In the grocery store, we really only have to think about six. And that’s just real quick: corn, canola, cottonseed, soy, sunflower, and safflower. In the United States, we have canola. Overseas, instead of canola, it’s rapeseed. But memorize those six. If you can turn the package around and scan for those six ingredients, then you can turn your health around.
Well, this is gonna be fun ’cause I was very impressed with your first book, and I’m just delighted that you’ve come out with a new one. I had the opportunity to read it, and we’re gonna have a great discussion. So you’ve highlighted a fascinating point in your book that vegetable oils, unlike anything our ancestors ever consumed, require extensive processing to be even considered edible.
And I want you to take people through this because it seems very obvious that, well, gosh, soybean oil, don’t you just have to press on a soybean, and out comes the oil, and there you go. So it’s a lot more complicated than that, right? – It’s quite a bit more complicated than that. It’s unimaginably complicated.
People have to get degrees from technical schools with huge backgrounds in biochemistry to be able to do it so that the oils don’t come out being absolutely inedible and just smelling bad and outright toxic. There’s many factories involved, not just steps in a factory, but there’s many factories.
And even just the first one, to get the oil out, they use intense heat, 600 degrees Fahrenheit, hotter than a pizza oven, which is a really hot oven if you’ve ever made pizza, and intense pressure. And the vast majority also need to use solvents like hexane gas, which is toxic too, to get the oil out.
And that crude oil that they extract truly is crude and rude. It is stinky, it is vile-smelling. It looks… It’s black, blackish brown, thick, and sludgy. And if you eat it, you would probably throw up. It’s that immediately and instantaneously toxic. – Now, I’m gonna stop you right there because I want everybody to know that you’re not just saying this as a whim or as an MD.
You trained as a biochemist, so you know of which you speak in these processes, correct? – Yes, I went to Cornell before I went to medical school to get a degree in biochemistry. And that’s actually the reason that when I started learning about what I was really eating back more than 20 years ago now, these oils caught my eye because when I looked up what their chemistry was, I recognized a fingerprint signature that signaled these things could be dangerous.
And that’s double bonds. And I do talk about that in chapter one of the book with pictures. You really need pictures to visualize some of this, I think. So it can be technical to understand it, but I go into those technicals so people can see that it’s real. Truly, we’re generating toxins here in these factories.
Yeah, and I like that you actually do use pictures and visuals throughout the book because a lot of this is fairly technical, and just seeing it visually, good for you for doing that. – Yeah, we’re actually fighting a different visual here. I’m fighting this battle to get people to understand how toxic these oils are and how they just destroy everyone’s metabolism.
Everyone is eating them, but I’m fighting against another vision. And you probably have heard about this and talked about it maybe because the idea of saturated fat being unhealthy rests on a visual too. It was originally put out there as these saturated fats turn solid, just like butter turns solid in your fridge, so it’ll solidify in your arteries and clog them up like grease in a pipe.
And that visual is so powerful that even though it was created in the 1950s and 60s, it’s still in our mind’s eye these days that saturated fat literally clogs up like a pipe. It’s not true. It never was true. It’s overly simplistic. It has nothing to do with chemistry. It’s just a dangerous visual.
So I wanna replace that with real visuals in the book. And I mention a replacement visual too, in addition to providing those chemical pictures so you can see how toxins are forming. The thinking that we can have is these oils corrode our arteries, like dumping some sort of toxin into your arteries. And it will weaken them, and they will bleed and clot.
And that’s more… It’s a more true, valid image because we treat heart attacks with clot busters, don’t we? – Yeah. – We don’t treat it with fat dissolves. If it truly were just fat, then we would put some sort of enzyme or something in there to dissolve that fat building up. But that’s not what we do at all.
I think one of the nice things about the book is kind of explaining where all of this idea of vegetable oils came from. Just take us through the industrial byproduct of cotton seeds, which were useless after taking them out of cotton. And take us through how in the world we got from a byproduct of making cotton to the idea that Crisco was really good for you.
Yeah, it was chemistry. It came from chemists. The brothers, Procter & Gamble, were chemists who founded a soap and candle wax company. And this was way back in the 19th century, like in the 1860s, 70s, and 80s. And they saw electricity and electric lights as a huge threat to their business, which was mostly candles.
So they wanted to diversify and divest, and they were already using this byproduct of the textile industry, meaning the cottonseed oil. They were already using that to make candles and candle wax. So they wanted to find a different use for it.
And what they did was hire a different chemist to tinker with it some more to remove one of the toxic agents that grows in the plant. The plant cottonseed protects its little seeds from being eaten by birds by putting in a toxin called gossypol that makes it immediately toxic to people and cows. It’s why they couldn’t use it as animal feed. The chemist had to remove that toxin. And then it was kind of like a sludgy, somewhat thick liquid. And they were like, huh, it kind of looks like lard a little bit. Let’s tinker with the recipe a little more. And poof, they invented Crisco shortening, one of the first vegetable shortenings.
And it was truly a byproduct of… A byproduct of a byproduct, basically, because it was no longer even useful for candles anymore. That was a third-rate kind of level of use, selling it to people who couldn’t afford the real thing. – And advertising you speak a great deal about using, and I’m blanking on his name, a great advertising genius of the mid-1900s who really knew how to sell things that people really didn’t need or didn’t want.
Yeah, this man was Ed Bernays. – There you go. – And he is considered the father of modern advertising because, unlike previous advertising psychology, which just spelled out, oh, this is a better product, it’s more durable, it was all based on logic. He knew how to pull people’s heartstrings and pull our levers and make us afraid or make us want to look cool with different products.
And so one of his first campaigns was actually to help sell cigarettes to women. So this just kind of gives you an idea of the kinds of industries he was working with, right? And he did that in a way that is being used today. It was kind of like the precursor for Virginia Slims, like the woman who is independent and can bring home the bacon and fry it up in a pan kind of thing.
He called cigarettes torches of freedom. And what it did was it elevated women who smoke from being seen as trashy to being seen as liberated and independent and free thinkers. So it was incredibly successful, and that really helped sell cigarettes really quick. The sales quadrupled in just a few years after Ed Bernays.
So he knew how to help Procter & Gamble, and he had kind of a devilish strategy if you wanna… Should I go into that now? – Sure, yeah, let’s go right there. – So his strategy, he knew that people would… Every doctor had a different thought on what was healthy and what was not healthy. Doctors had their own ideas.
So he knew that if he dangled the dollar bill in front of a bunch of doctors, that somebody would show up to grab it, and that would benefit his client, Procter & Gamble, because that’s just how it works. He knew psychology. He knew that if a man’s salary depends on him believing in something, well, gosh darn it, it’s gonna be impossible, next to impossible, to get him to not believe in it.
So the person who stepped up, well, the organization who he donated the money to is an organization that you, I’m sure, as a cardiologist are very familiar with, the American Heart Association. And that’s how they got started. They got $1.7 million from Procter & Gamble. And shortly after that, they started funding research that showed or that would show that vegetable oils lower cholesterol and therefore, that meant that they were heart-healthy.
And guess what? None of those two statements are true. They do lower cholesterol. – That’s true. – [Dr. Cate] But that doesn’t mean they’re heart-healthy, right? – Correct. – That’s the disconnect. That’s the disconnect that doctors of the day tried to regale against. They tried to say, look, this isn’t true.
We don’t have any evidence of this, but all of those folks are no longer with us. And the lie that was created back in the 1940s by the American Heart Association has gotten stronger and stronger and stronger. The American Heart Association is now the dominant source of nutrition thought in the entire world.