I welcome one of the most knowledgeable straight-shooting leaders in the health world, Dr. Cate Shanahan. Please enjoy her previous shows, Setting Things Straight, The Four Pillars of Health, and How To Become Cancer Proof! The occasion of her return visit is the publication of her long-awaited new book, The Fatburn Fix.
In this show Cate will explain just why the nasty industrial seed oils (canola, soybean, corn, etc.), which are still very prevalent in most diets, thanks to widespread use in restaurants and in processed foods, will royally mess up the number one attribute for healthy living: Dr. Cate argues that this is your ability to burn fat. If you cannot burn fat efficiently, all bets are off when it comes to fasting, going keto, or even building fitness.
Dr. Cate also breaks down the four aspects of our fat burning systems: mitochondria, hormones, body fat, and the appetite center in the brain. You’ll also learn the name of the man Dr. Cate believes is most responsible for our disastrous departure from natural saturated fats into the disease caused by excess consumption of unhealthy polyunsaturated fats. This dietary transition that occurred in the 50s and 60s, and spread across the world, has caused millions of premature deaths and health destruction…yes, primarily thanks to one “liar pants” man who Cate calls out for us.
This is a fascinating discussion that will make you feel proactive about making some big changes in your lifestyle and diet, even if you already consider yourself to be a pretty healthy person, because as William Shewfelt said when he was on the show, “There’s always more you can do.” True, there is always more to learn about health, and there are always things you can try out and incorporate (or eliminate) in order to ensure you’re living as healthily as possible. If you’re someone who eats healthy food but still eats snacks throughout the course of a day, you’ll be inspired to change that habit once you hear Dr. Cate explain how snacking affects the body. If you’re someone who likes to get take out food from “healthy” restaurants, you’ll be compelled to check out what cooking oils they use, and will probably hold off from ordering from them for a while, unless you can get them to cook in avocado oil or butter! Enjoy the show, and empower yourself with the knowledge you’ll gain from some seriously fascinating insights about health and the food industry from a true expert, Dr. Cate Shanahan!
TIMESTAMPS:
Dr. Cate is going to talk about the four categories of the fat-burning system. [04:00]
The ability to burn body fat trumps all other factors like family history, genetics, or whether you smoke, or how fit you are. [06:33]
We screw up our natural ability to burn fat by eating refined industrial seed oils as a regular part of our American diet. [09:28]
When the evidence is so clear, they still sell industrial seed oils everywhere. [13:49]
You can make your own mayonnaise at home. [16:36]
What is wrong with canola oil comparing it with the healthier oils? [18:45]
If you still think saturated fat is unhealthy, you need to do some more research. [24:20]
We are hungry shortly after eating if we don’t get saturated fats. [30:10]
Metabolism is composed of mitochondria that produce energy, hormones that store and release energy, body fat itself and appetite regulator in the brain. [32:52]
The reason we have Type 2 Diabetes is from eating too much polyunsaturated fatty acids. (PUFA), not from too much carbs. [35:23]
The average person now is metabolically damaged, even children. [42:43]
Once you start building a healthy breakfast and a healthy lunch, you will notice within hours that your mitochondria are functioning better. [49:34]
Snacking doesn’t allow for the hunger clock to be reset properly. [51:01]
The Fatburn Fix book explains why you want to focus on energy gain rather than on weight loss. [55:39]
You train your dog, or you train yourself to be hungry at certain times. Some people don’t realize when they are snacking! [59:14]
There is an urgent need to eliminate processed oils and reset the need to snack. [01:04:10]
How much fat is too much? [01:06:11]
Yo-yo dieting sets up most people for failure. [01:08:40]
LINKS:
- Dr. Cate Shanahan
- Setting Things Straight episode with Dr. Cate
- How To Become Cancer Proof episode with Dr. Cate
- The Four Pillars of Heath episode with Dr. Cate
- The Fatburn Fix
- Dr. Cate’s YouTube channel
- Ancel Keys
- The Canola Blob
LISTEN:
Get Over Yourself Podcast
Brad (00:00:00):
Welcome to the get over yourself podcast. This is author and 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 balance that competitive intensity with an appreciation of the journey. That’s the theme of the show. Here we go.
Brad (00:03:07):
Listeners, it’s my pleasure to introduce one of our favorite podcast guests ever. Dr. Cate Shanahan. Why am I connecting with Dr. Cate again? Because she rocks. She’s the real deal, one of the most knowledgeable and informed and also hands on thought leaders in the ancestral health movement. What I mean is she’s taking care of real people, real patients every single day besides doing her research and writing wonderful books. So if you missed our prior shows, go back and check it out. Especially our YouTube slash podcast production about how not to get cancer. That’s right. How to become cancer proof. And that is a wild show with Dr. Cate swinging for the fences and making some very strong assertions about the manipulative forces that are messing with our health and the dangers of following the conventional traditional path.
Brad (00:04:00):
And she goes off again on one of her favorite topics. Perhaps her favorite crusade is the importance of avoiding these nasty, toxic, refined industrial seed oils that are ever present in today’s modern diet and are messing with your ability to burn fat. And Dr. Cate explains why the ability to burn fat is really the end all of your health. If you can’t burn fat, you are going to lose with a big fat L with whatever other ambitions you try. If you don’t have energy, it’s going to suck. You’re not gonna be able to exercise. You’re not gonna be able to cut carbs, you’re not gonna be able to fast. And that’s kind of the focus of her new book, The Fatburn Fix teaching your body how to burn fat the right way. Oh my gosh, you’re going to love this show. You’re going to be absolutely compelled to go out there and get the book.
Brad (00:04:50):
She’s going to talk about what seems like a proprietary idea. She’s going to break down our fat burning systems into four categories of little teaser. It’s mitochondria, hormones, body fat itself, and the appetite center in your brain. A fascinating conversation she’s going to tell you about the one person, the one man who did flawed and manipulative scientific research back in the sixties and has been responsible for more deaths than perhaps any other person in the history of humanity. Oh yeah. It’s no joke. When you’re talking to Dr. Cate, please enjoy the show and go look at her website. Fatburnfix.com here we go.
Brad (00:05:33):
Dr. Cate Shanahan. I’m so glad to connect with you again. This time across the great continent from Lake Tahoe, Nevada to Florida. How are you doing down there, Dr. Cate?
Cate (00:05:45):
I’m doing good. I’m on a ake too. It’s Lake Carlton.
Brad (00:05:47):
Teeny little Lake. And what’s the name of your little town there?
Cate (00:05:50):
Mount Dora.
Brad (00:05:51):
Yeah, central Florida. So we had a great visit. Oh geez. That was almost a year ago. How not to get cancer. So we have that dialed. Everyone can go look on that on YouTube. It was a fabulous discussion and now we have a great occasion to talk about something else. And for those of us watching on video, hold that thing up. It’s very attractive, very attractive things on the video. It’s Dr. Cate herself and her new book, The Fatburn Fix. Uh, the reason I’m, one reason I’m so excited to talk about it, it’s going to help us burn fat and save our lives and all that great stuff. But also because you’ve been talking about it for quite a long time. It’s hard to recall how long has this project been in the works?
Cate (00:06:33):
It started about eight years ago and I started just collecting more like, but hacks really like biohacks and creating more of a streamlined system for my patients so that I um, like could identify exactly what somebody needed to do. Cause there’s this, this big field of ideas out there right now, right? That’s what you are like right in the center of it because you have people with different ideas coming and talking about the benefits of Keto versus carnivore versus intermittent fasting. And all these different things and different types of exercise. So what the book does, if Afrin fix is, it puts all that into context for you. That’s what it does. That, um, is kind of unique because the first thing that I have people do before they take any action before they start in on the plan is figure out how well they burn their body fat.
Cate (00:07:36):
Because that really determines everything about your health. There’s actually really nothing more important to your health than the ability to burn your body fat for fuel. Because it’s energy. If you can’t get energy, then you can’t do anything and your cells die. That’s what, that’s why people, uh, have, I mean that’s what a stroke is, right? Certain areas of your brain didn’t get enough oxygen to produce any energy and they died. That’s what a heart attack is. Certain areas of your heart didn’t get enough blood to support the cells needs for energy and the cells die. So energy is like the solution to so many problems and it’s really what you need to feel optimal. So it’s, it’s, it’s like takes care of the whole spectrum of health. Whether or not you’re a super elite athlete or, or maybe a diabetic who’s been on insulin for 20 years, it’s the, the, the problems that you have if you have any, are because you can’t burn your body fat optimally.
Brad (00:08:45):
And it turns out that quite a few people are in that category, even highly fit individuals.
Cate (00:08:53):
Totally. And this by the way I mention this, has nothing to do with your family history or your genetics or, um, you know, like whether you smoke or even how much you exercise, right? The, the ability to burn body fat for fuel is trumps all of that. And so if you don’t have the ability to burn body fat for fuel, even if you quit smoking or start exercising, you’re not going to get the benefits that you want from doing all that habit change.
Brad (00:09:28):
So we were born with this wonderful genetic attribute to burn body fat. Obviously we’re born with the ability to store body fat, burn it off, store it, and do all these great things that, uh, come from the ancestral example, the evolutionary health model. And then, uh, there are assorted ways that we screwed this up. How, how does this happen?
Cate (00:09:50):
Well, the one way does most important way that is, you know, the main problem that’s causing everyone’s issues, um, is the fact that our diets have been re-engineered chemically without us really knowing about or hearing about it or thinking about it because we now don’t we because we’ve changed the kinds of fats that we eat. And so this is where we start to get a little bit chemical. But what I’m talking about is, you know, you go, let’s put it in the common, the ordinary experience of trying to go grocery shopping. Let’s say you want to get, um, some yogurt. Well, you will have a hard time finding a flavored yogurt that isn’t fat-free and, okay. All right. Let’s say you want to get some, uh, sour cream. Well you gotta make sure that you get the real sour cream now because there’s this thing called fat-free sour cream, like cream is fat. And so it’s not sour.
Brad (00:10:52):
I never thought about that, huh?
Cate (00:10:56):
Yeah. It’s not sour cream if it’s not fat. So it shouldn’t say sour cream, but it’s confusing to people and butter. Like, uh, I went on a shopping trip with a patient of mine and uh, he didn’t know that butter was made from cream. He didn’t know to look for cream and the ingredients. So he just went to that section where they sell butter and margarine and smart balance and all these spreads. And it turns out all of his life, he thought he was having butter, but he wasn’t. He was actually getting hydrogenated vegetable oil spread. So, and then, and of course in all the junk food, right? So in junk food, most junk foods like Twinkies or candy bars, they don’t have olive oil or butter in there. They have some kind of vegetable oil in there, like, you know, whether it’s a soy or canola or cotton seed, um, that’s what the bulk of our junk food has.
Cate (00:11:46):
So we’ve had this restructuring of the kind of fat that’s in our food supply that one is talking about. And so we can’t even, like, some people can’t even understand what I’m saying and that put it in context or, or even accept that it’s happened. They’re like, well, I’ve had conversations with people, intelligent people, um, who I said, yeah, we all eat a lot of vegetable oils and actually 80% of our fat calories now come from vegetable oils and you know, these things didn’t exist a hundred years ago and people will come back with, well, I don’t sit down and eat big piles of Oreos. Right? So, so that’s not me. You’re not talking to me. And I don’t go to fast food restaurants. I don’t go to drive throughs. So you’re not talking to me. I go to high quality sit down restaurants in New York or Los Angeles or Seattle.
Cate (00:12:36):
I don’t care. The fact is that the rare restaurant now uses olive oil and things like pizza, right? It’s hard. You’re hard pressed to find a pizza joint that uses olive oil. Now most of them are gonna use what they call a blend of olive oil, which could be 1% olive oil and 99% soy or canola or whatever other vegetable oil, seed oils, and other term for these things. So if we have not paid attention, as we as a country, including doctors and most of the functional medicine doctors and a lot of people, even in the keto space, although the keto space is one of the most enlightened when it comes to our fats, um, for obvious reasons, they’re all about fat, right? Um, but if we haven’t come to terms with the fact that this has happened, we are completely blind to how it’s affected us. And that’s what the Fatburn Fix totally helps people aluminate is that, you know, if you can be normal weight but still be metabolically damaged enough to the point where you’re now you’re setting yourself up for, for cancer or autoimmune diseases because you’re not burning your body fat optimally.
Brad (00:13:49):
Whew. Well there she is, the world, one of the world’s leading crusaders against these nasty refined industrial seed oils. I guess you told me that’s the correct term. And we generally refer to it as vegetable oil, but it’s really that chemical process of changing these from their original molecular state because for example, that the soybean or the corn is hard to get oil out of a, we have a great video. You and I, and I think Luke was in the picture to the dangers of vegetable oils that you can find on YouTube. And that was like a 15 minute hit where if you’re not familiar with what Cate’s talking about right now, I encourage you to go and understand why these things are, uh, are so nasty and I want to have you discuss that even further. Um, but the one thing that jumps out to me is so offensive is that there’s still a certain segment of the, um, the scene here such as the fine restaurant that you mentioned that doesn’t have that cost cutting concern that the fast food joint does to use the cheapest oil. Uh, but then you go to Whole Foods Market that chain have the highest standards and their mission statement on their website is wonderful and I go look at the hot food buffet and canola oils and everything and then you go onto the aisle 17 and it’s got organic soybean oil, organic canola oil or something like that. So it seems as though there’s still some acceptance of these toxic industrial seed oils. Can you explain why those are still being sold when the evidence is so clear?
Cate (00:15:19):
Well, it’s cheaper. That’s the number one reason it’s cheaper. It’s like a half less than half the price, right? If you go to any store, Walmart, Costco, or even Whole Foods, you can compare the prices and the volume of like soy oil that you can buy for less than $20. And how much olive oil can you buy for the same price?
Brad (00:15:45):
Oh my goodness. My friend who’s a very health conscious eater, uh, was, you know, trying his first jar of primal kitchen mayonnaise, which is famously made with avocado oil. And it kicked off the whole industry segment and he complained that it was 10 bucks for jar mayonnaise. And it was a great opportunity to discuss that. That’s not really expensive, that’s a fair price for what you’re getting in that small jar. But our orientation is the giant jar of Best Foods with the nasty oil in there for $7 for a gallon. So that’s our association where really the quality foods are, they’re charging a fair price for an $8 bottle. I mean, an $8 container, a box of dark chocolate that’s made from bean to bar with fair trade and all that. But we’re so used to paying a couple bucks that we, we have to recalibrate our, uh, you know, our, our consumer habits here.
Cate (00:16:36):
Totally. And by the way, a little plug for my YouTube channel at the Dr. Cate and Chef Macy show. Um, I’m working with a chef and she has a 45 second video on how to make mayonnaise. So with like $4 worth of olive oil and um, a couple eggs you can get. Uh, what did she say? It was a pint or a quarter. It says on the thing, um, you know, a cup of a cup of olive oil. It probably cost you like $2 or $3. You can make a cup of Mayo for that much money basically. And if you have an immersion blender and a few, a minute or two, and then you can customize it to whatever flavor you want. So, um, I mean that, that if, if it is expensive, too expensive, um, then you want, but you love your tuna salad and your deviled eggs at your, um, your sandwiches with some G, then make it yourself. And it’s, if you have, the key is you gotta have an immersion blender and you gotta have the right balance of emulsifiers and acid. But then poof, once you get that, you’re good,
Brad (00:17:39):
Go watch the Dr. Cate and Chef Macy show on YouTube. You can record me for the jingle if you want. We will try it again after we’re done here. But more importantly, um, if you, uh, if we brought on as our next guest, the, the leader of, of Whole Foods Market, who’s putting this stuff into the salad bar, um, is he going to challenge your assertion that this stuff is unhealthy?
Cate (00:18:02):
Absolutely. When Luke and I lived in Napa Valley we went to a really fine restaurant. We paid like a hunDr.ed bucks for just the dinner part of the meal between the two of us. And, uh, I asked the server, Hey, is there anything here that I could buy that hasn’t, that doesn’t have canola in it? And she said, um, uh, actually, well, you can have a salad without dressing, but otherwise, no. And so, um, that was kind of the last straw. Like we thought we had gone to Napa Valley that which calls a itself as this culinary epicenter. And no, we can’t still can’t get away from the same crummy oil that you would get from, uh, you know, any kind of takeout, Sonic burger, whatever.
Cate (00:18:46):
Um, and so we wrote an article called the Canola Blob cause at the time we had a, um, recurring column in the Napa Valley Register. And like two days after it was published, I get this fax from the CIA, which I had to think for a second. I was like, Oh wait, they mean the Culinary Institute of America, that was the president, right. So the president wants to school me. Um, what I’ve been saying about canola because I am unnecessarily terrifying people out of eating the most healthy oil. Right? So he wants to school me. So I play along and he and I and uh, arranged to have a sit down and, and uh, Luke came with us as well as a reporter for the register just in case all hell broke loose. You want it to be there, I guess. And um, he sat down and the first thing he did was give us like a flight of olive oil tasting with chocolate.
Cate (00:19:44):
Right. And he was talking about a high level chemistry about what they do to keep the olive oil. Mmm. Like from oxidizing. So like basically going rancid or aging in the bottle, right? So they do all this cool stuff where they remove the air and put a level of nitrogen in there and keep it in the dark and all this stuff. And I said to him, I am really actually genuinely impressed with your knowledge. So why are you saying that? What applies to olive oil can’t possibly apply to canola oil, right? Because canola oil actually has much more fragile polyunsaturated, I’m sorry, polyunsaturated fatty acids. Those are much more susceptible to oxidation than the fatty acids that are in dominant and olive oil. And he totally understood the immediately and without skipping a beat. He went from the reality of the science to this political spin.
Cate (00:20:38):
And he said, well, we don’t have enough olive oil to feed the masses. I mean, I totally wished I had that recorded because that is like doctor evil level of, so let’s lie to people because, and say that it’s healthy because we don’t have enough olive oil, which we believe is healthy. And let’s say that this other oil that can’t possibly be healthy because of the way it oxidizes, let’s just say it’s healthy. Let’s just say it enough. Oh, and by the way, um, they are a corporate sponsor for like all of the CIA’s events. Um, and they probably have all kinds of other behind the scenes arrangements about, you know, what’s in their kitchen. Um, so there’s conflict of interest. There’s, it’s cheaper, there’s wanting to keep the, the, the really dastardly part that, you know, he wasn’t willing to say is, I want the good stuff for myself.
Cate (00:21:30):
You know, let’s lie to people who don’t have the knowledge, right of oxidation and all this stuff and tell them that what they’re eating is healthy because it serves me so I can get all the olive oil I want when I want it. I don’t have to pay a premium. I mean, look at what happened to the price of avocado oil when people started talking about it as healthy. It used to actually be a cheaper alternative to olive oil, but now I think you’d probably be able to switch gears and make a lot of healthy mayo out of olive oil if you wanted to because there’s so such this run on avocados, everybody’s guzzling them now.
Brad (00:22:06):
Okay. So to I guess to back up a little and cover the spectrum of the oils in a bottle that we use, uh, to, to cook with and that are used in prepared foods. Um, and we have the saturated fats which are, uh, temperature stable, uh, because the, the hydrogen, uh, uh, locations are saturated, right? And that’s what keeps them a solid at room temperature. And that’s also what protects from the oxidated damage when they’re heated. Such as in cooking. And then we go along this spectrum and maybe you can pick it up and explain why avocado and olive are more healthy and temperature stable than the highly refined seed oils that we see. Corn, cotton, seed, soybean, canola, and especially highlight canola because if you go on, people have challenged me and say, what do you, what’s so bad about this? And I try to give him my make, make my effort there.
Brad (00:22:58):
And then you can go on the internet and find out that canola is higher in Omega three and has these many health benefits and there’s a whole, there’s a whole section of information that’s giving a thumbs up to this. And it seems like once it gets through some gate of conventional wisdom and United States government or the powers that be saying this is okay, then it gets flooded into all 700 locations of Whole Foods, salad bar and all that. Even the finest restaurants, cause I can’t imagine they care too much about the cost of buying canola versus avocado oil when they’re serving a hundred dollar meal. Maybe I’m wrong, but I think people you know want it. There’s a lot of restaurants now that proudly stand that they’re serving the healthiest food and they’re going local and sustainable and all that. But I think we have a knowledge gap here where people still think it’s, um, you’re making a healthy choice when you choose canola, especially organic canola.
Cate (00:23:52):
Well, you know, I think that there’s, um, the, the tail there and what they really believe is, I think they know they’re doing it because it’s cheaper. Because when you call restaurants and ask the, the staff, what oil do you use? Unless it’s olive oil, they don’t have a clue. Right. So that means they’re not really that proud of it. They always have to go back.
Brad (00:24:16):
They have to go check.
Cate (00:24:17):
Yeah.
Brad (00:24:18):
The waitress always has to go check when I ask.
Cate (00:24:20):
Right. So they’re not that proud of it. But, uh, you know, and when it’s, when it comes back, like, so here’s another thing, it comes back as a blend, right? Oh, it’s, it’s, but they’ll say it’s olive oil and you, and you’ll have to say, do you mean a blend? And there’ll be like, Oh yeah, yeah, it’s a, it’s a blended olive oil will a blend could be 1% olive oil and 99% soy. The best blends, the most olive oil that you’re ever going to get is 30% so it’s still less than half. So why don’t they tell you that if they’re so proud of it, they think it’s so great. Why aren’t they telling you? Why don’t you, why don’t, why do you see this in the grocery store if canola, if everyone agrees that canola is healthy and everyone even believes it for a second, right? That it’s not just all about lies and conflict of interest. Why do they say on, um, the front of so many salad dressings, like even Newman’s own made with olive oil? But when you turn the back around, there’s canola first, usually if not second, usually. Maybe there’s some olive oil, but there’s also the as, why don’t they say made with canola on the front when it’s really partly olive oil in the back?
Cate (00:25:27):
I mean, that tells you that they don’t even believe it themselves. They just want to share in this lie. It’s like a talking point, right? Oh, it’s healthier because here’s what they say. Um, you know, it’s healthier than saturated fat, right? Cause this, this whole nonsense about saturated fat that nobody who’s educated really at this point, I’m sorry if you still think saturated fat is unhealthy, you cannot call yourself a knowledgeable person in the space of nutrition, even if you are a dietician. I mean, I know that’s, that’s what I learned in medical school. They still teach doctors this, but the fact is it’s all nonsense. And you know, so many folks have written books about this at this point. Um, most notably besides myself, um, Nina Teicholz and um, and there’s another doctor, Uffe Ravnskov all the people who’ve written about the cholesterol myths. I mean, there’s just so much available now and if you are interested in nutrition, you haven’t come across that you are gonna love it because it’s going to finally make sense. Right?
Brad (00:26:33):
I guess we’ve had an awakening in the last perhaps 40 or 50 years whereby 50 years ago it seemed that everyone was pounding this drum that we needed to switch away from these nasty artery clogging fats like butter and, um, high fat animal products and eggs, things like that because they would clog our pipes. And give us a heart attack. And um, okay, fine. 50 years ago, that’s, uh, you know, the most respected people and the most studied people were, were touting that message. And then I guess we’ve had an awakening that’s left behind 99% of the general population that doesn’t have time to live and breathe this stuff. And so you’re, you’re standing here asserting that anyone who’s, who’s spent a little time and energy educating themselves is going to embrace this new paradigm which shatters the, the old myths about, uh, eating an egg, having that cholesterol run into your bloodstream and start clogging up your pipes if you eat too many eggs.
Cate (00:27:32):
Yes, if you haven’t heard that or if you have heard it, but you didn’t buy it, I want you to take a look at the history of a man called ancil keys. And then I’m going to plug another documentary called the real skinny on fat. Um, this whole idea, you said the most respected people, but not the most knowledgeable people or the most honorable people. Because all of this whole nonsense around saturated fat comes from mostly one man whose name is Ancel Keys. And he actually, um, was a big liar pants. Um, I know a lot of folks think who’ve studied him actually, they overlook the fact that he did studies that showed that smoking was the cause of heart attacks and all the different countries that he studied. It was clear those countries where they smoked the most, they had the most heart attacks and the people who smoke the most had the most heart attacks.
Cate (00:28:32):
But in, in the interviews that he took back in the fifties and sixties, in his day, he downplayed the role of cigarettes and causing heart attacks and said, no, no, no, no. I don’t think, I don’t think that’s the cause. I think it’s the fat in our diet. And specifically I think it’s the animal fat. And now why would he do that? Why? Well, take a look at something called a K ration. This was the, the food that was supplied to the military, the entire military in world war two. So we’re not talking about a small time operation. We’re talking about a process, food industry coming from nowhere, right? To suddenly now will you have ready to eat meals that is processed food, the K ration, K, guess what that stands for? Keys. Ancel Keys. It’s his last name. He is the man who advised the military and what stick in there.
Cate (00:29:32):
And how did he do that? He just went to the grocery store and you know, said, okay, well I want some chewing gum in there. I want some cigarettes, I want some chocolate, I want a couple of cookies and crackers, some tinned meat and um, some other stuff to just fill people up with. And that was all processed food. So he really should be called the father of processed food. I mean, this man I think is responsible for more deaths than anyone else in history because it’s his idea to start telling people that saturated fat is bad.
Cate (00:30:10):
And what that does is that destroys your ability to make tasty vegetables, right? Because if you can’t put it just like, you know, steam some broccoli and, uh, put some melted garlic butter with some salt on there. Well, okay, now your kids are going to hate vegetables. So they’re going to grow up with this traumatic like feeling of I have to eat my vegetables, I hate vegetables, and they’re going to love starchy food and just being piles of starchy foods and they’re going to have starch cravings and they’re gonna have all these distorted relationships with foods because they were forced to eat flavorless vegetables. Just, just one example, but this, this one example of the fallout from this idea, but I see this everyday. Like my worst diabetics are people who grew up being forced to eat vegetables that didn’t have any butter or salt. Even. Um, they may have had a little tiny bit of margarine, but it just doesn’t create this healthy relationship with food because our bodies don’t register the fake fats in margarine, which are also very high in polyunsaturates. Um, just like vegetable oils, they, it doesn’t register that as nutrition because it doesn’t, we, it doesn’t provide ourselves with the energy that other fats do.
Cate (00:31:32):
So it’s not satiating. Right? It doesn’t, so, so it doesn’t make you feel like you’re full. Um, and that’s one of the reasons that you can go out to get Chinese food, but you know, lots of rice stir fried and some kind of vegetable oil, very little protein. And what protein is in there as lean chicken, usually your lean pork and you’re hungry and hour later, well, because you didn’t have anything satiating, you didn’t have any cholesterol or saturated fat or mono and saturated, saturated fat. These are some of the most satiating things there are. And, and we don’t get that when we eat. So no wonder we’re hungry shortly afterwards.
Brad (00:32:11):
Oh. And that sets us up for trouble and inability to, to burn fat. So I guess if we can, um, uh, try to progress toward the, the insights in the book. Um, this thing is so fascinating how we’ve been duped and so it exists in this state today, even health conscious people are getting a certain dose of these nasty, nasty industrial seed oils into our bodies. Uh, unbeknownst a lot of times when we go to the fine restaurant or we don’t read the label carefully, uh, they just trickle in there. And then what happens to our fat burning system when we’re consuming these, uh, these chemical chemical agents, uh, routinely.
Cate (00:32:52):
So I broke up our metabolism into four fat burning systems four, so that’s what your metabolism is composed of Mitochondria that produce energy, hormones that store and release energy, um, body fat itself. That’s like the star of your metabolism show, right? That’s where all energies housed. And it’s supposed to be your friend and appetite regulation centers in your brain that help you know whether or not you have enough energy or help you to help decide whether you’re hungry and what you’re hungry for. And all four of these are dramatically damaged by too much PUFA in the diet because, and the way it happens,
Brad (00:33:41):
You said poly unsaturated fatty acids. So that’s the, particularly the bottled vegetable oils are we get most of that, right?
Cate (00:33:49):
So we talked about saturated. Yeah. So we talked about saturated fat being the so-called bad fat and all this. It’s so the opposite of a saturated stable fat that provides us with, with energy is the polyunsaturated fats that are unstable. And um, and so yeah. PUFA polyunsaturated fatty acid, right? We get all confused about them. The reason that they justified switching, uh, us from saturated to these polyunsaturated is because the truth is our bodies do need some, our bodies need some for building brain and nervous tissue and for signaling within cells, right? So they, they, we need a tiny bit, how much do we really need in our diet? Probably somewhere around 2%, maybe three, maybe as much as a maximum of five. And it should come from whole foods where these unstable molecules are totally protected the way nature encapsulates them. Naturally they are protected.
Cate (00:34:41):
They don’t break down in a seed, for example, because there’s, there’s antioxidants and all kind of good stuff in there, right?
Brad (00:34:47):
So nuts and seeds are a reliable source of healthy source of PUFA. And then we have to distinguish that instead of just throwing that word around like they’re all bad, which we kind of made a mistake early on when we were sorting these stories out. We’d say, stay away from PUFA and go for saturated fats or mono and saturated fats. But you made a great distinction there. So the whole food sources of PUFA mainly nuts and seeds, I guess that’d be one of the main dietary sources. Okay. Uh, and then we have the chemically altered sources of PUFA which are the, the nasty oils.
Cate (00:35:23):
So yeah, it’s, it’s, um, it’s both a chemical alteration, but the real big problem is the simple amount of them. So, so we’re supposed to get somewhere like maybe a minimum of one or 2% to a maximum of 5% in our diet. And, and we know this because we’ve analyzed what people historically ate and we’ve, and we’ve run the test and it’s like, well, there’s, there’s only two to maybe a maximum of 5% in the foods that used to be in the food supply. The way we used to eat. I, even though there was relatively more Omega three in like grass fed animals, like grass fed dairy products, grass fed beef tallow, um, or pigs that ate like a more 4g type of diet rather than what they get now, which is corn and soy, um, and chickens and so on and everything. They used to have more about themselves as balanced ratio of Omega six Omega three cause their diet was balanced. But so, but we’ve been so myopically focused on Oh yeah, well we need omega-3 in our diet or we need these essential fatty acids, right?
Cate (00:36:35):
Both of mega three and Omega six even Omega six tends to promote inflammation and a mega three tends to kind of fight that. They balance each other. Um, the fact is we only need a certain amount of both and when we exceed that by five or 10 or even 20 times, we can’t be healthy. It’s just as simple as that. And what happens is that we, over time these unstable fatty acids become concentrated in our bodies, specifically in the body fat, right? That’s where they get stored, right? When you eat too much of anything, that extra is going to be converted into fat and stored in your body fat. So, but Omega three and Omega six are already fat. So it just gets stored as it is. And we can’t, we can’t take it from being polyunsaturated and turn it into mono unsaturated. We can’t do that easily.
Cate (00:37:30):
And so we don’t, we just store it as it is. It’s, we’re not designed to store it and to alter it before storage because we never had to do that. We never ate so much that, that it was necessary. And just as just like it’s unstable to oxygen in a bottle, it’s unstable to oxygen, not only in your bloodstream because I mean that’s really important as a whole. There’s topic and I talk about that in deep nutrition, why it causes heart attacks and strokes, but it’s unsafe in The Fatburn Fix. I talk about what it does to your adipose tissue. Adipose tissue is a fancy word for your body fat that’s under your skin, the kind of fat that is the normal fat that we have. There’s another type of fat that goes around organs that’s, that’s called elemental fat or um, it’s, it’s unhealthy fat, but so are our body fat.
Cate (00:38:19):
Our adipose tissue that’s under our skin that we see most easily, that is now reflective of our diet. And I know I’ve said that 80% of our, of our fats come from vegetable oils. Well when you look down at the level, so what’s the balance of the saturated versus the polyunsaturated? That’s somewhere around a 20 to 40%, right? Depending on exactly what, who you’re looking at, what you’re doing, what you’re eating, but the average is 10 times higher than what it used to be. Right? Like I said, it used to be maybe one as a maximum of five. Now it’s a minimum of 20. And you know, some people get 40 or maybe even 50 of their fat calories coming from this stuff. Um, and percent, I mean 50%. And so that’s directly reflected in their, in their body fat. That means when you do a biopsy of your body fat, it’s going to show 20 to 25% of these PUFAs.
Cate (00:39:18):
It could even be higher, but some of them are like breakdown so quickly that they don’t exist. It’s just like we’re, we max out at a certain percentage because they break down so quickly. And when you get to that max out point is where you start getting from, um, just being overweight to being deeply diabetic and very high risk for all kinds of problems because your body fat now can’t even store more fat. It itself becomes an inflammatory organ and you, and you can’t put more fat in there easily. It doesn’t hold onto fat properly. So it leaks into your bloodstream, it causes heart attacks and strokes. It starts building up in your liver and you get fatty liver. And this is all coming from this ridiculous amount of unstable fatty acids in our body fat that came from our diet. When you do biopsies of, of uh, people’s adipose tissue from 100 years ago when their diet had very little, almost no seed oils.
Cate (00:40:16):
So it just had like the natural amount, the content of polyunsaturated fatty acids was like two or 3%. So now when you do biopsies of folks, if you find some people where it’s low, of course there’s going be a range, right? Depending on what you eat. But some people are as high as 30%. That was, that didn’t happen back a hundred years ago. And guess what else didn’t happen? Type 2 diabetes. So what I’m saying with The Fatburn Fix is that the reason we have type two diabetes is because we eat too much. PUFA not too much carb.
Brad (00:40:54):
Uh, wow. So that’s sort of a, um, a radical notion because we’re familiar with the direct association with eating too many carbs and getting Type 2 diabetes, producing too much insulin. Uh, but you made this point clearly to me many times. It’s so interesting. So we just want to clarify this really well that, um, this is a, a huge contributing factor because when you eat this nasty chemically altered fat, is it the case that you can’t burn it really well as you might with another type of healthier fat?
Cate (00:41:27):
Yeah, that’s the key. So it’s unstable and uh, it breaks down in your bloodstream. It breaks down to promote inflammation. But when you, when you try to burn it in the fat burning system that produces energy. So this is the fat burning system, number one. But I talk about in The Fatburn Fix it’s basically it’s your mitochondria. These are little tiny parts of your cell that generate energy for the cell, and that’s where all your calories get burned, by the way. And if your calories are coming from these unstable polyunsaturated fatty acids and high enough concentration, it just simply shuts down the mitochondria. It blows a fuse. It’s too, it burns too hot, right? Like you have to put the right kind of gas in your gas tank or your engine doesn’t work. Right? Well, the exact same is literally true for your mitochondria, for your cells, energy, energy engines.
Brad (00:42:14):
Oh, that doesn’t sound good. And let me guess then where we’re going to get our energy. If the power plants shutting down. We always talk about mitochondria as the power plants and how you can liken it to a solar power plant because it’s clean burning because the mitochondria utilize oxygen, so you don’t have that, that, that free radical production and all these things that are negative and can lead to disease. So if you can’t do that, well I’m guessing you’re going to have to get your energy from the Slurpee.
Cate (00:42:43):
Exactly. So what happens is there’s always sugar in our bloodstream and um, you know, unlike, there’s not always a whole ton of fat in our bloodstream… Free fatty acids. Um, but there’s always sugar. And so if your cells are simply not getting enough energy, there’s all these ancient survival mechanisms that kick kick in and they start slurping the Slurpee out of your bloodstream as quickly as they can, which drops your blood sugar, right? So the cells start using more sugar drops your blood sugar. How are you going to feel like you don’t have enough energy? Like you don’t have enough blood sugar, like you need to snack. Like you’re hangry, like you’re irritable and so that goes on long enough and your body gets smart in a way and says, I know what I’m going to do. I’m going to raise this blood sugar so that a normal blood sugar, normally fasting is somewhere around, when I graduated from school, it was 65 to 85. They’ve raised it now because everybody’s so unhealthy. But um, so 65 to 85 is what I’m sticking with. And so that’s normal fasting and
Brad (00:43:46):
that’s so low. I thought, um, people are striving to get a hundred.
Cate (00:43:52):
Right because we are so dr damaged metabolically. We are. So it’s like we can’t see the forest of the trees. We cannot see what’s happening to ourselves because the average person is now a metabolically damaged. The average, you know, five-year-old has a much more trouble burning their body fat today than when I was a kid. I mean, it used to be nothing to just play all day and you know, go, go, go, go, go and then come in and you were, you might be rabidly, have a fantastic appetite and eat whatever’s put in front of you if you’ve been playing all day. Um, but um, the kids these days, they can’t do that. They need snacks right after school, need snacks during school. They need to take snack breaks in school. I mean this is a huge, we are unable to see what is happening even though it’s happening right in front of us.
Cate (00:44:40):
Our children can’t burn their body fat, so we have to give them snacks and instead of saying, Hey, what’s going on here? We’re giving them more sugar. Right, and they think sugar is the solution. Some people think sugar is a solution. Some people think sugar is a problem. Still we’re not seeing the real issue. The underlying issue is this, this only thing that’s so radically different than it was a hunDr.ed years ago. Our carb consumption today, our total carb consumption as a percentage of calories is no different than it was a hundred years ago. We were already kind of leaning sort of heavily into the carbs a hunDr.ed years ago, but we did not have type 2 diabetes. It wasn’t discovered until 1938 wasn’t described type one was, but type two was not until 1938 we had to have enough possibility for enough vegetable oil to be concentrated in a few people’s tissues where they would develop insulin resistance and that’s, that’s the, that’s type 2 diabetes is not about, it’s not about eating sugar.
Cate (00:45:41):
You, you have more problems when you eat sugar and now you have a whole other set of problems and you can’t really fix it very easily unless you cut your sugar, but you can fix it if you’re patient enough. If you, you don’t even have to cut your sugar if you have willpower, as long as you just get the right kinds of fatty acids into your body, start eating more healthy fats, you can still eat carbs and that’s what The Fatburn Fix does. It brings in a huge reality check into this conversation because just the way we’ve been talking about it has just been one radical swing to another one I work with for the Lakers. I love working there. I was working with some of the best people in the industry. Even still the tendency of the human mind is to go from one extreme to the other.
Cate (00:46:28):
So what we were trying to do really was just pull back on the empty calorie carbohydrates and give people more healthy fats like butter next. But what was reported in the news media at time and time again was that they were, they were on like a zero carb diet, right? That’s not what we were doing and that’s, that’s not what anyone really needs to do. Now if you want to accelerate your metabolic recovery and you are a type 1 or type 2 diabetic and your fasting blood sugar level is higher than normal, you can accelerate it by, by cutting back really deeply on carbs and that’s what The Fatburn Fix tells you how to do. I mean, that’s what makes us unique is that we, it actually gives you a, a diagnosis first before telling you what you need to do to treat your problem.
Cate (00:47:18):
Because there are people all over what I call the diabetes spectrum. And depending where you are, what works for person on one part of the spectrum, may not at all for a person on the other part of the spectrum, this is not your metabolic type. It’s because it’s your metabolic damage, it’s the damage to your four fat burning systems. And so, um, it’s not something genetic or that you’re born with or based on your blood type or based on whether you’re an ectomorph for an endomorph. It’s based on how much proof is in your body fat and how that’s affected you. All of which can be changed.
Brad (00:47:54):
So first and foremost, a total eradication of these refined industrial seed oils from the diet. That’s our starting point.
Cate (00:48:03):
Yes. You still need to get, you know, polyunsaturated fatty acids and you will, if you follow a normal healthy food diet, right? Because if you eat nuts and seeds, and even if you have, uh, animal fats, especially if it’s, if you can manage to get like, um, grass fed dairy, that’s a great source of Omega three, it’s really under discussed, um, under utilized. Uh, but, um, you will get plenty of the PUFA because the ones, the amount that you need, you will get it if you totally cut out all seed oils. Now what if you look at something and let’s say we’ve got like a marinated salmon that’s ready to eat and the, you know, the main ingredient is salmon and there’s some spices in there. And like one of the last things is canola or soy oil. Okay. There’s probably a drop. All right? Is not gonna kill you. It’s about the bulk of your calories. The bulk of your fat calories really should be the natural animal products and the natural plant products that are high in fat like avocado and coconut and nuts. Um, and, uh, whatever animal, I mean, I think that’s why the carnivore diet is so popular is because if you’re doing carnivore correctly, right, according to the rules, you are not doing seed oils either. So PUFA
Brad (00:49:25):
more solution, right? Pretty simple elimination diet. Cut. Cut this crap out.
Cate (00:49:32):
Yeah, exactly.
Brad (00:49:34):
Can you go into more detail about the four, uh, fat burning mechanisms besides the mitochondria? You, you mentioned the hormones, uh, the appetite, uh, mechanisms in the brain and then body fat itself and how those all interplay to becoming, uh, an excellent fat.
Cate (00:49:50):
Yeah. So, um, the mitochondria are, are like the place where you really need to get healthy fats. Like they’re the first thing, uh, in your whole body that can respond immediately to an infusion, to a switch, to an infusion of good, healthy fats. And once you start building a healthy breakfast and a healthy lunch, you will notice within hours that your mitochondria are functioning better. And you might think, Oh, I can’t feel my mitochondria. I don’t even know what they are. Um, what are you actually, you can, if you feel brain fog when you’re hungry, if you feel hangry or irritable, if you get nauseated or headaches or shaky or cold, when you’re hungry, that’s mitochondrial dysfunction somewhere in your nervous system usually, or maybe in your digestive system or both. Um, but, uh, when you are getting an infusion of healthy fats, then you’re going to make it from one meal to the other without needing a snack.
Cate (00:50:56):
And that’s huge. That’s huge. Huge.
Brad (00:51:01):
You’re, um, yeah, you’re not big on snacking. We learned. Right? And tell us what happens when you make an innocent reach for something, quote unquote healthy, like a keto friendly energy bar or even some trail mix or something where you’re trying to do the right thing and just, uh, take you through, uh, the lunchtime hour to the dinnertime hour breakfast to lunch. How does that set you back?
Cate (00:51:26):
Yeah. You’re not, you’re not burning your [inaudible] You’re not, um, enabling your, um, your stomach hormones in Europe, biological hunger clock to be reset properly. So you’re basically in a groove of, you know, you know, like if you have a pet, right? This isn’t your dog show up, like right around the time you normally feed him.
Brad (00:51:53):
Oh, Mark Sisson’s dog. Is it five o’clock on the minute every day? It’s, it’s a miracle. His old dog Buddha,
Cate (00:51:59):
I mean, do you think he re he knows how to read time? Did he learn how to read clocks? No, it’s because we have an extraordinarily accurate, um, circadian clock that tells us when we normally eat and all it’s there for is to help get our digestive system ready to digest food so that we don’t have all these weird digestive symptoms that make people think they have food allergies and all kinds of nonsense. It’s important to, to, for your body to be ready to accept food. And so ghrelin is, is the main actor here and ghrelin is tied to your circadian clock. And so if you are having even a healthy snack at 10 o’clock, that’s like just pure keto. No carbs. I’m not nothing gonna mess up your sugar, your insulin, um, you’re still telling your body to make sure to be releasing ghrelin iat that point in time, which also blocks fat burn. Ghrelin blocks fat oxidation. It blocks fat release the same kind of way that insulin blocks fat release. Grelin blocks it slightly different mechanism, but the fact is it blocks it.
Brad (00:53:11):
So ghrelin is the sensation of hunger. Your famous quote, gremlin gets your stomach growling. But If you, if you, if you don’t eat, aren’t going to kick into fat burning and you’re going to, you’re going to ignore that sensation of hunger in your stomach and then wait it out? Isn’t that a, is that a reasonable strategy? Are you saying what happens when, when ghrelin spikes?
Cate (00:53:39):
So if you’re ghrelin spikes and you are just going to tough it out, like you don’t want to snack, um, it’ll go away in about five minutes if you drink some water and just get distracted. It’s not that that kind of hunger is not the same as brain fog and feeling hangry and feeling shaky. They are totally different and that’s a huge thing that, uh, folks, um, need to be able to distinguish between the two of them. And so in The Fatburn Fix I give you worksheets so you can learn what’s happening. That you can learn whether or not it’s a habit related hunger or just a time of the day related to hunger with due to ghrelin, which is completely a benign thing. You’re totally safe to ignore that. Um, but it’s actually not necessarily safe to ignore your brain fog and kind of hunger or your, you know, getting a migraine headache kind of hunger that’s not necessarily saving.
Cate (00:54:39):
Sometimes you can overcome it with a little more adrenaline or a little more cortisol. But Hey, guess what that might lead to this thing we all call adrenal stress or adrenal burnout, right? If there is such a thing, um, it, it’s, it’s not going to help that you are constantly needing to boost your blood sugar with adrenaline and cortisol. So, um, that, that’s what is going on when you have some kind of brain fog or you know, you have that more desperate hunger. But it’s also doctors call it hypoglycemia symptoms. Meaning is a symptom that your blood sugar is too low because even if your blood sugar level might be normal, but for your body it’s considered too low because your body is like, I need more sugar. We’ve slurped up the mat, we need massive amounts of sugar over here and this person’s body, and unless the blood sugar, fasting blood sugar is a hundred or 110 I’m going to feel terrible. So it raises your blood sugar, right? So if you are,
Cate (00:55:39):
say it’s 10 o’clock and you want to avoid having a snack, but you’re getting brain fog and shaking and stuff like that, the way you’re going to get through it isn’t just by getting busy. It’s going to by be by getting revved up, by getting your adrenaline up. Because adrenaline, cortisol both help you to raise your blood sugar and they do help you to burn your body fat a little bit. But it’s, it’s, you don’t want to have to be digging that deep, right? It’s like getting your second wind. It’s really a strain on these other tissues that they have to produce more adrenaline and more cortisol. It’s not, you know, it’s not how it’s supposed to be. The way to get out of that cycle is when you make your breakfast,
Cate (00:56:21):
you want to have some healthy fats in that are what I call the clean burning fats. So you want to have some avocado or butter or almond butter, and I teach you how much in The Fatburn Fixed. And you can also have these things that I call slow digesting carbohydrates. And in fact, if you are a diabetic or prediabetic, you may not really feel so good on keto even though keto is a fantastic diet, um, for people who are healthy enough for it because you do need some of these slow digesting carbohydrates because otherwise your fasting blood sugar is going to drop and you’re just going to be converting protein. I mean, your body’s going to be so desperate for sugar. It’s going to convert the protein that you just ate into sugar, so you’re not going to get your blood sugar down you so you don’t get any benefit from going keto.
Cate (00:57:04):
In fact, it’s kind of hurting yourself because you’re forcing your body’s to convert amino acids into sugar and that’s not a healthy metabolic direction either. So that’s, that’s the key difference between The Fatburn Fix and every other diet book out there so far is I don’t define an arbitrary type metabolic type based on your, your blood type or your body type. I do it based on how well you burn your body fat. And so there’s a quiz in there. It’s 15 questions and it’s you’re going to get a score somewhere between zero and a hundred and if you’re over 75 then you’re on the super healthy end. And that means sure, you could just dive right into Keto or you could even do with something called intermittent fasting if you want it, you’ve got a lot of choices. But if you’re on the zero to 25 end, we gotta slow down.
Cate (00:57:52):
There’s a lot to deal with. And I don’t want you biting off more than you can chew because that’s the setup for failure and, and you know you can’t change too many habits at once and you got a lot of habits you’re going to have to change. So I don’t tell people that in that scenario to focus on weight loss, I tell them to focus on energy gain. Sure you’re going to lose some weight, but the focus should be on energy gain until you get healthy enough where you are ready to do these tricks of intermittent fasting.
Brad (00:58:24):
Right. Good point. I mean you mentioned that cortisol, adrenaline response. When we’re lacking the necessary nutrients, we’re not that great at burning fat. And so we kick into this overdrive and I think all the listeners, viewers could be familiar with those times when, let’s say you’ve been involved in a deep personal crisis going on for a sustained six, seven weeks in a row and you wake up and your fingers are jittery and you’re not hungry and you go through the whole day and you haven’t eaten anything and you don’t even notice because you’re just wired on fumes. And of course that’s going to lead to burnout and, and recalibrations like you see from the contestants on the TV show that gained their a hundred pounds back that they lost when the camera lights were on. So we want to be sure to avoid that, that, uh, that, that stress element of the dietary transformation.
Brad (00:59:14):
So I guess, uh, if we can back up to this idea that the snacking is going to spike, ghrelin. are you saying that, uh, this is going to happen on a daily basis at 10:00 AM if you start snacking at 10:00 AM, if I feed my mom’s little dog Quincy of scrap or two, uh, at 10:00 AM when he’s used to eating at 8:00 AM and 5:00 PM, then he’s going to expect something the next day.
Cate (00:59:37):
Absolutely. That’s what happens with training. Just like you, you train your dog to walk better on a leash or to roll over, you’re training their appetite and their, you’re training their digestive systems, nervous system to know what time it is. And you do that to yourself, too. And so, um, you know, a lot of folks. So there’s another thing that, um, that I talk about in the body system. Um, the most complicated of our four fat burn systems or the appetite regulation centers in our brain. So these are, these are the things that, that they do crazy stuff to us. Like they, they make us crave sugar. They make us even, um, not realize when we’re snacking. Okay. Now that sounds crazy, but, but like how could you not realize you’re snacking? But I’ve worked with so many folks who swear to me, they didn’t have a snack after dinner.
Cate (01:00:47):
This swear to me, they don’t snack. Um, and when not until weeks later, like when we’ve talked about, okay, well how come you’re not losing weight? This is how it used to be. Now I have a way of fast forwarding this whole conversation and now or, or until they like do a food diary, do they realize that, Oh my God, I have been snacking like so many times. I didn’t realize it. Like I snack all day. I’m a basically a Grazer. I don’t even eat real meals. And so this is how people’s appetite regulation centers totally trick them into thinking that you hardly eat anything, right? Because you do hardly eat real meals. But what doesn’t register is the snacking. Because what happens, I think the reason this happens is because if you eat something and it makes you feel better, you think you needed it, you think that you were deficient and you couldn’t possibly be overeating because for the day, right?
Cate (01:01:41):
Because you got hungry and you, and you felt so bad with your hunger that you were tired. So you had this little snack and it made you feel better. Well, that can’t be excess calories. That’s something I needed. Wrong! When you have insulin resistance and high insulin, you rapidly convert a lot of what you just ate into body fat, right? So, so that part of the problem, it doesn’t stay in your bloodstream long enough and then you get hungry real quickly. So that’s the role. That’s the interplay of hormones and your appetite regulation systems, which hide the fact that you’re eating when you don’t think you’re eating. Most people underestimate their calories by at least a third, right? So we’re talking 800 to a thousand calories for the average man and woman respectively. Um, this was done in the United Kingdom. That they underestimate, right? So no wonder people feel like it’s hard to diet because they’re already overeating by more than they think. If you’re, if you’re gonna cut down to, you know, a 1500 calorie diet, that’s going to feel like misery, torture. If you’re cutting down, you thought you were eating 2000 calories, you’re eating 3000 and now some dietician told you you have to cut down to 1500, that’s half of what you were doing.
Cate (01:03:02):
First of all, it’s not necessary. You’re going to lose weight. If you stop overeating, you’re going to lose weight, right? If you just pull it back to what you need, which is 2000 you’ll feel great. Especially if you build it out of clean burning fats, slow digesting carbohydrates, and lots of other nutrition. So this is like the fat from fixed just kind of creates a whole new paradigm of reality based diet rather than paradigm based diet. Right? That’s where we’ve been. We’ve been fat makes you fat, so don’t eat fat. We’ve been carbs, make you fat, so don’t eat carbs. These are paradigms. So this is, I guess I could call it reality based. Maybe I’m bias. It’s a fat burn based. It’s a body fat based paradigm, right? But that, that paradigm makes sense because I think everyone can agree that too much body fat is what makes you fat and that if you cannot burn your body fat, you are not going to lose your body fat and lose weight. So I think everyone can agree on this particular paradigm. So that’s why I call it reality based. Cause I think everyone believes that, believes in this reality.
Brad (01:04:10):
Is that on the subtitle? I love that. A reality based diet. You’d better get it on there. The next printing came up with a new one. People, Dr. Cate Shanahan’s, reality based diet once and for all. My goodness. So if we can pull out some key attributes, I’m so excited to you. You sent me an advanced copy. I read through it quickly, uh, as I’ve been known to do and are already, um, you know, have talked about a lot of this stuff at length, but I can’t wait to get all the way deep into this, but we’re pulling out some wonderful insights. One of them is that urgent need to cut out the single most offensive, uh, agent in the food supply, which is the, the processed oils and then, uh, the no snacking because it, it, it spikes ghrelin which is tied to circadian. And you also mentioned quickly that, uh, it’s going to shut off fat burning. Even if it’s a keto approved snack, you’re going to stop burning your own body fat in order to, to burn whatever you just consumed.
Cate (01:05:09):
Correct. Exactly. And by the way, unless you’re burning your body fat, you’re not producing ketones. So you can be eating fat all day long and not, you’ll never make because your liver produces body fat only when you have enough of this other kind of hormone around called glucagon. Uh, I’m sorry, your liver produces ketones. I said produces body fat. I meant your liver produces ketones out of your body fat. Um, and it, and it only can do that when you have a whole bunch of glucagon hormone. It’s like the opposite of insulin is glucagon. And that only happens when you’re burning your body funding. You can maybe force the issue by having a whole ton of coconut fat, but that’s not healthy. And I wouldn’t recommend that. I mean that’s, you can overload your system with anything if you try hard enough. And some folks just go so nuts on eating coconut and MCT, even MCT oil, they just go nuts on it. And um, and it’s not healthy at all. You can get yourself fatty liver from just doing that because you shouldn’t overload the system with anything.
Brad (01:06:11):
How much is too much? If you’re a enthusiast of the morning coffee with a dumping a bunch of fat calories inside?
Cate (01:06:18):
If you go much above like a 500, that’s too much. Right. And depends of course on your body weight. So someone like me, much above 300 calories of fat is going to be too much
Brad (01:06:29):
of added fat, like an MCT oil.
Cate (01:06:31):
Correct? Yeah. Uh,
Brad (01:06:34):
Cate, you’re destroying the extremely lucrative movement, uh, of, uh, of, of the keto scene where people are, have been taught to stuff their face with fat and processed fat snacks and things in order to make ketones. And you’re telling us now that, um, you can’t make ketones by consuming fat.
Cate (01:06:52):
It’s a, you’re hard pressed to do it and it’s not what you want, right? Like you can only do it by basically overloading your liver. Oh, here’s another great way to overload your liver, Drink a lot of alcohol because your body will convert. Your body metabolizes alcohol by turning it into a acido acetate. What’s that? A ketone. So when you know somebody, it goes out to a party and they have like 12 beers and the next morning they wake up and they are, they are blowing ketones. Was that good for their liver? Was that good for their bodies that good for their fat burn? No, it’s horrible. So the same applies to MCT oil. It’s just, you know, if you overdoing it and you’re forcing your liver to produce ketones that way, that’s not good for you. So don’t do it.
Brad (01:07:33):
So come into Keto from a fasting based perspective and a aligned of course with, you know, limiting your dietary carbohydrate intake if you’re, if you’re an enthusiast of that particular movement. But it sounds like with The Fatburn Fix if someone were to walk in the bookstore and grab this off the shelf, uh, like you’ve described, it kind of transcends any of the factions that we’re dealing with right now. It may be those are things for people to examine sort of at an advanced level. I try to convey that point to like this carnivore thing. I do a podcast on it. I feel great. I’ve done this, I’ve tried this, but I’m also coming into this with 13 years of highly regimented and focused carbohydrate restriction, fat-burning diet. So I’m going to be having a different set of decision making parameters than someone who’s struggling, such as the everyday folks that you see. But if they were to grab The Fatburn Fix and get started, it’s pretty much inclusive of anyone with a, let’s say their, their belief system is taking them down the plant based path or their, uh, wherever they’re coming from. Even if they have current metabolic damage, they can succeed with this?
Cate (01:08:40):
Absolutely. Yes. And that’s the thing. It does transcend the paradigms because it’s really focused on the goal of weight loss is burning your body fat, which by the way is the goal of health. You, we keep running into all these studies about like, Oh, there’s benefits from fasting for three days. Well guess what, after three days you’re burning your body fat. You know, there’s benefits from having your insulin levels low. Well, guess what? If you can burn your body fat, that’s because your insulin levels are low. I mean, it all comes back to burning your body fat. And it all comes back to the question of why am I not already burning my body fat? Which is something, no one questions. Everyone assumes, okay, I’m dieting. I am um, exercising. I am burning my body fat. Not necessarily if you’re losing weight, yes you are burning your body fat, but is it easy?
Cate (01:09:32):
Is it gonna? Is it as easy as it should be and is it damaging yourself? And so, um, if it’s not as easy as it should be, you don’t, you can’t stay on the diet very long. It feels like torture and the minute you stop, you regain right away. And that’s what I want to put it into is this yoyo dieting. That is what I have seen throughout my career. When I see patients who’ve gone to weight loss specialists who they lost 60 pounds and they were in love with the doctor because of course the doctor meant well, but he gave him like this, um, this, this packages of like ready to eat powders and uh, an appetite suppressant. And I’m like, God, it was the greatest thing. I lost 60 pounds in no time. But then I went on a cruise and I twisted my ankle and Oh my God, now I’m just up where I’m even up from where I was.
Cate (01:10:18):
I want to put an end to that yoyo dieting. This is not that this is a book for people who want to live in reality, who don’t want to live in the fantasy of it’s going to be easy to lose 60 pounds by, uh, by the time I need to fit in my bikini, you know? Okay. Yeah. Maybe if you are a super great fat burner, yes, maybe that is reality. But for most people, unfortunately in my experience, the average person who has 60 pounds to lose is not a good fat burn and they need to take certain steps to have success. And if they try to take shortcuts just in the long run, it sets them up to fail. And they blame themselves. Like this is the thing that like, I don’t want to talk bad about my fellow practitioners because they do mean well, all these weight loss doctors who were like, you got to get people to lose weight for us so they stay motivated.
Cate (01:11:11):
Okay. I know that’s, it looks like that you’ve heard that, but the fact is telling people that sets them up for it makes them love you, but it makes them hate themselves. And that sets people up for failure because you don’t trust yourself, you don’t. And the most important thing in The Fatburn Fix is I want people to trust how they are viewing. You need to trust how you feel. If the diet’s not making you feel great, I don’t care if you’re shedding fat, then it’s not what you need. Your body, any diet can make you lose weight, right? You can go on the bubblegum diet for four weeks. I have nothing but bubblegum. You’re going to lose weight. Losing weight is easy, but getting healthy and getting to the point where you can burn your body fat, that requires expertise, knowledge and a belief in the fact that nature knows best and an understanding of the four fat burn systems, which The Fatburn Fix will help you to gain.
Brad (01:12:14):
Very well said, Cate. You are. If you are an excellent promoter of your own book,
Cate (01:12:19):
I’m supplements.
Brad (01:12:21):
So we got a little into the science and we dipped in and out of it, but you, you did a good job explaining everything and I think these, these insights are really important. Even if you’re an experienced person who’s, who’s listened to a lot of stuff, read a lot of stuff, there’s still some notions floating around here that are, uh, that are, that are kind of been distorted and now we’re kind of taking our eye off the ball in a sense where you, you bring it all back to burning body fat as the end all really. I love that.
Cate (01:12:52):
Yeah. That’s really what it is. And that’s what everybody wants and knows. And when you get that, you will find that you didn’t even know yourself. Like if you’ve never been really good fat burner, you don’t even know what you’re capable of. And that’s the best part is when people come back and they tell me, I have so much energy now. I started a garden or I bought an an Instapot, a pressure cooker and immersion blender and a toaster oven. And now I’m getting my kids into cooking. I mean, this is who, what you can discover when you really get your metabolism to be healthy and find out who you really are. In fact, I didn’t know how much energy I could have myself when before I was a fat burner. I was still like stuck in being a sugar burner mode. Went back when I was an athlete. This was like 20 years ago. But um, you know, I, I didn’t know, I thought I was just somebody who at the end of my workday I was kind of grumpy, you know, and I was like, I just, I must just be a grumpy kind of tired dish person. But no, that’s not, that wasn’t me. And it’s, if you feel that way after work that’s not you and just know that,
Brad (01:14:08):
love it, The Fatburn Fix available everywhere books are sold. And if we want to get deeper in, we can go check you out at Dr.Cate.com you have some good content there.
Speaker 6 (01:14:18):
Thank you Dr. Cate.com. And also if you just want to remember one thing, remember Fatburn, Fix.com cause that’s the new mini website for the book and it connects to Dr. Cate anyway. Um, and also tells you, uh, you know, where you can get the book. And all that kind of cool stuff. You can even listen to an audio snippet and you can download and take the test to find out your fat burn factor today.
Brad (01:14:43):
Oh, it’s released fatburnfix.com thank you so much Dr. Cate. Shanahan. Great show. Go check it out people.
Cate (01:14:52):
Thanks Brad.
Brad (01:14:54):
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 cause they need to. Thanks for doing it.
