The Truth About Seed Oils | Dr. Mark Hyman & Dr. Andrew Huberman

00:00:00.000 | what's your view on seed oils?

00:00:03.920 | Oy.

00:00:05.780 | No, just, you know, I mean, I'll say mine.

00:00:08.100 | I like olive oil and butter, coconut oil,

00:00:10.740 | and things like avocados and some Brazil nuts and walnuts and stuff.

00:00:14.060 | So since I don't count calories, I kind of have an intuitive sense

00:00:18.400 | of what I'm taking in, how much fat, how much protein, how much starch,

00:00:22.400 | how much, you know, fibrous carbs, et cetera.

00:00:24.240 | So for me, like, I wouldn't pick canola oil because I could pick olive oil.

00:00:29.300 | Right, right.

00:00:29.860 | And then I make sure it's real olive oil.

00:00:31.660 | But I don't think seed oils necessarily will kill me,

00:00:36.320 | but guess why I know they won't kill me?

00:00:38.340 | Because I don't eat them.

00:00:39.180 | We should be eating whole food fats as much as possible, right?

00:00:42.920 | Avocados, coconut, nuts and seeds, you know, omega-3 fats from fish,

00:00:47.860 | olive oil, which is the most minimally processed oil you can get,

00:00:51.700 | extra virgin olive oil.

00:00:52.920 | And we're eating nuts and seeds.

00:00:56.460 | We're getting a lot of omega-6s.

00:00:57.780 | So the big theory behind seed oils is

00:00:59.720 | that it's omega-6 rich.

00:01:01.120 | It's imbalanced with omega-3s.

00:01:03.420 | It causes inflammation.

00:01:04.340 | The way they're produced and grown is problematic.

00:01:07.880 | They're usually GMO crops like canola oil.

00:01:10.600 | They spray lots of chemicals on them.

00:01:12.400 | Those chemicals get in the oil.

00:01:13.580 | They're manufactured in an industrial way that oxidizes them,

00:01:17.960 | that uses hexane to get rid of sort of some of the compounds in it,

00:01:22.120 | deodorizes them, bleaches them.

00:01:24.680 | And then they're easily oxidized.

00:01:26.240 | So would I want to eat an industrial food product?

00:01:29.380 | Probably not.

00:01:30.500 | Do we know for sure that it's a problem?

00:01:32.440 | I think the data is mixed.

00:01:33.840 | I mean, there's some studies that show epidemiologically that, you know,

00:01:37.140 | people who eat more of these plant-based oils or seed oils have reduced risk of diseases.

00:01:42.100 | So we don't know what they're doing and there's food frequency questionnaires

00:01:44.700 | and these studies are proving correlation, not causation.

00:01:48.000 | And what it's replacing.

00:01:48.900 | Sorry to interrupt here, but, you know,

00:01:50.520 | I'll see the data that seed oils are better for people than butter.

00:01:54.760 | Okay.

00:01:55.660 | I like grass-fed butter, but I don't eat it in excess.

00:01:58.880 | Yeah.

00:01:59.380 | I once joked about that and I like, I made some jokes early on and having a podcast,

00:02:03.620 | not realizing the implications.

00:02:05.040 | But anyway, I'm very careful now.

00:02:07.500 | I have some butter in moderation.

00:02:09.720 | Yeah.

00:02:10.040 | But so I could imagine that if you're eating a lot of lard and butter and bacon fat

00:02:13.460 | and you replace it with seed oils, you'll get healthier.

00:02:15.840 | Maybe.

00:02:16.760 | Maybe.

00:02:17.280 | Maybe.

00:02:17.620 | But you could imagine, I guess it depends on what else you're ingesting.

00:02:20.100 | Because the starch-fat combination is the one that gets people, in my opinion.

00:02:24.680 | That's right.

00:02:24.740 | That's right.

00:02:25.120 | But, right, somebody could be eating a lot of meat and fruit and doing it okay.

00:02:28.440 | Don't eat like your butter with a bagel.

00:02:30.820 | Put it on your broccoli.

00:02:31.940 | Because the saturated fat, refined starch combo is what's killing us.

00:02:37.740 | I wish people would really hear you on this.

00:02:43.400 | It's not fat per se.

00:02:45.580 | It's not starches per se.

00:02:48.260 | It's the combination of fat and starch, and in particular, fat, starch, and sugar.

00:02:53.540 | Yeah.

00:02:54.100 | Well, starch, sugar, starch, and below the neck, your body can't tell if it's a bowl

00:02:57.620 | of sugar, a bowl of cornflakes, or a bagel, or a bowl of sugar.

00:03:00.080 | So if I put a pat of butter on a bowl of white rice, is it that bad?

00:03:04.200 | No, not really.

00:03:05.800 | Okay.

00:03:05.980 | But if I put a pat of butter on a muffin, it's bad news bears.

00:03:09.540 | Yeah.

00:03:10.140 | You're doubling down on the sugar, yeah.

00:03:11.860 | And I think, you know, to answer your question about the seed oil, the data's not really

00:03:17.420 | completely answering this.

00:03:19.160 | And it's part of the problem with nutrition.

00:03:20.540 | It's not a nutrition science.

00:03:21.640 | It's the one large randomized controlled trial that was done on like 9,000 people, not on

00:03:27.980 | 90 people or 50 people or 30 people, which a lot of these studies are, but on 9,000 people

00:03:33.280 | that were randomized in a psychiatric hospital.

00:03:35.980 | Now, corn oil is a pure omega-6 oil, as opposed to soybean, which is mixed omega-3, canola mixed

00:03:52.640 | omega-3, 6 oils.

00:03:55.140 | And what they found was striking.

00:03:56.980 | They found that the group that had the corn oil, for every 30-point drop in LDL cholesterol,

00:04:03.940 | the risk of death from heart attacks or strokes went up by 22%, which is completely the opposite

00:04:11.860 | of what we think in medicine, which is LDL is the boogeyman.

00:04:14.980 | LDL is the bad cholesterol or L for lousy cholesterol.

00:04:19.340 | It's not so simple.

00:04:20.260 | And I think this oversimplification of, let's say, these C-dolls lower LDL, therefore they're

00:04:27.100 | good, it's just too simplistic.

00:04:28.400 | But would I, for example, have a corn oil that was expeller-pressed or that was organic or canola

00:04:35.520 | oil that was or sunflower or safflower oil?

00:04:37.860 | Yeah.

00:04:38.100 | I mean, I'm not worried about those in small amounts.

00:04:40.340 | But that's not what most people are doing.

00:04:42.680 | Most people are eating, most of their diet is ultra-processed food, 60% of adults, 67% of kids

00:04:48.580 | is basically junk food.

00:04:50.060 | And the major oil in those are these refined oils.

00:04:53.460 | So is it the oils?

00:04:54.980 | Is it the junk food?

00:04:56.120 | They're just a vehicle for this.

00:04:57.780 | And we've increased our consumption, for example, of the main seed oil or bean oil, it's not really

00:05:02.660 | a seed, is soybean oil by a thousandfold since 1900.

00:05:08.140 | Now, I'm sort of an evolutionary thinker, I'm like, how are our bodies designed and what

00:05:13.880 | should we be doing with them?

00:05:14.820 | And you talk a lot about light and that's like, you went to sleep with the sun, you woke up

00:05:20.200 | with the sun, it was just how things were.

00:05:21.780 | And you had circadian rhythms and our whole biological clocks and rhythms are screwed up

00:05:26.080 | because of how we live.

00:05:26.780 | Yeah, well, we evolved under the major constraint of sunrise and sunset.

00:05:30.420 | That's right.

00:05:31.060 | And artificial lighting is a wonderful thing, but I think there's highly processed light.

00:05:36.280 | It's devoid of long wavelengths, the eradication basically of incandescent bulbs and all these

00:05:41.560 | LEDs and daylight savings times.

00:05:44.740 | It's really messing people up.

00:05:47.580 | It means, oh, it's just an hour.

00:05:49.020 | No, actually, it's your mental health.

00:05:50.760 | When it comes to the seed oil thing, I actually predict that seed oils will lose.

00:05:55.700 | I think in the end, it's just obvious.

00:05:57.520 | Like, why wouldn't people just say, you know what?

00:05:59.580 | The seed oil thing may or may not be a problem.

00:06:01.660 | I'm just going to eat olive oil and a little bit of butter.

00:06:03.900 | Yeah, that's kind of my view.

00:06:05.040 | My view is if you have a new to nature kind of compound or an unnaturally high amount of something

00:06:13.420 | that we're having in our diet, I mean, sugar was always around.

00:06:15.680 | We would get honey, whatever.

00:06:16.720 | But we'd have 22 teaspoons a year as hunter-gatherers.

00:06:20.840 | Now we have that every day for every American.

00:06:23.440 | If you had a magic wand and you could get rid of seed oils or you could get rid of highly refined sugars in modern American diet, which one would you know?

00:06:32.820 | No contest.

00:06:33.340 | It's starch and sugar that's driving our metabolic crisis, like, by a huge factor, by a huge factor.

00:06:40.040 | Does that mean no pasta, no bread?

00:06:42.080 | It doesn't mean no, no anything.

00:06:43.620 | It just means the volume of stuff we're eating.

00:06:46.460 | It's like we're eating pharmacologic doses.

00:06:48.400 | It's 152 pounds of sugar and 133 pounds of flour, which has a higher glycemic index than sugar.

00:06:54.480 | Really?

00:06:55.200 | Yeah, well, that's how it's set.

00:06:56.480 | It's set at white bread as 100 and the sugar's 80 because it's fructose and glucose.

00:07:01.060 | So you have to break that apart.

00:07:02.220 | And so your glycemic load, which is how it affects your blood sugar, fructose doesn't raise your blood sugar.

00:07:08.380 | Glucose raises your blood sugar.

00:07:09.720 | Glucose raises your blood sugar.

The Truth About Seed Oils | Dr. Mark Hyman & Dr. Andrew Huberman

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