34. The Ultimate Guide to Oil

My name is Patrick McGilvray. And I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, Master Life Coach, and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve learned that running more and eating less does not work for weight loss, and that there’s a better way. Now I help runners like you to get leaner and get stronger, so you can run faster and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is Running Lean.

Hey there, and welcome to episode number 34 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray. I’m your host and the weight loss coach for runners. And today we’re talking about oil. What I know is the ultimate guide to oil. For decades we’ve been taught that saturated fat is bad AND to stay away from it.

It causes all kinds of health issues like obesity and coronary heart disease and that the solution is to replace all those unhealthy fats like lard and butter with hard healthy fats like vegetable oil. The problem though, is that ever since we’ve increased our consumption of vegetable oils, we’ve just gotten fatter and sicker.

So what the heck is going on? In this episode, I get to the bottom of this issue, and I explain why vegetable oils are actually pretty bad for us as humans, and what oils are better options and what you should use instead.

So if you liked this podcast, then I think you got to come check out the Running Lean community on Facebook. This is a positive energetic informative group that goes hand in hand with the podcast. So it’s a fun group of like minded runners who all share common goals. Goals like wanting to run their first marathon or just make running easier or living a more vibrant life or losing weight.

And in that group, I do a series of live trainings on topics related to the stuff I’m talking about here on the podcast, things like running mindset, nutrition, weight loss, all kinds of fun stuff. And actually one of our members, one of the members of the Running Lean community, Melissa, asked this question recently.

She said, “You’ve mentioned a couple of times that canola oil is poison/garbage.” Yes, that sounds like me. “Can you do a podcast episode on fats and oils? I’m fairly well educated on general nutrition principles and good fats. But I would be interested to hear more of your perspective on which oils are best and why. Thanks.”

Well, yes, Melissa, that’s what I’m doing today. That’s a very good question. And so I’m devoting this whole episode to answering that. So come and join us in the Facebook group in the Running Lean community on Facebook. And you can get your questions answered, too. So just go to Facebook and search for Running Lean community, and you’ll find us also.

Did you know that I do one-on-one coaching? I do. Listen, doing this stuff, trying to figure all this nutrition out, especially as a runner becoming fat adapted, you know, knowing what to eat, when to eat, and all that other stuff can be kind of challenging to try to do it all on your own. So that’s why I’m here to help you.

Listen, we’re all different. We all have different nutritional needs, different genes, different values, different lifestyles. And when you work with me, I help you develop a eating program, a nutrition program, a weight loss program that works for you. You get my help and guidance. You get my personal attention, you get a step by step action plan, you get to be held accountable for all your results, which is awesome.

And then I help motivate you and help keep you moving forward and give you tools and skills to help you improve not only your nutrition and your running but other aspects of your life as well. Just imagine how much easier it would be to lose weight when you have somebody right there walking you through it step by step showing you exactly what to do and holding you accountable.

Just go to innerfiretribe.com/weightlosscoaching, all one word, and you can apply for coaching with me. I’d love to talk to you about it. Okay, let’s get into this. This is the ultimate guide to oil. And in doing my research for this podcast, I realized that the whole vegetable oil industry kind of was birthed right here in Cincinnati, Ohio. No.

So back in the 1800s Cincinnati was known as porkopolis because there were a lot of pork processing plants around here. So they did a lot of rendering of animal fats. And a lot of pork was being consumed. There’s a lot of slaughterhouses and all that stuff. So Cincinnati was known as porkopolis. That’s why we have the Flying Pig marathon. It’s kind of a play on that and some other things but anyway.

Oh, and another really cool thing is the pork. This may sound gross but the pig disassembly lines in the slaughterhouses. So they would have these kind of factory lines where they would disassemble pigs for different purposes.

Henry Ford actually took that idea and reverse engineered it, basically reverse the process to create the first assembly lines for cars. So even like the whole assembly line thing, got it? Started from Cincinnati and porkopolis. The things you learn, I’m telling you, it’s amazing.

So anyway, Cincinnati, late 1800s, lots of pork being, you know, rendered and stuff like that, lots of animal fats being consumed. And there are these two guys, William Procter and James Gamble that had this little soap and candle company called Procter and Gamble.

And at the time, and just another side note, if I look at my apartment window, I live near downtown Cincinnati. And if I look at my apartment window, I see the Procter and Gamble global headquarters building right there. So like I live kind of in the shadow, this whole Procter and Gamble thing.

And so when I was doing this research, I was just like, this is really hitting close to home. Anyway, okay, enough time digressions, I’m gonna keep moving forward here. So at the time, they were making soap and candles, right, Procter and Gamble, and animal fat, the lard that they were using, from the animal fat from the pork rendering facilities and stuff was expensive.

And so they started trying to find a cheaper alternative. And so they were using like palm oil and coconut oils instead. And they made this soap that floated in water using these oils, and it’s called Ivory soap, right. And, and so this was going along pretty well.

But even that was kind of expensive coconut oil, palm oil was kind of expensive. So they found an even cheaper alternative. And it was a waste product from the cotton farming industry, cottonseed oil. And so before processing cottonseed oil is this cloudy red, and very bitter oil.

And it has this toxic chemical in it called and I don’t know if I’m gonna pronounce this right, but gossypol, and it’s toxic to most animals. It causes dangerous spikes in the body’s potassium levels, it causes organ damage, and it causes paralysis.

Okay, so they had this very toxic cottonseed oil. And they decided, at some point they were going to use this to feed to humans. Now, an issue of Popular Science at the time kind of sums up the evolution of cottonseed oil. Here’s what they said. They said, “What was garbage in 1860 became fertilizer in 1870. Switch to cattle feed in 1880 and then table food and many other things in 1890.”

So it slowly entered our food supply. And then there was this new invention that took cottonseed oil to the next level that really got it into America’s kitchens and restaurants in our homes. And this is in 1907 when Procter and Gamble started using this new chemical process called hydrogenation. Hydrogenation that took this liquid cottonseed oil and produced a solid fat.

Okay, so the company’s researchers had been trying to produce a more solid form of cottonseed oil for a long time. And it was very important for them in the soap manufacturing business. They wanted an oil that was solid at room temperature. So the company’s scientists took this hydrogenation. And they created this new creamy pearly white substance out of cottonseed oil to use in soapmaking.

And it looked a lot like the most popular cooking fat of the day, which was lard. And so Procter and Gamble, grabbed onto this stuff and said, you know, this kind of looks like lard, I mean seems innocent enough. And so they sold this new substance. And today we know this is hydrogenated vegetable oil.

So they sold it to home cooks, as a replacement for animal fats. And they called it Crisco, short for crystallized cottonseed oil. Okay, so they took this stuff and they were really intending to use it for the creation of soap. And they actually got a patent for this stuff in 1910, for Crisco, and in the patent, it says, a food product consisting of a vegetable oil, preferably cottonseed, oil, partially hydrogenated, and hardened to a homogenous white or a yellowish, semi solid, closely resembling lard, the special object of the invention is to provide a new food product for a shortening in cooking.

Okay, so they just had this idea, let’s just start feeding this to humans. No real research went into this about the deleterious effects of this stuff, or about the health consequences of eating this stuff. But they started selling this now food product. And it was unprecedented at the time.

They sold 2.6 million pounds of this stuff, Crisco, in 1912 2.6 million pounds. And then just four years later, they were up to selling 60 million pounds of Crisco. So this new, quote, unquote, food bolstered the bottom line of Procter and Gamble. Keep in mind, their only products at the time were things like Ivory soap, Lennox soap, White Napa, laundry soap, and star soap.

This was their contribution to the, you know, dietary nutritional needs of America and the world really. And this sort of ushered in this whole age of vegetable oils in low fat foods later on, but this was all marketing. Okay, it wasn’t healthier by any means. Like, they didn’t have any science to prove any of this stuff. They didn’t do any real deep scientific testing.

They were just like, well, I mean, you can eat it, I guess it’s okay. You know, but it was all marketing. So they were like, hey, this seems like it’s probably better than animal fat. So, you know, it’s healthier for you. And so that’s why they marketed it, it’s just a marketing thing. Okay.

But this stuff, Crisco, you know, remember it was made for the soap industry, it was 50% trans fat. And we know that trans fats are very bad, right? It wasn’t until the 1990s, really, that we understood the health risks of trans fats. But they estimate that for every 2% increase in the consumption of trans fats, which are still found in many fast foods and processed foods today, your heart disease risks increase by 23%.

So every 2% increase in the consumption of trans fats, the risk of heart disease increases by 23%. What’s interesting, though, and surprising is that animal fats, the fact that, you know, people have said that animal fats increase your risk of heart disease is not supported by science. Okay, that’s very important to understand.

So they took this stuff that they wanted to make, whether we wanted to make soap cheaper, and quote unquote, better, and they started feeding it to humans. basically selling it as healthier than animal fats. And this was the birth of the vegetable oil industry, everybody started to get in on this, okay. And it birthed the whole new era of cooking oils.

So prior to this time, you know, we used to cook with tallow, which is beef fat suet, which is like lamb or sheep fat, and lard from pigs, and then butter, right, that’s what we used to cook with. And for thousands of years, humans, wow, I’m gonna go back millions of years, humans used an eighth of those for saturated fats, mostly from animals as part of their diet, with no of the health issues that we experience from eating vegetable oils.

Thousands and thousands and thousands of years of eating this stuff, and that we, you know, we also consumed in certain parts of the world, you know, back, you know, a million years, a few 100,000 years, we also consumed coconut oil, palm oil and olive oils in some of the tropical more Mediterranean regions. But seed oils, these things like we’re talking about here, cottonseed oil, safflower seed oil, stuff like that, were not eaten by humans.

It wasn’t until the modern era and the industrial revolution that the seed oils were produced at all. And actually they are produced to be used as lubricants and machinery. And did you know that you can use vegetable oil in a diesel engine? Like you can pour in vegetable oil? I think you have to modify something.

But my understanding is that you can run a diesel engine perfectly fine on vegetable oil. Why are we eating this stuff? It just seems so bizarre, right? Okay, so that’s kind of the history of, you know, where this idea of eating these industrial oils comes from.

And now I want to talk a little bit about you know, why these are bad for us. Okay. But I gotta before I get into that, I need to talk about a couple of sciency type things, just so we understand. The first is like, the vegetable oils we’re talking about here are the polyunsaturated fatty acids.

Okay, that’s kind of the bad part of these things, or PUFAs, polyunsaturated fatty acids. These are the oils like corn oil, cottonseed oil, soybean oil, safflower seed oil, sunflower seed oil, peanut oil, canola oil, which is made from rapeseed, and grapeseed oil. So these are all the what they technically call seed oils, or industrial seed oils.

And the USDA, or the US Dietary Guidelines for Americans recommends that we eat around two tablespoons of these oils every day. Okay, so they’re basically just saying, like, eat this stuff. It’s good for you. So, polyunsaturated fatty acids, that’s the kind of stuff we’re talking about here.

And then there’s a difference between saturated and unsaturated fats. Saturated fats are or saturated oils are typically very stable. They’re solid at room temperature, like lard, butter, coconut oil. And then the unsaturated types are very unstable. They’re liquid at room temperature and when you heat them up, terrible things happen.

But anyway, in order to make these seed oils edible, they have to go through a massive refinement process. Okay, so this is where things get pretty weird with this oil. Okay, so think about something like coconut oil which is so natural or even olive oil.

To get olive oil, you just smash some olives and the oil comes out right and they do it at a cold on a cold press, you know, they don’t have to heat it up. And there’s basically zero refinement involved at all. So you just squeezing olives and olive oil comes out. And it’s beautiful. It’s delicious. And very, very healthy, good for you, right.

But these see these seed oils in order to get the oil out of them, and to make it edible for humans have to go through a massive amount of refinement. So for example, let’s look at how they make canola oil and pretty much all the seed oils are made the same way.

Canola is made from grape seeds. Grape seeds are almost entirely GMO genetically modified, they are heavily treated with pesticides. And then they take these seeds and they have to heat them to super high temperatures just to get the oil to start to get the oil out of them, so they are under high heat and pressure to get the oil out of them and get the oil out to have to use a chemical solvent.

It’s a petroleum based chemical solvent called hexane. Hexane actually causes nerve damage to humans. But anyway, so they have to use this industrial solvent to extract the oil from the seeds. Okay? The resulting sludge that comes from this process is this rancid, super bad smelling and gray sludge.

And it’s inedible at this point, it’s actually very toxic for humans. And so they have to heat it again to remove the toxins, they have to deodorize it so they go through another heating process to get that odor out of it. And then they bleach it to remove the gray color.

Okay, then they add some enhancements, like artificial colors, and some synthetic vitamins. So by this time, we have something that is an industrial oil. And it’s great for running diesel engines and really good for lubricating machinery and stuff like that.

If people were to like just come up with this idea today and propose that we eat this stuff today, there’s no one in their right mind that would say like, this is a good idea. But because you know, industry got behind this, you know, 100 years ago, it’s just stuck with us. And oh my gosh, this stuff is just, it’s horrible.

And when I say this stuff is garbage, slash poison. This is what I’m talking about. We’re taking something that is unfit for humans to eat. And we’re not only, not only are we suggesting people eat it, the US Dietary Guidelines for Americans suggest we eat it and suggest we all eat this stuff. And it’s just causing all kinds of problems, all kinds of heart or health and heart problems for us.

But you know what, there’s a lot of money going into this stuff. There’s a lot of profits. And there’s a lot of like bad science that is promoting this stuff as being healthy, even though they’ve never really proven to be healthier at all. So just as an example. And there’s so many studies out there, I’m just going to mention a couple of things here.

But there’s like so many good studies that prove that these vegetable oils have not helped at all. But just think about it this way. Animal fat consumption went from around 12 pounds per year in 1900 to around five pounds per year in the year 2005. So in roughly 100 years, we’ve lessened you know more than halved our consumption of animal fats.

The polyunsaturated fats consumption went from around 10 grams a day in 1900 to basically almost zero to around 40 grams a day in 2005. So we’ve quadrupled the amount of these vegetable oils that we’re eating. The problem though, since 1900, is that heart disease, obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, hypertension, cancer, all of those have steadily increased along with the consumption in it tracks very nicely.

If you look at it on a graph from vegetable oils, how much we’ve been consuming to the amount of heart disease and obesity and diabetes and all these other things. Today, the average American consumes around, this is crazy, 70 pounds of vegetable oil per year. 70 pounds of this stuff per year. Whoa, that was crazy.

And you don’t have to be like pouring it into a pan or like doubling it to get that much into your body because all fast food almost all processed food most packaged food contains these industrial seed oils, potato chips, granola, fried chicken, french fries, burgers, quote unquote healthy cereals, processed meats, plant based meat substitutes, crackers, pretzels, practically everything you see at a store has vegetable oil in it.

It’s crazy. And so we’re eating like 70 pounds of this stuff per year. And this is not good. So why, why is this bad? Like, why are vegetable oils bad for you? If you’re not convinced already that these industrial seed oils are not bad for you, here’s some more things to understand about these kinds of oils.

So they did these animal studies on rats back in the 1940s. Poor rats, they always get the brunt of these studies. But anyway, these poor rats, so they took these rats and they fed them linseed oil, corn oil, soybean oil. And they realized that eating this stuff was very toxic for these animals that caused them to grow poorly. They suffered massive diarrhea, they had enlarged livers. They had gastric ulcers, heart damage, and they died prematurely.

And then this part is kind of gross. But they had this like varnish like substance that they found in their feces that actually caused these poor rats to actually be like, stuck, like glued to the wire mesh floor of their cages. So they had this like, byproduct of eating this stuff that was like this toxic varnish that glued them to their cages.

Why are we eating this stuff? Right? It’s horrible. So this is done in the 1940s. But these kinds of studies were summarily dismissed. Because it didn’t fit with the agenda of the big food companies that were like, well, you know, we’re trying to promote something heart healthy here, so, and they put big money into studies that showed that this stuff didn’t have those kinds of effects.

Anyway, when you heat up these vegetable oils, they become extremely toxic. So this is like, the worst thing you can do with these vegetable oils is to heat them up. So they break down inside our bodies, they create free radicals, they create aldehydes. Aldehydes cause rapid cell death, aldehydes interfere with our DNA and our RNA.

They basically screw up the way our cells function. They cause extreme oxidative stress to all of our tissues. They cause really terrible effects to our health like heart disease and cancer. In fact, they took one piece of fried chicken from a fast food joint, and they were able to isolate 130 volatile compounds found in this one piece of fried chicken. And honestly, you’re not going to like this part.

Virtually all restaurants use vegetable oil to cook with because that’s what’s recommended. So virtually all restaurants are heating up this vegetable oil, creating this toxic very toxic sludge. And that’s what we’re they’re feeding to all their people. I know that sucks, right? It’s hard to get away from it. It really is.

So polyunsaturated fats tend to, you know, react with oxygen in our bodies and they cause oxidative stress. This is important to understand. So you’ve heard that we should be eating foods that are high in antioxidants, right? Eat dark chocolate, eat blueberries. We should be eating these foods to combat or prevent oxidative stress. That’s why they’re called antioxidants.

But these fatty acids in vegetable oils actually sit in our cell membranes. They increase the they cause oxidative stress increase these harmful oxidative chain reactions. And they actually lead to structural changes within our cells within our fat stores within our cell membranes. These kinds of oils create a very pro-inflammatory state in our bodies, while the mono unsaturated fatty acids like olive oil, for example, are anti-inflammatory. Okay.

One more kind of sciency thing to talk about here is the omega six versus omega three. So you’ve probably heard that we should be getting lots of omega threes and kind of limit our omega sixes, right? I think we all kind of understand that. Just so you understand, like, our bodies need both. Our bodies need Omega sixes and Omega threes, and they just have to be in a certain kind of balance.

And it depends on who you talk to what that balance is some people say four to one, Omega six to Omega three, some say one to one. But whatever it is, we want to make sure we have enough omega threes in our system. So omega threes. The problem is though, when omega sixes are high, it really lowers the amount of omega threes, it throws that thing off balance, okay.

And these oils that I’m talking about here, these industrial seed oils are very high in Omega sixes, and they throw off that balance. And so you want to like limit the Omega sixes, you want to really just eliminate these vegetable oils, and increase your omega threes to get the optimal kinds of fats that you need.

So the only way we can get these two very important types of fats is by eating certain types of foods and fats that can or foods that contain these fats, right. So we want to make sure that, you know, we’re limiting the amount of omega sixes, so limit the vegetable oils basically is the easiest way to do this, and increase the Omega threes.

Omega six oils are very unstable. They’re made of these polyunsaturated fats, and when you cook them at high temperatures, like I said, or microwave them or, you know, cook, fry food in them, they oxidize the fats. And like I said, oxidized Omega sixes damage your DNA, they cause inflammation of your heart, they raise your risk of several types of cancer including breast cancer, they also interferes with brain metabolism.

So, get that foggy brain Omega sixes or inflammatory omega threes or not, you need both, but because of that inflammation factor, you want to maximize omega threes, minimize Omega sixes, okay? Overconsumption of omega sixes, and under consuming omega threes, has been shown to increase all kinds of diseases like heart disease, obesity, type two diabetes, irritable bowel syndrome, macular degeneration, rheumatoid arthritis, asthma, hypertension, autoimmune diseases, reproductive disorders, hormonal disorders, kidney, liver damage, infertility, cancer, I mean, the list goes on and on and on, of not having these things in balance. Okay?

When you have a diet, though, that’s high in omega threes and low in omega sixes, when you’re eating more natural fats, and I’m gonna get into some of what you should be doing in just a second here, but things like coconut oil, let’s say, that will help to keep your Omega three to sixes in balance. Okay?

Some of the good sources of Omega threes, just so you know, would be things like wild caught salmon and grass fed beef, sardines, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, avocados, walnuts, flax seeds, all these things are really high in omega threes.

And then there was this 2018 study that the title of the study was omega six vegetable oils, as a driver of coronary heart disease, the oxidized linoleic acid hypothesis. And I’m just gonna read you the summary of this paper, it’s really good and really well done. Well, well documented. Lots of experts in the field in science and fats and things like that.

But here’s the summary. It says: “In summary, numerous lines of evidence show that the Omega six polyunsaturated fat linoleic acid, promotes oxidative stress, oxidized LDL, chronic low grade inflammation and atherosclerosis, and is likely a major dietary culprit for causing coronary heart disease, especially when consumed in the form of industrial seed oils, commonly referred to as vegetable oils.”

That’s enough evidence right there for me, and should be for you that this stuff is no good. So I’m going to talk about some better choices for you in just a second, but just really quickly, you know, when I when I start talking about these things, and say, Hey, we need to get off the industrial seed oils and start using just the natural fats.

Whether you’re vegetarian, vegan, whatever, carnivore, but this whole idea of eating saturated fats as being bad for us, has just been drilled into our heads and that’s just not true. There’s never been a randomized controlled trial, which is the the actual good science, okay? There are two basic types of studies.

There’s epidemiological studies which study a group of people and what they eat. And then they make conclusions based on that. And that’s okay, it can show it in association but doesn’t show cause. A better type of study is RCTs, or randomized controlled trials. These are where you take groups of people and you separate them, you control everything about their environment, and make sure everything is the same except for certain types of diet, okay?

And when you can randomize the groups and control exactly what they’re eating and study that, that is good science. Okay. So anytime I see association studies, I’m very skeptical, I really don’t go by that, I always want to look at the randomized control trials, okay, that’s important to understand.

And so this idea of like saturated fat being bad for you in the 1960s and 70s, all these governments from around the world got together and looked at all these randomized controlled trials that had been done and, and they, and they did all these studies that included over 75,000 men and women.

And these experiments that they’re talking about these randomized control trials, lasted anywhere from 1 to 12 years. So there’s long term studies, right? Very expensive to do this. The results from all these studies from a meta analysis like looking at all these studies, showed no effect of saturated fats on cardiovascular mortality, or total mortality are sometimes known as all cause mortality.

In other words, these people eating saturated fats were no more likely to die of heart disease, get heart disease, or die from these kinds of problems than the people that were eating the low fat, non saturated fat diet, it’s very important to understand that. So my takeaway from looking at data like that is saturated fat is not bad for you, and never has been proven to be bad for you.

In fact, it’s proven to be just fine. So what are some better choices? So if we want to get away from the industrial seed oils, what should we eat instead? It’s a great question. So stick with cold pressed very minimally processed oils, oils that are produced without high heat or chemical solvents. Okay, this is just standard.

So things like coconut oil, coconut oil is one of the best. It’s a saturated fat. It’s like one of the best things very versatile. You can use it in a lot of stuff. It’s great for cooking because it has a very high smoke point, you can heat it up to very high temperatures and it won’t oxidize so it doesn’t break down.

It’s also solid at room temperature, much like Crisco or lard. And so you know, the coconut oil is very versatile, you can use it in baking and all kinds of good stuff, and it tastes good. So that’s a super awesome alternative to vegetable oil.

Another one is olive oil. Olive oil is very, you know, always get the cold pressed extra virgin olive oil and only use olive oil cold you don’t want to heat up olive oil, so don’t cook with it because it has a very low smoke point, it’ll start to break down if it’s heated up to to too high of a temperature. So I just want to use cold olive oil.

Another great option is avocado oil, which a lot of people love. And it has a higher smoke point than olive oil. It’s great for cooking as well. You can use it cold or hot. So it’s great for salad dressings and things like that. And you can cook with it as well.

Macadamia nut oil is another good one. It’s low in the polyunsaturated fatty acids, it’s good for dressings, and it’s good to make mail out of. Apparently I have not done that but that sounds amazing.

And then one of the best oils you can use would be fish oil, it has tons of great omega threes. It helps to promote proper cell function, good lipid numbers, and actually has been shown to improve insulin sensitivity. Okay, so these are the oils you should stick with. I would say olive oil and coconut oil would be my to go to and I always have that stuff around. And I use that stuff every day.

The bottom line seed oils, these industrial seed oils should not be consumed for humans. They were not created as food. I think they’re unfit for human consumption. They harm your health. They create oxidative stress. They break down ourselves, they damage our DNA. They’re highly inflammatory. They throw off our omega three omega sixes ratio, basically depriving our bodies of the good fats that we need for optimal health.

The solution is to replace these industrial seed oils with good oils, good heart healthy oils, the real hard healthy oils like olive oil, avocado oil, coconut oil, or just used butter. And these things restore the Omega three omega six ratios, they don’t promote oxidative stress. Some oils, like olive oil, are actually anti inflammatory.

And these will dramatically improve your health a little bit of a bigger picture, look at things here like we’re consuming, you know, less animal fat and more vegetable oil than ever before. And yet we’re sicker and fatter than we’ve ever been. And honestly, we can look at vegetable oil as just one of the key players to this and I call the three key players here.

Sugar, refined grains, and these industrial seed oils. I call this the Vile Triumvirate. It’s this horrid toxic concoction of these three things it’s like making us fat and sick and killing us all. And yet, these three things make up most of the processed food available in the supermarket today. These three things are found in almost all processed and packaged food.

And it’s kind of what the United States dietary guidelines recommends we eat. You know, since the induction of the dietary guidelines in 1980, the overall health of Americans has sharply declined. The guidelines have had a profound effect on our health in a bad way. And the guidelines affect more than just like us sitting at home.

Okay, so like all school lunch programs are based on the US Dietary Guidelines, and 19% of school aged kids are now obese. The Dietary Guidelines affect all military rations and mess hall food. And now 7% of troops are obese, not just overweight, but obese. The guidelines effect special nutrition programs for women, infants and children like WIC. And now 15% of toddlers in WIC are obese.

The guidelines determine what food is served in hospitals. The guidelines determine what food programs we give to the elderly, and life expectancy is actually going down. Alzheimer’s is going up diabetes has gone up rapidly. Cancer has gone up rapidly among the elderly. The guidelines affect agricultural production. So they actually because of the guidelines, they incentivize farmers to produce more and more cheap carbohydrates like soy beans, wheat, and corn.

And of course, the Dietary Guidelines for Americans affect what the food industry produces. So the food industry is producing more and more and more of this garbage loaded with sugar, refined grains and vegetable oil. So what’s the solution here? The solution is my favorite thing, eat real food.

Let’s just go back to eating whole food. You know, and I use this example a lot of like, what a caveman eat this or a cave woman? And if the answer is no, then you probably shouldn’t be eating it either. If it’s highly processed, if this thing you’re about to eat has been highly processed, it involves multiple steel, that’s high pressure, high heat, toxic chemicals, deodorizers and bleaches to make it, probably take a hard pass on that.

If it comes in a package, I would say, really examine it carefully before you eat it. Really take a look and see what it is you’re eating. If it’s something deep fried, I would say don’t eat it. Unless they’re using something like, you know, beef tallow or duck fat to fry in, which some places are starting to do this.

Now, if you go to a restaurant and you’re worried about eating vegetable oil and them heating up this vegetable oil, you can tell them you’re allergic to vegetable oil, just say hey, I’ve got a vegetable oil allergy. Do you think you can cook my food in butter? And a lot of restaurants will actually do this for you.

And it doesn’t matter if you’re being super honest about it, they take it seriously and they will. They’ll do this for you. And the ones that won’t, you know, maybe don’t eat there. That’s an option. But honestly just like let’s go back to eating real food, none of this highly processed stuff.

And when it comes to highly processed food vegetable oils are probably one of the most processed and refined foods in existence today. And one of the things that’s making us really sick. So that’s why I say this stuff is poison slash garbage. Okay.

All right, we will be continuing this conversation over in the Running Lean community on Facebook. So just join us over there jumping on the conversation, it will be fun to have you in there and ask your questions, and I’ll see if I can answer them right here. And if you do enjoy this podcast and if you’ve got something out of this, you can show your support by just leaving a quick review on iTunes. I would super love that.

Okay, that’s all I got for you today. As always, lots and lots of love to each and every one of you, my friends, keep on Running Lean. I’ll talk to you soon.

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