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Welcome to the Christian Healthy Lifestyle Podcast where I help you navigate natural health so you can stay out of the doctor's office, age gracefully, and live abundantly. I'm your host, healthy lifestyle modification expert David Sandstrom. Today we're going to be talking about seed oils. I was looking back at the back episodes and it's been almost a year since I did an episode on seed oils. So it's about time we did an episode on that again. Now there's a lot of confusion around this whole saturated fat
mono and polyunsaturated fat debate. And polyunsaturated fats are PUFA for short, P-U-F-A, polyunsaturated fatty acids. So I might be referring to those as PUFAs as the episode moves along. Now, there's been a lot of hot debate over this topic and our government recommendations are very flawed because of some really bad science that they embraced decades ago. So we're going to be talking about that today.
Now, I believe that there's a lot of people out there suffering needlessly from chronic diseases like obesity, type 2 diabetes, even cancer and heart disease because of our government's recommendations. So I believe they're all wrong and I'm going to explain why I believe that on this episode. So I want you, the natural nation, to be really clear on the facts surrounding saturated fat and polyunsaturated fats.
Now before we get started, I want to mention that the Christian Healthy Lifestyle Community is launching in two days on May 8th. This episode is going to go live on May 6th. And if you're listening to it on the day comes out, you'll still have two days to join the membership at founding member pricing, which is going to be the lowest price that will ever be available for a membership. And one of the main features inside the membership is I'm going to have some Healthy Lifestyle courses in there.
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Right now I've got the Fundamentals of Health course in there, and as you know, if you've been listening to this podcast for a while, that I believe we are spirit, we have a mind, and we live in a body. So therefore, I'm going to be producing more more courses around the topics of spirit, mind, and body, and whole person health. So those courses are going to be for sale on my website, but if you join as a member of the Christian Healthy Lifestyle community, you'll have lifetime access to all those courses, and you can watch them whenever you want.
review if you want. It's going to be a great way to avail yourself to some of the information that I share here on the podcast and go even a little bit deeper. Now, as I announced last week, starting with this episode and moving forward, the podcast is going to be audio only and the publicly available podcast is going to be a shortened version. The full version of the Christian Healthy Lifestyle podcast is only going to be available inside the community. The cost is very affordable.
And there's still time to get in on the founding member pricing. So go to my website chlpodcast.com forward slash membership and you can join there and you'll be locked in for life at the founding member price. One of the foundational Bible verses that I like to apply to everything health is John 10 10. Jesus said, I have come that they might have life and have it abundantly. Now, abundant living means a lot of things to a lot of people, but it certainly doesn't mean an expensive import in the driveway.
and a fat 401k. That's not what Jesus is talking about here. He's talking about a life that's full of love, joy, and peace. And one thing's for sure, that life is going to be lived out in service to other people. Jesus modeled that for us in stunning fashion, always putting other people ahead of himself. 2 Timothy 3.16 says, may the servant of God be thoroughly equipped for every good work. And I believe that God wants to equip us for
the works that he has forced in service to other people. God wants to give us all the spiritual strength, mental-emotional fortitude, and physical vitality we need to accomplish the tasks that he's given us. The Standard American Diet sets us up for chronic disease, and that disease hinders our ability to live abundantly and accomplish all that God has for us. It hinders our ability to become more whole.
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and to become all the men and women that he created us to be. Now, I take a deep dive into seed oils and the history behind seed oils and how our government got it wrong. Those are episodes number 141 and 142. Now, I'm not going to get that technical on this episode. This is going to be more or less a summary of those two. But if you really enjoyed this topic, I encourage you to go back and listen to episodes 141 and 142.
There I take a deep dive into this topic. So what are seed oils? Seed oils are oils that are made from primarily seeds or beans, like soybean oil, canola oil, corn oil, sunflower oil, safflower oil, rice bran oil, et cetera. Those are all seed oils and they're commonly labeled as vegetable oils, but that's a misnomer. They're not vegetable oils, they're seed oils.
And remember the seed is the most heavily defended part of a plant. There are more defense chemicals in a plant's seeds than anywhere else. So when we're eating large amounts of seeds or the product from seeds of seed oils, that introduces problems into our diet. Now I always like to anchor everything that I believe about health and wellness with scripture. And in first Timothy chapter four, verse four, we find this for everything created by God is good.
And nothing is to be rejected if it is received with gratitude. Now in context, 1st Timothy is talking about eating food that was or meat that was sacrificed to idols. And he's saying that, if it's created by God, it's good. And we, as long as we have the right heart attitude towards it, it's not a problem. But I want you to kind of focus in on the phrase created by God for everything created by God is good. So don't miss that phrase. It's very important here.
So created by God in nature is always better than highly processed food made by man in a laboratory. Now seed oils are highly processed junk food. In fact, I would go one step further and say, there's really no such thing as junk food. We have food and we have junk. There's really no such thing as junk food. Right? So seed oils definitely fall into that category of junk. The number one rule for healthy eating is
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eat food as close to its God-given natural form as possible. Now seed oils are produced with high pressure, high temperature, filtering, deodorizing. So all these steps make seed oils anything but natural. They are a highly processed food product. So the best way to consume food is to eat the way our grandparents or maybe even our great grandparents ate. They ate lots of red meat. They
consumed whole fat dairy and things like butter. That's what they cooked in. They ate food much closer to its natural God-given form than we've ever dreamed of. Now someone might be saying, wait a minute, Dave, doesn't the Bible teach vegetarianism? In Genesis chapter one, there's a verse, right? And that is true. Genesis chapter one, verse 29 says this, then God said, behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the surface of all the earth.
and every tree which has fruit yielding seed, it shall be food for you." Well, if you stop reading right there, you could conclude that God wants human beings to consume vegetables and fruits only. Well, that's Genesis chapter one. That's in the Garden of Eden before the fall. If we go a few pages to the right, in Genesis chapter nine, verses two and three, Moses and his family are emerging from the ark after the flood.
And there was some kind of a big shift that went on. Listen to this passage. So God's referring to Genesis 1 29 right there. He's saying,
Yeah, it used to be plants only, but now things are different. There's going to be animals in your diet now. There's going to be animal products in your diet now. So there was a shift that took place there. I don't know exactly what happened, but there was a big shift that went on. So I want to give you a little biology. I'm not going to make this too complicated, but I want to give you a little biology surrounding saturated fat, mono and poly unsaturated fats. So a saturated fat,
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It's come to be a dirty word these days because it's been demonized for so many years, several decades at least, really more than that, which I'm about to get into in a little bit. But every fat molecule has a glycerol head and a fatty acid tail. And that fatty acid tail is made up of carbon molecules. And those carbon molecules want to be bonded to other nearby molecules. And in a saturated fat, every carbon molecule is
with a hydrogen molecule. So there's no open spaces. So therefore it's said to be saturated with hydrogen. It's really not all that mysterious. Now a mono unsaturated fat means that you don't have enough hydrogen atoms to go around and in one of the carbon positions there is no hydrogen molecule. So when that takes place the carbon molecule will bond, form a double bond to the carbon molecule next to it.
and that creates a kink or a bend in the fatty acid chain. And what that does is it makes the oil less dense and it makes the oil more vulnerable to oxidation. So a monounsaturated fat has one double bond or one open bond and a polyunsaturated fat has, as the name implies, more than one or maybe several. So that's the science behind how these fats work. Now, a saturated fat
will behave differently. It will be solid at room temperature and a mono and a polyunsaturated fat will be liquid at room temperature. So all mono and polyunsaturated fats are blends of omega 3, 6 and 9. So what does that mean? Well, the omega position is the location of the first double bond. So omega 3, the double bond is in the third position. Omega 6, the double bond is in the sixth carbon position.
and omega-9 is in the ninth position. Now here's an important point. We need some polyunsaturated fatty acids in our diet. We can't live without it. But traditionally speaking, when we look back at our great grandparents or people that lived back in the 1800s, they consumed about 1 to 2 % of their total calories in the form of Bufas or polyunsaturated fatty acids. Today, the standard American diet is about 20%.
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that's way more than we need in that over consumption of polyunsaturated fatty acids that become oxidized in the processing, but also oxidized within our bodies become a real problem because our bodies have to take what we eat, what we consume and turn it into us. And our bodies are constantly making new cells. And a really important part of ourselves is the cell membrane. And cell membranes are primarily made
of fatty acids. So if we're giving our bodies way too many calories or way too much nutrition in the form of PUFAs, they have no choice but to use those PUFAs to make our cell membranes. And that's a big, problem because if the fat is oxidized and our bodies are struggling to make healthy membranes out of these oxidized fatty acids, our cells then become oxidized or become weaker. So what's oxidation?
Well, oxidation is when oxygen acts on the surface of that molecule and starts to break it down. Rust is oxidation. If you took an apple and cut it in half and set it on the counter for a few minutes or a couple hours for sure, that fleshy part of the apple that turns from white to brown is a result of oxidation. So that's not at all healthy when it comes to ourselves. Now, during respiration and the process of making energy,
Our cells do make some free radicals and they do create some oxidative stress, but limited amounts are just fine. That's normal physiology. But when you have 10 times the amount of oxidation that you should have, that becomes a real problem and it exposes us. It weakens our systems and it makes us more vulnerable to all kinds of chronic degenerative diseases. Now I want to emphasize.
I am a naturopathic doctor, which means I'm a teacher of natural health. I'm not a medical doctor. I don't treat disease. That's the area for medical doctors. I focus on education and that education is centered around building health, not treating disease. Doctors treat disease. Natural health practitioners build health. There's a big difference. Now, as I said earlier, I always like to base everything that I believe about health in scripture, if possible.
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And in Proverbs chapter three, verses seven and eight, now I often quote this on the, on the podcast, but I think it applies here. It says, do not be wise in your own eyes, fear the Lord and depart from evil. will be healing to your body and refreshment to your bones. I think this theory that saturated fat is bad for us. and that leads to what we call the diet heart hypothesis is an example of man trying to be wise in his own eyes.
and kind of abandoning God's natural design for food. see, seed oils are a fairly modern invention. They've only been around for about hundred years. So I'm reminded of Romans chapter one, verse 22 says, professing to be wise, they became as fools. Seed oils that are very high in polyunsaturated fatty acids are a modern invention. And for most of human history, the vast majority
of human history, people subsisted on natural foods that contain plenty of saturated fat in the form of meat and dairy. So someone might be saying right about now, yeah, but if you eat saturated fat, your LDL cholesterol will go up. Isn't it better to consume polyunsaturated fatty acids like canola oil or soybean oil because they can lower our cholesterol?
Well, that is true. They will lower your LDL cholesterol. But my position is, is that necessarily a good thing? There's a study that was done where it was a single individual, he ate 12, this guy was single guy. He ate 12 Oreo cookies a day for 16 days. And then he, and he lowered his cholesterol. He had a 71 % reduction in his LDL cholesterol over that 16 day period. And then he had,
period where he went back to his normal diet, was a ketogenic diet. And after his cholesterol returned to normal, he went on a cholesterol-lowering drug called razuvastatin. He took 20 milligrams a day of this statin for six weeks, and he lowered his cholesterol with the drug therapy as well, but only by about half what the Oreo cookies did. His cholesterol went down by 32.5 % on razuvastatin.
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Again, he lowered his cholesterol by 71 % eating 12 Oreo cookies a day. So is lowering our cholesterol, no matter how we do it, a healthy thing to do? I challenge that notion. And again, I've had other podcasts on that topic. If you want to listen to episodes 138 and 139, I go into a deep dive on statins and how they're actually harmful to our health.
So you could check those out if you want. I'll put links in the show notes. Now it helps to have a little history here on how we arrived where we are with our government's recommendations and the real, the mantra that we hear from medical professionals that are getting their information from those government agencies. The demonization of red meat and saturated fat has been going on for a long, time. In the late 1800s, the United States had a lot of
cotton crops. And one of the byproducts of cotton was cotton seeds. And up till the late 1800s, that was just a waste product. But they discovered that they could actually extract some fat from those seeds, but that fat was not fit for human consumption. And then along came Procter and Gamble that invented the process of hydrogenation, where you artificially insert a hydrogen molecule
in those open bonds in the mono and the polyunsaturated fatty acids and made and took polyunsaturated fatty acids out of in the form of cottonseed oil and turned it into fake lard. It looked a lot like lard. It was white and it was solid at room temperature. But the problem was this is not a natural form of fat. It's a manmade concoction and it deviates from that number one rule.
for healthy eating, which is eat food as close to its God-given natural form as possible. You see, I believe the more man gets his hands on our food supply, the worse it becomes for us. So in the late 19th century, before they were able to hydrogenize that oil, seed oils were simply used as machinery lubricant. So the marketing of these hydrogenized oils started in the late 1800s and continued into the early 1900s.
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And in 1906, they got a real shot in the arm. A guy by the name of Upton Sinclair, he was a devout socialist and communist, a member of the American Communist Society, and he believed that the government should own all big business. And he was outraged at the conditions that he supposedly observed in the food packing industry. So he wrote a fictional novel that he called The Jungle. In the town that he set this meat packing company in, he called Packing Town.
And of course, it was a fictional novel, so he was free to put anything he wanted in there. But he wanted to sway public opinion. His stated goal for the book was to encourage people to be outraged at the conditions, the working conditions in the meatpacking industry so that he would gather support for his communist socialist ideology that the government should take over businesses like that. So he had stories in there about rats being thrown in with the meat.
and this deplorable sanitary conditions and child labor and all those kinds of things. Now, there's no doubt there probably was some horrific things going on back then. But again, this was a fictional novel and he had a bias in it. He had no motivation really to represent the packing industry as it truly existed. So what happened was this book was an incredible success, this novel. And a year after this book came out,
The book came out in 1906. By 1907, meat consumption in the United States was down by almost 20%. So people were outraged, but they were outraged at the wrong things. Sinclair wanted to outrage people over the deplorable working conditions in the factory, but instead people were outraged at the quality of the meat. And he was quoted as saying, Alton Sinclair said himself, I aimed at people's hearts with the book.
but I hit them in their stomachs. So the book did not have his intended consequence. It had something else and it started to add fuel to the fire, so to speak, of demonizing meat, red meat and dairy. Then another pivotal event happened in 1918 where a Russian biologist by the name of Nikolai Anistikov did a study on rabbits. Now he theorized that cholesterol was bad.
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and he fed rabbits in his study a diet that was high in cholesterol and those rabbits proceeded to develop arthrosclerotic plaque and heart disease as a result. But can you think of a problem with this study? Rabbits are vegetarians and there's no such thing as a vegetarian source of cholesterol. You have to eat animal products to find cholesterol. So he fed rabbits an unnatural diet and their health suffered as a result.
No surprise there, right? But the fact that that's not a natural diet for a rabbit just kind of seemed to escape the researchers' minds. And even to today, researchers are still pointing to this study as solid evidence that cholesterol is harmful to cardiovascular health. And again, episodes 138 and 139 of the podcast, I go into a deep dive there.
It's simply not true. So as I mentioned, Crisco oil hit the market in 1911 and the demonization of animal products along with saturated fat was really starting to pick up steam. But you what else was picking up steam? Chronic degenerative diseases like obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and cancer. If you look at the chart, it's stunning. The rise in chronic degenerative diseases
is almost a complete parallel line to the rise in the consumption of polyunsaturated fatty acids or PUFAs in the form of seed oils starting in the early 1900s. Then two more crucial events happened in the 1950s. The first was President Eisenhower had a heart attack while he was in office. So we were seeing, Americans were seeing heart disease on the rise, and then the President of the United States had a heart attack while he was in office.
And people were saying, what is going on here? Why are middle-aged men dropping like flies from heart disease when we haven't seen this in the past? Then along came Dr. Ansel Keys. Ansel Keys was a brilliant biologist, very smart guy, very hard-headed, and very prideful. And he was very charismatic. And he would forcibly argue his ideas and his theories. He's most well known for his
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famous seven countries study. Now I go into why the seven countries data is flawed in episode 142 in the podcast. Ancel Keys' theory was the diet heart hypothesis in that when you increase saturated fat, LDL cholesterol goes up and therefore that causes heart disease. He theorized that and he set out to prove that with the seven countries study. Well, he took the evidence from 22 countries and figured out which countries would
be most likely to support his theories and he chose seven. And there's a lot of problems with data collection here. First off, that study was observational. They just simply asked people what they remember the eating. Okay. I don't know about you, but I don't remember what I had for lunch yesterday, let alone six months ago. Okay. But so that's all, all of the studies done that way have a massive inherent flaw. And that is the data collection can be just wildly inaccurate. So
Another problem was he collected data in Crete, Greece during Lent. Now at the time in the late 1950s, 60 % of the population in Crete were Orthodox Catholics. Well, if you're an Orthodox Catholics, you've refrained from eating meat during Lent. So keys didn't see that as a problem and they decided to collect their data during Lent in Crete, Greece. So obviously skewed the data towards
vegetarian diet. Then the last thing I want to mention here on the research and the government recommendations is Ansel Keys started his seven country study in 1958 and he published the data in 1978. And because of a lot of the reasons that I just cited, his data was highly criticized. There were a lot of people that did not agree with Keys and they thought he was wrong. Well, Keys, as I mentioned, was kind of a
charismatic, hard-headed kind of a person. And I think, I theorize, that he got tired of listening to the criticisms of the observational study, and he decided to create a study that no one could criticize. And he actually set up a brilliantly designed study that was a double-blind placebo-controlled trial where they had complete control over what people were eating. They...
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made sure that the only people in the study were in either nursing homes or mental institutions. So they had complete control over what these people ate and didn't eat. And it was completely double blind. Not even the servers knew who was getting what diet. And after the conclusion, the study lasted five years. And at the conclusion of that study, the exact opposite of what Ancel Keys was trying to prove was shown out in the data. That it once again,
that the people that ate more saturated fat had less heart disease and died at lower rates than the people with a high Pufa diet. Those people died younger and more frequently than the people that ate a standard American diet, which had more saturated fat content in it. So there's a lot of problems here, but because Keyes was so influential and he had a lot of prestige in this area of nutrition, his
dietary recommendations to reduce our saturated fat intake and increase our Pufa intake was adopted by the United States Senate Advisory Committee in the early 1980s. And that became dogma from the USDA to the FDA, National Institute of Health, all the way into the medical industry. It became dogma. But the truth is starting to come out now. The research is in. Keyes was wrong.
He's a brilliant guy. He did a lot of great research, but he just identified the wrong fat as the culprit. It was polyunsaturated fatty acid was the reason why heart disease was on the rise in the fifties, not saturated fat. But there's also a great book on this. It's called The Big Fat Surprise by Nina Tekkels. And it's a great read. I highly recommend you read it if this is a topic of interest to you. And I hope it is. I'll put some links in the show notes to that book. So what are we supposed to do with all this information?
The first thing we want to do is prepare more food at home. Buy single ingredient foods at the grocery store, organic when possible, and prepare them yourself at home. When we eat in restaurants, we completely lose control of what's going into our food. And restaurants love seed oils because they're so highly processed that they have a very consistent product. You know, if you want a chain restaurant, you want to bring consistency. That's critical.
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to the success of any restaurant really, but especially a chain. One of the things I went over in business school, my MBA program, I had a great instructor and he asked us this, he asked the class this, could you make a better burger in your backyard grill than McDonald's makes? And everybody raised their hand, yeah, I could. And then he asks a follow-up question and he said, could you make a better business system than McDonald's has? Nobody raised their hand. Okay, they have a great business system. One of the keys to the McDonald's business system
is consistency. And those highly processed seed oils, because they're so highly processed, they're very, very consistent. They produce a consistent flavor, a consistent texture, and that's what restaurants are after. And they also have a fairly high flashpoint. So they consider them great for cooking. And because of all the misinformation that's been going on since the mid 1970s or later, they believe that it's actually healthier to cook in those oils when it absolutely isn't.
So one of the main things we can do to fight back against over consumption of seed oils or PUFAs is to stop eating out so frequently. Eat home more often and bring your lunch to work, those kinds of things. Avoid going to restaurants when you can. Now I'm not saying you have to be a hermit and never go out to eat anymore. Go out to eat with your friends and coworkers, enjoy yourself, but know that you're cheating. And when you get back home, get right back on your healthy diet. If you go into a party,
offered to bring a dish and you can prepare that at your home and you can put some healthy fats in there, whatever it is. And that way you'll at least have one dish at the party that you know is healthy. When you're choosing foods to prepare at home, focus on meat and organs from ruminant animals. What's a ruminant? Cows, bison, lamb, sheep, elk, those types of animals have a very sophisticated digestive system.
And although they're vegetarians and they consume a lot of polyunsaturated fatty acids in their diet, their complex digestive system is capable of converting those bad fatty acids for us into healthy saturated fat. So, ruminant animals, especially organs like kidney, liver, heart, those types of things are extraordinarily packed with nutrients and bioavailable.
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nutrients for us for human consumption. If organ meats don't sound appealing to you, you can buy them in supplement form. If you are inside the Christian Healthy Lifestyle community, you can set up an account with my Fullscript dispensary and you'll get a 10 % discount on all the products you purchase there. And it's all high quality as well. Another thing we want to do is as long as you don't have a food sensitivity to dairy, eat fermented dairy like yogurt,
kefir, is a drinkable yogurt, and cheese, preferably raw cheese. Another thing we want to do is avoid deep fried foods at all costs. Those are seed oils. They're heated up to very high temperatures. They probably don't change those oils out for at least several days, maybe even weeks. They become so toxic it's ridiculous. And cooking things like donuts and French fries and chicken wings in that oil
and eating those is extraordinarily bad for our health. So try to avoid deep fried foods whenever you can. Now you can deep fry in something like tallow or lard or butter at home, coconut oil, all those are quality saturated fats, but don't do it in a restaurant. It's going to be seed oils. It's going to be very toxic. You also want to limit your nuts and seeds. Nuts and seeds have a lot of PUFA or polyunsaturated fatty acids. Now, if you really enjoy nuts,
The nut that has the lowest amount of Pufa is a macadamia nut. After that it would be cashews, hazelnuts, and pistachios. After that those nuts have a pretty high content of omega-6 Pufa syndrome. So you want to avoid those. Now a handful of almonds once in a while is fine, but you don't want to make those staples. So the good news is our diet is within our control. We can choose what we buy and what we prepare and what we eat. That's the good news.
We want to take control of the controllables. We have the ability to have a great deal of control over what we eat. But here's the bad news. The half-life of PUFAs, or polyunsaturated fatty acids, inside our cells is 680 days. In other words, you'd have to wait almost two years to reduce the amount of PUFA in your cells by 50%. If you wanted to completely eliminate PUFAs,
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it would take about five to six years. But here's the good news. If you eat low PUFA, you will start feeling better in a matter of weeks or maybe a few months. And if you eat that way for a year or more, I can testify that you will feel better. You'll be sleeping better, you'll have more energy, you'll have improved mental clarity, your health will be improved a great deal.
You'll have more tolerance to sunlight because the cells in your skin will be more durable and more able to handle higher amounts of sunlight, which by the way, sunlight is a great thing. Sunburn is bad, but we should be getting sunlight on our skin every day if we can. Get outside, walk, walk barefoot on the ground, breathe fresh air, get sunlight on your skin. It's all natural and all very healthy. If you do that and you eat a low proof of diet,
you will see improvements to your health. I guarantee it and it won't take six years. Probably in a matter of months, you will feel noticeably different. And don't forget the Christian Healthy Lifestyle Community is launching in two days. This episode is going live on May 6th. On May 8th, the community will be live. Now there's still time to get in under the founding member pricing, which is the lowest price that will ever be offered publicly for membership. Inside the membership, you'll have access to the full version of every one of these podcast episodes.
I'm going to have numerous online courses in there on spirit, mind and body. We're going to have a community of like-minded believers. We're have a private newsletter. There's going to be discounts on quality supplements at my Fullscript Dispensary, as I mentioned, and you'll have access to my health support protocols, which are nutritional supplement protocols for all kinds of things like heart health, better sleep, better libido, healthier skin, all those things.
You'll have access to that inside the community. So go to my website chlcommunity.com forward slash membership and get signed up today. CHL stands for Christian Healthy Lifestyle, chlcommunity.com forward slash membership. That's it for now. Thank you for listening. I appreciate you. Go out there and live abundantly. Be blessed.
