What If You Consumed Increased Saturated Fats For 30 Days

Hello, all champions. Today we're going to talk about what would happen if you ate more saturated fat for 30 days. And I know what you're saying at home. That's just crazy. Why would anyone do that? And after all, everyone knows how bad that is. And that's the dangerous statement. Say that everyone knows as if that made it true. If something's been repeated often enough that we believe it doesn't make it right. And we've been told on so-called nutrition labels how bad certain things are. So the worst thing of all is calories. And even though every other species, besides human, gets up every day and tries to find enough calories, enough food to survive, for some reason calories apparently are dangerous to humans. That's why they're in such bold script at the top of the label. And then in order, the next worst thing is total fat and saturated fat. Now, of course, saturated fat goes along with cholesterol. And in a single tablespoon of butter, we've already had more than a third of all the saturated fat or bodies supposedly can tolerate in a day. And the next thing is cholesterol and then, of course, sodium. And on every one of these, we got it completely backwards. But what if almost everything you've ever been told about fats in general and specifically about saturated fat? What if it's not just wrong, but what if it actually makes you sick? What if it causes disease? And what if the key to better heart health, better brain health, better immunity is to eat not less fat, but more of the right types of fat. And what if saturated fat is one of the right types of fat? And I know this is hard to believe because we've been told for so long, so many times, how bad saturated fat is. But I want you to compare this to some other things that we were told, such as cigarettes are healthy for you. Camel is the brand of cigarettes most recommended by doctors until we found out that cigarettes actually kill you. And then we were told that butter is so bad, but margarine is really healthy until we found out that it kills you almost as bad as cigarettes actually. And for decades, we've been told how good medications are, how necessary they are for human health, and how safe they are. Even though humans have lived for hundreds of thousands of years without any medication, without any chronic disease, all of a sudden it's like we need these medications and they're also safe until they're not so safe anymore and the companies are being forced to pull them from the market and they are with multi-billion dollar lawsuits because they kill people. And I think a big reason we get these things so backwards is we don't understand what health is. We don't understand what it means to support a body. We have developed a world that is so contrary to what our bodies need. And then we think that the people we call health experts know anything about health when in fact they are sickness experts. Most of the people in the so-called healthcare field are medical doctors and they're trained in sickness. And there's nothing wrong with that because sometimes people get sick, but we have to understand they're trained in sickness and we can't ask them about health in terms of how to take care of our health because they're not trained in that. And as a consequence we have a so-called healthcare system that's actually a sick care system that in the United States spends almost five trillion dollars a year and yet people get sicker and sicker and sicker. We have more diabetes, we have more autism, we have more Alzheimer's dementia every year because we're not addressing health, we're not supporting health. So for decades we've also been told that saturated fat and cholesterol causes heart disease, cardio vascular disease. Well today we also know that that is wrong. They got that one backwards as well. And even though we know today what the true causes are and that saturated fat is not the problem, there is little doubt about how it really works, the message has not changed. And the reason is that change is difficult, it requires learning, it's much easier just to keep doing the same thing we've always been doing. And especially if there are monetary interests, if there are people making money or not changing, it's going to be very difficult. And that's why I think the change is coming, there is absolutely no doubt it's inevitable, but it's probably going to take another two generations. And the reason is that most people don't change. We have to have old people die off and new people being born who learn a new truth from the beginning and then who take it for granted. So in the meantime you can stick your head in the sand and believe the dogma or you can learn the truth and help spread that message. If you eat more saturated fat for 30 days, what you probably find is you get better brain function. And why is that? Because the brain is perhaps the most complicated thing ever devised in the world. And it has a very complex structure. And for that structure, it has cell membranes and saturated fats are a critical integral part of these cell membranes. And now the critical component of these cell membranes are cholesterol. And then we also have omega-3 fatty acids and they need to be primarily EPA and DHA. So when we have these three components in the right proportions, then they balance each other out. The saturated fats provide stability and the omega-3s provide flexibility. And that balance is key for the very regulation and signaling that is the purpose of the brain. But the problem is that instead of these essential components, what we are recommended is to eat so-called vegetable oils, the canola and the soybean oil and the corn oil and so forth. And those are very unstable oils that have no place in a cell membrane. What they do is they promote inflammation that's destructive to cells. And they degrade the myelin sheet. And myelin is insulation. It's basically like on an electrical wire you have the plastic coating that allows the electrons to go in a straight line. And that's what myelin does as well. When the brain sends signals and it needs to send the signals with precision and speed, we need that myelin sheet. If that myelin degrades, now we have electrons that go where they're not supposed to. We can basically get short circuits and we don't have those precise quick signals being transmitted. And the classic disease for that is called multiple sclerosis when you have an autoimmune disease that attacks that myelin sheath. Now even though most people are deficient in omega-3s, it doesn't mean that we don't need omega-6 fatty acids at all. But you don't want to get them from those altered, harshly processed oils. If you want to get those, then you eat the seed or the nut directly where these oils are protected inside the food. The second thing that's going to happen if you eat more saturated fat is you might stabilize your mood. You might have better mental capacity. And this also goes back to these brain cell membranes. That if we have the right balance of saturated fat, cholesterol, and omega-3s, we have more stable membranes. And this allows the brain to have a more reliable, more stable production and function and release of neurotransmitage, which are chemical messengers in the brain. And saturated fat will support myelin integrity. And it will improve omega-6 to omega-3 ratios because we'll eat a bunch of plant oils and these harshly processed vegetable oils. We're getting too many omega-6s. We have a ratio of as much as 20 to 1 in the average population. And we want to have no worse than 3 and a half or 4 to 1 ideally 1 to 1. And with those improvements, we will reduce neuroinflammation. And that is so common today. We have hundreds of millions of people today with brain fog and memory loss and impaired cognition that is due to this neuroinflammation. But we also want to change how we think about food. And a lot of the times it's really just about better than what? It's not that the food is this miracle thing that's supposed to do something. It's just that it replaces something that is much worse. So when it comes to fats, especially polyunsaturated fat, like we get from soybean oil, canola oil, corn oil, safflower oil, etc. When we process it, then it becomes unstable and it becomes damaged and damaged food is really bad for us. It's oxidized, it's full of free radicals and it leads to inflammation. Saturated fats, on the other hand, are natural. They are unprocessed for the most part or very slightly processed and therefore they are undamaged and they're simply real food. But the most common type of comment and question I encounter is, well, if it's so good, if this food is so good, what does it do? What does turmeric do? What does garlic do? What does saturated fat do? And for the most part, that's the wrong question because the answer is it doesn't do anything. It's not supposed to do anything. It's just supposed to be food. It's just supposed to provide things that the body needs and the body needs energy and it needs components to build structure. And fat saturated fat is one of the best forms of energy. It's clean burning, stable energy for the body and then we use fats for structure. Like we said, we build cell membranes, we build a mile in. We have insulation in the body that is made from fats. And if we start understanding that, then we also stop thinking that more is always better. It's about balance and it's about eating a variety of things that provide things the body needs and that don't do damage. So why then would we eat more saturated fat at all? Well, there's certain things that we can provide the body. We can provide it fiber and your body your cells don't need fiber, but they feed the bacteria in your gut. They provide a certain bulk that create motility for regular bowel movements. So it does have a function. And then we have micro nutrients and these are things like vitamins and minerals and enzymes. And that's what the body uses to make things happen. When we make a protein, when we break down a food into energy, then those are cofactors. They're like little keys that fit into reaction and make them happen or make them happen hundreds of times faster than they would have otherwise. Then we have proteins that we break down into amino acids and reassemble into hormones, into signaling molecules and into tissue like muscles and hair and bones and so forth. And then we have essential fatty acids. And one of the main functions there is like we said, for the cell membranes, both in your nervous system, but also in every single cell in your body, you have these essential fatty acids. And then of course one more thing we're looking for from food is energy. So then we have these different food groups that we can eat to provide the things your body is looking for. And these are things like leafy greens and non-starchy vegetables. We have meat, fish, foul and game meat. We have nuts and seeds. We have natural fats and we have starch and man-made oils, which I call anything that has been very harshly processed. And I know this is a gross oversimplification, but I'm just trying to make a point with this. So from the greens group, we get fiber and we get micronutrients, vitamins and minerals. But that's about it. Even though they have very small amounts of protein and natural fats, it's not enough that we could really live off of them. It's more like trace amounts. The next one is meat and here we get micronutrients. We get lots of vitamins and minerals. We also get lots of protein. We get some essential fatty acids from all of these, but primarily from the fish and from the fatty fish. And then of course we get lots of energy from the meat group. The majority of energy or calories that we get from the meat group is in the form of natural fats. And then we have nuts and seeds, which provide fiber. It provides micronutrients. It provides protein, some essential fatty acids. And the reason I put a dotted line there is that yes, it has omega-3s, but it doesn't contain the EPA and the DHA, which is like the final end product that we need to put in the cell membranes. And again, we get plenty of energy from nuts and seeds because they contain these natural fats. And then we have natural fats. And here I'm talking about natural foods that have fat in them, where the fat is a normal part of that food like meat and fish and nuts and avocado. But I'm also talking about minimally processed oils, things like extra virgin olive oil. And in some cases avocado oil, talking about coconut oil and butter, where we haven't really altered the food, we have just separated it into a more concentrated form. And the natural fats will provide some micronutrients, some vitamins in particular. They will provide some essential fatty acids, especially in the fish like we talked about. And of course, you get lots and lots of energy from those fats. And then we have the last group, which is the starches and the manmade oils. And that's every oil that you find on the shelf called vegetable oil. That's harshly processed. And it is all of the grain. It's the rice and the bread and so forth. And it could have some fiber in it. If it is not so processed, but it's not a major source, we could get some micronutrients. But again, if most of it's processed, that is very negligible. It has a little bit of protein. But the biggest reason I put these in dotted lines is that the main reason we would eat this would be to get the energy, to get the calories. So this brings us to the question of why would we eat more fat? Well, if we follow the guideline, if we think that saturated fat is something really, really bad, now we're going to be eating a lot of our food in the very last group. We're going to eat lots of grain. We're going to eat lots of these polyunsaturated, harshly processed oils that are really horrible for us. And we're going to get most of our really good nutrients from the first three groups. They're going to have the essential fatty acids, the essential amino acids, the vitamins and minerals, etc. But if we're looking at where most people get most of their calories, it's going to be either from fats or from grains. That's where the bulk of calories are, whether they are man-made or whether they are natural. And that brings us to the question of why would we eat more saturated fat then? And that's because if you buy into the idea that saturated fat is really bad and you try to eat as little as possible, you're going to find that you get most of your calories from the grain and starch and man-made oils portion. And if you start understanding that that group is not so great for you, that is where most of the sad diet, the standard American diet calories come from that cause disease, then you have to replace those calories with something else. And then you have the other four groups to choose from. And here we have the first three, which you could eat more of, but it's very expensive to get more calories just from high quality meat and from nuts and seeds and from leafy greens gets kind of expensive. The nuts and seeds not too terribly expensive, but more so than the fats because these two categories are relatively very cheap. So between the cheap choices over here, all you have to know is that one does damage and the other one is neutral and stable. And that's all we're really looking for is we're looking for a wide variety of food that provide a wide variety of different benefits and enough calories, enough energy to sustain us. And in order to reduce the food that do damage, you have to cut out the last category and the most logical place to increase your calories now is from whole food and that's going to have some saturated fat in it. So a good starting point is what we call a paleotype diet. And that goes back to the idea that our paleolithic ancestors only ate certain things that were available to them at that time. And what they didn't have was sugar, they didn't have any grain, they didn't have any processed foods. So those you want to cut out completely or eat very, very minimal amounts of. You want to eat meat, fish, foul and yellow. and you want those to be as natural as possible. You want them to be raised in a natural environment and having eaten there in ate food. And then you want to include a wide variety of nuts and seed, non-starchy vegetables, and some good natural fats like extra virgin olive oil, butter, and coconut away. And then we want to have everything in moderation. I'm sure you've heard that expression that everything in moderation, the only problem is that there is a wide range of beliefs and opinions about what moderation is. So I agree everything in moderation, but let's talk about what that might be. So if we follow the USDA guidelines, they suggest that we get 45 to 65% of our calories from carbohydrates. We should get 10 to 30% from protein. We should get 20 to 35% from fat. And we should get 6 to 10% from saturated fat. And the 6% is what the American Heart Association is trying to get people down to. And 10% is kind of the going recommendation, less than 10% of calories from saturated fats. Now I would suggest that if you eat a paleo-type diet, and the reason I put that in quotation marks is that I don't believe that we should follow something as a religion. I think the paleo is the best starting point, but I think that we can use some common sense and trial and error to figure out what works for us. And if you just cut out the things I talked about, the sugar and the grain and the processed foods, you need to dramatically reduce. There is no way to eat a paleo diet and get up to these numbers of carbohydrates. So if you're trying to be on the lower end, as if you're really trying quickly to reverse in metabolic problems like diabetes, then you might choose to be as low as 5% of net carbohydrates, which would be a ketogenic diet. Everyone needs to do that, especially not all the time, but I think that you want to change your life up a little bit so that you go back and forth in that range. I think protein, they're not too terribly off. I want to tighten that up just a little bit. And then fat, I think, should be somewhere between 60 to 80%. And it doesn't mean that you try to gorge yourself on fat. It simply means if you eat natural food, if you eat nuts and seeds and avocado and meat, then and you cut out the carbohydrates, you're naturally going to end up around 60 to 80%. If you don't eat a bunch of rice and potato and bread anymore, then that fat percentage is going to go up dramatically. But a lot of people have this misconception. They heard of paleo and they think it's the caveman diet and they think, well, that's very heavy in meat. They hardly ate anything but meat. And meat is all saturated fat. So therefore, they think that the saturated fat portions should be the same as the total fat or close to it. Well, it turns out you're probably going to end up somewhere around 20 to 30% saturated fat. Even if you increase your fat total by double or even more. So let's look at some of the foods that we included in the paleo diet and let's see how they break down on fat. And we'll talk about nuts and seeds, fish, extra virgin olive oil, beef and butter. And let's see how they break down on saturated fat, monounsaturated fatty acids, and polyunsaturated fatty acids. So nuts are going to vary a lot depending on the nut. But I'm just trying to get you a general idea that nuts do have some saturated fat in them. But they're mostly monounsaturated. And they have about a third polyunsaturated. And except for walnuts, the polyunsaturated is going to be pretty much all omega-6s. And then we have seeds that have about the same amount of saturated fat. But they're going to have less monounsaturated and a lot more polyunsaturated. So that's where we have things like flax seed and chia seed that are actually very high in omega-3s. And we have other things like safflower oil and sunflower oil that are going to be high, also high in polyunsaturated, but it's going to be mostly omega-6s. And then we look at fish and we have about 15% saturated fat. We have a good bit of monounsaturated, but what fish is famous for is the polyunsaturated. And here they're going to be almost entirely the best kind that your body is looking for. The polyunsaturated EPA and DHA. And extra virgin olive oil does have some saturated fat, but not a whole lot. It has almost all of its fat from mono unsaturated fats. And just a tiny little bit of polyunsaturated, which would be omega-6s. And this profile also matches almost exactly what avocado would be. And here's the big surprise that most people don't realize because they've heard that beef is all saturated fat. When in fact, it is about equally split between saturated fat and mono unsaturated fats. And then a tiny little bit of polyunsaturated. And again, those polyunsaturated, even though it's a small percentage, it does have some of the EPA and the DHA in it. And then we have butter, which has a very high, it's had about 65% of its fat as saturated fat. And then coconut oil is even higher. But think about that. How can butter be higher than beef and yet butter melts easier? And coconut oil has even higher, even more saturated fat than butter, but it's liquid at room temperature. So there's differences between the saturated fat also. And beef has mostly what's called stearic acid, which is a long chain. That when it's saturated, it gets very solid. It gets very hard and stable. Whereas butter has a lot of short chain fatty acid. It has more of a mix up of different lengths. And that's why if you take a stick of butter and you rub your finger on it, it gets oily very quickly. You're melting it very quickly. Whereas you're not going to be able to do that with beef fat. And the reason is that it has more of the short chain fatty acids that behave completely differently. So it's a little misleading to look at the high percentage and think that that would be a bad thing or that we would be very saturated. The third benefit from eating more saturated fat would be to reduce inflammation. And the reason again is that saturated fat is more stable. It doesn't react as easily with heat, with light and with oxygen. And therefore it is less prone to oxidation, making less free radicals. That's what happens with oxidation. And therefore it will reduce inflammation. And then there's some more benefits. We'll go through them pretty quick, improved hormone production. Because cholesterol is a precursor for some of your hormones, especially the sex hormones and the very important cortisol. Even though it is often emphasized as a bad hormone because we stress too much, it is still necessary to have the precursors and be able to produce cortisol in the right amounts when necessary. Number five is improved satiety, improved fullness, and therefore improved weight control. Because if you eat something and you're full longer, you tend to eat less and you tend to eat less often. So the foods that contain saturated fats like eggs and beef are generally very filling. Number six is improved immune function. And there's a couple of things here again, reduced inflammation is always going to help your immune system. Also, some of the short-chain fatty acids are actually antibacterial and will assist your immune system. Number seven, saturated fats are better at stimulating the gallbladder and contributing to the absorption of the fat soluble vitamins, A, D, E, and K than other fats are. Number eight is better bone health. Saturated fat helps improve the absorption of minerals, but again, reduced inflammation will help the body make better bones. And then we come to the big ones because a lot of people will see this and they say that, "Okay, so saturated fat can be good for certain things and it might improve the brain, it might improve cognition and a few other things." I am worried about my heart and a lot of people even believe that you have to compromise, that you have to sacrifice your brain for the sake of your body. heart but your body is way too smart for that. If it helps one part of the body, it helps all parts of the body. If it helps the whole, if it helps maintain balance and homeostasis, then it helps all parts of the body. So number nine is that increasing your saturated fat can give you better heart health. So like we mentioned, the recommended levels of saturated fats are 6 to 10% of total calories and basically they believe that less is better. But we have to understand that that has nothing to do with the true causes of cardiovascular disease. And they're so well established today that heart disease is caused by chronic, low grade inflammation and from oxidative stress. And we've talked over and over about how saturated fat is stable. It is neutral to inflammation and oxidative stress. It does not contribute at all to the true causes. Instead, it is the processed oils that we talked about. It's the sugar and the grain and all the things additionally causing insulin resistance that are pro-inflammatory that are the true cause of heart disease. So if you were to increase your intake of saturated fat from 10% to 25% saturated fat like we talked about in the previous tables on the paleo diet going to whole real food and cutting back on your carbs, then you will most likely improve your heart health. So now the skeptics will pull out one more argument and they'll say that saturated fat increases cholesterol and cholesterol causes heart disease. So let's talk about that. It is true in some people saturated fat can increase your LDL cholesterol and that's the LDL C that is measured in milligrams per desolide. That's the total weight, the total volume. And that's a very outdated marker. Almost everyone who knows anything agrees that that is not a very good marker of heart disease risk. But additionally, the saturated fat typically also increases the HDL C and it does that more so than it increases the LDL. So usually we hear that LDL is bad and HDL is good. That's not true. The body makes the appropriate type for whatever is going on in your body. And if you have a lot of inflammation, you tend to make more LDL and you tend to make a lot less HDL. If you reduce inflammation, then you can make a little more LDL but you will increase HDL more. So one of the ratios that indicate heart disease risk is to take the total cholesterol and divide by your HDL. So let's say, for example, that your total cholesterol was 180 over 30, then that ratio would be 6. And a lot of people will say, "Oh, this is good. Your total cholesterol is 180. That's below 200. You're okay. You're in good shape." But it's not about the total number. That's another very outdated marker. It is almost completely irrelevant. So if we increase or saturated fat, what might happen is we increase total cholesterol, but we also increase the HDL. So now if we went from 180 to 200, but the HDL goes from 30 to 40, we actually lower that ratio. That's a much better indicator of heart disease risk. But even though this ratio is useful, it is still lacking in detail and it doesn't come close to the true risk factors for heart disease. So let's look at the true risk markers and let's illustrate with an actual case that came through my office. And this was a person that watched some videos, a mine, and he had changed his lifestyle. And for about a year, he had eaten a paleotype diet. So he had eaten pretty much like the numbers that I showed you before. And he felt better. He was healthier in many regards. His blood pressure was down. He was off a bunch of medications. But then his doctor looked at his total cholesterol numbers and he was pressured to take a statin medication. So here's what happened. His total cholesterol went from 260 to 190. So a huge drop. His LDL went from 160 to 108, also a big drop. And this doctor was super happy, said, "Look how much healthier you are." So no one is disputing whether a statin drug can bring down cholesterol. It absolutely can and it will. It goes right in and blocks certain pathways in the body so the body can't regulate or produce cholesterol the way it wants. But the question is, is that necessarily a good thing? His HDL went from 91 to 66. So there was a dramatic drop in the so-called good cholesterol. Now his ratio was very good. Around three is optimal and he stayed around three. So that was not a problem there. But now we look at the actual risk markers, the biggest and most important risk markers. And that's not the weight of the LDL in milligrams, but the number of particles. And that went from 1245 to 1410. So taking a statin increased the number of particles. And that's a much more important, much higher risk factor. And it's pretty incredible that you can decrease the volume of LDL, but increase the number of particles dramatically at the same time. And the reason that happens is not very healthy at all. So the size went from a very healthy 22 and a half nanometers, which is, would be an average size for his LDL particles all the way down to 20.7, which is not a good number. And that's why he could increase his particle number. But the two most important markers is the number of particles and the number of particles that are small, that are under 20.5, because they are the ones that actually do the damage. And the reason they're small is that they have been damaged by oxidation and by inflammation and by glycation, which is high blood sugar. So one of the most important markers is how many small LDL particles you have. And he went from less than 90, which means they're so few, they can't accurately count. And he went all the way up to 699. So according to the way most people get treated and the way most doctors practice, they manage to lower the cholesterol. But again, this is very questionable whether that has any validity, whereas most of the numbers got worse. His HDL got worse on the ratio. There was no change on the particle count. It got worse on the size and the number of small LDL particles it got dramatically worse. So even though he was treated according to the standard of care and on the surface, it looked like a success. This person actually got a lot thicker from this treatment. And then of course, he went from feeling really good to also having some muscle aches and fatigue because when you block the cholesterol production to bring these numbers down, you also interfere with a very important enzyme called coq10 that is necessary for energy production. So your energy production suffers and it suffers the most where you make the most energy, which is in your brain, in your heart, in your liver, and in your kidneys. And in the case of coq10 also in the muscles. So I'm not suggesting that a statin drug is never appropriate. But what I am saying is that as the standard care, when they only look at the total cholesterol and the LDL and they prescribe statin drugs like candy, this person got significantly sicker when he should have just stayed with eating real food and measuring some additional markers to see if there was actually any risk. If you enjoyed this video, you're going to love that one. And if you truly want to master health by understanding how the body really works, make sure you subscribe, hit that bell and turn on all the notifications so you never miss a life-saving video.