pmr309 - dr. cate shanahan - paleo magazine · deep nutrition: why your genes need traditional...

PMR 309 Transcript

EPISODE 309

[INTRODUCTION]

[00:00:20] AVH: Hello everyone and welcome times 10. I'm so glad you are joining me on this.

I'm assuming Tuesday morning, because that's when the podcast drops, but I suppose you could be listening to it any time. Happy day, whatever day it is for you. I'm glad that you're

joining me and I'm really excited about today's guest. I say that every time, but like I mean it every time. Just so you now, this isn’t a script, like I really am expected for every guest.

But this is a little extra special because she is a staple in the ancestral health, paleo, nutrition

and wellness world. She's been hugely influential and around for a long time, and I have learned a lot from her over the years. She's somebody that I followed and learned from for a really long

time and I haven’t had her on the podcast yet. So I was really glad. I managed to kind of track her down and was able to get her on the podcast for a little bit chatting about her new book.

Of course, I'm talking about Cate Shanahan. She is a former LA Lakers science consultant. She

was a consultant to NBA athletes on how to get them to eat and feel better. She's the author of Deep Nutrition: Why Your Genes Need Traditional Food. Anybody who's been sort of in this

world, been like a paleo nerd for a while. They know the book Deed Nutrition. She's really working at among other things eradicating diabetes, because it is the thing that we have a lot

more control over than we think. She wants us to all stop eating vegetable oil, because it's the worst. We talk about that.

We talk about her new book called The Fat Burn Fix, and we also talk about, of course, because

she is a fan of traditional foods, we talked about what that means and why she advocates for things like collagen and organ meat, because anybody who knows me, knows that I'm a fan of

organ meat, and it's still not a super popular subject. Whenever anybody is as interested in organ meats as I am, I got to ask them about it, because it's exciting to me and most people

don't want to talk about liver as much as I do. We talk about that.

But one of the cool things about her book, The Fat Burn Fix, that I really appreciated, she's essentially talking about making a case for this higher fat, lower carb, whole foods approach.

© 2020 Paleo Magazine Radio 1

PMR 309 Transcript

Call it keto if you want. We can just call it sort of whole foods and built around your activity level,

built around your unique physiology, all of these things, and the premise that in this modern world where we have too much food, hyper palatable food, not enough movement, all of these

things. Too much stress, chronic stress. Our bodies have kind of turned off the ability to burn the fat that we have as fuel, which is what it's for, right? Because we’re just burning all the carbs

that we’re constantly putting into our bodies and we’ve got all of these other lifestyle factors going on. We talk about what turns that ability off, like why we can't do something that our

bodies are naturally supposed to be doing. How we get it back.

We talk about the fact that calories matter. Yes, they do. I know better than anybody. I can eat healthy food and still gain weight. It’s a thing. So we need to pay attention to this stuff. We talk

about metabolism. What that means? What it means when people say that your metabolism is slow or fast and when really it means is maybe it's not functioning as well as it could because of,

again, lifestyle factors. How we sort that out?

We talk about – One of the things actually that going back to, one of the things I like the most about this book is that she really approaches this lifestyle change from the perspective of

optimizing your energy rather than losing weight, right? Because most of us, sadly, we all think about how we want to lose a couple of pounds, or maybe more than a couple pounds. But fat

loss is like always a thing especially for us ladies, and so many diet books or so many nutrition books are about like, “Okay, here are the things. Just cut them out. Cut them out of your diet

and then you start doing X, Y, Z and then you start losing fat. Lose fat. Do this, lose fat. Take this out, lose fat.”

What she's talking about is how to create an environment and a lifestyle where you have

optimal and consistent high energy so that you can then do all the things you want to do, include exercise, move, all that stuff, and also you don't have to maybe be as dependent on your hourly

feedings, or your midafternoon snack, or your bodies functioning more optimally. Then as a byproduct of that, you're going to achieve a better body composition.

Long story short, we’re focusing more on energy and proper body function rather than here are

the steps you need to take immediately to lose some weight. Because as she outlines in this


PMR 309 Transcript

book and in this talk, it can take weeks and months even for your body to start functioning in a

way that it allows it to lose the fat that you want to lose.

Often times we look at a diet and we say, “Okay, we have to do all these things, and maybe it's not sustainable, but we can pull it off for a couple of months,” and we’re doing these crazy

things and we’re maybe not losing the weight as fast as we want or at all and our bodies are stressed out and there’s all those stuff, and then we give up, and then we’re disillusioned, and

then we’re upset, all of these things. If we can focus primarily on how to just get our body feeling the weight it supposed to feel and working the way it's supposed to work. That other stuff

comes. It's not about not caring about fat loss or caring about what you look like or all those things, because we do. Let’s be realistic. It's about the health part first and then all that other

stuff comes as a bonus.

I really, really appreciated the approach that she had to this book and it was just a dream come true for me to actually sit down and chat with her. She's just such a positive, helpful person in

this world. I'm just glad that she sat down with me. I hope you enjoy the episode. You can find out more about following Cate and her new book, The Fat Burn Fix, in our show notes, all that

good stuff. I’m going to stop rambling and let Cate Shanahan teach you lots of awesome stuff coming right up.

[INTERVIEW]

[00:06:09] AVH: All right. Dr. Shanahan, thank you so much for being on the podcast. This is so

overdue and I can't wait to pick your brain. So thank you for being here.

[00:06:16] CS: Thanks, Ashley. I am excited to talk to you too.

[00:06:20] AVH: Yeah. You're such a well-regarded figure in the sort of paleo magazine and paleo world and it's like one of those things where I’m like, “How have I not had Cate on the

podcast yet?” I’ve been this doing this for like four years and I guess I’ve just been trying to maybe chase you down, but you're busy writing books and stuff. I'll give you pass on that. Better

late than never, right?


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[00:06:39] CS: I’m an oldie, but a goodie.

[00:06:41] AVH: Yeah. It's a classic. Let’s say classic. I like it. Awesome! You’re here today.

You’ve written a new book and I want to dive into that because one of the big pieces of the work that I do for the magazine and for the podcast is reading all of these amazing books that are

coming out and researching new sort of approaches to diet and lifestyle and health and all of those things. I think that with the proliferation of sort of higher, fat lower carb, keto type books

that are coming out, you are approaching things in kind of a unique way. I really want to kind of get into that. But maybe first, just for anybody who isn't familiar with your work, if you could just

kind of introduce yourself and talk a little bit about the work that you do for our listeners.

[00:07:20] CS: I’m a family medicine doctor and I have for 20 years been working as a primary care doctor and it had become increasingly difficult to actually spend time with my patients and

share my expertise. So I kept moving around the country. I’ve lived in Hawaii, in New Hampshire, in California, in Denver and a few other places on top of that, and now I'm in Florida

because my current boss called me out of the blue while I was in Connecticut as a standard doc in the box, still feeling like a round peg in a square hole or the other way. However that saying

goes.

But the opportunity he presented was, “Can you just get everyone in my company to be healthy?” and I immediately said yes because I knew that would mean it has so much more time

to talk to folks. I mean, just this weekend, I went on a shopping trip with one of our employees and he said it was like life-changing. It's just having these simple things. He is a diabetic that

was basically on the fast track to heart failure and liver failure and now we've got him off his diabetes medications and he's able to lift his arms over his head, little things like that, without

getting short of breath. It’s amazing that my employer has the willingness to go way out on a limb and it’s a retail company. We’re not talking about like a .com company. It’s this very difficult

situation, because there're people all over the state. We have to come up with all these innovative ways of changing people’s lives even remotely. It's been quite a journey inside. My

employer, if anybody's listening in Florida, it's the ABC Fine Wines & Spirits retail chain.


PMR 309 Transcript

[00:09:10] AVH: Wow! That is fascinating. I would never have even thought about that

approach. I mean, like you said, your boss, this individual is really forward-thinking in a way that a lot of companies aren't, I guess.

[00:09:21] CS: Yes, and there really isn't a model for this even. It’s kind of the closet model is

called direct primary care where the primary care doctor does not accept insurance and the people pay directly, but this has to be the way of the future. Because if it's not, then the country

is going to just go bankrupt and we’re going to be a laughingstock of the world, because we’re spending so much money on health insurance. The health insurance costs have tripled since

2000, and between 2000 and when I started in medicine, they had like gone up more than 10 times. It's just employers are footing the bill of this whole healthcare crisis and no one's really

helping them.

[00:10:02] AVH: Yeah. I mean, it's an issue where we’re seeing – Maybe in this bubble that I live in, in this like sort of health and wellness kind of nerd bubble, we’re seeing more functional

medicine physicians and practitioners and people who do this sort of much more in-depth relationship-based interaction with their patients or their clients in a way that the average person

is not getting to experience or see. You wonder, it would be great if we could sort of fl ip the switch and everybody would have that kind of in-depth, long-term, really holistic, knowledge-

based relationship with their doctor, but we don't have the capacity for that even if we could, if we wanted to, right?

[00:10:38] CS: Yeah. The thing is that it doesn't even – Like most of what I'm doing with people,

like going shopping in the grocery store, it’s not something you need to be a doctor. Really, the better solution is just helping people understand that there used to be this thing called cooking

that had almost like become, “Oh! How queen? Do you actually live in the kitchen?” That’s the problem right there.

I mean, once you take people away from self-sufficiency, they’re at the mercy of whatever

company or fat or whatever, and that's where people are now. Most people nurse themselves through fast food, and that's really the problem and that's what I'm struggling against. Therefore,

the solution is really almost entirely culinary.


PMR 309 Transcript

You don’t need that. That’s what I kind of like – I’m still a square peg in a round hole in the

sense that within the functional medicine movement and everything, you don't need all these fancy tests. You just need to get – You don’t need all kinds of expensive supplements and stuff.

What you really need is very simple, and I outlined that in The Fat Burn Fix.

[00:11:54] AVH: Yeah. I mean, you mentioned that the biggest intervention really is culinary, but I would also add to it that there is like a mindset or there is a behavioral sort of component to it

too, because it seems like one of the things that makes North America so uniquely positioned for this problem is what makes the country so great and what makes it problematic, is that we

have everything. We have everything. Everything come super easily. We want everything immediately. We want it cheaply. We want to do very little work to get it, and I’m talking about

food and nourishment and entertainment and the fact that we can go through our entire day and walk less than 100 steps if we want to and sort all of these issues where we’ve now not only

have we backed ourselves into a corner where life is so easy that we don't want to have to work hard, but we also think that we shouldn't have to and that food should be ready in one second

and we shouldn't have to take any time to do it and we shouldn't have to seek out better ingredients. We shouldn't have to put any work in.

I’m not trying to assert condemn the listeners because I think we’re all in this together. We’re all

sort of experiencing this cultural shift where we shouldn't have to ever really work very hard for these things when in the entirety of human history up until very recently eating, procuring food,

and making food, and eating food was like a massive part of our day and resources and all of that. I’m not saying we have to go back to 100% to it, but finding some kind of happy medium

where we don't think that everything should be hyper palatable and super cheap and super easy. But how do you go back? How do you like stall progress in that way? How do you go back

when we have this culture that encourages the exact opposite of what our health requires?

[00:13:34] CS: Yeah. Actually, that’s what I've been struggling with myself, and the solution I came up with is basically refined down into what The Fat Burn Fix is all about, because what I

came to realize over the years of working with people and watching all these different movements starting with like there was a low-carb movement back in the early 2000's, and then

paleo came long, and then keto has come along, and all that works because of one thing, and that is – Be ready for it.


PMR 309 Transcript

[00:14:06] AVH: Ready. Fix it. Fix our problem.

[00:14:09] CS: Whether or not you can burn your body fat. After all these years of work, it all boils down to you are you burning your body fat or not? That's what is the number one

determinant of your health at any moment in time. It’s more important than your family history than whether you smoke, than whether you exercise. It may be as important as sleep, if not

more.

What I came to realize is that my patients with weight problems and with diabetes and even who didn't have diabetes or weight problems but we’re getting cancer and autoimmune diseases,

they all could not burn their body fat. It’s like body fat is this organ of our bodies and it’s the biggest organ in our body, right? We don’t usually think of body fat as an organ, but it is,

because in every sense of the word, it is an organ. It has a specific function. It has hormones that it produces to communicate with other organs just like the brain, just like the liver, just like

the heart. It's got a nervous system. It's got every definition of the word.

What happens when people get any of these chronic diseases that we are now struggling with, and so I am including a huge category, neurodegenerative diseases, dementia, all of these are

connected by the fact that our body that is essentially been hijacked by the junk food industry and no longer serves us. In The Fat Burn Fix I talk about your body, what it does and how this

happens.

[00:15:43] AVH: Okay. This is what I want to start digging into? Because essentially what I read and what I'm hearing is that the premise and the conversation we have to have is that our body

– Many of us, our bodies no longer know how to burn our body fat as fuel when that is really what it's there for, and that's because of the problematic sort of lifestyle and food choices that

we’re making. It's really less about vilifying carbs or vilifying any particular macronutrient. It's more about how do we get back to that place where we can relearn how to use our own body fat

the way it was intended, and there's obviously a lot more to that. That's essentially what we’re talking about, right?


PMR 309 Transcript

[00:16:23] CS: Exactly, and it shouldn’t be something we have to even think about. But the

reason that we do is because, like I said, it’s been hijacked by our body fat. Literally is owned, you could say, by the junk food industry, and I’m including, of course, fast food chains. Most

obvious junk food, and even so-called health foods that people buy in the freezer and many, many restaurants. In fact, the majority of restaurants, because of one thing that's happened that

I've been talking about it and one other person has been talking about it, but we are these two lone voices in the wilderness talking about, and that is the fact that most of the fats that we eat

now come from these refined, bleached, deodorized seed oils that are high in polyunsaturated fatty acids. That one sentence, there’s a lot in there, I know, but it needs to be unpacked to

understand really what it's all about.

[00:17:21] AVH: Okay. I do want to dig into the vegetable oil conversation, because like you said, I think the current conversation is much more about sugar is the enemy, carbs are the

enemy. So I want to dig down into some of the science around the vegetable oils, but just to kind of start again from a larger perspective and drill in, one of the things that I thought was so

interesting about the approach in your book is that instead of maybe addressing immediately what most people are stressed about, which is like fat loss, right? Maybe they're coming to you

or they’re trying to read more books or trying to learn about keto, because they are overweight and they want to lose fat.

One of the things that you mention is that you sort of you come at it with the approach of gaining

and regaining your energy first, like just your energy before you focus on restricting and lowering body fat and losing weight and doing this. It's more about like filling yourself up first

with good staff before you try to kind of bring things back down. How you have to prime your metabolism to get more energy and to burn fat. Can we come to start there and go from that

point?

[00:18:24] CS: Yeah, absolutely, because I think that many people assume that they can just adapt a keto diet or a paleo diet and then experience weight loss. But some people can, some

people can’t. What happens is that if you are not able to burn your body fat efficiently between meals, you are going to get hungry and feel bad when you change your habits dramatically.

That gets in the way of long-term success because people can – With willpower alone, they can


PMR 309 Transcript

sustain an amazing amount of dietary restriction and forcing their body to use body fat in spite of

the fact that the body fat is actually further damaging their body as they burn it.

What I'm talking about is inflammation. Because of these vegetables oils, our body fat like build up these polyunsaturated fatty acids over time and it gets to a certain concentration in our body

fat where it's just too high for life to be normal anymore. What that means is your body fat is supposed to be like this source of energy, right? It’s supposed to be, of course, you eat

something and then you don't have to plan your meal to sustain you. If you skip a meal or miss a meal or don't have a snack that you are you still at a certain time, you just start burning your

body fat. We've taken for granted that that will happen, but it absolutely doesn't happen once you've gotten to this threshold where there's too much of the wrong kinds of fats in your body fat

and it just can't sustain your energy.

At that point, you’re really not ready to lose weight just yet. You can try, but I really don't want you to focus on that, right? Some people if they have like 200 pounds to lose or 100 pounds,

yeah, they will lose weight doing just about anything because of course they stop eating all kinds of junk food, and that’s sort of an easy win. But it doesn't go on for very long and they’re

really not ready to restrict calories to a point where – Because calories do matter, right? In all this macronutrient conversation, you kind of don't get reminded very much that calories do

matter. We talk about, “Oh, okay. Well, as long as I have a snack that’s keto or paleo or whatever, I'm good to go.” No. Of course, then you can eat way too many calories and you won’t

lose weight.

In order to be healthy enough to lose weight, what The Fat Burn Fix does is it helps you understand when you're ready to lose weight. There is a test, a quiz in there called know your

fat burn factors or your fat burn factor quiz. That tells you, that number tells you whether or not you're ready to lose weight, very simple. If you're not, it gets you ready to lose weight.

What happens in between the not ready and the ready is exactly what you said. You are gaining

energy because you are no longer having these sugar swings, because when you're not ready to burn body fat, that’s very closely tied to developing pre-diabetes and diabetes or being

diabetic. We have to basically help you understand that your body, if you're not burning body fat, you are instead dependent on sugar, and that's where all these crazy out-of-control sugar


PMR 309 Transcript

cravings and carb cravings come from and that needs to be addressed metabolically before you

can really have long-term success or before the weight loss gets you to really where you want to be.

[00:22:06] AVH: Got it. Okay. This feeds in really well to my next question, because talking

about energy and having your body in the right place to work as efficiently as it can and how that relates to metabolism and/or mood swings and being hangry and weight gain that we don't

want and all of that stuff, can you talk about how your body and being prepared for weight loss or fat loss and being able to use fat as fuel, how that relates to a healthy metabolism, because I

feel like there's so much confusion around like what metabolism is and how it works in the body. There are all these conversations about damaging your metabolism and having, “I just have a

slower metabolism, or it gets slower as I age, or you just have a fast metabolism. That's why you can eat anything.” I don't think that's a thing. I don't think slow or fast metabolism really the

way we think of it is a thing, but maybe if you could clear that up for us.

[00:22:57] CS: Exactly. That is such an important point, because everyone thinks about, “Oh, well. Your metabolism slows down as you age. That's why weight gain is inevitable. But, no.

That's really happening as you age is that your metabolism is becoming sick and not able to access the primary source of energy, and then being body fat, and you have to increasingly rely

on this emergency or secondary fuel called blood sugar.

As that happens, the first thing that people notice is they start to get hangry. This term hangry, which is a mixture of hunger and anger, that term didn't exist 20 years ago. I don't know why

we're not like all shocked that all the sudden people are no longer just hungry and have a good appetite. They’re angry and they need to get something with carbs or protein. Some people are

metabolically damaged and they cut their carbs, but they've gotten really good at converting protein to sugar. That right there is why it can be dangerous to start restricting calories before

you're ready, because your body will simply switch over from burning the carbs that you used to get in your snack or your meals, and if you suddenly cut those out or cut your calories and you

don't get enough of those, then in many cases your brain will say, “Oh, okay. Well, I got to get sugar from somewhere.” So it tells the liver to start breaking down your muscles and convert the

protein, the amino acids in the muscle, into glucose or other sugars so that the brain can get the


PMR 309 Transcript

energy it needs. That’s what I mean by metabolic damage and unhealthy metabolism. That’s

what happens as we are gaining weight with age.

The only reason that age plays a factor here is it's very simple, because we've gotten to a point where our body fat is now more concentrated in these polyunsaturated fatty acids than our body

fat can handle and that our body can handle. It’s like a personal PUFA threshold, right? Where maybe your body fat concentration of polyunsaturated fatty acids is twice as high as it should be

or 10 times as high as it should be, but different people have different thresholds and they reach it at different ages depending on their different habits.

That's what happens as people, like say, they'll have like their second baby and they’ll be like,

“Well, I just can't lose the weight like [inaudible 00:25:33] for my first baby.” It's not so much the hormones or the pregnancy or the baby. It’s that the interplay of all of those things with the

concentration of PUFA in your body fat has now started you on this path towards increasing metabolic disruption.

[00:25:52] AVH: Okay. Let's talk about this vegetable oil issue and how like – Because that's

one of the bigger pieces, I think, of this book that people may be wouldn't expect, is that the focus isn't specifically or even primarily on carbs and sugar and how they’re across-the-board

evil or even how different fat is better or well it is, but how we've switched out this one type of dietary fat that we usually and throughout history have used and replaced it with this other one

that's causing all kinds of metabolic issues. Can we get into this? Like deep dive into the vegetable oil and what it's doing?

[00:26:25] CS: Yeah. I think this is perfect for the paleo diet listeners, because the whole point

of the paleo diet is it’s get back to doing what we used to do, right? So we never used to do any kind of seed oils. Why? Because I should say that refined, bleached, deodorized seed oils.

Why? Well, because the answers right in the description. We couldn't refine, bleach or deodorize until the industrial age. The consumption of soy, corn, canola, cottonseed, sunflower,

safflower, those are six of the most common vegetable oils, was nil, because we didn't have factories to refine these things.


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When I say polyunsaturated fatty acid, I think maybe I need to just spend a short minute talking

about what the heck that is, right? We’ve heard about saturated fat, and that’s supposed to be bad for us because it can raise your cholesterol, and having cholesterol in the blood is

supposed to be bad for you. I say supposed to be on purpose because none of all those things are actually true. It's all kind of a made up nonsense from the 1950s era. I talk about Ancel Keys

in my first book, Deep Nutrition, who basically set us on course for chronic disease by telling people that the saturated fat and butter was going to clog their arteries, when all along he was

not using butter, he was using margarine and he's kind of like the father of processed food. You could also call him the father of chronic disease. I think that would be accurate.

The other kind of oil is unsaturated oil. We’ve got saturated – Or I should fatty acids that are

composing the chemical makeup of what we eat, and it can be saturated and it could be unsaturated. Without getting into any real deep description of any of that, it has to do with the

molecule and how stable it is, really, chemically, and we should have a lot of these stable, more saturated kind of fats in our body, and the more unsaturated, the most unsaturated, we should

have very little of, and those are just called polyunsaturated fatty acids.

If you've heard of omega-3 fat, that's one of them. If you've heard of omega-6 fats, that together. Both of them are equally bad for us when we have too much in our bodies, and the only way we

can know how much we’re supposed to have is probably like among the best evidence available in all of nutrition science, and that is looking at what we used to eat and what we eat now, and

looking at our body fat percentage hundred years ago, which we actually can do, because we have biopsy data, and what is it now? You see that in tandem, the polyunsaturated fatty acids

have increased like nothing else in the diet, like nothing else in the world.

They've gone up by something like 20 times, that we consume 20 times more polyunsaturated fatty acid because of all the seed oils than we used to 100 years ago and exactly the same kind

of changes in our body fat. They used to be like something like 2% polyunsaturated fatty acid, maybe 1%, very low. Now it's like 20% to 30%, very high. What does that mean? Why does it

matter that you have all these unstable fats in your body fat?

Well, to give you an analogy to kind of help you understand what's going on. Imagine you're trying to make a cake, let's say, for the sake of argument that it's keto cake or a paleo cake.


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[00:29:49] AVH: Yeah. Nice, healthy cake.

[00:29:50] CS: Yeah. But you’re not going to get that spongy texture if it’s too liquidy, right? That's basically what's happening in our body fat. We’ve have got the wrong recipe for it. So

let's say the recipe calls for like a teaspoon of water, but you had a cup. Well, it's not going to be a well-informed cake, right? Your body fat, is it going to be different? Yes, absolutely. One of the

reasons actually that we see people who have very low body fat concentrations still getting cellulite is because the inflammation in the body fat in that unstable fatty acids is breaking down

the supporting structure that’s supposed to keep our fat looking nice and smooth and plump like a baby. I've even seen babies that have cellulite, and that’s like another thing that just should be

this giant red flag that something is dramatically wrong with our body fat.

[00:30:46] AVH: Okay. I’d like to stop you there just before you go too much further, because I always thought as much as we all dislike it, I always thought that especially for women that

cellulite was to a certain extent a relatively normal and even healthy type of fat for us to have, like the appearance of cellulite indicates a type of fat that is relatively normal and healthy for

women to have. Are you saying that's not the case?

[00:31:08] CS: It is not the case. No. No. Just like babies. Just like babies. The fat should be smooth. When I say cellulite, what I'm talking about is the appearance where when you kind of

squeeze it, it gets that cottage cheesy lumpy. That happens for a reason. It happens because the supporting tissues in your body fat are actually what's creating those downward dimples. But

if you had enough supporting tissues, there would be so many of them that there is no downward dimple.

[00:31:39] AVH: Got it. Interesting. Yeah, I had never knew that. I assumed like the way that

we’re told that sort of women carry their fat in different places, which is normal in terms of like hips and butt and for reproductive reasons, and men tend carry in other places. But I always

thought it was like part of the conversation that cellulite was just sort of like comes with the territory.


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[00:32:00] CS: Cellulite is kind of a warning sign that your body fat is not as healthy as it should

be and –

[00:32:07] AVH: Why do so many more women get it than men? Because it seems like there's just as many men suffering from obesity or nutrition and lifestyle related overweight as women.

Why are we getting so much more cellulite?

[00:32:20] CS: Yeah, because we’re better at building fat and worse at building connective tissues. The fl ipside of what guys get is they get fat building up in their arteries instead of in

their body fat before we do. While we get cellulite, they get heart attacks and die.

[00:32:37] AVH: Okay. We did kind of get the better end of the [inaudible 00:32:39] on that one a little bit. All right. Okay. That's interesting. I had no idea. I mean, going back to the

conversation too, and sorry to interrupt, I just had to go down that because I think that's something that people would probably be questioning. This conversation also leads into a term

that I read in the book that I had never heard before, and I think this what you're speaking about, which is fat toxicity. So it's your own fat that's now toxic to even yourself, right?

[00:33:04] CS: Exactly, because of that concentration of PUFAs. How is it toxic? Well, for one

thing, the fat itself is not functional. In other words, you get to a point, and this doesn't happen at the very beginning where the body fat is just not able to accept new shipments of energy, and

body fat is the organ that stores extra energy, whether it came from fat, protein, or carbohydrate. It doesn't matter. It at all gets converted into fat and it’s supposed to be stored in your body fat

and your body fat is supposed to accept new shipments of extra energy quickly to clear it out of your arteries.

But what happens when your body fat is toxic enough, and this is once you've gone all the way

down the metabolic disruption spectrum to either pre-diabetes or diabetes. They’re almost – They’re very similar diseases. They really should have the same name. Once you're sort of a

full-blown diabetic or pre-diabetic, that at the point where now your body fat is so damaged that it cannot even store more energy effectively and so it stays in your arteries and you see this in

your blood test in the form of reducing your HDL, which they say is the so-called good


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cholesterol, and increasing triglycerides, which is just the fact in your artery. The amount of fat in

your arteries goes up in proportion to how sick your body fat is.

In the very, very beginning of this though, your body fat is still able to store fat. In fact, it spends more time storing than releasing, and that's not how it should be. That's how this hangar and

everything come in. You start whirling like you just don't have any energy once you've used up the calories from your last meal or put them away in storage.

[00:34:48] AVH: Is really the only way to minimize or mitigate the fat toxicity that may be many

of us are just walking around with all of the time because of extra fat and because of the things that we ate to get that extra fat, there is really no way to get rid of that than to actually physically

lose your excess body fat, right?

[00:35:09] CS: Well, yes and no. There’s a saying in toxicology called the solution is dilution. You can start improving the health of your body fat before you lose a pound, because if you start

eating healthy fats or what I call the clean, burning facts, which are basically just the traditional high-fat foods, like eggs or meats with the fat included. When you get ground beef, don't get the

lean kind, get the regular kind, and butter and stuff like that.

Traditional high-fat foods, olive oil, of course, avocado oil, coconut oil, these actually the preferred fuels, and that's what our body fat is used to storing because they're high in saturated

and monounsaturated fatty acid in very little of the unstable polyunsaturated fatty acids, or PUFAs. Because of that, when we eat more of those, we’re basically almost like diluting out the

effect of the PUFAs, because they still do get released into our circulation whenever we go long enough without eating and ourselves burn them at their peril. But as time goes by and ourselves

get more and more of the healthy stable clean burning fats from the good fats and oils, then the concentration actually starts to drop. In other words, you can change the composition of your

body fat even without changing the amount of your body fat.

[00:36:43] AVH: Interesting. Okay, I did not know that. I assumed, because I think I had read somewhere. This is why you’re here, Cate, to fix these things for us. To fix these

misconceptions, because I was under the understanding that the fat is where we hold our toxins, generally. I think animals are the same way and that's why you said it's common


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knowledge that if you can afford sort of the best quality animal products or protein, you want to

get like leaner cuts, generally, because that's where the kind of bad stuff is going to be. I had always kind of worked under the conception that like you can't – What's in your fat is in your fat,

and the only way to get rid of it is just to lose that fat and kind of start over again with a better diet. But that's not completely the case.

[00:37:21] CS: Well, when we’re talking about polyunsaturated fatty acids, that’s a bit different,

because unlike mercury and PCBs and other fat soluble toxins – A lot of toxins are not fat soluble and we don’t store them in our body fat, but some are. If we’ve had a lot of exposure to

fat soluble toxins, sure, our body fat will have those things, but that’s a whole different issue, because those things are simply toxic and we also consume them in minute quantities

compared to how much polyunsaturated fatty acid we have, right?

You can do a biopsy and see how much your exposure mercury is and it's going to be like in 1 billionth of a gram would be the concentrations, but these polyunsaturated fatty acids, they

would be present in gram amount. So a billion times more, right? They’re much, much more prevalent and it’s because they're not actually supposed to be toxins. It’s just that the

concentration is way out of order.

I mentioned earlier that omega-3, the fish oil and omega-6 are both kinds of polyunsaturated fatty acids. We actually needs some of these in our diet because our bodies can't make them,

right? This is what’s confusing about toxicology, because something that’s actually a nutrient can become toxic when we have too much of it. Vitamin A is kind of a classic thing. You can liver

failure from too much vitamin A in your diet. If you've too much vitamin D, of course, it has side effects too. You can hypercalcemia and have seizures and die.

When it comes to toxicology, we have to appreciate that the dose makes the poison, and that’s

true for everything. Even true for things like aluminum, right? We don't want that much aluminum in our body, but we've grown up or we’ve evolved in a world where aluminum is in the

soil. So we can handle a certain amount and it's just fine. I'm not going to say it's good for us. We don't need it, but we can handle it and it’s just like you don't need to get your hair wet on a

daily basis. When you go out raining, you don't need to have like your clothes ruined, but it's not going to – It’s not permanent. That's how like the level of some of these things our bodies are


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able to – We have kidney enzymes and liver enzymes. That can handle and process and help to

eliminate some of the toxins in the environment, but the amount of polyunsaturated fatty acid that we’re consuming at the current level is simply toxic. Fortunately, the solution is dilution. You

can just stop being it and start eating healthy fats and your body will take care of everything. It’s not like you have to go through chelation or have any special kind of a detox going on. You just

stop doing what's bad for you and start doing what's good for you, and it fixes everything.

[00:40:14] AVH: Oh! If only it was so easy, right? If it was just that easy. Okay, so let's then talk about – I kind of want to talk a little bit about some specific maybe food recommendations or

things that you talk about the book, because there were a couple things in there that I also thought were a little bit unique in the current conversation. One thing that I do appreciate is that

you talk a lot – I feel like you approach the food part of this in a very sort of realistic and inclusive way, because I think that there's a lot of – We tend to latch on the things that are like

click bait or things that seem extreme. So people can either dismiss it outright or they can say, “Okay. Well, this is the new crazy thing. Let's do that.”

I think about like the carnivore diet, for example, which I could actually get into. I can dabble

with that here and there, but I'm not extreme enough to like just say I'm going to eat animal protein for the rest of my life, but people latch on to it because it’s tis very specific thing. It's easy

to follow even if it sounds a little bit extreme and crazy.

But one of the things that I think you do is that you do a really good job of explaining things that are less good, introducing things that are better, but it's very much like sort of replacing or

offering better alternatives to things that people are already going to eat. Maybe this is just sort of a convoluted way of saying that I think you’re offering, like you're setting realistic expectations

and offering realistic options to people who aren't going to go from maybe 30 years of eating standard American diet to suddenly eating just only green leafy vegetables and organic protein.

There are so many steps that have to happen in between to make this like a realistic

sustainable lifestyle for people. I really appreciate that. But I guess like just to start, like let's talk about – We’re getting rid of these vegetable oils, and so we can say, “Okay, we don't want

anything that's cooked in canola oil or we don't want to cook with that ourselves,” but this stuff


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shows up in almost everything we’re eating, right? What are some like good rules of thumb to

just like immediately start cutting out these oils that are just bad for us?

[00:42:16] CS: One of the rules of thumb is to start assessing where these things get into your body, and you simply do that by turning around every item you buy that has an ingredients list

and reading the ingredients. It's the teeny tiny thing underneath the nutrition label. If it lists one of the three C or three S oils, so that’s corn, cottonseed, canola, soy, sunflower, safflower,

everybody should memorize that list. If it lists one of those, then it’s suspect and you might still be able to get it, but that depends on whether or not it's like really just going to be present and

something like a spice blend, because they'll add it to – Like let's say you're buying – One of things I recommend often to my patients is rotisserie chicken. Rotisserie chicken is basically

chicken that's rotated on a stick and stewing in its own fat in its own juices mostly, but there can be some spices on the outside.

If there is a rub of a spice blend and they put canola oil in there, that's not enough to worry

about. You got to get in the habit of looking and then you have to kind of understand that they list things on the back, on the ingredients list, in order of amounts. The first thing is the thing

that's present in the most amount, and the last thing is the least amount.

Some of the common things, so rotisserie chicken, even if it has some, it's not going to be a lot. Because even if it was the oil that was used, it's on the outer surface. So it doesn't penetrate

that far. But some of the things I tell people about that they don't even usually suspect is like salad dressings, because how many people go on a diet and they want to eat salads or they

start ordering salads at restaurants or having salads delivered. Our company did that.

Before my boss read Deep Nutrition, he had orders shipped from a friend of his who had a restaurant delivery service and all of their salads were just loaded up with soy oil, and that is a

PUFA-rich soil and you don't want that. Salad dressings is one big thing. So I just teach people, “Just get your olive oil and a little bit of vinegar and make your own dressing. It is the easiest

thing in the world. If you can open a jar, you can do it.”

Then another thing that’s super common is mayonnaise, right? When I was working with the Lakers, I found out that mayonnaise was like their favorite condiment. They used it for


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everything and their favorite dressing was ranch dressing, which is very often heavily made with

mayonnaise. I had a conversation with Mark Sisson where he was talking about how he was going to make salad dressings, and I told him, “Forget that. Just make mayo.” Then he had a

consultant that said the same exact thing. So that’s, I think, was their number one bestseller for like the longest time before they ended up selling the company.

[00:45:18] AVH: Yeah. Their mayo is delicious, by the way. Thank you for that.

[00:45:22] CS: Now it’s available in like regular – It’s available even at Walmart, rate? That

wasn’t the case when I first started. It was very difficult to find a substitute. But now if you have mayo, you can make deviled eggs. You can make tuna salad. You can make ranch dressing and

you can even make a regular sandwich if you use the right kind of bread, which is a whole other conversation about carbs and the good carbs and the bad carbs. I don’t know if you want to get

into that or finish out the conversation with that first.

[00:45:49] AVH: Yeah. I think this is like a conversation that could go on all day and all week if we wanted to. it I think that one of the things for people to sort of like internalize is we tend to

like be better at understanding the extremes of a topic or a conversation, and I think that most people aren't going to be 100% perfect, aren't going to get rid of every single source of carbs in

their life. They aren’t going to stop eating mayo, like all of these things.

Just educating ourselves and what the better options are. Maybe there’s better timing to eat certain things. There are certainly better ingredients to make better versions of the things they

want to eat. There is substitutions that make more sense depending on the time in your life or the goals that you have or whatever, and I think that that sort of nuanced conversation is more

important than the conversation that people are having where it’s like just never eat X, Y, Z ever again ever in your life. If you do, it's horrible. Because that works for some people, but a very

small subset of people.

What you just said there, we’ve got to take a detour here and talk about the work you do with the Lakers, because obviously you can't drop that and then we not talk about it, because that's

way too cool. But it's also interesting to note that like you were working for the LA Lakers. You were a consultant for them and helping them with their nutrition. I’ll let you talk about that. But


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these were elite athletes that were eating like terrible food, a lot of them, right? We think that

elite athletes, you have to be on a different level than the rest of us, but they're having the same struggles or the same misinformation as we are too. Yeah, tell us about your time with the

Lakers.

[00:47:17] CS: Yeah. We're talking about kids who grew up – many of them grew up in households where they were not privileged at all. I mean, some were, but they had what’s kind

of a miracle that they were able to get enough protein to build the big long bones that they didn't get enough calcium and stuff like that. But so many did not know anything about vegetables and

before the game and after the game they would just eat stadium food, right? Because that's what's there.

If you think about it, how else are they going to eat? You would think that their organization

would feed them better than stadium food, but they didn't at the time now actually. That’s one of the big things that I did when working with the Lakers is I pointed out, “You guys, this is not even

– You can’t use this for anything in your body. It’s just recipe for aches, more aches and pains, more injuries, shortening your career, to have all this vegetable oil and high-carb garbage,” like

nacho chips with the fake cheese and all kinds of weird fries and deep-fried everything.

That was one of the first things that we did was just have actually catered real food to the stadium. So that during the breaks and after the games, they could actually get their hands in

something that wasn't toxic. That was one of the first things. Then also we worked with the chef at the Lakers training facility name Sandra Padilla. She's a fantastic chef. She’s still there and

she's got like an Instagram. You can follow her on Instagram and see what she does. Basically, she was one of nine children of Mexican-American family and she grew up in the kitchen just

cooking every traditional possible things.

When I told her, “Look, you can just keep doing that, but please don't use anything with vegetable oil in it and try not to use so much sugar and flour.” She was like, “Oh! Yeah, great.

Well, this how I grew up.” So she just got permission to do what she loved anyway, and her cooking, like a lot of the guys didn't even know there was a program because I wasn't able to

get down there very often. But they just knew it was the best food that they'd had in their lives.


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[00:49:26] AVH: Yeah. How about convincing, or I guess convincing isn't the right word, but

encouraging in teaching and working on compliance with athletes. Because I think another thing that you touched on is that sometimes people don't even make the connection that what they're

eating is going to have an effect on their performance or how they feel, right? It's like does this fi ll me up? Do I enjoy eating it? Do have some energy right now? People don't think maybe

consistently over the long term that like what I'm putting into my body is really going to have a tangible impact on my performance and my ability to be an athlete.

But with that said, when you come in and may be completely uproot like what they've always

been eating and saying like, “Look, we’re going to try this completely different way.” What was some of the feedback? What was some of the response? Were people kind of just jumping on it

right away and saying let's try this or did you have to kind of work a little harder to get people on board?

[00:50:15] CS: It was no problem to get them on board, because they loved the food that we

were serving them. Now when it came to what we weren't serving them, what they did at home, that was a challenge for them as it would be a challenge for everybody, except for those who

had their own personal chefs.

I tried to make the case that at their level when their bodies or there meal tickets, their paycheck depends on their bodies, that the investment of a personal chef at around $50,000 a year, even

if it just extended their million dollar minimum yearly contracts by a single year would pay for itself. That's what my main argument was, was just, “Guys, you can afford. It’s silly not to. Go

ahead and get a personal chef, and then I'll work with them.”

That’s what I did for a few of them, but because of what you said, which is so important that people don't make the connection between what they eat and their health, because they don't

have the experience of knowing what to look. They don’t know what to look for, honestly. That’s what The Fat Burn Fix does, is it kind of teaches you, “Okay. Well, if you're having this happen

to you, this might be why. So consider doing that.”

That was what a lot of my work with them was, was to help them understand that, “Okay. Well, if you're hungry, this hungry, that means that you have a metabolic problem, right? So let's have


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you include more healthy fats in your diet.” I did that with a number of them as well, and those

guys who were all on it, which was mostly the guys who either hired a personal chef or could cook, like Jeremy Lin. Oh my God! He's an amazing cook.

Jeremy Lin still actually now working with – He’s still in the NBA, but I think Chris came as

retired, but they both were so good at just jumping on a cooking for themselves. They immediately almost within blank days said that what had been a monkey on their back, which

was just this constant hunger that they always had to feed was just gone, and that's a big deal for athletes because athletes are living on the edge of low normal or under normal in terms of

body fat percentage.

Even when your body fat is healthy, a body fat percent for men of less than 10% is borderline not enough where you can sustain healthy testosterone levels and healthy cortisol levels. A lot

of these guys were 8%, right? They were always experiencing what happens when you're in a near starvation mode, which is food fantasies and just like being driven by hunger and

distracted by hunger. How can you play at your best when you're distracted by hunger?

Anyway, that they described it as – One of them described it as a monkey on his back. Just getting they healthy fats made such a difference and it was life-changing. This is why even

though – I only spend, I don’t know, maybe a couple of hours working with a couple of these guys, they continued on it for the rest of their lives in spite of all the difficulties, right? Because it

isn't that easy to be a chef to get really good food and always be preparing it yourself.

[00:53:24] AVH: Yeah. I would imagine , it would be also a bit trickier when you're saying – Like you're talking about super active elite athletes, also very large human beings, which is a whole

other thing, because another thing that I kind of thought was interesting in speaking to other athletes who have either undergone like a ketogenic diet or just sort of switch to a more paleo,

like just generally lower carb, higher fat than what people traditionally eat. It still looks often very different for them than it would for the “average person”, and that's where it goes back to this bio

individuality and having to do kind of the hard work of experimenting and figuring out what works for you.


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I know I spoke to an MMA athlete who was doing a training camp and they said they were

eating like keto or keto adjacent. I mean, they were eating probably twice the carbs that I would eat on like a high carb day, but they’re also doing super high-intensity work for six hours a day,

right? Their body is just working differently using different fuel in a different way. I would imagine it would be kind of an interesting experiment working with a 6 foot 8, 8% body fat athlete versus

me, for example. It’s a completely different diet for him.

[00:54:38] CS: Yeah, absolutely. They have different needs, and they do need more, like on a grand basis, carbohydrate, but like on a percent of lean body mass, I don't think it's going to be

that much different.

[00:54:47] AVH: Right. Interesting. Yeah, that’s very cool. One of the other things I have to ask a specific food that you talk about quite a bit in the book that I was kind of surprised about is

dairy, and dairy is something that is I think often quite maligned in this kind of conversation and in the whole foods, paleo, and is it paleo, because no other animal eats another animals,

whatever.

I have done DNA testing and I am able to tolerate dairy, and I know that just inherently from experimenting with food and knowing that I actually do quite well with dairy and high-quality like

raw milk and high-fat cream and cheese and things like that. I know that it seems like it's a conversation where most people do not tolerate it well, and you get into the book about how

sometimes that's just the type of dairy or the way it's processed or the amounts or maybe that kind of thing. But you do seem to be maybe more pro-dairy than most people in this world are.

So can you talk about that a little bit?

[00:55:42] CS: Yeah. The reason we have leg dairy issues is mostly food allergies, right? We have food allergies to the foods that are in the most processed foods. That's why the top

allergens for long time have always been wheat, soy, egg, dairy and I think there’s one other one, but that’s what they've always been the top allergens, because they’re in the most

processed food, and what that does is it alters the proteins and arrives in the gut in this [inaudible 00:56:11] of pro-inflammatory vegetable oils and highly refined carbohydrates.


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I'm talking about like any infant formula. Just take a look at that. What the protein is? If it's a

dairy, it’s probably going to be dairy protein or a soy protein and it's going to have some kind of a vegetable oil and a ton of sugar in there. That's where many, many children now are starting

their lives on this recipe for food allergies.

It's not the food is the problem. We’ve been blaming the food, but it's actually our immune systems have been altered by the fact that we've been consuming – Many of us have been

weaned on processed foods, and if not like pre-weaned. Our formula is like that’s what you live in. You survive on processed foods as a baby.

Then we move over to different processed foods, which have all these processed proteins in

them. That’s I think where the problem with these foods originates, because when I first started in practice, I have to tell you that it was the rare child that had any kind of problem with peanuts,

or soy, or textural issues, or anything like that. That was like almost nonexistent.

The tests that we have were just confirmatory, like all these blood tests that we do to see if your food, if you have an allergy to a given food. They were designed 20 years ago, a generation

ago, and they are not to be used in the way that most people now who are not allergists, like medical doctor allergists are using. Unfortunately, they're using these standalone diagnostic

agents and they're not meant to be like that. they're just an assist to when you've already done an elimination diet and an extensive food history to kind of confirm.

In most cases, they’re not even usefully. You still have to ignore them. The gold standard is an

elimination diet, which by the way has a lot to do with the success of things like the carnivore diet, because we almost never encounter beef proteins in processed food other than like

relatively whole foods. When I say processed food, I really mean like unrecognizable, to the point of unrecognizability. It's a white powder or a clear oil, like the vegetable oils.

The reason that the carnivore diet helps so many people and it's something that I totally support

it, is because it quickly gets them away from whatever they may be allergic to because very few people are actually allergic to whole meat proteins. It works well for a lot of people as a – I want

to reduced my inflammation quickly and feel better quickly. However, people, if they start to feel bad on it, then I think that's when they might need to add back a lot of stuff that I talked about in


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The Fat Burn Fix, but it's not necessarily something you have to sustain. Really, it’s an easy way

to get you away from vegetable oils and highly refined carbohydrates. If you’re just eating meat, you just don't get that stuff, especially if you’re cooking in the right oils, which so far all the

books that I've seen, they emphasized the right kind of fats.

[00:59:09] AVH: Right. I think one of the – Again, just to kind of like double down on the dairy conversation and like the gluten conversation, and there like a little bit of nuance here, the

difference between foods that are just sort of inherently bad or that humans aren't supposed to eat. It's not so much that’s the case. It's more that it's like combinations with other things that

are less beneficial. It's the amount of these products that we’re eating and the processing that goes into them that's causing problems in our ability to digest or tolerate or make use of these

things.

It's kind of like there's sort of a slight difference in how we explain these things, like dairy is just bad. You shouldn't have it after your weaned as a baby, versus it's just sort of the type and the

way that it’s processed and the way that we’re fitting into the rest of our diet. There're all these other factors that are making it problematic, right? Is that right?

[01:00:02] CS: Right. What you said is 100% the professing. One of the most persistent

interesting arguments I hear against dairy is that we’re the only animal that consumes another animal’s milk, which actually is not true. If you go to a zoo, you’re going to see that the animals

there are raised on other animals’ milk and they’re just lying. Of course, the zoos is a man-made construct, but even in the wild, there are reports of the wrong kind of a mother losing their

babies and then nursing another species, right?

Even that isn't quite true. But what is 100% truth that we are the only animal that processes our food, and by which when I say process, I mean it makes it unrecognizable. Talking about either

a white powder or a clear oil. We’re definitely the only animal that does that, and we are also the only animal that in so doing generates chronic disease not just for us, but for any other species

that's unlucky enough to be fed by us, because most of our pet foods have a lot of these junk in them too.


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One of my favorite passages in Deep Nutrition is where I talk about the standing in the grocery

store or looking at a box of Cheerios and walking around the store and looking at the ingredients in hamburger helper, and then finally in pet food, right? The ingredients are almost identical. You

still see wheat flour and hydrolyzed vegetable protein or hydrolyzed – some sort of hydrolyzed protein, maybe yeast and, very often, sugar, and definitely these vegetable oils.

[01:01:32] AVH: Yeah. I mean, if that’s not incentive to stay out of like the middle of the grocery

store, I don't know what is, right? Stick to the edges where there are no ingredients that remind you that what you're eating is essentially dog food. Ooh! Yikes! Okay.

I know we've come to an hour here. I don't want to keep you too much longer. There's so much

more we could talk about, but I kind of would like to maybe round out the conversation with another important part of the food aspect to this, which is –And you talk about in Deep Nutrition

why are genes want and need the traditional food.

One of the things that I really want to talk about specifically is you talk about bone broth and collagen and organ meats, and that's I mean about as traditional as it gets and it's a part of the

diet that has been so largely eradicated in the Western world, which I think is to our detriment. But can you kind of talk a little bit about what traditional food means to you and why that's so

important for us?

[01:02:25] CS: When we wrote Deep Nutrition, we systematically analyzed what all cuisines around the world had in common. We did this because at the time books like the Blue Zones

were coming out and they are talking about the Okinawa diet or the French paradox or the Mexican paradox and all these paradoxes around people who traditionally had lots of fat in their

diet and were healthy, or what is the secret? What is the secret to this diet or that diet or the other diet? They were all like, “What’s the healthiest diet? Oh! This one. That one.”

We said, probably, people around the world use the same exact strategies to extract nutrition

from their environment because people think the same way, right? We ate what tasted good and we hunted. If there was something that we could grow or that was already growing, we’d eat

that too without much hesitation.


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What we looked at is what were the common elements around the world before processed

foods came along and before McDonald's came along when people were self-sufficient and sustaining themselves off their own environment? How do you find those things? Well, you just

look at cookbooks from before the great change in whatever country that was. In this country, it was about 120 years ago.

We looked at cookbooks from the 17 and 1800s here and also looked to the work of Weston

Price. Had a lot of good fun watching a lot of travel shows where they would say, “Well, this is a traditional meal.” We always saw the same for things. We saw the four pillars of the human diet,

that’s fresh food for [inaudible 01:03:54] and sprouted food. That’s two pillars. Third pillar was meat on the bone, which includes the collagen, the skin, and the joint material and bone stock.

The fourth was organ meat. That emphasized the fact that it was truly nose to tail eating.

Even the carnivore diet today is mostly muscle meat and fat and maybe the occasional personal will throw in some tongue or some liver, or heart, or something like that, or bone marrow maybe.

We absolutely need to – If we want to be optimally healthy, get that kind of stuff. I just lament the fact that it's so hard to make liver taste delicious. It’s horrible eating it.

[01:04:30] AVH: Yeah. Cate, I'm going to help you with that, because I'm working on a book

right now and I am experimenting with a lot of different liver recipes. I've told people before, because I get asked this question a lot, because I talk about is a lot and they’re like, “How do

you make liver taste good?” I'm like, “Maybe I'm not the best person to ask, because I like it. I don't really have to mask a lot of these foods.” I don't know why. Maybe it's like my deep

ancestral roots coming out and I just enjoy it. I love the fact that incorporating organ meat into your diet, it not only gives use so much health benefits, but you get all of these textural

differences and flavor profi les that are different. It just really spices up a meal so much more. I love a steak. I'm never going to turn that down. I love some chicken thighs, but like sometimes

it's nice to have something that's just different, right?

I think if people started approaching it with a little bit more sort of maybe open-mindedness and like adventure, an adventurous sense about what you're eating instead of like, “Well, this

doesn't taste like steak.” It’s like, “No,” because it's not. It's something different. Let's celebrate that and do something different with it and enjoy it, right?


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That's my hope that you talk about it, you talk about bone broth and organ meats and I hope that more people talking about it and just make it seem less of a scary thing, I think. Hopefully

we’ll encourage more people to just give it a shot, because I have to say, like I've never eaten anything that made me feel healthier than when I eat organ meats. Truly, like you've been

walking out in the desert all day and you're thirsty and you haven't had anything to drink and you have some like cold water and you feel it go through your body and you're just like, “That is

nourishing me.” That's how I feel when I eat organ meat, truly, in a way that I don't feel when I'm eating a chicken breast in my salad.

[01:06:08] CS: Exactly. It's a totally different sensation from the taste, and if we can just

become more aware of that, I think we will become healthier. That's kind of what one my favorite like goals, really, my secret goal, is to just get people to fall in love with culinary adventure. I

don’t mean like be a lead foodie and you have to have caviar and foie gras. No! I've just mean trying new stuff. If you've never had broccoli, try it. Try it with butter and garlic butter. If you've

never had liver, well, maybe grind up a little bit and put it or have a little bit, chop it up real small and put it in with the next and you make a realistic thick like meat sauce. We did that, and

actually, like you said, it gave it like another dimension of flavor. I'm super looking forward to being seeing what you come up with then –

[01:06:58] AVH: Yeah. I’m excited about it. I mean, you and I are on the same page, like

adventure, right? Because I feel like it's one of those things – Like I’m going to try anything once kind of person within reason, I suppose. I guess our reason, everybody has different ideas of

what reason is, but I just feel like there's so much to gain from trying new things and usually not a lot of risk, right?

If you try something new, whether it's food, or a workout, or a new book, or new whatever and

you don't like it, you just learn something about yourself. If you do like it, you've just opened up like an entire new world of fun and adventure and deliciousness and all kinds of excitement,

right? Why not just sort of apply that to the way you eat and apply it to the rest your life? I mean, it’s no brainer.


PMR 309 Transcript

[01:07:37] CS: Exactly. Believe it or not, there are ways that you can help to guarantee you're

going to like a new food. There's ways that you can make sure that you hate that new food. I actually teach people a little bit about that in The Fat Burn Fix too, and one of the key things that

has to happen though before you're really ready to enjoy new foods is if you have a sweet tooth, you have to extract it.

That's why I spend a good amount of time talking to folks about how to cut down their total

sugar or to assess their sugar and cut down on the amount gradually so that they don't feel like they're just living on willpower or depriving themselves. It's a gradual process and baby steps.

I'm just so into baby steps. Whenever somebody – I've been doing this over a long time. I've been practicing medicine for over – Like for something like 25 years and I've been in this field

20 years. I've seen so many people come to me and say, “I’ve gained and lost hundreds of pounds. I can follow with diet, but I don't stay on it.”

We need the Holy Grail, and I hope that I'm leading people to in in The Fat Burn Fix, is how do

you make it sustainable forever so you're – The carnivore diet doesn't become yet another yo-yo for you or the keto diet or even the paleo diet. How do you make it sustainable? That's what I

spent so much energy kind of rethinking over the success stories that I've had throughout my career and putting into practice actually over the years of what do we do to guarantee this

person’s success?

That's why it's a totally different weight loss book. It doesn't focus on weight loss first. It focuses on helping you understand where to start and getting more energy so that you're looking instead

on the scale. You're looking internally. I have worksheets that teach you how to assess different kinds of hunger, healthy hunger, from unhealthy hunger and how to understand that, “Okay, well

just not having a snack craving at 10 AM.” Maybe you haven’t lost a pound yet or maybe you’ve just lost some weight, but not four pounds a week. That’s a win, and that’s a win because you've

dramatically changed the fueling of your body from sugar dependent, now you're burning fat. Weather it may not be your body fat or it may have been dietary fat. Still, that’s a win and it

sustained your energy and it's good for your brain.

I talk about the four fat burn systems that you have to recover for it to be sustainable, and that's another reason why we need to understand the value of baby steps. I want to change the whole


PMR 309 Transcript

conversation away from, “Well, I lost 100 pounds in six months, and that's a big win,” to, “I

learned how to make a fast delicious breakfast that sustains me all the way to dinner so I don't need to bother with lunch.” That's a win for me.

[01:10:25] AVH: Yeah, I appreciate that so much. The baby steps and also the focus on energy

and basically vitality over just the numbers on a scale, because let's not pretend that we all don't care about losing body fat and having a good looking body and feeling good in our skin. But I

think that just the approach of like thinking about what we can add to our life first before thinking about what we take away just from a pragmatic, like psychology standpoint makes so much

more sense. We know that shaming people into changing their behaviors doesn't work and we know that making people feel bad or overwhelmed about the decisions that they have to make

doesn't work, right?

Instead, let's look at all these baby steps. Let's look at how many little choices we can make every day to make things better, because there're always a billion little choices you can make.

Instead of making that seem overwhelming, you think, “Look at all these choices. Look at these little things I can do that cumulatively are going to have this positive effect,” and we look at it in a

positive way, like let’s bring more energy and happiness and vitality into our lives rather than like, “Okay, cut this. Cut that. Do this. Do that.” I think that that's really a refreshing way to

approach it. I appreciate you putting this work out into world and I think it's going to be really helpful for people. Thank you for that.

[01:10:25] CS: Thanks, Ashleigh.

[01:11:41] AVH: Yeah, I appreciate it. Can you remind people before I let you go and beg you to

come on again and do another hour, because we’re going to need it. Before I let you go, could you tell people where they can go to get the book and the best place to maybe connect with you

online?

[01:11:54] CS: Sure. My website is drcate.com, and it’s D-R-C-A-T-E.com, and my book is already available on Amazon for pre-purchase. It's going to be released on 24th March.


PMR 309 Transcript

[01:12:08] AVH: Okay. Great. Awesome! Dr. Shanahan, thank you so much for your time and

hope to have you back soon.

[01:12:14] CS: Thanks so much, Ashleigh. It’s been great talking to you.

[END OF INTERVIEW]

[01:12:20] AVH: All right. Unfortunately, that's it for today’s episode. I could have kept cate on the line asking her questions all day long. That's the blessing and the curse of this job. I could

just keep talking all day. Keep asking questions, but people have jobs to do. I’ll have to get her back on again and chat more. If you have any questions for Cate or anything that you want me

to cover an upcoming podcast, whether it's a Q&A, or an interview with someone else, or whatever, let me know. Send me a message. You can send me an email at

[email protected]. You can reach out on social media @PaleoMagazine or myself personally @musclemaven. Take all suggestions as long as they’re friendly. Please do that,

because I'm looking for ways to improve the podcast and grow it and make it more useful for you. So please do that.

Also, don't forget that I am offering some other resources outside of this podcast if you go to my

website, ashleighvanhoutman.com. I have a weekly newsletter where I’m posting all kinds of free resources, special offers, information about upcoming events. I recipes on there. I post

about awesome people to follow, other podcasts you should be listening to, tons of free content. Just sort of a stream of consciousness of what I think is great and useful in the health and

wellness world.

So sign up for the newsletter once a week. I won't spam you any more than that. I promise. That's it. Just follow Paleo Magazine. Follow me. Keep learning, keep sharing. That's all we can

do. I hope you have a wonderful, healthy rest of your week.

[OUTRO]

[01:13:49] AVH: The intro music for Paleo Magazine radio is a song called Stronger performed by Alter Ego, and I hope you love it.


PMR 309 Transcript

[END]


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