statistics to figure out what you’re supposed to eat.
Cate: 00:49:50 And you can’t, heaven forbid, just look at what granny used to make and look at cookbooks. That is science, that is a body of science. Like we started out this whole conversation that is a body of science that is right now being ignored. But within the pages of every cookbook older than 50 60, 70 years old. Our instructions for building a healthy human, and if you just look at Fannie Farmer cookbook that’s been reproduced now from 1895, you’ll see that they use like esophagus and everything. Everything’s people. Everything. I’m talking about the four pillars, they’re all in there and they don’t do a lot with fermented food. I think at that point in time that wasn’t appreciated or it was too regional or, I don’t exactly know why it didn’t make it into those cookbooks. Fermented foods are kind of like one of those secret things that maybe people don’t want to talk about cause like wine or something. I don’t know.
Brad: 00:50:41 Maybe somebody was selling refrigerator selling the first iceboxes, right. Yeah. Right. My Dad still calls the refrigerator the icebox, those of you who are not aware of that before refrigerators with a plug, we had iceboxes and the ice man used to come and deliver ice and that’s where you put your stuff. So then the, the desperate need for fermentation would be overrun by industry in that example.
Cate: 00:51:04 Exactly. So that could be, you know, why the, they’re kind of like the first ones to fall off, but, but um, you know, fortunately there’s a resurgence now of all people doing all kinds of [inaudible]. The little shout out to him, he, he’s, he, um, has a book called wild fermentation. He’s a couple of other books about fermentation that are all just great references on how to ferment stuff in your own kitchen without even, you know, buying anything other than the food. You’re gonna ferment in a few containers. So, um, that’s so that’s uh, that’s that. Uh, so fermentation and organ meats I kind of mix about mix up about them because of the fact that they have similar flavor profiles. They’re very complex flavor profiles. They’re often very, um, overwhelming to the uninitiated. Um, and, and they’re overwhelming you. I use that word on purpose because they’re overwhelming you with flavor, right?
Cate: 00:51:52 Like people put a little bit of say, you know, liver pate or um, Natto which is fermented soybeans and on their tongue and they’re like, oh my God, that is so strong, the flavor. And, and that is an, a reflection of the nutrition that it has. So. our brains are just not wired to learn to understand all of that information cause we haven’t gotten it. It is an overwhelming amount of nutritional value that our brains just haven’t been trained to tease out in separate and understand at for what it’s worth for its true value. So we spit it out and we’re like, this is disgusting, but it is actually loaded with nutrition. And so, so if you want to start enjoying that stuff, there is a way to do it. Um, and, and, and you know, a lot of times, you know, you come full circle, right?
Cate: 00:52:44 Like you, you’re like, well, I want to eat good food that I enjoy. But then you also learned more about nutrition and what you’re missing out on by not eating some very nutritious foods that you just don’t happen to like, and you’re like, well, I’ll eat it if I have to, if it’s good for me, but I don’t want people to do that. I want people to train themselves just like you would train a little child, like have a little tiny taste when you’re hungry. And that’s the best way to start actually liking some foods that are good for you.
Brad: 00:53:12 Right. You mentioned that, um, in the Keto reset diet material that I quoted you where, especially if you’re an athlete, maybe this was in prime endurance, where if you come back from your three hour hard workout and you’re famished and you bust open a can of sardines, which you hate, Sardines are disgusting, can’t stand them. But if you eat them at those times when your, when your appetite center is most primed for rewiring, you can actually make yourself like these certain foods that you should eat, but you don’t have, have not acquired the taste yet. Or the taste has been overrun by lifelong consumption of sugar.
Cate: 00:53:49 Yes. One of my favorite patients, um, has, uh, told me that hunger is the great teacher. Right? And as really true. Like, and it’s, you know, it literally true with hunger as well as with other things that you hunger for. But um, but when you’re hungry, your brain is ready to understand the more complex nutrients that it maybe doesn’t really have the ability to understand when you’re not so hungry.
Brad: 00:54:16 But, but wait, I’m never hungry because I ate three meals a day. I’m an American standard American diet. When’s the last time you were hungry? Can we answer? Pause this tape for a minute. Sometimes. Sometimes people aren’t hungry for, for years
Cate: 00:54:30 They aren’t actually hungry. They’re experiencing energy emergencies. So, so this is that what I’m talking about in my next book called the “Fat Burn Fix”. And as a course I’m going to be really thing about that too at some point. But um, but um, the “Fat Burn Fix” is all about helping us get our true hunger back and stop, um, being slave to these energy crisis sorts of hunger where we crave basically sugar. Um, and, and so, you know, if you’re having an energy crisis and you’re craving sugar and you’re feeling hypoglycemic and hangry, that is not true hunger. We’re not ever supposed to feel that way. We are, um, we are having an energy crisis and that is an impossibly unhealthy state. Um, it’s, you cannot really create new cravings, unhealthy cravings from that state. You have to, you have to resolve yourself of those crises. So that’s like phase one of my protocol that I work people through when I work with them. Um, is to get them away from those energy emergency crises.
Brad: 00:55:29 And those are resultant from a craving sugar for your blood sugar, dropping difficulty or inability to produce burn stored energy produce ketones. Right. Exactly. Um, so just quickly since we kind of jumped into that topic, if you are eating these three meals a day and they’re high in carbohydrate and you do so for a years and decades, you become dependent on those outside calories because all that insulin produced after each of these meals hyperinsulinemia is that condition. So you’re carrying that with you for years and years. You suck at burning, stored body fat as Mark Sisson would say.
Cate: 00:56:05 That is not entirely the story. So that’s an important,.
Brad: 00:56:10 that’s why we have Dr Cate on the podcast to get the whole story. Oh yeah,.
Cate: 00:56:15 that’s an important piece of the puzzle. But it is not the first thing that goes wrong. The first thing that goes wrong is that your body gets damaged when it tries to burn fat gets damaged or Mitochondria that’s where your body produces energy. That’s where your body burns fat. And these little parts of yourself called Mitochondria that generate cellular energy, the ATP. And when your Mitochondria tried to burn vegetable oil, they produce a lot of free radicals and it, it shuts them down and they can’t produce energy. Um, it’s, there’s something in there called the uncoupling protein that basically it’s, it’s like you blew a fuse in your mitochondria. It shuts them down, their ATP, um, production stops. And so, um, cells will die if they don’t have an alternative source of fuel, but they do have an alternative source of fuel in this world where the sugar, you know, available within easy reach. So that’s how people become dependent on sugar.
Brad: 00:57:13 So the culprit, the cause is this lifelong ingestion of vegetable oil, hand in hand with sugar, obviously when we’re talking about basic modern diet, but the vegetable oil gets ingested and then it stays in there and it integrates into the fat cells? And then we try to burn it and it’s dysfunctional or it’s not meant to be there in the first place or what happens?
Cate: 00:57:39 We’re not supposed to have so much of it. So, um, our diets now have about 20 times the amount of linelaic acid. So linelaic acid is the most common polyunsaturated fatty acid that’s in the vegetable oils, which are soy, sunflower, safflower, corn, canola or cotton seed. So those are the most common vegetable oils. And linelaic acid is the polyunsaturated fatty acid that’s in there. So you can actually up human beings and you know, our fat and see how much linelaic acid we have in our fat. And then you can go back to biopsies that were done a hundred years ago and see how much they had back then. And you find that it’s 20 times as much. So we have radically altered the composition of our bodies.
Brad: 00:58:19 How about 50 years ago?
New Speaker: 00:58:21 Fifty years ago it was about 7%. Um, so now it’s over 20%
Brad: 00:58:26 and it was one or 2% a hundred years ago cause these foods didn’t exist.?
Cate: 00:58:30 Right. So we had, when you were getting, you wouldn’t be getting that much linoleic acid and you wouldn’t be getting that much polyunsaturated fatty acid because there are those in, you know, you do get there. We’re talking about omega three fatty acid and omega six fatty acid. And of course those are naturally occurring in food, but it’s in a lower amount and, and, and our bodies don’t need that stuff so much for energy. We don’t want it for energy. We use it for signaling and we use it for building, um, nervous tissue and for the proper, uh, fluidity, maintaining the proper fluidity of our cell membranes and our body temperature. And I think that this oil is a big reason behind the epidemic of thyroid disease. Um, because our thyroid’s trying to, our thyroids are very primal organs and they, uh, they, they do stuff like maintain our body temperature and that is low basic and um, and it’s based on physics.
Cate: 00:59:28 And when we’ve changed the, the melting point basically of our body fat, um, then the physics by which our thyroid operate have been disturbed and our thyroid doesn’t operate properly anymore. So we got tons of people with, um, thyroiditis, thyroid nodules, hyperthyroid, um, and um, and it, there wasn’t this epidemic of thyroid disease before vegetable oils and even more like correlating if you have to use correlate to, to figure things out. Um, pet food. Um, you ask a vet who’s been around for 30, 40 years, pets now are starting to get thyroid disease and thyroid nodules and stuff, uh, that they didn’t before and pet food didn’t use to have all this soy oil in it until about 10 years ago. So, um, there’s a lot of arrows pointing towards oil, canola oil and the vegetable oils being the number one scorge far more important than sugar.
Cate: 01:00:38 And you know, I think it’s important to understand that, you know, sugar is addicting, bad and not be controlled by it and by your sweet cravings. But it’s way more important as, um, a health care provider for me to tell people that vegetable oil is, if you just get vegetable oil out of your diet, you’re going to do way more good than if you get sugar out of your diet. If you just isolate that one thing. Now what happens is when people decide to eat healthy, they stop eating junk food. Um, right. So they’ll say whether they say they cut gluten or they, they’re now they’re Vegan and they, they cut their red meat or they say they cut, um, soy or they say they cut. Um, whatever. You know, they also almost always stop eating junk food. And the number one source of calories in junk food is vegetable oil, right? The chips and everything, the vegetable, vegetable, oil and sugar. But vegetable oil is the greater source of calories. And so when people start feeling better by following any diet where they’ve eliminated anything, I always ask them, so do you still do take out Chinese? No, no, of course not. I don’t do that even though I’m going, I’ve gone gluten free. Right? Like so. And they’ll say it’s because I’m avoiding the gluten and the soy sauce or some like, you know, there’s like a nano gram of, of gluten.
Cate: 01:02:03 So, so it’s not doing that much to avoid that nanogram. What’s really have helping you is avoiding the, you know, hundreds of calories of vegetable oil that are disturbing the basic physics by which your body is trying to operate.
Brad: 01:02:20 So we have the producing too much insulin, uh, as, as one small part of the puzzle. But then we have these dysfunctional fat cells in the vegetable oils been integrated there because we’ve been eating it for years and decades. And so if we want to clean up our diet tomorrow and ditch these vegetable oils, um, how is our health journey going to improve? What happens then?
Cate: 01:02:43 So, well, what you’re going to do is substitute it with something actually healthy. And so what I usually recommend is just, you know, the usual stop but the edge of the grocery store. But make sure to get animal fat, like don’t do the boneless skinless chicken, um, and get the bone in skin on and get, uh, don’t do the 80 or the 95% lean ground beef. Get the 80%. But it, you know, it’s also really, really important to talk about what the animals were fed because that’s going to impact their body composition and what their fat is made out of. And so if you go and just get like, you know, the normal grocery store is only going to have normal KFO, you know, soy oil, corn oil, chicken and ground beef and stuff. That’s, it’s still better than eating the boneless skinless and then getting all your fat in the form of vegetable oil.
Cate: 01:03:34 But um, you know, it’s like 10 times more expensive to get pasture raised meats and it’s just, it’s really a, a big problem. And that is our health crisis right there is that healthy food isn’t available. Right. It’s not to mention the available affordable. There’s not, if everybody tomorrow where to start, you know, somehow deciding they wanted to spend more money on, on eating healthy food, we wouldn’t have enough because the, you know, they talk about the GMOs are going to feed the world. What’s really feeding the world is the fact that we aren’t feeding the animals that we eat properly. We’re not giving them grass. They need grass. And that takes space and it takes time. And that’s why it’s more expensive when it’s grass fed and pasture raised, you know like you know, sheep and chickens and pigs and pigs don’t eat grass, but they, they root around in forest and stuff and eat mushrooms and chestnuts and worms and whatever they can dig up.
Cate: 01:04:33 But that is a whole different food chain. And we have altered that food chain over the past 50 years and that’s behind the health crisis. And no one is talking about that either. The food chain, right? This, it’s not like we just have like one easy answer. You can just cut gluten and everything’s going to be fine and miraculously there’s going to be, you know, everybody’s going to be skipping and dancing and holding hands and going to get along and be healthy and just discard all their medications. Now it’s going to take a radical reconstruction of the way we produce food in this country and the way we think about it. But you know, the, the bottom line is if you want to be healthy, you can individually, radically reconstruct your lifestyle and start with something easy. You don’t start with a radical reconstruction. I didn’t, I just started by, um, cutting out vegetable oil.
Brad: 01:05:16 How long ago?
Cate: 01:05:18 2004.
Brad: 01:05:20 What did you notice?
Cate: 01:05:22 I didn’t even notice I had done anything because um, I just, uh, what I was doing was, um, eating more butter and I mean, I just like, I didn’t notice anything. It was not hard. And what happened though was that I had much more control over my craving for sugar. That’s the first thing I really noticed that I was no longer completely slave to sugar.
Brad: 01:05:48 You were 75% slaves?
Cate: 01:05:50 Yes, I was still slave, but I was not 100%.
Brad: 01:05:53 What’s the association between having the vegetable oil in your diet and then craving for sugar or is that, is it because it’s messing up your fat metabolism?
Cate: 01:06:01 Correct. If it’s making your mitochondria basically shut down every time your body is trying to burn your body fat or you know, eat the, the fat from your diet. So what happens is the cells basically desperate for something else. They put more sugar receptors on their surface, right? So they just basically find some way to get more energy and it’s going to be in the form of sugar or even protein. A lot of people who can’t burn their body fat burn amino acids for energy as well. Um, so, um, so that’s the basis of the uncontrolled, the 100% slave to sugar is, is the vegetable oils. And once you start cutting down on those and giving your body some actual fat that it can metabolize properly without killing yourself, um, or killing, I mean shutting down your mitochondrial energy production, then you yourselves can do something other than crave sugar.
Brad: 01:07:00 So this is unwinding this horrible problem of a diet failures where we’re trying to come into this with willpower, resolve, even if it’s negativity. I’ve let myself go now for sure on January 1st I’m going to start this diet. No matter what. I’m going to stay away from my vices of a pint of Ben and Jerry’s in the evening and all that stuff. And then the most well meaning people who are burning calories through their devoted exercise routine and trying not to shop for this crap. But what happens, uh, metabolically is not having that energy to access and burn to get you through the day. And then you’re, you’re left in a desperate state where you’re, your head’s gonna fall down at your desk in your cube. And the brain is, I imagine sending strong signals, like the Ghrelin hormone is going crazy
Cate: 01:07:51 Beyond strong. You, you, your brain is desperate for energy. And if it doesn’t get energy, you can have a seizure or a stroke. I mean, and that’s not something that happens too often, but, or,.
Brad: 01:08:01 or just pass out out. I mean, I know from bicycle riding, if I don’t put that Gel into my mouth at mile 80, it’s not going to look good at Mile 90, I’m going to be pushing for Uber. But, uh, this was before Uber, so you had to that sugar and that the drive is so powerful.
Cate: 01:08:18 So what happens to a lot of people is they get headaches and we now know that people who suffer frequent headaches actually have on MRI,Athey have identical changes to people who’ve had miniature strokes, multiple miniature strokes. So these headaches are occurring because your brain is needing energy in an area that’s not getting enough. And the, the, um, I mean that’s my take on it. On these particular types of subset of migraine headaches, um,.
Brad: 01:08:48 a certain description of the headache, does it, does it have to be the strong heavy pressure on one side or is it just headache in general?
Cate: 01:08:56 Headache associated with hunger. Headache associated with hunger. Yeah.
Brad: 01:09:00 That, that thing I can raise my hand there. He used to happen alone. Just headaches. Yeah.
Cate: 01:09:06 So that, you know, if we ever did an MRI of your brain and we saw white matter changes, can somebody, a doctor might say, oh, you, you might have arteriosclerosis, you’d better cut your cheese and you know, habit. But it would really truly have possibly resulted, hopefully you don’t have them, but um, would have resulted more from those energy crises that are re a result of your body depending on sugar and not getting enough energy, uh, your brain not getting enough energy at some point in time. So your brain is a high energy organ, right? It’s a high performance organ. It uses 20% of your calories at rest, right? That’s more per square whatever centimeter than any other part of the body at rest. And that means it has to get a lot of blood in that area and it’s very easy to run out of fuel. It very easy for the brain to run out of fuel. And particularly if you’re fueling with sugar, could, is it because it is a less efficient fuel and our bloodstream can only carry about 15 calories of sugar at any given time.
Brad: 01:10:08 in the total total circulating volume of the bloodstream. You have very little sugar,.
Cate: 01:10:12 Very little energy. Right? And we have, you know, somewhere around 90 to a hundred of fat if we are, you know, burning any level of fat in between meals, right? So, um, let’s say you wake up in the morning, you’ve got more energy at that point in time in your bloodstream from fat at then at any other point of time during the day, if you’re following a standard American diet. And certainly far more than a of sugar at that point in time.
Brad: 01:10:39 when you wake up,.
Cate: 01:10:39 when you wake up.
Brad: 01:10:40 because you haven’t messed up yet with the orange juice, oatmeal, toast, butter, and some fresh fruit, right? Some flavored yogurt, right? So once you pound that stuff, what happens to the fat energy and what happens in your bloodstream?
Cate: 01:10:56 So then that shuts down your, um, release of fat from your, your fat stores and, uh, so that your body can then metabolize whatever you just ate. Um, and if there’s fat in it, then hopefully your body will be able to burn that. Unless it’s all vegetable oil and your body’s already decided, we’re not going to do that. We’re going to just crave more sugar. So this is where people get into this horrible vicious cycle, uh, that they feel like they can’t lose weight and they have to work so hard to lose weight and they gain it back really easily. That’s because their cells are dependent on sugar and it’s very difficult to lose weight when your cells are, are wanting to burn sugar and resist burning your body fat. It’s like you have this toxic, um, your, your body fight. You can think of it as like a jacket on, you know, under your skin, right? That’s where you store most of your body. Fat is right under your skin, on your arms, your legs, your belly under your chin, even a little bit on your face.
Cate: 01:11:52 Um, and um, and that stop body fat that you have stored if you’ve been eating a standard American diet loaded with vegetable oil, 20%. Linelaic acid is got basically junk fat in there that your body can’t use for energy. So you have this toxic jacket of fat that you need to be able to burn for energy in order to lose fat. But when you burn it for energy as it is, it hurts your Mitochondria and promotes inflammation, makes you feel bad. And so what do you do? That’s why I created the protocol that I am creating and the”Fat Burn Fix” because you really are locked in a vicious cycle and there is a way out, but you have to kind of follow a very um, somewhat strict protocol to, to get out of it. So that’s, that’s the courses that I’m going to teach, teach people how to do that. How do you get out of that? What do you do? What do you eat for breakfast, lunch and dinner and how do you break yourself out of that cycle so that you can actually start using your body fat without hurting yourself. And a big part of that is, um, is actually going to be my very first supplement. I’m actually going to have like a little supplement, which I’m very excited to be able to produce with natural stacks.
Brad: 01:13:04 Thank you for listening to the show. We would love your feedback at getoveryourselfpodcast@gmail.com and we would also love if you could leave a rating and a review on iTunes or wherever you listen to podcasts. I know it’s a hassle. You have to go to desktop iTunes, click on the tab that says ratings and reviews, and then click to rate the show anywhere from five to five stars and it really helps spread the word so more people can find the show and get over themselves because they need to. Thanks for doing it.
