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Today's going to be another exciting discussion, deep dive into nutrition, learning together, just having a free flow conversation. And I'm joined by two individuals who tell you it's going to be a little hard for me to keep up, but I'm just going to try to catch a tiger by its tail and learn a little bit and hopefully try to translate it to our audience because you guys go into the weeds and that's good, we need that. And to do so, we have a discussion today on the topic of nutrition, particularly the issue of
seed oils, and we're joined by Brad Marshall of FireInABottle.net and Dr. Ray Peat. You can visit Dr. Ray Peat's website, raypeat.com, and also join his newsletter. So Brad and Dr. Peat, thank you for joining us. Well, thanks for having us. I'm excited for the opportunity. Very good. Dr. Peat, I wanted to start with you, just some open questions to kind of get us thinking, what is the ideal diet for a child? You know, when you're thinking about raising a child, I know my audience is a lot of younger people in their 20s, 30s, maybe they're
starting a family and maybe they found this podcast because they're thinking okay I just don't know where to go. Some people are telling it's all about this or that, it's keto, it's plant-based, it's this or that and is there a little shorthand guidance you might be able to have for our audience, Dr. Peat, about what is the best ideal diet for raising and upbringing a young child into the world? Dr. Peat Wilkinson It depends on the age. Milk is the ideal food until they're about a year old. At birth, because of the effects
of the different oxygen tension and higher estrogen and so on, at birth the baby is overloaded with iron. And so milk is very low in iron to allow the baby to grow into its iron. And so the apparent iron deficiency of milk is just right. We don't want to listen to the experts that say since plain simple milk is low in iron, a baby needs supplements. The high estrogen that increases during a woman's pregnancy has a very powerful effect. Even on borderline iron intake, her body is going to load up on iron
under the effects of estrogen. It becomes nine or 10 times as efficient as a man's body at extracting iron from food. And that guarantees that essentially all babies are going to be born with an excess of iron. And at about a year of age, they will have grown into their overload on iron, and so they can start eating a mixed diet even before a year if it isn't iron content food like meat. The metabolic rate is extremely high in newborns, partly or largely because of the absence of polyunsaturated fats in their tissues.
By the common test of so-called essential fatty acids, almost all babies are born deficient in the so-called essential fatty acids, but in fact, that's ideal for metabolism and the brain. As soon as a baby or an animal is born, the exposure, like a calf, starts growth on milk with a relatively low content of polyunsaturated fats. As they mature and start eating other foods, their tissue starts loading up on PUFA. Same happens in babies that are down on a mixed diet. Their tissues progressively load up on polyunsaturated fats and that increases, but the fats from
the environment are diluted gradually by the growth of the body. So like the... And where are kids, where are children getting a lot of their PUFAs in the environment, you're saying? Yeah, from foods other than milk. And so as they shift to more environmental foods rather than milk, their PUFA content increases, but as long as their body is increasing in volume, that is a slow increase. In the 20s, when growth slows down greatly, the rate of accumulation of PUFA in the tissues accelerates.
So by middle age, people have a very high content of tissue PUFA and that increases into old age and the degenerating demented brain has a very high level of polyunsaturated esters of cholesterol which lowers the free cholesterol in the brain and so impairs all of the metabolic processes that free cholesterol should participate in. And as that lifelong accumulation of PUFA continues, the metabolic rate is like a mirror image of the PUFA concentration.
Baby has a very high calorie consumption and CO2 production, heat production, but by middle and old age, the heat production and caloric requirements are much, much lower. So you tend to get fat unless you sharply reduce your calorie intake after middle age. So, if you're at that one-year-old stage and you said you're introducing mixed foods from one to two to three to four, what are the best dietary principles to follow in the proper nourishment of a child to very high in PUFA. A few tropical nuts are safe as far as PUFA go.
Fatty fish are another source. They talk about the fish fats as being needed in the brain because the adult and old brain has such a high content of what we think of as fish oils, the N minus three highly unsaturated fatty acids, but those are exactly corresponding to the decreased cognitive ability and decreased metabolic rate. And so, even though they say
rate. And so even though they say the PUFA N-3 long chains are brain foods, they're exactly fat seeds and especially fish, cold water fish with a high fat content should be avoided. Should children be, should fruit or sugars, you know, table sugar or fruit, should that be limited for children or should that basically be to whatever the child desires? Yeah, basically what they desire. And traditionally oatmeal was one of the first things to introduce into a child's diet and that's not terribly high in PUFA but at least it's very high in carbohydrate.
And during gestation, the brain develops pretty much in proportion to the availability of fructose and glucose. And the more you displace those by fats, the more you tend to slow metabolism. So all sorts of carbohydrate, if you take into account their relative lack of PUFA, all of those are brain-activating foods, especially fruits. So, is it, I mean, there's the common adage that people, parents are worried about their kids eating too much candy, but if you've got, I mean, is it okay for kids to eat candy a lot?
I mean, I know there's a lot of ingredients in there. I mean, assuming you had, you know, a candy with a good fat, you know, and lots of sugar and table sugar added, is that okay for kids to eat to their satiation or is that not good? Well, they should tend to eat it in batches, not keep it in their mouth a long time and support cavities, but if you eat a lot of it and then rinse your mouth, that's fine. Wow. That's interesting.
So it's really - that's something that I think is very interesting for folks who there's there's a lot of you know conventional wisdom that would say you know you're one of the essential things you've got to do if you want to be nutritionally conscious for your children young children is to limit their access to you know table sugar type foods and candies and things like that. Yeah. That, that pretty much grew up, uh, along with the cholesterol myth, uh, in the early 1950s, the seed oil industry was seriously damaged by the petroleum chemists who
learned how to make paint and plastics out of petroleum and so they didn't need the seed oils. And so instead of using the polyunsaturated seed oils for paint and varnish, they decided to sell them as human food and pig food, for example, because they found that high-proof soybeans and corn were ideal for fattening pigs cheaply for market because of the cheapness of producing weight as fat and general growth. But the nutritionists working on how to fatten a pig took the same information. The rate of growth was the center of what a nutrition is supposed
to do. A vitamin that makes you put on weight faster was evaluated. You would give an extract of food and if it made you grow faster, then they would look for which component it was and identify that as a vitamin. But that blurring between fattening pigs and feeding people caused lots of problems. But the seed oil industry, to convince people that they weren't going to just get fat like pigs, that there had to be a reason to make people eat the paint stock, the previous seed oils that had been used industrially.
And to do that, they resurrected the work of the Burrs from 1929 and 30 claiming that the PUFA are essential nutrients. That was multiply debunked all through the 30s and 40s. There was nothing left of the Burr's claims. But the seed oil industry brought back supporters of that doctrine and said they simply ignored the disproofs of George Burr's experiments and said, if the polyunsaturated are essential nutrients, then the more you eat, the better. And so they looked for a reason for getting people to eat larger amounts of polyunsaturated fats
that wouldn't do if they would eat a gram a day, which would be implied by the Burrs' research, even though that was wrong. Wouldn't do the industry any good if people met their nutritional needs with just one gram a day. So they said the more you eat the better because, and then they connected it to the fact that these toxic oils lower your cholesterol and they resurrected some other failed research claiming that cholesterol caused heart disease. It had clearly been established in the 1930s that things that cause heart disease
cause you to defensively make more cholesterol protectively. Things like polyunsaturated fats that inhibit your thyroid function. Your metabolic rate goes down as you eat the PUFA, partly because your thyroid hormone simply isn't available as it should be. And so, eating the seed oils lowers your thyroid function, and the thyroid function lowering the metabolic rate requires a defensive adaptation to raise the cholesterol, but it's the low thyroid and the elevated polyunsaturated fats that are damaging the blood vessels, to produce the defensive systems against heart disease increase cholesterol so you can make more defensive hormones
and compensate to bring up your metabolic rate. And so they got the situation exactly backwards. to bring up your metabolic rate. And so they got the situation exactly backwards. The PUFA do lower cholesterol, but they do it by creating a heart disease supporting condition. And that shift to fear cholesterol, then a professor Yudkin wrote a book saying it isn't saturated fats that cause cholesterol to rise, it's sugar. And in fact, sugar is part of the defensive system that helps you overcome the suppressive metabolic effect of the PUFA. The sugar helps to restore your cholesterol system,
your active pro-respiratory DHEA, pregnenolone and progesterone, and it protects the cells, prevent heart disease. So the fear of saturated fats because they simply are not PUFA, which they wanted to sell. That extended to the sugars which support the saturated fats and oppose, protect against the PUFA. And so the teaching parents to starve their kids for sugar came about right after the phony cholesterol theory of heart disease. Right. So there's a lot of confusing paradigms on top of each other where we stand today from your position.
Why is it that if sugar rots your teeth and rots your face out, why would it be healthy though? You know, you said you got to swallow quickly and wash your mouth out. I mean, is that really something we should be eating at that level if it rots your face? The problem with cavities is that other things in our metabolism, things that suppress thyroid, such as PUFA, change the composition of our saliva and the saliva should be very antiseptic. And with the overall pattern of the diet, our saliva has lost the antiseptic quality
that kills mouth bacteria. So does that mean, and maybe, maybe I'm over assuming here, but does that mean that if a child was not introduced to these high PUFA foods, they avoided the fatty fish, they avoided the seed oils, they avoid the nuts with these high PUFA foods, does that mean that if they were to eat a high carbohydrate diet, high table sugar even, that there would be less likelihood of cavities coming or no? Dr. John O'Connor Well, tropical people very generally eat a
high carbohydrate diet and very generally, if they're on their traditional diet have extremely good teeth, but when they shift to a diet such as beans and tortillas, nutritionally deficient and higher in PUFA from the beans, then the problem of tooth decay becomes horrible. So it's nutritional deficiency plus PUFA that is the foundation for a high sugar diet to cause cavities, is that what you're saying? Yeah. Okay. And that works largely through the composition of the saliva and its loss of antiseptic function. So Brad, I wanna bring you in. Any thoughts first?
I wanted to ask you about the kid diet thing, but I wanna go back and just let, is there anything you heard that you wanna ask about or talk about? Yeah, I mean, it's very interesting to hear, you know, Dr. Peat's historical analysis of sort of the early days of, you know, the vegetable oil industry. You know, I'm not old enough to remember a lot of those things, and so that I think that's really valuable insight, right, that Dr. Peat is bringing there is how did we
sort of, how did we get here, right? And I think that is a very interesting insight that at one point, you know, vegetable oils were made into paint or linoleum, and then that's, they lost that market, and that's when they said, hey, you know, let's, maybe we can sell this to people. market and that's when they said, hey, you know, let's maybe we can sell this to people. So you know, that's a nice little anecdote and I'm sure that it's true, you know.
And so I think that's a very interesting and valuable part of this whole discussion. I'm not nearly the expert on child nutrition that Dr. Peat probably is. I don't have kids of my own, and I tend to spend my time thinking more about obese adults than I do about raising children, although I've raised a lot of piglets. But just, you are a pig farmer pig farmers you have some connection to the reason why i want to bring it up is because i think having a starting point with a tangible. Issue that.
That you know where the rubber meets the road okay we're talking about theory it becomes okay how we gonna raise generation we have an obesity epidemic. okay, how are we going to raise the generation? We have an obesity epidemic. And so I want to know, it's like a whodunit mystery novel for me. Whodunit, where does this go? Is it the sugar? Is it the carbs? Is it the meat? Is it the puffas? Is it just seed oils? Or is Dr. Peat right that
the nuts and the high puffa fish needs to be avoided? I want to figure this out because we have an obesity epidemic for children. And if we solve that, then we can kind of know where we're building the next generation. Right, I mean, here's what I will say is that, so I'm also a student of, I like looking at cultures around the world and I know that a lot of grain eating cultures in particular, especially like rice eating cultures in Asia, or let's say the Mayans in Mexico who eat primarily corn, right?
And so these are very grain-based cultures. And if you look at, you know, Dr. Peat was talking about metabolic rate. If you look at these cultures where they're feeding children primarily relatively low PUFA grains, they have very high metabolic rates, just as Dr. Peat suggests. In fact, the whole cultures have very high metabolic rates, right? And so if you look at time- What are low PUFA grains? What do you think? Right? So most time, right? What are low PUFA grains? What do you think? Rice? So most grains, right. So most grains are very low in,
they're very low in fat overall. A lot of the fat that is there is PUFA. So like rice, so like if people eat white rice, we're talking like that's a very low PUFA food because most of the PUFA that there is is in the bran of the rice, and that gets removed when you make it into white rice. And so rice is low in poofa to begin with, but when you eat white rice, it's even lower. It's like, it's 1%, or I think it's well under 1% polyunsaturated fat by weight.
And so you're talking, it's very, very low. And so like on my blog, I talk about this study about Thai rice farmers, and they have just through the roof metabolic rates. Like the highest metabolic rate that I've seen in any metabolic study in the world is in female rice farmers in Thailand. But the same thing is true. Like they studied the Mayans in the 1930s, and they showed that the Mayans in the 1930s, and they showed that the Mayans in the 1930s had metabolic rates that were significantly elevated versus the metabolic rates of
Americans. And this is another case where, you know, 90% of their calories are coming from corn, and corn has more PUFA than rice does, but still when you make it into the masa, you remove the, this is the, this is the refrajar, this means rubbing, you remove the, you soak the corn in an alkaline solution, and then you remove the husks and the germ, and that's where a lot of the oil is. So the, when you eat the tortillas, it has, the traditional processing methods of Mayans, right, who are one of the earliest
people in the world to domesticate corn, like they remove a lot of the pufa in the natural normal processing. And so that's why I also sometimes people knee jerk say, well, all food processing is bad. And I'm like, well, no, I think traditional food processing is actually very smart in what they do because people don't eat, you know, the mines didn't eat whole, don't eat whole kernel corn, right? They removed the germ first and that's where the oil is. And so they make tortillas out of that. And again, they had higher,
they had very high metabolic rates in the 1930s. And I like the point you illustrate about your research in Native Americans, the West Coast and the East Coast, both using methods to reduce PUFA, right, for their acorn oil? Exactly. So, yeah, so East Coast and West Coast, we have first account narratives of Native Americans on the East Coast and the West Coast, both removing acorn oil. And what period of history is this? Well, I mean, I don't know the exact dates of those, but this would have been 1700s,
or yeah, 1700s probably, both of those anecdotes. In the 1930s, George Creil did studies around the world of metabolic rates, actually measuring oxygen consumption and CO2 production. oxygen consumption and CO2 production. And he found that the American culture was outstanding in being far below the traditional cultures in metabolic rate. Many of the so-called relatively undeveloped cultures Many of the so-called relatively undeveloped cultures had a metabolic rate 50% higher than Americans. In US medicine, that would be considered pathologically hypermetabolic. That was a rate that went with good health traditionally. What was his name?
George W. Krile, Sr. Spell his last name. He was a famous surgeon and physiologist from 1900 until his death. Right. No, I just want to make sure I have his name right. Do you know the spelling of his last name? CRILE. CRILE, okay. No, I mean that sounds fascinating, but it's not, but that is very much in line with what we see. And I've talked about a lot of my blog about the history of metabolic rates. And one of the things that I noticed is in the metabolic community in the 1930s,
this kind of controversy broke out because someone at a Southern school, and I forget the first one, studied young college women. And so these early metabolic rate studies had been done in the north, primarily in the 19-teens, and the, you know, between 1910 and 1920. And they had come up with a couple basic equations to predict your metabolic rate based on your height, weight, 1920, and they had come up with a couple basic equations to predict your metabolic rate based on your height, weight, gender, and age. And so you put those four numbers into the,
you know, onto your notebook and you calculate it out and that tells you what your metabolic rate should be. And this was very accurate in people from Chicago, in people from New York City, and then somebody tried it in Oklahoma or in Florida I can't remember exactly and they found that these young women young college-age women had a metabolic rate that was around 15% lower than these equations suggested that they should so they had this low metabolic rate and This was repeated in Florida, Oklahoma, South Carolina,
and others. There was at least, I think, four different schools that tested these equations. And they said, yes, every time it was like the New Orleans, the young women here have a metabolic rate significantly below what the mainstream equations would predict. And then someone in Connecticut redid the experiment again, and they said, nope, the young women in Connecticut have a metabolic rate that is exactly what the equations would predict. And they thought it was just that people didn't need to have as high metabolic rate in warmer climates, but then that was pretty much disproven.
One of the ways they disproved it was by going to check the Mayans. That's why they went and looked at the Mayans and they were like, well, no, the Mayans actually have a metabolic rate 10% higher than Americans. But what's interesting is today, if you look at people in Chicago, in New York, they have the same metabolic rate as the Southern college women of the 30s who had a metabolic rate 15% below the general population. And so, you know, something was causing those women to have a low
metabolic rate and now everyone has a low metabolic rate. And if you look at the history of kind of oil consumption, well, you know, cottonseed oil was the first oil and USDA data from the 1930s will tell you that much more of the cottonseed oil was consumed in the South before it was consumed in the North. Yeah, during this period, thyroid disease, low thyroid function was increasing steadily and rapidly. And an interesting fact that is seldom discussed is that George Burr himself, the promoter of PUFA essentiality, in 1932 or 1933, did experiments on his rats,
showing that when he made them deficient, according to his definition, in unsaturated fats, their metabolic rate was 50% higher than what he called normal. So he was making normal rats and calling them sick. Interesting. Yeah, Dr. Peat, I recently took, I actually stumbled across those papers recently and I was looking at them. And what I was wondering is, it looked to me like the amount of PUFA in those rat diets that made them hypermetabolic was almost below the rate that one could get in a normal mixed diet. You know what I mean?
Yeah, but one person in his lab tried it on himself for six months, the laboratory purification to try to create a human version of his rats. And his PUFA levels did gradually go down and after about four months, all of this man's prior symptoms disappeared and didn't recur when he went back to his usual diet. But all he demonstrated was that doing his best to eliminate PUFA for several months improved his health very noticeably. Yeah, that's great. Brad, you mentioned in, what was it, the 1930s, you looked at the caloric intake.
It was like 5,000 calories per person or something that the USDA, what was that? Right, so the USDA, in the 1939 yearbook of agriculture, which is, the Yearbook of Agriculture is like the USDA's big publication for the year. And I think it was more important back then than it is now. I don't even know if they still do it. But back then, to be written up in the Yearbook of Agriculture was a big deal. And so this is the USDA's really flagship publication from back then in 1939. And every year it's about a different topic.
So one year it might be about soil. The next year it's about you know, this one was called food and life. And so they reported on on American diets and and they're the USDA publications are very much about economics, right? They're not about So the point of the study was not Really about nutrition it was about How much people How much food different families bought? people, how much food different families bought given different income brackets, right? That was really what it was about. But then they indexed all of the numbers and saying,
okay, well, is this a good diet? Is this enough calories? This is enough protein. And interestingly, in those old USDA publications, there does not seem to be a concept that eating too much is bad. That concept apparently did not exist yet because there's not even like a hesitation where they say, well, maybe you shouldn't eat this much, but here's what these people do. There's no, when you read the pros from back then, it seems like, well, more food is more nutrition is more better. There's no, you know, they
don't, that's just, it's just more is better. That's what they thought in the 1930s, right? And so you're like, well, that in and of itself is interesting, the fact that they're not saying, like, but watch your calories, like, there's none of that language. And so, right, and so what they, an interesting thing about this is, in the 1930s, if people could afford to buy and eat more food, they did. And so what you find is that the most, the families who were eating the most most were the wealthiest city dwellers basically and so
You know probably the least active people probably lawyers and doctors, you know, these are not day laborers, right? They're not the ones who can afford the most and best food and and it's all The numbers are all averaged to what an adult male would eat. And they don't tell us exactly how they do that math. But by the estimation of the USDA in 1939, the richest East Coast cities, the average man would have been consuming something like 4,500 calories. Interestingly, on the west coast
The number is like 5,100 calories. So according to the USDA in the 1939 Wealthy, you know a doctor living in San Francisco or Portland would have been consuming a little over 5,000 calories a day normally assuming a little over 5,000 calories a day normally. That's a man or everybody? That's per adult male. And so you have to assume that it's gonna be less for a woman or for a 12 year old, you know, but it's, and they have some, they have formulas. So 4,000 to 5,000 calories a day. Absolutely, that is what the USDA says.
Dr. Peat, do you think that, is that accurate? Oh yeah. What were they eating back then? I mean, it's actually quite explicit. It's, the USDA will tell you, it's flour, butter, sugar, potatoes, pork, some beef, a lot of dairy, you know, milk. Lots of chicken at the time or no? Nope, not much chicken. Fatty fish, PUFA fish, nuts? No, no. It's, you know, it's meat and potatoes and flour and sugar. You know, they're eating apple pie, right? They're eating apple pie and they're eating mashed potatoes and they're eating pork chops.
They were just tearing into that stuff. And they didn't have the obesity rates like we do today, huh? Right. And they're drinking it with whole milk and probably fresh baked bread. And, and that, and that's what people ate. Was there was the bread back then not as messed up genetically as the bread we have? Was that a part of the fact? Well, it would not yet have been the hybridized wheat that we got coming out of, you know, Mexico post 1970, but yeah, so it would have been old fashioned varieties of wheat, yes.
Dr. Peat, should we be eating 5,000 calories a day? Yes. If you choose your foods the way they used to. When I worked for the Bureau of Land Management in the 1950s in the woods, we had a cook who was at the time in his 50s and had learned cooking in the Navy in the 1930s and 40s. And our diet was just a tremendous amount of food, all of it tending to be saturated and carbohydrate, lots of steak and ham, eggs,
a huge bowl of some breakfast cereal first thing in the morning, and then pancakes and ham and eggs as the main course of breakfast. And all we wanted to pack in a grain bag tied to our belts to eat for lunch and then huge dinners, very often a pound of steak as the main course, but with soup and cold meats, cheeses, boiled eggs, everything else besides the pound of steak and various vegetables for carbohydrates. And everybody was really lean, I bet, huh? Yeah. I calculated that I was eating about 9,000 calories a day.
So now the argument would be, well, back then everybody was exercising way more and we're all a bunch of couch potatoes. So that's why we can't eat 5,000 calories a day. What would you say to that, Dr. B? Oh, yeah. My work was just walking through the woods, putting plants on the map. It wasn't heavy work. Just basically walking. So were you doing like, were you doing any cardio in that job or anything to do 9,000 calories a day and not be overweight or whatever? No, not at all. I mean, I don't think, Dr. Peat,
people didn't really do cardio for the sake of doing cardio back then. Is that correct? That's been my impression. Yeah, never heard of it back then. When did cardio get invented? Like the 70s. back then. When did cardio get invented? Like the seventies? Uh, yeah. John Kennedy, uh, with his touch football, uh, and so on. Uh, and Sputnik in the fifties, uh, they did tests and found that, uh, uh, Americans, uh, even in their teams, uh,
were by far the weakest people in the world. So as part of the response to Sputnik, the government started promoting various types of exercise, but then the Kennedys popularized the idea of jogging. that came on in the 60s. So gentlemen, help me understand something here. So 1930s, you guys are saying that there's this rise in these low metabolic rates for women, right? And you, Brad, were suggesting that's cottonseed oil doing that, or? Well, my suggestion is it's cottonseed oil. But what I can say is that the metabolic rate
happening in the 1930s in women is real, and it's captured by at least four different universities. And then a university in the North redid their study again and said, nope, our metabolic rates have not changed. There's something different about the metabolic rates in the South. And I've postulated that this could be due to the rise of cottonseed oil in the South, but no one did that experiment. We don't know why, but it definitely did drop. So why do we still see, like, I'm just trying to map this damage, I'm trying to investigate
this train wreck that happened in the last century. I'm like, look, I mean, as best as I can as an armchair detective here, I'm sitting here and I'm thinking, okay, so you're seeing already in the 30s a drop in metabolic rate, and you're linking that to cottonseed oil or maybe something else. Dr. Peat might have something to suggest there, but then what happens like why is it that they you know the famous thing people? I think was you or somebody's showing photos of people lining up to see Star Wars in the 1970s
And everybody's thin as a rail is that you that posted those photos or somebody else? Those are not mine, but I know Dr. Goodrich or somebody posted Yeah, and they're like and then they show you know Those are somebody else. And they're like, and then they show the 2000s, people lining up for Star Wars and everybody's obese almost. And it's like, what happened? So what was going on that in the seven, you're saying the metabolic rates were dropping low in the thirties.
Well, why do we see, why does it like, how come it takes to the seventies, eighties, nineties before this explosion and obesity and diabetes and all this other stuff. Or maybe I've got it wrong. Can someone help me? I think it was the very heavy propaganda starting in the 50s for polyunsaturated fats as more than an essential nutrient as a way to protect against heart disease. Okay. Yeah, I mean, and I think what Dr. Peat means is that if you look at the amount of vegetable oil consumption,
it was sort of creeping up in the 30s, 40s, 50s. up in the 30s, 40s, 50s, it didn't really explode until the 60s and 70s, even 80s, 90s. I think that my suspicion is that for most people, sure, like, you know, I think this is a long-term process. I think where you start to ingest too much PUFA, your metabolic rate probably dips to the most, for a lot of people, that might, the fact that you're not burning fuel as fast, that might mean your appetite dips for a while and you maybe might, you know,
it seems like people at a certain age, their kind of weight gets kind of set. And then I feel like you start to see the obesity oftentimes in the next generation. And I'm not sure exactly what, I don't understand exactly what drives that. I'm not trying to pretend that I understand it. But I think that the the polyunsaturated fats are much more damaging to kids. And I think that you see every generation, you see higher childhood obesity. And then, you know, when once you're obese in childhood, you're going to
probably fight obesity for your life, you know, that's a genetic switch that turns on or something? I don't, no, I don't believe it's a genetic switch. I just believe that in a growing, like in a growing child before your metabolism is set and your adipose tissue has matured and your, you know, there's a lot of things as you grow that gets, you know, a child is very plastic and can adapt to a lot of situations. And at some point, you sort of are set the way that you are. And it's not
to say that you can't change these things. But, you know, I see personally, I see obesity is something that often happens in your youth very young. I mean, I was obese by the time that I was in first grade. There's no reason for that. You know, I wasn't like out. I wasn't out at the all you can eat buffet all night. I was an active kid. I was running around. Were you eating 9,000 calories a day like Dr. Peat? Well, not in kindergarten. And that's the thing, I wasn't. I wasn't eating that much.
Like my mom was very, like my mom didn't buy us. We didn't get bacon. My mom thought that was bad. It was too high in fat. We didn't get that. We did have margarine, though. We did not have butter, because butter was bad. That was bad. We had margarine. And so, despite the fact that everything in our house was low-fat, and it was lean, and it was low-calorie,
and we had skim milk, we had all the things that everything in our house was like low fat and it was lean and it was low calorie and we had skim milk, right? We had skim milk. We had all the things that we were supposed to have and yet by kindergarten, I was chubby, right? And so my mom was doing everything right except that the only cooking oils we had, which we used judiciously were vegetable oil based. You know, we had margarine on our toast, but like we weren't, you know,
my mom was very careful about feeding us things that she thought would make us fat, right? Like that was, we didn't have soda in the house. Like we, my mom tried to do everything she could to avoid that for us, but yet it didn't work. And my parents both struggled with their weight and all of us kids, you know, to one degree or another, struggled with our weight. And so, you know, you can see that it starts very young, and it's
not - you can do all of the right things, and it still happens - ”the right things", and it still happens, right? We know that. And so, I ... yeah, and so that's where I think it does. I think there is sort of a generational knowledge, or it's just that children are very apt to the particular damages as you're growing if there's too much PUFA around. Dr. Peat, any thoughts on that? Yeah, I think it's all epigenetic, induced by the environment.
And the real problem is that we don't have any science left, science in the abstract sense of objectivity. What we have is industry guided propaganda research. The nutritional so-called science is under the heavy dominating influence of the food industry. Dr. Peat, do you think that they know that their stuff is that bad or they just choose to ignore the science that suggests their products, these PUFA products are bad, these high PUFA oils? It's bad for their business to do actual science. They choose what gets published and what gets taught in the universities.
I forget exactly what year it was, sometime in the late 80s I think. I had been traveling around giving talks on the dangers of PUFA, and on one trip I had talks scheduled up and down the West Coast. And on that trip, every time I would get to a site, it would mysteriously be locked up. And if we held the talk, it would be at some, someone's house locally. When I got to the last stop, I found that not only the auditorium was locked up, none of the publicity had been done,
and the person who had scheduled my talk had been fired. Just 100% intervention mysteriously. Some outside influence caused all of these sites to close up and pretend that nothing had been scheduled. When was this? I forget the year, but probably 86 or 88 around then. How many people were like you talking about seed oils and universities and the dangers of high PUFA? Is that what you were talking about, I'm assuming? Yeah, and I didn't know anyone else who was doing it. You didn't know anyone? There's no academician or anybody that was talking
or lecturing out publicly? No. There's basically, you've been a voice in the wilderness here for a while, huh? Yeah's pretty. Yeah. In doing my dissertation research, I came across the history of age pigment and what the factors are that cause that. The polyunsaturated fats and respiratory stress caused by such things as estrogen dominance led to the formation of age pigment, which is an alternative electron acceptor, a last ditch effort of the stressed organism to consume electrons so that life could continue. Abnormal consumption of electrons has its own effects, intensifying the effects of stress,
estrogen, and damage to the mitochondria. But the role of PUFA that I ran across in trying to understand the effect of reproductive aging. That was the core of my subsequent thought giving importance to the dangers of PUFA. So is that what you were talking about in those lectures that were being mysteriously canceled when you would show up? Yeah. Were they all fired or just one gentleman was fired, you said? The only one that I inquired about was a person I had known, and it was caused by the fact that he had scheduled my lecture.
Did any of your work in the 80s or 90s hit the popular press at all in any local newspapers or anything? Or was it creating buzz back then? No, I don't know of any reporting about it. So what do you—I'm just curious, I don't want to go off too, but I just got to ask you, what do you think about all this newfound interest in seed oils? I mean, you've been out there talking about them as a lonely voice, that must be maddening when nobody else seems to pay attention or listen to what you're saying,
decade and decade and then now all of a sudden, because of the internet and things going on, there's this newfound explosion of people talking about seed oils and how toxic and damaging they are to our health. How does that make you, what do you think of that? Oh, I'm glad it's finally happening. Did you think it would happen sooner? I did my best to try to get people thinking about it. Do you feel that the corporate forces are going to continually suppress this information from being popularly reported?
Yeah, it's exactly the same thing throughout the culture. The giant corporations have taken over everything, and if the people don't get wise, the whole system is in the process of dying, killing itself. Yeah, that's true. Dr. Peat, I wanted to ask you if we could do a thought experiment for a moment. Supposing that we eliminated all the seed oils over the last, the 20th century, but everybody was still eating the same amounts of nuts and high PUFA fish and high PUFA chicken and pork,
would we have seen similar explosions in the rate of obesity? Or, I mean, is it really the seed oils driving the obesity explosion, or is it actually the other high PUFA natural products, or, you know, relatively natural? I guess it's kind of debatable whether the amount of PUFA in chicken fat and pork fat, as Brad could attest, maybe that's not so natural. But would it still result in a similar explosion in obesity and other issues? Chicken and pork fat has changed radically over the decades.
Roughly every 15 or 20 years, the government has revised downward the amount of cholesterol in an egg, going back about 60 years. And every time they examine the average commercial egg, they find that the cholesterol is much lower than they thought. And it's the shift of the chicken's diet causing the defective egg production loaded up with PUFA, deficient in cholesterol. But do you think, I guess what I'm saying is, how much of a role would, if people didn't eat seed oils, but they ate the same amount of high PUFA of fish, high PUFA nuts?
Would we still have the same rates of obesity or would it be cut in half? I'm just speculating here out loud here. Yeah. You wouldn't naturally choose that much fish and fat chicken and pork and so on, as you can get in the bottled seed oils. But still, those changes are industry-promoted and damaging the population. So just - and Brad, maybe you can help me understand this, or both of you, because I'm trying to see, like, if we could wave a magic wand, because there's a lot of people getting on this no seed oil
bandwagon, but I want to know how much of the problem that we're identifying here about obesity is triggered by these other high PUFA sources, like nuts and seeds and these fish and the chicken and pork. People are being propagandized to make those choices that no one would have thought of making on their own. Yeah, and I see, it's hard to tease out. I mean, Ana, you see the broad trends happening, right? And you see what happens in lab rats. And what I see is that the, well,
the triggering event of eating a lot of seed oils, of eating a lot of high, yeah, sure, high PUFA chicken and pork, and, and other foods is that and nuts is well, and this is I don't know if we if we've actually got there yet. But the initial proposition, I think of this talk was to talk about reductive stress. And what I see is all of those foods are essentially leading us to a place of what I would call reductive stress, which I'm defining as basically
lack of NAD plus or not enough NAD plus. And that that is really, that place is where what is driving the obesity epidemic is essentially this this kind of reductive stress that we're all in and I think that that the things that have really sparked this problem of reductive stress are definitely the seed oils. You know it's hard for me to say exactly the the proportion of that came from high PUFA chicken versus seed oils. But But mostly, I mean, when you look at how much seed oils and everything, it feels like that
is the primary culprit. Maybe it's 70% or 60%. And the other things are 40%. That's what I'm trying to get a just a ballpark image for me because there's a lot of Tucker I mean Tucker Tucker Goodrich has a citation that he's posted in his Twitter feed and it says like top sources of PUFA and the American diet and I'm doing this from memory but I think the number one source is chicken and Number two is another one that I wouldn't have predicted, which is grain-based desserts, so things like cake and cookies
and things like that, which I would have guessed French fries and potato chips, number one, and I would have guessed salad, number two, because everybody puts, you know, Kraft dressing made of soybean oil on their salad. But according to that, it's number one is actually poultry. And number two is like cake, which I neither- You're saying fried poultry or just any poultry? Well, it doesn't say, yeah, it might be buffalo wings, you know, fried in soybean oil. So I don't, I don't know. But yeah. Just that chickens themselves are toxic
because of their artificial seed oil diet. They are sources of seed oil. They are. Absolutely they are. So you avoid chicken altogether, Dr. Peat, or at least fatty chicken, chicken fat? Basically limiting it to occasional chicken wings deep fried in coconut oil to exchange as much fat as possible for coconut oil. So I want to get- I just want to put a quick plug in for Buffalo, New York, home of the Buffalo wing. Anyway, sorry. Is that where you reside? I know you're up there somewhere. I'm in upstate New York.
I really am in the Finger Lakes near, in Shermansburg near Ithaca, but I also spend a lot of time in Buffalo, so. And we've got Dr. Peat, you're in Oregon, right, sir? Yeah. So, it's interesting, just like the Indians, the East Coast and the West Coast both independently discovered that PUFA was toxic and high. That's interesting. You guys didn't even know each other's work and you came to the same conclusion. So, I want to hone in on the topic like Brad suggested about reductive stress in our obesity panel, which you both were a part of.
I saw, Brad, you were smiling, you know, very happily when you heard Dr. Peat reference reductive stress. So I want you guys to unleash, but try as best as you can to make this accessible for people who are a little new, but don't let it hold you back too much. Go try to find the balance there. Explain what is this reductive stress and how is this connected to PUFA and how is this causing obesity. Bye for now.