You Were Lied To About Fat — Your Cells Are Paying the Price

Dr. Josh Axe (0:00)

There's one structure in your body that decides whether you get heart disease, cancer, or dementia, and almost no doctor will ever mention it to you. It's not an organ, it's the wall around every one of your 37 trillion cells. It's made of fat, and most people have spent 60 years building it out of the wrong kinds of fat. In a study on 42,000 people, the people that had the right type of fat built into their cell wall had a 15-18% lower risk of dying and way better health. And here's the thing about an unhealthy cell membrane, is you feel it way before a diagnosis. You'll start noticing things like brain fog, cold hands, dry skin, the 3pm energy crash, and joint stiffness. And you've been told, hey, it's just stress or it's your age, but look around you. There are 72 year olds with sharp minds and warm hands, and 40 year olds who can't hold a thought past lunch. If it were just age, that couldn't happen. And here's the part that nobody tells you. Every year you leave it, it compounds and it gets worse. Your arterial walls stiffen, your joints stiffen, your hormone receptors don't work as well, and your mitochondria starve, and your energy gets lower and lower and lower. And most of the time, your labs will stay normal. I'm Dr. Josh Axe, and I'm going to walk you through the seven ways I use with my patients to rebuild the cell wall and every study behind it. And stay to the end because I'm going to rank all seven by the biggest impact. Welcome to The Dr. Josh Axe Show.

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By the way, before we get started, do me a big favor. If this show has ever helped you, hit subscribe right now. It takes one second, and it's the number one way we get this message out to more people. And also think about the one person that could benefit from this. Maybe they've got brain fog or cold hands or hypothyroidism, and they need to hear this one. Bless them by sharing it with them. And as we go, here's what I want you to do. Count how many of these seven you're already doing, and I bet it's far fewer than you think. Now, I got turned on to cellular health because my mom was diagnosed with cancer, and what I'm about to share with you literally saved her life. I started digging into research on how can my mom heal naturally, and I came across the work of a woman named Joanna Budwig and many others, and they started to say this.

If you want to heal and fight cancer naturally, you have to get more oxygen inside the cell. And the science said, in order to do that, you have to have a healthy cell membrane. And it said literally, there are people out there, many people whose cells are starving for oxygen, and your cells also can't make ATP and cellular energy without oxygen. And they said one of the key factors at getting more oxygen inside the cell and toxins outside the cell was having a healthy cell membrane. So your cell membrane, so every cell in your body has this membrane on the outside. It's the outer part of your cell that acts as the wall. And so your cell membrane should be moldable and pliable and soft and spongy. Think about kind of like a trampoline-like material or even Play-Doh.

It should be that, and that's healthy. But what can happen to some people over time is their cell membrane can get very hard. And we actually see this in arterial plaque. If your arteries become stiffed, and we actually call it arterial calcification, it calcifies, it hardens like a rock and gets stiff. That greatly increases your risk of a heart attack and stroke. So in order to be healthy and get more oxygen inside your cell and more nutrients inside your cell and more toxins out, your cell membrane needs to be healthy, and your cell membrane is made predominantly of fat and secondarily of proteins. And the way that it works is oxygen slides straight through the fat. Okay, so it allows oxygen to come in and out if you have the right fats making up your cell membrane. And so again, your cell membrane is made up of phospholipids, cholesterol, protein, and fatty acids. And think about how crazy the low-fat diet craze was, or even doctors today saying, you know, people taking statin drugs to lower cholesterol. Your cells themselves are made up of cholesterol and fat. And there were years where doctors put people on low-fat, low-cholesterol diets. So their cell membranes and their brain and nervous system was literally deteriorating. And so what I'm going to walk you through today on today's episode is exactly how to heal your cell membrane. And it is probably one of the single greatest things will allow you to feel younger and look younger. Now, I mentioned cancer a minute ago with my mom. And so one of the things we really focused on doing was healing her cell membranes and her mitochondria in order to fight cancer. And there's some research around this. And I want to talk about how you start to fix a cell membrane or what happens in the body. So cancer cells actually can rebuild their own walls. And they do this to hide from your immune system. And there's pretty recent research. This is published in 2021 And researchers found that when tumor cells took in DHEA, this type of omega-3 fatty acid from fish oil, their walls actually broke down of the cancer cells and the cancer cells died. This was a study done on animals. And they found that omega-3 fatty acids slowed tumor growth. And the reason why this worked is what they said in the study was DHEA started to become part of that cell membrane of the cancer cell, which then allowed oxygen to get into the cell.