Overcome Your Fear Of Cholesterol

When was cholesterol chosen to be the villain of good health? What is the history behind the campaign against cholesterol? Dr. Cate Shanahan, the author of “Deep Nutrition” and “Dark Calories”, reviews the dark history of the misunderstanding related to this important nutrient. She discusses cholesterol’s true (and important) role in hormone regulation and reducing oxidative stress.

Cholesterol is so important, actually, that Cate suggests that we should celebrate when our cholesterol levels are high!

Cate also answers the question: If cholesterol doesn’t cause heart attacks, what does?

Visit 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.

Cholesterol functions as an antioxidant in the body. Did you know that it is a critical building block for ourselves as well? It is on our side. Why do we fear it? What’s the history behind our misunderstanding of cholesterol? This is Episode 482, and our guest is Dr. Cate Shanahan. Cate is the author of Deep Nutrition and Dark Calories. In this episode, Cate reviews the history of our collective fear instilled by the campaign against cholesterol initiated in the 1950s as men in their prime, as she puts it, began to suffer heart attacks, investigations began, and cholesterol was fingered as the culprit.

Cate explains what she believes was leading to the heart attacks in the first place and how cholesterol is a hero in the body, not the villain. She goes into detail about its role in the body and why we should even celebrate when our cholesterol levels rise. This is the 3rd episode and a 3-part series on cholesterol. If you didn’t get to read the other two, check out the previous two episodes published with Sally Fallon Morell and Dr. Tom Cowan on the subject.

Before we get into the conversation, I want to remind you that censorship is real. Let’s have a direct line of communication. Join the Weston A. Price Foundation email list to stay abreast of action alerts in your area, along with important topics of interest regarding food freedom, upcoming events and more. Click on the yellow button on our homepage to sign up.

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Fear Of Cholesterol

Welcome to the show, Cate.

Thank you for having me back. It’s great to see you again.

It’s great to see you too. The last time you were on the show, we talked about the Hateful Eight, the seed oils that we should avoid like the plague. This time, we’re going to do a deeper dive into those, but we will also talk about how their promotion and marketing are inextricably tied to our fear of cholesterol. Can you go into that a little bit?

That’s why I needed to write my next book, Dark Calories, because I had many patients cut seed oils out and start eating healthy fats in a healthy diet, and they would feel great. Their blood pressure would be better. They would be able to get off heartburn medications, reverse diabetes and so on, but they’d go to their doctor, who would check their cholesterol levels and they would invariably go up. That would put the fear into them like, “I’m doing this great new diet. I feel great. I want to keep doing it, but my doctor’s now terrifying me that I’m going to have a heart attack.”

Wise Traditions | Dr. Cate Shanahan | Cholesterol — Dark Calories: How Vegetable Oils Destroy Our Health And How We Can Get It Back

That’s what happens. I’m sure you’ve seen that with people who start eating healthier and their cholesterol goes up. I need to make it as plain as day, and that is a good thing. The whole reason we’re eating these horrible oils has to do with the false idea that cholesterol is bad. They are related to each other. You cannot take that one without the other. We wouldn’t be eating seed oils were it not for the fear of cholesterol. The history of how that happened and that deserves to be remembered.

History And Promotion Of Vegetable Oils

That’s why we have you on. We want to go there. We want to understand when did this push began for these so-called vegetable oils. We both know that there are no vegetables to be found in most of them, if not all of them. How did these start getting promoted? How did they come on the radar? Tell us some of what you call in your book The Dark History.

It has to do with the fact that in the middle of the 20th century, around 1940 and 1950, heart attacks were killing mostly White male executives. Men in their prime, as they called it back then. Men who were aged 40, 50 and 60 at the peak of their careers were dropping dead from this new problem that didn’t exist before the middle of the last century.

The president of the United States at the time, Eisenhower, was beloved. He suffered a heart attack. That puts heart attacks on top of the mind. It was on the front page every day. Doctors didn’t have a clear answer because it was a new thing. It was a search for a cause that inspired this one man named Ancel Keys to act like he had the answer. It was a good quest, in theory, a very important endeavor to find the root cause of heart attacks, but he distorted it because he came in with a preconceived idea. What I talk about in dark calories is his attitude, which was disrespectful of people who were overweight. His preconceived idea was that for people who suffered poor health, it was their fault.

He blamed it on their diet.

He blamed it on the indulgent fatty foods. He did that before he had any evidence. I say this based on an interview from 1961. At that point in time, no evidence had been published. He was involved in designing studies and the very famous study called The Seven Countries Study had already been designed, but they hadn’t even collected the first set of data from it. He had no evidence.

He set out, as we often do, with a bias already in mind against the fatty foods and against people that he saw as heavy and saw them as guilty of overindulging in these fatty foods.

I feel like his ideas were quickly adopted because, like the Temperance Movement and another organization that truly means well, the Seventh Day Adventist, are related to the Temperance Movement, too. The history comes from the same era and time point in American history, the late 1800s. I think that there were leaders around Ancel Keys who glommed onto that idea because it was part of their religion. It was part of their preconceived ideas about good and bad foods.

A lot of folks maybe don’t know that the Seventh Day Adventist group runs hundreds of hospitals in the United States. It is a huge, powerful organization. They didn’t run a lot of hospitals back then, but they always had this health bent. In fact, some of their founding papers included dietary ideas that were, they say, handed down from God. That’s where the diet came from. That’s not science. That’s not the root cause. That’s not how science works. You can’t be a scientist if you’re also beholden to some other non-scientific philosophy. The difference is that one requires faith by definition and can’t be proven. That’s religion and science must be rooted in provable realities.

There is flawed logic in that something suddenly appearing these heart attacks or these men in their prime keeling over because of heart attacks. How would that have been caused by something that had been enjoyed since the dawn of time, humans eating fat, protein, meat, animal products and so forth? In other words, to be looking at that as the issue was missing a bigger picture.

Their timeline had been shrunk down because humans don’t have this collective memory of what our ancestors did. We can remember what we grew up with. That’s about 20 or 30 years. Unfortunately, in the 40s and 50s, we were coming out of two different eras, food scarcity and animal fat, animal food scarcity. There had been The Great Depression and then during the war, there was a lot of, “Don’t eat fat because we need tallow to lubricate airplane engines or something.” They had to use a lot of food for equipment and feed the military.

It didn’t seem that illogical, even though to us, with this bigger picture now having access to facts, figures and a huge timeline back then, we didn’t have all this data at our fingertips. It seemed totally logical. The thing is, not only did Ancel Keys have a preconceived notion, but he was willing to lie. That’s where he crosses a line. It’s one thing to be a scientist who has their heart in the right place. They’re trying to solve a problem, but they have these biases. It’s another entirely different thing to do what he did, which is fabricate data.

I understood that he cherry-picked data, but I haven’t heard anyone say that he out-and-out fabricated data.

He was willing to do that in the media. He wouldn’t necessarily do it in writing in the scientific journals, which probably 1% of people read compared to the number of people that read Time Magazine. In 1961, this interview that I’m using as my source of information here on a lot of important stuff, there’s a lot of important information in that interview that’s been overlooked. In there, there’s this huge, huge headline of, “I’ve got 5,000 cases.” He was going around to other scientists who were looking at the root cause of heart disease and lying to them and saying that he had 5,000 cases that he apparently already had 5,000 cases of people who’d suffered from heart disease already and analyzed their diets. That was the fabrication.

That was not even close to true because, like I said, he’d only started The Seven Countries studied. Before that, he’d hardly done any studies. At that point in time, I looked through all the literature and it looked like maybe he had a couple of dozen people who had suffered heart attacks that he was involved with studying, but he never published anything about their diets. He completely fabricated and bullied people. This is something that has been picked up by other journalists. Even his friends said that you couldn’t argue with him.

One of the other sources I used was The Life and Times of Ancel Keys, a little documentary that is available for free from the University of Minnesota. It’s like a 30-minute documentary. They interviewed one of his friends, Henry Blackburn, who said that he was not somebody you could argue with. He didn’t do the back-and-forth. He just shut people down, “He was very disrespectful. This is not a scientific person.” That’s his friend describing his behavior. He was a liar. I think he needs to be called out by medical historians and not have excuses made for him. Just because he didn’t necessarily do flat-out lies in the medical literature. He used his force of personality and the behind-the-scenes line to convince people of things that weren’t true.

If we look at the data, we’ll see that heart disease rates don’t go down as people increase their consumption of these seed oils. As a matter of fact, they continued to skyrocket. Is that what your research has proven?

Yes and no. Disease has skyrocketed. We’ve got obesity and Type 2 Diabetes, all kinds of mental disorders, birth defects, scary things and infertility, and important stuff for the future of humanity, cancer, and young people that are all skyrocketed. There was another thing going on, and that is smoking peaked in the middle of the 20th century. Smoking causes deadly heart attacks. People in the mid-20th century were smoking like chimneys. President Eisenhower would sometimes smoke 6 packs a day, but he was a regular 4-pack per day smoker.

People were constantly with the cigarettes in their mouths, inhaling fumes. No wonder people started dropping dead from cigarette smoke. At that point in time, the primary driver probably wasn’t seed oils. It was smoking. I have this graph in my book, Dark Calories, that plots out heart attack deaths per capita against cigarette smoking per capita. Those two are perfect alignments for most of the past hundreds of years. At the same time, cigarette smoking was increasing. Heart attack rates were increasing. At the beginning of that, seed oils were also increasing a little bit, too. After the peak in both cigarette smoking and heart attacks, it starts to go down and our seed oils continue to go up. This probably has confused a lot of epidemiologists.

This is fascinating. Thank you for shedding light on Ancel Keys, his own motivation, his own behavior, his unscientific behavior, and then what could have been the cause of heart issues back in that day, maybe even nowadays. One thought I was thinking was, what about stress? You talked about these high-powered executives, men in their prime. I’m thinking were they starting to get on this treadmill? I suppose there are not a lot of clear answers about what is indeed causing heart disease and heart attacks, but it’s very unlikely that it’s cholesterol itself.

Absolutely not Cholesterol itself. Cholesterol is a nutrient. I try to make that plain as day, clear as a bell in chapter five of the book Dark Calories to help people get the confidence that they need to be able to do battle with their doctor. Another thing that I needed to do in writing the book is to clarify that the root cause is no mystery. In my first book, Deep Nutrition, at the very back of the book, I had an appendix that had to be removed from the second edition. This appendix said, “Here’s the root cause of everything, folks. It’s nutrient deficiency and toxicity.” Those two factors combine to cause a state of cell imbalance that chemists, biologists or pathologists recognize as oxidative stress. Oxidative stress has been for years recognized as the root cause of every single disease of aging. It is, in fact, the root cause of aging itself and the root cause of death.

Why did your publisher ask you to remove that appendix from the back of your book in the second edition? I’m curious.

It was for a good reason. They said, “This is another book. There’s an entire other book in here.” Since then I’ve been wanting to write this entire other book because that’s what dark calories is. I explain how we know that the root cause is oxidative stress. Oxidative stress happens because of nutrient deficiency. What do vegetable oils have to do with this? These cholesterol-lowering, supposedly heart-healthy oils lower cholesterol by oxidizing it. Oxidative stress is the root cause of what doctors believe is a beneficial thing. That’s how far medicine is from getting to the root causes. Modern medicine is truly in the dark ages when it comes to causes because the only root cause that we have established is incorrect.

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Coming up Cate explains the best way to slow down oxidative stress.

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The dietary root cause is incorrect. It isn’t medical doctors that talk about oxidative stress. The people studying this are scientists that doctors don’t talk to and they use terms that doctors don’t understand. They publish their research and journals doctors do not read. One of these people was a brilliant doctor who, in 1950 something discovered why we die. His name was Denham Harman. If you’ve run into anybody from the anti-aging medicine, longevity medicine or free radical medicine, they all stem from him in the 1950s wrote a single 3 or 4-page paper called something about like, “Free radicals are killing us. Free radicals are the reason we die.” This one paper sparked aging medicine, the biohacking movement and longevity medicine because ever since Denham Harman in the 1950s, people have been looking for ways to slow down oxidative stress.

Vegetable oil is oxidative stress in a bottle. The best way to slow down oxidative stress is to get off of vegetable oils and celebrate when your cholesterol goes up because the reason they lower cholesterol is bad. When you get off of them and you see your cholesterol coming up, that means you’re experiencing less oxidative stress. Cholesterol is an antioxidant.

Cholesterol As A Nutrient

I love it. You’re setting the record straight. Let’s go back for a minute to how you said cholesterol is an important nutrient. Let’s review what it does in the body.

Cholesterol is a building block for every single membrane. It helps to stabilize our cell membranes so that they can function. If we didn’t have cholesterol, we would literally melt into a pile of liquid sludge. We wouldn’t have individual cells. It’s important.

It’s an understatement.

Other than being one of the absolute skeletal building blocks of our cell membranes, it’s a hormone that we use for all of our sex hormones. We are lowering our cholesterol as a population. Now, the population average is down because cholesterol is a building block for estrogen, testosterone, DHEA and progestins, all of the things involved in procreation lowering it has on a population scale is going to have an effect. We’re seeing them now.

This is what you’re getting at. Fertility is going down, but also sex drive is going down. I have heard of twenty-somethings who get together and want to cuddle. There’s nothing wrong with cuddling, don’t get me wrong, but it doesn’t lead to procreation. It’s because there’s less drive there. From what I understand, it’s quite unfortunate because it’s leading to this dramatic decrease in population.

Unfortunately, there are transgenerational effects due to epigenetics that have somewhat programmed the growth of these later generations. Similar to how Schrodinger’s cat, a famous experiment, programmed the growth of subsequent generations of cats who are deprived of nutrients. That’s causing oxidative stress. Nutrient deprivation causes oxidative stress. Vegetable oils are both toxic and practically devoid of nutrition. They promote oxidative stress. Oxidative stress is happening on an individual also, unfortunately, this transgenerational scale, which is changing the human race in very profound and, I think, terrifying ways. It all comes from the fear of cholesterol. If it weren’t for these oils lowering cholesterol, we wouldn’t be here now.

Seed Oils And Our Health

Sally Fallon Morrell herself has done a series called The Oiling of America. It’s a video, and she’s probably writing some articles along these same lines. We are very concerned about such things here at the foundation. My question to you is this. If these oils are damaging to our overall health, even if they do effectively lower cholesterol, why is the American Heart Association and groups like it still backing and promoting our switch to these oils from the more nourishing fats that our ancestors enjoyed?

They can’t admit that they were wrong. They were the ones who promoted this in the first place. The American Heart Association, let’s first clarify, this is not a government organization. A lot of folks who are in that don’t trust the government camp. This is old news. Don’t trust the government. No, this is a private medical organization. It’s a nonprofit run by doctors. This is the organization that educates all other doctors about what a healthy diet looks. If they would have to admit that they’ve been wrong for 70 years and there might be legal culpability because they’ve caused heart attacks. If people started investigating, they would see that it was all based on a lie and a conflict of interest.

Is anybody investigating?

No. It’s just me and Nina Teicholz. We and a couple of people. Zoë Harcombe.

I do know who she is.

She has investigated some of the claims of the American Heart Association guidelines and other people have done similar things. They’re not going after the American Heart Association, but they’re going after similar claims. That’s David Diamond.

Some of these people we’ve had on the podcast we’re thankful that there are allies in this work. The other thing is, and tell me if you’ve noticed this, more and more people seem to be catching on to the fact that seed oils are making us sick and not benefiting us in any way whatsoever, despite the fact that few people are pushing back against these American Heart Association and governmental dietary guidelines. Why do you think that is?

For one thing, everyone looks around and sees, “People are not in good shape health-wise.” You go to a beach, and it’s different than it was. People are struggling with their own health, and that often makes them open their minds to question things. Now that folks like you guys, Nina Teicholz and other people who have been in this space and talking about these oils, people have realized, “They sure are in everything.” I did my first article on them. My first publication was in the Weston Price in 2004, where I wrote a couple-page article. It was called Heart of Darkness. I talked about the river of vegetable oils and how they were in everything and how they contain toxins.

People are struggling with their health, and that often makes people open their minds to question things.

That was many years ago.

It’s taken a while, not overnight.

I was at the grocery store, and I was shocked when my daughter said, “Could you pick up some chips?” Almost every bag I turned over said sunflower oil, safflower oil or soybean oil. I was like, “Can this still be a thing?” Even Whole Foods, if you go to their hot bar or to some of their prepared food sections, everything is done in canola oil. I don’t trust that oil, even if it says organic.

It still has the wrong polyunsaturated fatty acid profile. That’s one of the key concepts that if we want to understand why these oils are bad and truly, if we want to understand that they are the worst thing in the food supply, we need to understand a tiny bit of the core chemical principles, which has to do with how many double bonds they have because polyunsaturated the term literally means this fat has two or more double bonds. Unsaturated refers to a double bond. A double bond is a special bond that is less stable and it attracts oxygen. It has two double bonds in a row, just as polyunsaturated fatty acids have. They have a net positive charge and oxygen has a negative charge. You can see opposites attracting is going to make oxygen basically attack polyunsaturated.

This is why life almost died all those many eons ago because oxygen attacks plants, etc., and we need to have antioxidants everywhere to protect against it. When we’re living on many oils, the organic has nothing to do with this issue. Being organic is important, obviously, but this has nothing to do with it. GMO has nothing to do with it. Those are separate problems. This is beyond the harms of Roundup and beyond the harms of GMOs by magnitudes like times a million because it’s that much more fundamentally damaging to our cells and our biology. That is the root cause.

Thank you for pointing that. That’s important because a lot of us do go into the stores and we’re like, “What’s organic? What’s non-GMO?” There are many things to look out for. This is why I prepare food at home because I don’t want to be buying it packaged because you don’t know what’s in that stuff.

It’s great if you can prepare your food at home. I do it. I want to point one thing out for those people who can’t quite do that yet. That’s what you want to aim for. That is the poll start. That’s fantastic and it’s going to make the best-tasting food. When you make it yourself, you use the best ingredients. If you can’t do it, you can only do one thing. You can only get your mind wrapped around one thing, wrap it around the vegetable oil concept and learn what the Hateful Eight toxic seed oils are. Should I list them off here?

Do it.

It’s corn, canola, cottonseed, soy, sunflower and safflower. Those are six so far. Those are the most important to memorize because those are the ones you’re going to see when you’re grocery shopping. They’re the ones listed on labels. The other two are rice brand and grape seed. I haven’t seen them on a lot of ingredient lists. Where do they show up in restaurants that want to have this healthy aura to them because they are sold, they have successfully marketed themselves as being the healthy vegetable oil. Their fatty acid profile speaks the truth. Once you learn to understand the double bond principle that I talk about in their calories and you learn, that means it’s going to cause oxidative stress and deteriorate into toxins. When you cook with it, you’ll understand why it does not deserve that healthy aura.

I feel like you’ve put in a nutshell some of the things we need to understand on how damaging these oils can be. Do you ever do this in conversation out and about? In other words, if you saw me and we were hanging out. I went to the grocery store to grab a bottle of sunflower oil, which has all the right labels, heart healthy and maybe even organic on it, and the little sunflower looks pretty. What would you say to me to deter me from that? Do you have a quick, pithy phrase we could use to point out, I know you already said oxidative stress in a bottle, but is there something else we can use in our day-to-day?

If you had a Geiger counter and wanted to go down the grocery store and find the most radioactive equivalent because these cause free radicals, which are damaging to our cells in the same way that radiation is. They’re high-energy particles that fly around and destroy things in our cells. If I had a Geiger counter and I was walking down the aisles and putting it against vegetable oil, it would burst into loud static. You take that to butter, silence.

If I had a Geiger counter while walking down the aisles and I put it against vegetable oil, it would be a burst of loud static. Take that to butter, silence.

Actionable Tips

That’s such a good thing. I need to make a device that’ll do something like that. That’d be fantastic. I have two more questions as we start to wrap up. How can we move from a dark history such as the one described in your book and in this show to a brighter future? Can you offer us any hope?

Yes. On the individual level, I recommend making it a habit. Anytime you go shopping to pick up that package and turn it around and scan for the Hateful Eight, or it’s like the Sinister Six. If you can turn the package around, you can turn your health around. Once you turn your health around, you are going to have more energy. Once you have more energy, you can start to make a dent in your community about helping everyone else become healthier.

If enough people in enough communities across America start doing that little switch, which all begins with turning that package around, then we can have a brighter future because there’s no reason we can. We can grow all the right foods. We can stop growing these toxic, worthless oils. We are intelligent beings. We can create an intelligent food system, which we don’t have right now. It does start with destroying the idea that cholesterol is the root cause of heart disease. We have to open our eyes to the real root cause of heart disease and everything else.

If enough people in enough communities across America start doing that little switch, which all begins with turning that package around, we can have a brighter future.

One more question. I love to pose it at the end. If the reader could do one thing to improve their health, what would you recommend that they do?

Memorize the vegetable oils and avoid them. Embrace and look forward to having your cholesterol go up from all the butter, cheese, eggs and healthy whole foods with healthy fats that you’re going to be able to enjoy. Look forward to that LDL going up.

Beautiful. I love it. Thank you so much for this conversation. It’s been a pleasure.

Thank you. It’s been great chatting with you.

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Read this article that Cate wrote for the Wise Traditions journal on the unhealthy byproducts of vegetable oils and their processing: Heart of Darkness (Lipid Hydroperoxides)

About Dr. Cate Shanahan

Cate Shanahan, MD “The Energy Doctor” is a Cornell-trained physician-scientist whose works have inspired entire movements involving bone broth, live-culture ferments, and seed oil-free business empires. Together with NBA legend Gary Vitti, she created the LA Lakers PRO Nutrition program, which has been emulated by elite championship teams around the world. She has dedicated her career to exposing the truth about a decades old campaign of health misinformation and opening the door to an honest conversation about how anyone can reclaim their health. She runs a health-education website, DrCate.com, a telehealth practice, and lives with her family on a peaceful lake in Florida.