The Hateful Eight

Industrial seed oils are killing us. They act like toxins in the body, accumulate in our body fat, increase feelings of hunger, hamper the body’s ability to utilize stored energy, and contribute to chronic disease. Dr. Cate Shanahan is a board-certified family physician and the author of Deep Nutrition and The Fat Burn Fix. Today, she identifies what she calls the “hateful eight” oils: canola, corn, cottonseed, sunflower, safflower, soy, grapeseed, and rice bran.

She explains how PUFAs (polyunsaturated fatty acids) in these industrial seed oils cause inflammation and lead to a host of health problems. She offers insight on how to go about eliminating these oils from our diet and the benefits, such as increased energy and vitality, that we can expect as a result.

Visit Dr. Cate’s website: drcate.com

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Episode Transcript

Within the below transcript the bolded text is Hilda Labrada Gore and the regular text is Dr. Cate Shanahan.

Have you heard of PUFAs? They’re Polyunsaturated Fatty Acids that are inflammatory and can lead to all kinds of chronic conditions like obesity and diabetes. These are found in industrial seed oils, primarily the ones that we cook with and are in so many of our processed foods. This is episode 263. Our guest is a researcher and physician, Dr. Cate Shanahan.

Dr. Cate is a board-certified family physician with years of clinical experience. She’s also the author of The FatBurn Fix, Deep Nutrition and Food Rules. Cate talks with us about PUFAs and what she calls The Hateful Eight, the industrial seed oils that act like toxins in our body, accumulate in our fat and increased feelings of hunger, hamper our ability to utilize stored energy and contribute to many chronic diseases. Cate talks about how to eliminate these oils from our diet and which oils to consume instead for increased energy and vitality.

Before we get into the convo, join me at the Wise Traditions Conference. It is on. It is in Atlanta, Georgia. All ages and stages are welcome. Staying healthy in a toxic world is the theme with top-notch speakers who will address how to deal with 5G, holistic dentistry, homeopathy, homesteading, how to make broth and stocks and much more. Go to WiseTraditions.org to sign up. Do it while you can while the early bird pricing is still in effect. If we have to cancel for some reason, do not worry. You will be entitled to a full refund. I hope to see you.

This episode is brought to you and powered by Bovine Tracheal Cartilage by Ancestral Supplements. Ancestral Supplements makes New Zealand sourced nose to tail, organ meats, bone marrow and bovine tracheal cartilage in simple, convenient gelatin capsules. Bovine tracheal cartilage has unique and powerful effects on wound healing, immune conditions, joint health and other conditions considered to be treatment-resistant to conventional therapies.

Bovine tracheal cartilage provides concentrated amounts of connective tissue, immuno regulators and cartilage building blocks that are missing from the modern diet. Visit AncestralSupplements.com to see what they can do for you. Ancestral Supplements, putting back in what the modern world left out. Stick around until the end of the episode. I always read a letter from our journal or a review from Apple Podcasts. It’s super encouraging to know.

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Visit Dr. Cate’s website: DrCate.com.

Check out our sponsors Ancestral Supplements and North Star Bison.

Sign up for our conference at WiseTraditions.org.

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Welcome to the show, Cate.

Thanks so much for inviting me to your show.

We love your book, Deep Nutrition. We know you have a lot to offer our audience. I want to begin our conversation talking about oils. Particularly, I’ve heard that PUFAs are very damaging to our health. Tell us a story of a client you’ve worked with who changed their oils and improved their health.

One of the my experiences working with somebody is a classic. It’s, in fact, the reason that I wrote my book, The FatBurn Fix. She was in a post-menopausal age, had type 2 diabetes for years and was so excited about keto intermittent fasting. She dove right into it. She managed to lose a lot of weight but unfortunately, her energy was mysteriously bad. She had lost nearly 100 pounds. She was so disappointed that all that work hadn’t led to her having a bundle of energy. Everything she was reading about keto and so on was promising.

When she got a hold of The FatBurn Fix and started swapping out the seed oils, it kept getting better immediately within the first day. She noticed that her energy was more sustained between meals. Ultimately, it was sustained all day and suppressed her hunger. That’s one of the things that folks don’t register as technically as we should. The key indicator of our metabolic health is our hunger or how often we’re hungry. The absence of hunger in spite of maybe skipping a meal or something is a key indicator of extreme metabolic health, what we call metabolic flexibility that you can burn your body fat.

I’ve personally noticed that I’m not as hungry as I used to be. I guess that means I’m eating the right kind of fats to sustain my health and energy, as you’re saying.

It could also mean that you also include some of the healthy, slow-digesting carbohydrates. One of the things I love about The Weston Price Foundation is that you do promote. You’re not like anti-grain necessarily and not specifically anti-carb. You just want to do the carbs right, which involves sprouting beans, seeds, and stuff like that. It’s so important. The sprouted grain bread has a dramatically different impact on your metabolism and improves your energy in ways that even whole wheat bread can’t.

I would love to keep talking about bread, but I want to pivot though because I wanted to focus on PUFAs. Can you first tell us what they are and what they do to us?

There are eight seed oils. I call them The Hateful Eight. They are corn, canola, cottonseed, soy, sunflower, safflower, which you’re going to see in the grocery store. These other two are mostly in quality restaurants, rice bran and grapeseed oil. I have a website and an infographic. You can snap a picture of The Hateful Eight infographic and pull it up whenever you’re shopping so you can look at every single thing that you purchased from the grocery store. They filter into our bodies through so many foods. They’re bad for us because they’re very high in polyunsaturates. We only need maybe 1% to 2% of our total daily calories to be polyunsaturates.

WT 263 | Industrial Seed Oils — The Fat Burn Fix

When we eat more than this, they act like toxins in our body because they accumulate in our body fat and other tissues as well but primarily in the body fat, where they promote inflammation because they’re unstable. We get this inflammatory body fat and make ourselves incapable of generating energy efficiently with our body fat, making us hungry. It’s like this profound metabolic disturbance that is largely unexamined and uncovered. Even in the keto space and the low carb world, there’s not a lot of discussions that’s focusing on the branded stuff, the carbs, low carb or ketones.

It’s so important to look at what these seed oils are doing to our metabolism. That’s what my book, The FatBurn Fix, is all about. I did start it with Deep Nutrition. I have two chapters in there that describes this in some detail. There are hundreds of references to how these seed oils are responsible for a lot of diseases that we’ve been blaming cholesterol for, as well as saturated fat. In theory, cholesterol and saturated fat had been the fall guy for diseases and crimes committed by polyunsaturated, the excessive consumption of these things.

What diseases are you referring to exactly?

Everything that has to do with inflammation, which is almost all the chronic diseases that I saw. In other words, it’s almost impossible to avoid things like diabetes, Alzheimer’s, cancer, autoimmune disorders, and eventually obesity. If your diet has these seed oils and unless you’re specifically avoiding them, it will.

What do we generally do? Let’s say I’m gaining weight and low on energy. What do we usually do instead of looking to the culprit?

What we do is we snack. If you feel hungry and you feel tired when you’re hungry, the natural inclination is to think, “I didn’t eat enough with my last meal,” but you probably ate plenty. You could very well have eaten plenty. What happens is your body efficiently puts the calories from your last meal in storage. Much of it goes into your body fat, which is one of the early stages of metabolic damage you get from these seed oils. When you are insulin resistant, your body fat doesn’t get released into your bloodstream very efficiently so you get hungry.

When you are severely metabolically disturbed like pre-diabetic or diabetic, it doesn’t give you energy when you try to burn your body fat. For both of those reasons, either the lack of fat release from your body fat or the fact that the fats released will not give you the energy they need. Both of those things that occur to people who are insulin resistant, pre-diabetic or diabetic, drive you to eat much more calories than you can possibly burn off on any given day.

Most metabolically damaged people end up eating somewhere around 600 to 800 more calories than they realize, which is many hundreds of calories more than they need. That’s why everybody feels like it’s inevitable to gain weight as they get older. They assume it’s their metabolism slowing down but it’s a radically different process that’s happening.

The “hateful eight” oils: canola, corn, cottonseed, sunflower, safflower, soy, grapeseed, and rice bran.

All the doctors that are treating diabetics, people struggling with obesity or a heart condition, you may think they’re looking in the wrong direction. Is that what I hear you saying?

Yes. Even a lot of times, the low carb doctors know a lot more about nutrition, how to advise people and help people, but they still often don’t talk about the underlying cause of all this, which is the seed oils and the inflammatory reactions that occur that are the driver of all these diseases. Regular doctors like myself didn’t learn any of this in medical school.

How did you get to the bottom of this? How did you discover that seed oils are at the root of some of these issues?

I couldn’t have done it without a serious love of chemistry. I was a student of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry when I was at Cornell. I was in their graduate program. In 2002, I got sick, and my husband forced me to do something about my horrible diet. I had a huge sugar habit. I learned about these essential fatty acids and it blew my mind. We all know about the essential fatty acids, omega-3 and omega-6 but this was so long ago. I hadn’t learned it in medical school and hardly anybody knew what they were.

With that information, not all fats were bad for us. Our body needed some fats and we needed to eat them because our bodies could not make them. I was fascinated. After that, I reread my entire biochemistry book from cover to cover. That’s when I discovered The Weston Price Foundation and all of the information you can get about traditional diets. I realized that there was a lot more saturated fat consumption. I had to do a lot of more research to be comfortable, overturning essentially, vetoing everything that I had been taught in medical school and becoming comfortable saying things like, “A lard is healthier than margarine.”

Which is hard for people to hear, isn’t it?

Yes, lard is a derogatory term even.

In that information, I also saw that you said that these rancid seed oils make us more vulnerable to COVID in your estimation. Can you explain why?

When you’re sick, you’re not eating, so you’re releasing your body fat. If you had zero of these PUFAs, Polyunsaturated Fatty Acids, you wouldn’t have an inflammatory reaction and you’d die of infections and a lot of other things because you need them. They’re essential. When you have such an incredibly high amount in your body fat, and I’m talking about something like 20% to 30% of the average person’s body fat, especially if they’re overweight, when PUFA is supposed to be something like 2%, we have fifteen times more of this stuff and that’s being released into our bloodstream.

It’s going to react with oxygen in an uncontrolled manner that causes polymerization, free radical cascades and out-of-control inflammation. It’s like you’re trying to put out a forest fire with a flamethrower. It makes the problem worse. The Coronavirus stimulates inflammation. Unlike other viruses that we’ve been faced with, this one seems evolved to specifically hide behind the out-of-control inflammation that occurs in most people because we have this underlying condition called too much seed oil in our body fat.

You’re making me realize that when people get diagnosed with it and they’re like, “That was a healthy man in his 30s,” maybe he wasn’t as healthy as we thought.

There’s a great comedian, Michael Yo, who’s had me on his podcast twice talking about what’s happened to him after he was infected with Corona. He said he was so sick. He felt so bad that if there was an out button of like, “This was going to end everything for me and I don’t have to deal with this pain for another minute,” he would have pressed it. That’s how bad he felt. He’s a comedian. He has a great life. He lives in LA. That’s how bad it made them feel. He’s been radically overhauling his diet and has so much more energy.

I don’t know if you know this, Cate, but we at The Weston Price Foundation espouse the terrain theory. We’re convinced that this virus isn’t necessarily a contagion but rather a process that’s happening on the cellular level where our cells are excreting exosomes. The point is regardless of how you think this virus has spread or caught, the idea is if we are healthy because we’re consuming the right kind of fats and not these PUFAs, we’re likely to be able to resist whatever is happening in terms of something trying to make us sick.

You need your inflammatory response to be available to you to fight off the bad guys but then you need your body to be able to limit the inflammatory response to the bad guys. It doesn’t just start attacking your tissues willy-nilly. That’s what happens when a person is in an intensive care unit with the Coronavirus infection and has ARDS, as they call it, which stands for Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome. That’s the thing that kills folks who are on the ventilators. One of the key things is the inflammation itself, not the virus. The exosome theory sounds interesting because that’s how the virus, for those of us who believe in the virus theory, says that the virus escapes the cells through exosomes. I wonder if there’s much disagreement. I always love probing scientific boundaries in all directions and seeing if they ever end up in the same place because a lot of times, they do.

Sometimes we have to be open-minded and unlearn the things that we’ve clung to so that we can discover something new.

That’s what I did. I’m the poster child.

You overhauled your own diet and then you’re trying to help other people do the same thing.

The seed oils and the inflammatory reactions that occur that are the driver of all these diseases.

This was back in 2002 or 2003 that I started my radical overhaul and turned everything upside down. I live my days as a physician helping people understand what their diseases are. In fact, there are complications of the modern diet, which is super pro-inflammatory and extremely deficient in nutrients. That’s where our Deep Nutrition comes in. This is the first book. We’re continuing in the vein of Weston Price’s work and your foundation’s work, trying to explain to folks what truly a human diet and a traditional diet is. That’s what Deep Nutrition does with the four pillars of world cuisine.

My real passion is helping other healthcare practitioners understand that the science of nutrition didn’t start with Ancel Keys in 1950 and his diet-heart hypothesis. It didn’t start with technology or understanding macros. It started before human memory and with human beings caring for their family, making tasty food out of the healthiest parts of their edible world. That is a science.

Encoded in the pages of every traditional cookbook, by which I mean cookbooks that are usually 100 years older or more, is an enormous amount of traditional wisdom around that conversion, converting a healthy environment into a healthy human. I love turning people’s hearts towards cooking. The love and joy of cooking, getting good quality food that tastes good and makes you feel better is good for your family and for everything, even the environment too.

That’s one blessing that’s happened. People are getting in the kitchen again, but it’s important for us to help them understand this oil piece. As Sally says, “There’s been an oiling of America.” In a way, we’ve been sold some snake oil thinking that the vegetable oils, canola oils and the things lining the supermarket shelves that look so nicely packaged and so bright yellow, but those are the last things we’re going to want in our diet.

They are the first things that you should cut out for that very reason, but they do sneak their way into your body through so many products. It can feel a little bit overwhelming when you start going through your kitchen, your refrigerator and turning those products around to look at the ingredients label. It’s not in the nutrition facts. It’s on the ingredients label. You got to scan for those hateful eight. You’ll see them in crackers, food bars, cereal, salad dressing and sauces. Also, on my website, I have a free shopping guide to a lot of the newer products that are being created that are made with olive oil, avocado oil or coconut oil, one of the healthier, stable life-giving, energy-giving fats instead of the seed oils.

You didn’t mention peanut oil and we often get questions about that. Where does that fall?

Peanut oil is a traditional oil in Africa where they call it groundnut because it’s tastes like a nut, but it grows on the ground. It’s an exception to the seed oils because technically, peanut is a seed. The other traditional oils are technically fruits, coconut, avocado and olive. We are using the pulp to get the oil. The peanuts are seeds but they are extremely generous in their ability to give off the oil so that when you refine that or when you extract it, you don’t need to use such harsh processing the way that you do with the other seeds. They do have a lot of PUFAs but nowhere near as much as the soy and the instability problem of canola. That’s why I recommend peanut oil. That is the part of it.

The other part is that because it doesn’t have to be refined because it’s so generous in giving up its fats, you easily extract it. That means you don’t need to use high heat or high pressure. It’s not damaged in the process and you don’t need to refine it. Some places do and I don’t recommend that kind of peanut oil but the lack of refining means that the antioxidants that come out with the oil are still there. They help to stabilize it as you cook it and even as you eat it.

This is another whole discussion. What happens to your microbiome when your diet is so high in these pro-inflammatory PUFAs? It’s important for the oil to be stabilized with the stuff that’s in the peanuts, whether it’s olive, so on and so forth. The antioxidants that are in the plant that stabilize it, you should cook it and consume it with that presence because it’s going to stabilize it along that whole journey from the seed into the bottle, into the pan, onto your plate and through your digestive tract.

What about cod liver oil?

We wouldn’t cook cod liver oil. It’s a different category. It’s a supplemental oil. People have amazing health benefits and turnarounds from that, but the downside is the polyunsaturates in cod liver oil are some of the most fragile and oxidation prone on the planet that it has to be high quality, extracted very carefully, ideally in a low oxygen environment with nitrogen or something to suppress the reactions. You have to consume it quickly before it oxidizes.

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There’s an important difference between what causes rancidity and oxidation. This is the chemistry thing. A lot of folks will use culinary terms in a slightly different way than the chemical term. The rancidity technically comes from free fatty acids. You have to understand that when you’re having an oil or any kind of fat, butter, coconut, you’re consuming these things called triglycerides. These are made out of three fatty acids, hence the tri bound to a glyceride. That’s what they’re called triglycerides. You don’t need to remember any of this but the key point is the rancidity comes from enzymes that release one or more of the free fatty acids from that triglyceride. You can have a rancid taste even in an oil that is healthy, believe it or not.

Human beings do not like the taste of most free fatty acids. Dogs and animals that consume carrion and fats that have been released from their triglyceride by the decay process love that taste. That’s a little bit of a different taste. You can’t tell by taste when an oil is oxidized. You don’t look for the rancid taste. What you would look for is almost like the absence of taste or a diminished taste. I feel like it’s an important point because the chefs start to get confused about what oil is good for them to cook with if they don’t understand at that point.

The absence of taste is a marker of unhealthy oil.

I have heard people say, “Cod liver oil tastes so bad, it must be rancid,” but from what you’re saying, that might not be the case because we can’t tell by taste alone.

We can’t tell when it’s oxidized by taste alone. If it’s refined, we notice the absence of taste and that’s another marker of unhealthy oil. If you’re buying peanut oil but it has no flavor, it’s not anywhere near as healthy for you. It’s in my okay list. It’s not good. It’s not as toxic as the seed oils, but it’s not going to be healthy the way that a full-body, flavorful, unrefined, delicious peanuty flavored peanut is going to be.

This is another reason that’s confusing. In the supermarket or even at the farmer’s market if you go to a little oil stand, sometimes there’ll be labels on the oil such as expeller or cold-pressed. You end up scratching your head like, “What does that mean? Is that better?” Can you address that at all, Cate?

I’m so glad you brought that up because it does fool a lot of folks, especially if they’re shopping at an expensive chain. The expeller-pressed is the first part of the processing. You can expel or press any oil. Olive oil should be expeller-pressed as opposed to solvent-extracted. It’s a mechanical extraction versus a solvent extraction. It’s the superior thing. You squeeze it gently. The more gently, the healthier. It’s meant to distinguish it from high pressure and hexane extraction that’s used. That’s only the first of many processing steps that ultimately damage the nutrients that were present in the seed. It’s not like you can’t have sunflower. I list sunflower. I know there’s a little bit of controversy on that one.

Personally, my take is that the chemistry says sunflower seed oils don’t do so well once they’ve been processed and refined. Sunflower, canola, cottonseed and soybeans themselves. They’re natural and have been used in traditional cuisines for years. Not cottonseed or canola but the familiar ones, the soy and the corn. Grapeseed has been used as a traditional supplemental oil for a long time in India. The traditional use of these things is as foods, as intact seeds or as extremely gently extracted. Flax would not be something that could withstand factory processing, but flax oil used to be extracted from a wedge press in your kitchen. It was mechanically extracted that you’d bang on the wedge. It would produce a couple more drops of a golden beautiful, flavorful oil that was not refined in any way. The canola that says expeller-pressed has been refined.

That’s how they started the process. It’s not like they didn’t do anything else to it.

Refining is so damaging.

That’s exactly what Sally addresses in her DVD, The Oiling of America. It’s important to get this information out. I’m so grateful that you’re sharing some of these thoughts and helping us wrap our heads around these concepts that we see on the labels. We’re not going to cook with any of these oils if we can help it. You said they would also be in our foods. I guess salad dressing is one of the main culprits or main places we’d find it.

It’s in all junk foods. It’s the defining feature of junk food. The Twinkie, a candy bar, a store-bought cookie, fast-food French fries, these are all super high sources of bad seed oils. Not only are they bad because of all the reasons we’ve already talked about, but when you make fried foods and a lot of these processed foods, they’ve been reheated multiple times. That’s like the worst of the worst.

Inside but also it was used for cooking it. It’s all over the place, all over that food.

The average American gets 80% of their fat calories from these things. That leaves only 20% of actual natural whole food fat sources, whether plants or animals. It’s like somewhere between 30% and 50% of their total calories for the day. This is like the single most common ingredient in many people’s diets and nobody is talking about it, except for the figureheads at places like Tufts and Harvard that say that we need to be eating more of these vegetable oils or seed oils.

I’m serious. I know it’s so irresponsible. I’m sure these doctors either have no clue what they’re talking about and just parroting information or know that they’re saying it because that’s where their funding comes from. There’s a Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian who was on Real Time with Bill Maher a few weeks after I was. Tufts has a school of nutrition and he’s the Dean of the school. When you look at that school’s website and what kind of foods they are trying to push people to consume more of, they have a list of 4 or 5 foods that people need to eat more of them. Believe it or not, vegetable oils are one of them.

The people following that advice, what do you think their lives and their health look like?

It’s horrible. You look around and at the news. That’s why we have so many people getting so sick from the Coronavirus. You take away the seed oils and take away anyone under 65 in the hospital. They don’t need to be in the hospital. Their immune system will eradicate the Coronavirus. Many of them won’t even know that they were sick and that is the case. The company that I work for, I’ve dealt with about 130 cases of potential Coronavirus and somewhere around 30 to 40 actual positive results there. It’s run the spectrum of, “I didn’t know I had it. I just got tested because my wife had to get tested and I wanted to give her support with that nasty nose poke.” Unfortunately, someone died. When I look at their lab tests, it was predictable.

There are predictable lab tests that you will see when a person’s body is overloaded with these seed oils that their metabolism is incapable of controlling inflammation. That’s what I do. What I spend my days doing every day working with patients is helping them understand their metabolism based on lab tests, history, and everything else. Understanding what health they can expect when they do the hard work of getting these seed oils out of their daily diets. You can imagine if somebody’s getting 50% of their calories from these things, it’s going to take an overhaul to get them out and that’s challenging for a lot of folks. This company is a retail company, so they’re working hard for long hours and when they come home from work, they’re tired. How are they going to do something other than order a bucket of KFC?

I want to ask you two final questions. One, can you repeat the list of The Hateful Eight so we can keep our eye on them, look for them on our labels and do our best to avoid them?

Here’s a mnemonic. Three Cs and three Ss, so corn, canola, cottonseed, soy, sunflower, safflower. There’s sometimes Y with the vowels, the grapeseed and the rice bran. Those last two though are going to be in restaurants. They have not made their way into products in the grocery store. You mostly need to memorize when you’re shopping the three Cs and the three Ss.

The GR could stand for Get Rid of. Cate, this has been fantastic. I am on the same page. I know the foundation is too. We’re on the same page with you. We appreciate your work. I want to ask you, if the audience could do one thing, Cate, to improve their health, what would you recommend that they do?

A healthy breakfast because breakfast is the most important meal of the day not to screw up. If you get the wrong kinds of fats or too much sugary, starchy carbohydrate, it’s going to set you on a path of energy highs and lows for the whole day. If you get your breakfast right, you won’t be so driven to snack. You’ll be able to concentrate better and it’s going to set you up for a good day. A couple of examples of healthy breakfast is eggs with bacon or eggs cooked in butter. Sprouted grain bread toasted with half an avocado and a little salt sprinkled on it or whole milk yogurt, ideally pasture-raised if you can get it, with a little bit of nuts and seeds and some fresh berries on it. Those are three popular, super-fast ideas anyone can do.

Thank you so much. We appreciate your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Hilda, it’s been so nice talking to you. It’s fun.

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Our guest was Dr. Cate Shanahan. Visit her website, DrCate.com, for more resources. You can find me at HolisticHilda.com. Now for a letter from a journal. “I want to take a moment to express my gratitude to the Weston A. Price Foundation, Joel Salatin and everyone in this movement. I’m 29 years old. Years ago, I was vegan. Now I own 24 acres, 6 beef and dairy cows, 50 meat birds, laying hens and two goats.”

“I’ve learned how to ferment my own veggies, fruit and dairy for long-term preservation. I’ve learned how to prepare compost properly and rotate animals to keep my land productive. I have three perfectly healthy kids under six. We are not afraid and perfectly prepared for whatever the markets, medical system and public institutions of all kinds throw at us. I have a very strong sense of purpose that I’ve never had before. I’ve discovered all kinds of beneficial jobs for people and the environment, ways to save local economies and the world. Thank you, everyone, for the time and effort. We’re one of many families you’ve saved.” That’s from Brianne in Canada. Brianne, it is our pleasure to get this information out. Feel free to submit your own letter for the journal or rate and review our show on Apple Podcasts. It’s one way you can support the work we do. Thank you so much for reading. That’s it. Hasta pronto.

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About Dr. Cate Shanahan

Dr. Cate Shanahan is the leading authority on nutrition and human metabolism. A board-certified Family Physician with over 20 years of clinical experience, and NY Times bestselling author of The FatBurn Fix, Deep Nutrition and Food Rules, her expertise is fixing the underlying problems that cause metabolic damage and inflammation, leading to autoimmunity, weight gain, diabetes, cancer and accelerated aging processes. Her passion is helping people feel their best.

Metabolic Conditions Dr. Cate Helps to Prevent & Reverse

Overweight and obesity
Prediabetes and diabetes
Cancer
Autoimmune diseases (inflammatory bowel, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis, lupus)
Cholesterol and blood lipid issues
Hypertension
Arthritis
Chronic fatigue
Fatty liver
Neuropathy
Headache
Poor circulation
Macular degeneration
Asthma
Allergies

After getting her BS in biology from Rutgers University, she trained in biochemistry and genetics at Cornell University’s graduate school before attending Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. She practiced in Hawaii for ten years where she studied ethnobotany and her healthiest patient’s culinary habits. She applied her learning and experiences in all these scientific fields to write Deep Nutrition: Why Your Genes Need Traditional Food. Together with Dr. Tim DiFrancesco and NBA legend Gary Vitti, she created the PRO Nutrition program for the LA Lakers and helped forge a partnership between Whole Foods Market and numerous NBA teams. In May of 2018 she begin Director of Metabolic Health for ABC Fine Wine and Spirits, a progressive, family-run company interested in saving money by the betterment of health.

She’s also the Medical & Scientific Advisor at CB Supplements, overseeing their premium-grade multi collagen protein, and for beliv, a forward-thinking Latin American beverage company.