Unmasking the Dangers of Seed Oils with Dr. Catherine Shanahan

**Dr. Drew** (0:10)
Hey, welcome to the Dr. Drew Podcast today. Of course, support the people that support us. Let us know what you want us to hear about. We're happy to take direction and input. But today, I'm very excited to get to my guest, as I often am. But today, especially, because she is a friend, and she's a colleague. She's somebody I've admired for a long time.
She is a biochemist by early trade, and eventually became a family practitioner, because she became very involved in nutrition, was actually the nutritionist for the Lakers at one time, and has several very important books out there. I'll let her promote them. But the first one, the one I want you all to go get right now, is available as we speak. It's called Dark Calories, How Vegetable Oils Destroy Our Health and How We Can Get It Back. It's Cate Shanahan. Cate, welcome. And this vegetable oil drum, you have been beading for as long as I've known you.
So here we are.

**Dr. Catherine Shanahan** (1:02)
Here we are. And we still have where most Americans are getting massive amounts of these oils in their diet.
It's up to 30% now. When I first started writing about this, it was somewhere around 15, 20%.

**Dr. Drew** (1:17)
Oh, it's gotten worse.

**Dr. Catherine Shanahan** (1:18)
Yeah.

**Dr. Drew** (1:19)
Oh, I thought people were becoming aware of this. Is that just, is this the nonsense of the food industry that's foisting this on us?

**Dr. Catherine Shanahan** (1:27)
It's the nonsense of the American Heart Association.
And I can explain that. So like, you know, the trans fat ban that went into effect. We started taking trans fat out of the food supply in 2004 and by 2018, it was supposed to be gone. So what that effectively did was double the amount of liquid vegetable oil that people were eating, double it. So in the past, like between 2010 and 2020, obesity has doubled, vegetable oil intake, liquid vegetable oil intake has doubled.
The trans fats are not good for us, but the trans fats were invented because the edible oil industry knew that just using liquid oil in a heater, a deep fryer over and over again would generate toxicity. And so the edible oil industry was scrambling and they were unable to find a solution. This problem came to us from the American Heart Association. The American Heart Association is the reason that we're eating vegetable oils in the first place.

**Dr. Drew** (2:32)
And why are they not able to adjust course? I know bureaucracies are just terrible and we saw it in full bloom with COVID, but medicine is supposed to be able, I guess, let's be fair, they haven't changed the food pyramid in 50 years except to add fruit loops or whatever they did recently, which was unbelievable.

**Dr. Catherine Shanahan** (2:54)
Yeah, they change only for the worse, it seems like.
So, well, let's maybe dial it back to where this problem started and why I wanted to write Dark Calories, because I really want doctors, other health practitioners, dieticians, physical trainers, physical therapists, and of course the consumer to know that this problem is coming from within the medical industry, who is greatly profiting off of this. And the organization in the medical industry called the American Heart Association is actually a privately funded. A lot of people think it's the government, and so they think, like you just mentioned, bureaucracy, government, of course they can't change. But no, the American Heart Association is a private organization that educates doctors, educates other organizations about nutrition. So in other words, the American Diabetes Association, the American Cancer Society, they all look to the American Heart Association for nutrition advice. What's a healthy diet comes from the American Heart Association. And the American Heart Association is corrupt. They accepted money from the vegetable oil industry many, many decades ago now.
They accepted $1.75 million from Procter & Gamble. And Procter & Gamble had two products that were very important that they really needed to move. They had cottonseed oil and soy oil. And nobody was buying those products, but there was a ton of them, those surpluses from, because these are byproducts of other industries never used for human consumption in the past. So after the war, there were surpluses of these two oils for a variety of reasons.
And Procter & Gamble needed help unloading them and basically convincing people to eat them. So they teamed up with the American Heart Association who gladly took their money and immediately almost started promoting these oils with no evidence, Dr. Drew. They just started promoting these oils as what? As an antidote to heart attacks.