Ben Greenfield [00:00:00]: My name is Ben Greenfield, and on this episode of the Boundless Life Podcast.

Steven Rofrano [00:00:05]: Everyone knows what's your body temperature. 98.6 degrees. Right? That's the standard human body temperature. That's actually not true anymore. That was true in 1905 or 1907, when the Harvard whoever was measuring average human body temperature. People on the whole have gotten, I think, whatever that is, 15 to 20% colder.

Ben Greenfield [00:00:23]: Everybody's doing cold plunges now, bro.

Steven Rofrano [00:00:25]: Yeah. Yeah, that's it. So, yeah, people have gotten colder, which is one way of measuring average basal metabolic rate. You know, I'm not necessarily claiming that seed oils are the only cause of this drop in body temperature, but clearly something is going on with humans where we're much less metabolic than we used to be.

Ben Greenfield [00:00:45]: Welcome to the Boundless Life with me, your host, Ben Greenfield. I'm a personal trainer, exercise physiologist, and nutritionist. And I'm passionate about helping you discover unparalleled levels of health, fitness, longevity, and beyond.

Ben Greenfield [00:01:05]: It's time to get greasy. I got Anthony Gustin on the show. Anthony, didn't I have you on the show before? Like, decades ago?

Anthony Gustin [00:01:14]: It may have been like. Yeah, like 2012 or something.

Ben Greenfield [00:01:16]: Yeah, yeah, like forever. And for those of you not familiar with Anthony, he's kind of like an OG in the health industry. Former sports rehab clinician, turned entrepreneur, author, podcaster, inventor, amateur farmer. I don't know how many hats you wear, Anthony, but you're a prolific person. Also, Anthony's a functional medicine practitioner. He's a board certified chiropractor. He has a master's in science, doctor of chiropractic, and he does a lot in the healthy food industry along with Anthony.

Ben Greenfield [00:01:46]: Hooray. Surprise. We get a... get a three-way show here. Steven Rofrano, who's basically building like the Frito lay of health food and will talk a little bit about seed oils and chips and why Steven's made something as like, my new crack hanging around the pantry. But I really want to take a dive today into seed oils in general. And these chaps are a couple of the most informed dudes that I know on the topic. So I've got so many questions from you guys about, I don't know whether or not you need to avoid the cold pressed canola oil, cold food section of Whole Foods, all the way down to is this olive oil okay?

Ben Greenfield [00:02:29]: So anyways, we're gonna dive in. Anthony, Steven. Welcome to the show, fellas.

Anthony Gustin [00:02:33]: Thanks for having us.

Ben Greenfield [00:02:35]: Yeah, and there's obviously a ton of places that we could go with the whole seed oil chat. And because we have so much to cover, I'm gonna skip asking you, like, you know, what you had for breakfast and where you were born and how you were raised and all that jazz. And I just want to jump straight into the science. You guys game to do that?

Steven Rofrano [00:02:56]: Yeah, sure.

Ben Greenfield [00:02:57]: All right, cool. We'll do it. So I kind of sat down before the show and thought, what are a bunch of questions that I wish I had a better answer to when it comes to seed oils? And some based on omega 6, omega 3 ratios, some based around heat stability and oxidation. But probably the first thing that people hear about when it comes to seed oils or the polyunsaturated fatty acids, the PUFAs in seed oils, is that they're unstable and they get damaged when they're heated. Different people have different ways of explaining why that's a problem. But why would you guys say that that's an issue? The heating of PUFAs in general. Yeah.

Anthony Gustin [00:03:44]: I think that you look at why linoleic acid, which is omega 6 fatty acid, predominantly found anywhere from like, 20 to 70% in seed oils, which is, besides nuts and seeds, mostly like, low single digits in our food supply. There's two main things that make those bad. Like the molecule isn't bad itself. It's the fact that it can oxidize really easily and break down into.

Ben Greenfield [00:04:07]: You mean.

Ben Greenfield [00:04:08]: You mean the molecule linoleic acid?

Anthony Gustin [00:04:10]: So it can oxidize itself very easily, but also break down into a bunch of different toxic metabolites. And so it's not just heat. When I think about oxidation of these molecules, it's sort of a function of time times heat times oxygen times light. And so all those factors sort of combine to see, like, how fast and how much does this oxidize itself as well as lead into these toxic metabolites.

Ben Greenfield [00:04:35]: Okay, so time, heat, light. Those are the three things that would actually somehow cause damage to linoleic acid.

Anthony Gustin [00:04:42]: And exposure to oxygen. Yeah, yeah.

Steven Rofrano [00:04:44]: Which conveniently, your body has all of those in large quantities.

Ben Greenfield [00:04:50]: You mean your body has time? Obviously. It's got oxygen, it's got heat. What about light?

Steven Rofrano [00:04:57]: Maybe not a lot of light.

Ben Greenfield [00:04:59]: I mean. Well, some. I mean, these days, people like the mitochondria signal each other using forms of red light. Who knows how much light the body produces? Right. If you're into gas discharge visualization cameras or whatever, that. That could be a factor.

Steven Rofrano [00:05:12]: Well, especially in the skin. Right. People talk about seed oils and skin cancer and seed oils and sunburn. Like, you got light there. So some. Somewhere.

Ben Greenfield [00:05:21]: Yeah. What's going on with that? With. With the linoleic acid sun exposure thing? Yes.

Anthony Gustin [00:05:24]: So, I mean, there's three ways to think about this. Oxidation, toxic byproduct equation. One is the oils oxidizing and doing this outside of the body and then inside of the body. So when you consume all this stuff, the linoleic acid, your body's mostly made of fat, will be taken up in the phospholipid membrane, the mitochondrial membrane, and cardiolipin all over the place, different lipoproteins in the skin. So your skin then turns into effectively linoleic acid. And so it takes two to four years to get that out of most of your cells. Up to like there's.

Ben Greenfield [00:05:58]: I've heard some people say three months. You said two to four years.

Anthony Gustin [00:06:01]: Yeah, two to four years.

Steven Rofrano [00:06:02]: The half life. The half life is two years. So it could take, you know, if you, if you do the math on a half life, it'll take seven years for 90% depletion.

Ben Greenfield [00:06:12]: Holy cow. Has that actually been looked at? Like, obviously it's one thing to say it, but is there a way to do like a tissue analysis that, oh, hey, a person ate this whatever carbon labeled linoleic acid X number of years ago, and here's where it's at in the tissue, like where those numbers come from.

Anthony Gustin [00:06:26]: Yeah, I mean that's exactly how they calculated this. There's other examples as well of tissue turnover. This is just in fat cells. And so there's a study. I mean, I can take a list here of all the studies we talk about and then get you a list for the show notes.

Ben Greenfield [00:06:41]: Oh, that'd be awesome.

Anthony Gustin [00:06:42]: Um, so let's take a note right now. But yeah, I mean, that's, that's where it was at 700 days for the half life in general tissue.

Ben Greenfield [00:06:49]: Geez. Okay, so that's obviously an issue. And by the way, show notes gonna be at BenGreenfieldLife.com/seedoilpodcast. BenGreenfieldLife.com/seedoilpodcast. You said one thing there. Everything you just said, you said made sense, Anthony, except one thing. Cardiolipin, the mitochondrial membrane and cell membrane a lot of people are probably familiar with. But what's the cardiolipin?

Anthony Gustin [00:07:12]: So electron transpoint chain. So you have the mitochondria in your cells. It has auto membrane, inner membrane. In between those membranes you have a bunch of gradients, you have actions that go on. I don't know how crazy you want to get into this, but you have the inner membrane complex 1, coenzyme Q2, 3, 4. You have cytochrome C and the ATP synthase. So electrons flow along that gradient and that allows hydrogens to be pumped into the inner inner membrane, which creates ATP. So cardiolipin is a molecule that's found basically bound up in all of that.

Anthony Gustin [00:07:47]: Cardiolipin is of 4, has 4 esterified fatty acids, like we know of triglycerides as 3 fatty acids. Cardiolipin has 4. And it's demonstrated that when you eat linoleic acid. So I mean this, it might be interesting to just pull back and say our linoleic acid in our tissues have, has known to go up considerably over time. Steven guinea did a study where he looked at the rate from about 1958 through 2000, I think it was 16 or 18. And it went from low single digits in our cells to above 20 plus percent. So we know that the more we eat and our, our diet composition has gone from low single digits to now 35% of our calories are coming from linoleic acid. The more we eat, the more we bioaccumulate because it takes so long for it to get out of our cells.

Anthony Gustin [00:08:36]: So as it gets accumulated into the tissues, different fatty acids will then start switching out. So the cardiolipin, which is made of the linoleic, which is made of fatty acids, then start swapping that out for linoleic acid. The reason this is a problem is because again, we talked about in your body heat time, et cetera, starts oxidizing. This starts changing the shape of that inner mitochondrial membrane, which does a lot of things. One of them is that opens up the cytochrome C, which has a heme group in it. And that itself has oxidizing properties. Iron, like free iron in the body, oxidizes then surrounding tissues. Cardio, the cardiolipin ends up also becoming effective like a, a firecracker.

Anthony Gustin [00:09:21]: So once it starts oxidizing, it starts producing this toxic metabolite called 4H N E, which is pretty much only found from eating omega 6 fatty acids.

Ben Greenfield [00:09:29]: Yeah, I've heard of that. 4. 4 what? Hydroxy, nonenal.

Anthony Gustin [00:09:32]: Yeah, 4 hydroxy 2 nonenal is the technical name of it. And so it starts producing that, which then destroys more cardiolipin, which then produces more insects. Firecracker. Firecracker. Cascade of oxidation in the cell, which disrupts the entire inner membrane of mitochondria.

Ben Greenfield [00:09:50]: Okay. And I'm sure that people are wondering right now why the heck would nature even have linoleic acid. Like why is it if I have an acorn or a peanut or whatever that this would even exist if it's so bad or is it just the amount?

Steven Rofrano [00:10:03]: Well, so remember that whole thing about how the body has oxygen and heat and all this stuff? Well, mammals have heat, but other organisms are not warm blooded. So seeds, where these things are found, seeds, particularly seeds that are in, you know, temperate areas. So places that have winter, they need liquid oil, they need oils that remain liquid when it's cold. It serves quite a purpose in the places where they're found because these seeds needs have some kind of fat. And when it's cold, saturated fats are solid, similar to fish. Why do fish have unsaturated fatty acids? Cold water fish in particular? Well, cold water fish, if their bodies were made of tallow, you know, saturated fat, they would freeze solid and they'd be, they'd be unable to swim.

Ben Greenfield [00:10:45]: So right when you go fishing, you'd just be plucking clumps of fat globules off the surface of the ocean.

Steven Rofrano [00:10:50]: Yeah.

Ben Greenfield [00:10:50]: Basically with, with little pieces of fish.

Steven Rofrano [00:10:51]: Meat, they would not be able to move. So there are useful functions in nature for these types of oils. One of the main features of them is that they are liquid. I've heard it compared to antifreeze almost because if you put olive oil in the freezer, it'll, you know, get cloudy. But if you put seed oils in the freezer, they'll remain liquid. So there are uses in nature for this, just not in human biology.

Anthony Gustin [00:11:11]: And when you look at what it does to the human physiology of effectively creating damage to the fat cell and the fat cell causes insulin resistance in the surrounding muscle, muscle tissue. And then also if you, I think you had Brad on, I don't know if you've had Peter Dover talk about their Ross theory of obesity, which is.

Ben Greenfield [00:11:31]: Basically the reactive oxygen species theory of.

Anthony Gustin [00:11:33]: Obesity, which is basically saying that eating linolenic acid and some of these fatty acids lead to lowered f d h2 to NADH ratio, which is just a fancy way of saying again that input to the electron transport chain, which causes some transient insulin resistance, which when you're eating saturated fat is a good thing because your body stops taking in fat. So why would nature want this? So if you look at the amount and seasonality of foods that contain linoleic acid in high amounts, which is nuts and seeds, basically, they drop in the fall and they're in high amounts only in the fall.

Ben Greenfield [00:12:10]: I see where you're going here.

Anthony Gustin [00:12:11]: So when animals need to pack on weight to hibernate. They want insulin resistance and they want fat accumulation, but it's only in that short period of time and they burn through all that and then don't get it again to the next fall. Work essentially in like a preparing for winter and preparing for hibernation status all day every day for your entire lives, but never going into hibernation.

Ben Greenfield [00:12:35]: Well, like with a human, you know, theoretically, let's say I were going to say, okay, well I'm going to eat seasonally, I love almonds, but I'm only going to have them during the cold months. Would that be a reasonable way to go? Or do you just like forego seeds and nuts altogether?

Anthony Gustin [00:12:51]: I think if you then also took the natural environment to the nth degree and like I'm also only gonna hunt and forage for my foods. And food scarcity is much lower, therefore calories are much lower. Like you're gonna want to put on that fat. But if you're gonna be shopping from supermarkets and have high food availability, it doesn't make sense. And this is also like the colder the climate, the more linoleic acid. So like if you look at latitude, the higher in latitude you go, the more foods have higher amounts of linoleic acid for, for the plant physiology itself. But also to pair with the mammals there that eat those, those products say.

Steven Rofrano [00:13:24]: They were the cold water fish, the Vikings have access to cod, or the Eskimo have access to salmon or something, all of which are super high polyunsaturated fat content foods. Those are unique to a certain place and time of year. And conversely, if you go to the tropics, right. What kind of oils come from the tropics? Coconut oil, palm oil, all these are very saturated oils because in the, in the warm weather of the tropics, they're liquid all year out. So the place and time where you're eating and their relation and how much that affects you, right. If you, if you live in a car or if you live in a house with heat and you get in your car with also that also has heat and you wear warm winter clothes, like are you being as affected by the seasonality as your, you know, hunter gathering ancestors may have been? Probably not. But all that thing, all of those factors should be taken into account when thinking about what I'm going to eat, when I'm going to eat it.

Ben Greenfield [00:14:15]: Okay. So I could just imagine somebody like, I don't know, like let's say Leigh Norton on YouTube next week saying, hey, heard on the BEN GREENFIELD SHOW don't eat nuts unless you're snowboarding or you're gonna have a heart attack. Right. Do you guys really just, like, not eat seeds and nuts unless you're in a state of extreme hypocalorism or cold?

Steven Rofrano [00:14:35]: So I think there's a big difference between eating seeds and nuts and eating seed oils. Right? That's. That's kind of the issue.

Ben Greenfield [00:14:41]: So that's probably an important differentiation here. So. So please.

Steven Rofrano [00:14:44]: Yeah, but we're just, I think, illustrating why they're there in nature and what purpose they serve. But, I mean, again, the dose makes the poison, right? Am I going to eat an almond and freak out? Of course not. But when you. Not that almond oil is very common seed oil, but the amount of almonds you would need to produce 1 tablespoon of almond oil are more almonds than you would eat in an entire season. Right. And then people consume that on a. Or several times that on a daily basis.

Ben Greenfield [00:15:07]: Wait, say. Say that again.

Steven Rofrano [00:15:08]: So the amount of whatever seeds that the oil comes from that you would need to produce 1 tablespoon of that oil is more quantity of those seeds than you would eat in any reasonable time frame. Okay, Right. So.

Ben Greenfield [00:15:20]: Okay, so. So you're, you're, you're arguing more for the concentration and volume and the extreme concentration that we find in oils. You're not saying don't have a handful of nuts, Correct?

Anthony Gustin [00:15:30]: Absolutely.

Ben Greenfield [00:15:31]: Okay.

Steven Rofrano [00:15:31]: And naturally occurring linoleic acid in food also contains things that help reduce the oxidation. So nuts also known to have a high amount of vitamin E paired with that. There's also a study of consent that shows that egg yolks that have higher amounts of linoleic acid also have these things called hydroxylates that predict against the oxidation of linoleic acid.

Ben Greenfield [00:15:54]: Right. And choline, that can help to protect neural cells for example.

Steven Rofrano [00:15:58]: The brain is made up predominantly of dha, which is a highly unsaturated and therefore unstable fatty acid. But the brain also tightly controls the oxidation that happens in your brain. All right. It's. I think it's called oxygen tension. The oxygen tension, AKA the partial pressure of oxygen. Your brain is lower than other parts of the body. Glutathione and other antioxidants are directed towards the brain in order to keep that fat stable.

Steven Rofrano [00:16:23]: It's supposed to be there. That's fine. The problem is that the seed oils in these artificial extracts are concentrated and they're removed from the context that they've occurred, that they naturally occur in, which makes them very dangerous. Right. If you, if you keep the vitamin E, if you keep all these antioxidants, you keep all the other nutrients, you eat them in low doses, it's going to kill you. No, but when you extract them and remove them from that context of, you know, that safety net, basically, then that's where the problems arise.

Ben Greenfield [00:16:49]: Okay, I'm, I'm tracking, playing devil's advocate here. You know, I've seen. I don't know. I don't know how good this data is. You guys probably know better than me. Areas of places like Japan and some parts of Asia, or even components of the Mediterranean diet, and some people in Mediterranean regions have really good health outcomes, but somewhat high seed oil consumption, or at least seed oils are a part of the diet. How do you reconcile that data with claims that across the board seed oils would cause issues?

Steven Rofrano [00:17:23]: Yes, there's two things. Let's do Asia first and then the Mediterranean. Um, Asia has 27 of the top 50 countries by diabesity rates per capita. Um, North America has two countries in the top 50, and they are Mexico and St. Kitts. So while the Asian countries may not, like China, for example, may not have the obesity symptoms, they clearly have other symptoms that are not so great. Um, oh, and also importantly, related to, you know, metabolic syndrome and all these other things. Right.

Steven Rofrano [00:17:52]: The diabetes rates of Asia are kind of off charts. The other thing is that the seed oil is consumed traditionally in most Asian countries. Like what? You go to a Thai restaurant, what do you get? You get Pad Thai, it's fried in or tossed in peanut oil. Peanut oil happens to be one of the lowest, have one of the lowest concentrations of linoleic acid of any seed oil.

Ben Greenfield [00:18:14]: Good, because I used to fry my turkeys in it for Thanksgiving. Yeah.

Steven Rofrano [00:18:16]: No, there you go. And so, I mean, not that I would go and eat a whole bunch of five guys French fries. However, the fact that they use peanut oil does make it much safer than someone using soybean oil, for example. So I think for Asians in particular, it's not. They may not be fat, but they are unhealthy in other ways. And also, insofar as their traditional cuisine does contain seed oils, those seed oils have lower concentrations of linoleic acid. As far as the Mediterranean diet is concerned, I can't think of any traditionally consumed seed oil in Mediterranean countries. Like, the health outcomes in Mediterranean countries may still be high today, but they're getting worse by the year.

Steven Rofrano [00:18:54]: And their food quality is also getting worse by the year. Seed oils were, you know, industrially produced seed oil is what we're talking about here, were invented in America. And there was a very long and drawn out scientific argument between the American Heart association and their corresponding doctors and researchers in the UK that that cholesterol and saturated fat were, you know, even bad for you. The British doctors maintained that saturated fat was good for you up until, I think the 70s after 20 years of fierce scientific, you know, battling, of course, science funded by the seed oil companies themselves. So, yeah, in summary, the Mediterranean countries may be healthier than us today, but their trend is getting worse. And they also have historically not consumed high degrees of polyunsaturated fats at all.

Ben Greenfield [00:19:40]: Yeah. So that's why the croissants taste so much better in Europe.

Steven Rofrano [00:19:42]: Yeah. They're legally mandated to be made with.

Ben Greenfield [00:19:44]: Butter croissants for breakfast, like every morning. Yeah, this is made with butter. They're incredible.

Anthony Gustin [00:19:48]: And I, in the Japan front, which is. There's another study I can share here, I think, Elheim 2014, where they took three groups of mice and they were fed 1% linoleic diet, linoleic acid diet, 8% and then 8% linoleic acid and then 1% omega 3. The 1% totally fine, 8% was obese, like morbidly obese. The.

Ben Greenfield [00:20:15]: Wow.

Anthony Gustin [00:20:16]: The 8% plus 1% group did not get obesity, but they died of liver failure and heart disease. And so it seems like Omega 3 in small amounts with Omega 6 in particular has some protective benefits for getting fat. But you still have high incidence in rate of. Of issues because it's the Omega 6. The total Omega 6 still breaks down into these toxic metabolites. So it may help with obesity, but still have all these downstream effects on the mitochondria.

Ben Greenfield [00:20:44]: Okay, now, now that's something people might find confusing because you also hear in the oil debate the claim that, oh, hey, we're eating whatever a 20 to 1 or 30 to 1 ish omega 6 to omega 3 fatty acid ratio. And in primal, ancestral times, we're eating a 4 to 1 or a 3 to 1 or 1 to 1. Is the. When people say, is the omega 6P synonymous with linoleic acid or is there something else about the Omega 6s that make them an issue when consumed in excess?

Anthony Gustin [00:21:17]: I think that it's impossible to square the. I mean, it's just, it's the wrong thing to look at because if you're consuming 10 milligrams of fat total and the ratio is 20 to 1, it's not gonna be an issue. If you consume 3 liters of fat and it's 1 to 1 ratio, not gonna be good again. All this Omega 6 still has a breakdown. It gets stored in your body, it oxidizes over time, it turns into these toxic metabolites. And if you were to balance out even the recommended daily intake, which is why that study was at 8% from, from the USCA, is 5 to 10% of our calories from these omega sets fatty acids. The food availability is actually 30% and so we're getting way more than that. So to eat a one to one diet, you'd have to eat anywhere from 12 to 30 salmon fillets, wild caught salmon fillets a day to get that back up to a one to one ratio, which is obviously impossible.

Ben Greenfield [00:22:15]: So when people say things like PUFAs, are heart healthy, Are they totally off base or are there shreds of truth to where that's coming from?

Anthony Gustin [00:22:24]: That claim is generally shared because what happens is when you consume these fatty acids, your LDL cholesterol goes down. But what's not shared is that your allele cholesterol gets oxidized, eaten up by like G, gives a signal into macrophages, turns into foam cells and gets deposited in your endothelium as plaque. So that's why your LDL goes down while eating seed oils. So yeah, LDL may go down. That doesn't mean that you actually have better outcomes from heart disease.

Ben Greenfield [00:22:56]: I'll ask because I know some people will. Real quick, are you just saying that or have they actually shown that when you consume PUFAS and LDL decreases, there's increased plaque accumulation?

Anthony Gustin [00:23:06]: Yeah, I mean there's, there's a, a paper from James DiNicolantonio online. This entire process of how from 2018 I can share again in the show notes. You almost cannot get oxidized LDL without linoleic acid and oxidized LDL is required for the macrophages to turn into foam cells. You cannot. The guy who found the LDL receptor did a study to say, oh great, we figured this out, let's turn these into foam cells was impossible. A follow up study had to be done and it had to be oxidized to be taken up into foam cells. And that could only happen with omega 6 fatty acids.

Ben Greenfield [00:23:44]: That's an important differentiation because it's still pre published. But a paper came out, I heard about it yesterday, that there is no significant association between LDL and coronary plaque. But from a semantic standpoint, you did not say LDL, you said oxidized LDL.

Anthony Gustin [00:24:01]: Correct. So 75% people who have heart attacks actually have a normal LDL level. But people, people who have oxidized LDL had 16x more risk for heart attack.

Ben Greenfield [00:24:13]: If I go to my doctor and get a blood test, can I get oxidized LDL or is there any way to know if the LDL is oxidized or non oxidized?

Anthony Gustin [00:24:20]: Yes, I mean, it's, it's pretty ubiquitous at a lab company at this point. Will most doctors run that? No, there's, I mean, you can also figure out like, I know that APOB is a huge point of contention around, like, is this predictive for or, or causative in any way? You can also with Boston Heart Health, get an oxidized APOB and look at that from an oxidized level. Um, so there are ways to measure these things. It's also important to note that 9hode, which is another toxic metabolite from oxidized linoleic acid, is used as a marker of atherosclerosis. That and 13 HOD are found in atheros, atherosclerosis and plaques 30 to 100 times full.

Ben Greenfield [00:25:05]: If I didn't have a lot of money to throw around, let's say, and my doctor ran just a basic blood panel on me and my LDL was elevated if I also had elevated levels of inflammation, because most basic affordable blood tests are going to tell you crp, for example, maybe homocysteine. Do you think you could draw a reasonable conclusion that if you have high levels of inflammation, that some of your ldl, if elevated or non elevated, I suppose, is getting oxidized?

Anthony Gustin [00:25:34]: Yeah, I mean, this program to be like a very complicated web of inflammation and how that gets distributed through the body and how it affects different pathways, you know, is that connected to like, what would a person do about it? That's, that's what I care about generally, especially when I was practicing with patients. It's like, okay, we have this data. Now what do we do? And the thing that's very easy to do just to see afterwards, do you still have these oxidized levels of ldl? Do you have higher levels of inflammation or do these things go down is reduce things like seed oils, high amounts of omega 6, eat more real food diet. And generally what happens is oxidized LDL goes down, LDL P goes up, LDL C goes up. So you're like, you're basically trading out oxidized LDL for quote, unquote, regular ldl.

Ben Greenfield [00:26:25]: Okay, all right, that makes sense. You know, we've talked about the linoleic acid and the issue with heat and oxygen and light and temperature. But when it comes to seed oils, I've also heard it's not just the fats that there are, there are also toxins in them somehow related to the way that they're created or processed. Is that true?

Steven Rofrano [00:26:47]: So hexane is used in the processing of seed oils. The question is how much of it can be actually removed. Hexane is fat soluble. So it's this, is, this goes into the whole sort of fda, like what do they regulate for? The FDA cares about, you know, if you get inspected by the fda, if they, they come to our factory, what are they going to look for? They're going to look for microbiological contamination pretty much 99 out of a hundred times. You know, on their a hundred thing long checklist. Most of the things they're looking for are things that have implications for microbiological activity. And so part of the issue is that stuff.

Ben Greenfield [00:27:20]: I mean. You mean like, like E. Coli or something?

Steven Rofrano [00:27:22]: Yeah, whatever bacteria, stuff that's dirty things. We're not sterilizing this or that. The other thing, they don't check for certain contaminants or they don't care about. They actively don't. Like, they'll recommend you use plastic for almost everything if you can. Even though that will mean there are gonna be microplastics in my food. Right. They'll say that's okay.

Steven Rofrano [00:27:39]: Cause they don't care about that kind of thing. They care about bacteria. Same thing with these solvents, other chemicals, the deodorizing, the bleaching, all the other stuff that people do with seed oils. If it doesn't cause a bacterial outbreak and it doesn't kill you dead instantly in a way that's like very easily tied to the cause. Like this cause and effect relationship, their standards for it are, you know, they basically don't care that much about it. And so, I mean, there's an entire industry around the production of seed oils and making them taste okay, these rotten, rancid, oxidized fats. There's an entire industry that's developed around this in food production. And what they can do, like what they do is the FDA doesn't care.

Steven Rofrano [00:28:18]: Right. Because we operate under this model of generally recognized as safe in the US So in order for a food item or something in production to not be used, I, the person complaining about it have to go and prove that the thing is unsafe. And until I do that, the manufacturer can keep using it versus somewhere, you know, in Europe. For example, it's. The burden is on the manufacturer to prove that the thing is safe before they start using it. So it's a completely. The burden of proof is on a completely different party and it's way more rigorous over there, which is why, I mean this. I know this is getting a bit beyond seed oils, but this is one of the reasons why they have so many substances that are banned from usage in food or agriculture.

Steven Rofrano [00:28:55]: And arguably one of the reasons why they're so much healthier than our, than us, is because their food industry is unable to use as many chemicals as ours is.

Ben Greenfield [00:29:05]: So if somebody like the Food Babe says where there's. There's aldehydes and toxic metabolites of processing in your seed oil, are you going to go test it, or I were to look at, I don't know, epidemiological data showing accumulation of those compounds in actual tissue. Is it overblown or is it an actual issue? Like is this stuff actually accumulating beyond just say like damaged linoleic acid?

Steven Rofrano [00:29:27]: So the aldehyde and toximitablate is sort of like the downstream issue of linoleic acid itself getting oxidized, breaking down. And then there's another issue which is like unequivocally the more we consume, the more we have in our body and unequivocally tied to enormous amount of downstream pathologies. Like it is just very, very clear. I don't know why anybody argues this. There's entire journal episodes of like scientific journals, entire journals dedicated to hne and how that affects the body which we get into. But so that's like very clear. It's. No one should question that if they look at the literature.

Steven Rofrano [00:30:03]: The second one, I actually sort of like don't think that a lot of the processing in itself adds to a bunch of extra toxins because for example, like the bleaching agents are mostly clay. It's like clay from the earth that filters through the solvents. I think there's a fair argument that they don't actually end up in the food itself. There are things like TBHQ, which is a artificial preservative. So like I was saying before, food has natural things like vitamin E, choline, et cetera, to protect from the oxidation. A lot of food manufacturers will add in TBHQ which has been shown harm in humans. Like that is one of the things. However, I think it's more.

Steven Rofrano [00:30:44]: But just the sheer amount that we're getting in the processing, changing the food to such that we cannot use our senses to be repulsed by it. So, for example, we, we know this process happens in fish very easily. So the omega 3s and 6s in, in fish get oxidized very easily. And this is why when we take fish that's been in our fridge for a week, we haven't, we haven't cooked that smells rotten, smells fishy, right?

Ben Greenfield [00:31:09]: Or, or the Costco fish oil has been sitting on the shelf for three months.

Anthony Gustin [00:31:11]: Exactly. And then like our nose and our eyes and our taste and all we have all these senses to tell us without an RCT, without human RCT data, don't eat this food. When you put the seed oil through all this crazy manufacturing, add all these chemicals, bleaching, deodorizing, refining, et cetera, what we're doing is we're stripping our body's ability to tell is this an okay food to eat? Because before it goes through all these steps and it's just the raw, from seed to fat. I don't know if you've seen like the how canola oil is made, et cetera. Like you wouldn't, you would see that and just know without having to have data, this is not a food to eat because I'm internally repulsed by it. And so that's why I think the processing itself is bad.

Ben Greenfield [00:31:57]: So this just makes me think like, if we were to change the processing and go with healthier options, you know, before we record the show, I asked you if you were still involved with that company, Zero Acres. I interviewed them, was fascinating. They figured out how to use some process of fermentation to actually produce like a healthy oil. It didn't seem that scalable from an affordability, mass population standpoint. If, if we aren't processing these ingredients at mass scale, you know, from, from the standpoint of actually having enough oil to go around for restaurants, cooking, et cetera, like, do you guys see that having economic implications?

Steven Rofrano [00:32:38]: Yeah. I mean, this is a huge issue in our food system overall is that we're depending on these large monocrop, large multinational corporations to drive food prices down. We've gone so far away from having diverse small farms that can handle resiliency and produce more food per acre that, yeah, I think like we're truthfully in a quagmire. But the way out is not continuing what we're doing. We need to start going backwards and finding more resiliency in our food system on all fronts, on a scalable front as well as on a non scalable front. And we can't keep, we can't keep doing it.

Steven Rofrano [00:33:13]: At the same time that this is happening, right, we're monocropping and pesticiding our way to obesity and early death. Billions of pounds of beef fat are being turned into biodiesel or soap or whatever in this country because there's no real use for it, even though obviously grass fed pasteurized beef is superior to factory farms.

Ben Greenfield [00:33:36]: Is that like, is that like tallow, Steven? Is that what you're talking about?

Steven Rofrano [00:33:38]: Yeah, exactly. So most of the, I mean, every cow has fat. And because we don't use tallow in our food system, the fat goes somewhere. And so the processors, like Cargill, right, which does $100 billion a year in revenue, it's the largest private company in the world or America. They, they do a staggering proportion of all beef processing in this country. The fat that comes off those cows goes straight to biodiesel. It's not even slot, it's not even sent to a USDA, you know, food approved facility. It's just going straight to industry.

Steven Rofrano [00:34:09]: I mean, as far as I can tell, there's much more petroleum around and much other ways, much better inputs for the diesel system than taking valuable foodstuffs and not eating them because we're obsessed with this low saturated fat. Whatever.

Ben Greenfield [00:34:22]: So you could scale diesel without tallow and free up more tallow for the food supply, Is that what you're saying?

Steven Rofrano [00:34:27]: I mean, they're just doing it because they don't know where else to put it. Right. The places where you could put large quantities of any sort of fat, whether it's animal fat or anything else, you can turn it to biodiesel, you can make soap out of it, or you could eat it. Those are, you know.

Ben Greenfield [00:34:41]: I know your chips are made with tallow, but what about like, you know, vegans and vegetarians don't want to have beef tallow as an oil. It's still an issue.

Steven Rofrano [00:34:46]: Yeah, I mean, vegans and vegetarians, vegans in particular make up less than 3% of the American population. They're not that large of a group. If we want to send all our olive oil over to them, they can have it. You know, go for it. But for the rest of us, good.

Ben Greenfield [00:35:00]: Trade, trade, trade, trade, trade. Our olive oil for extra beef tallow.

Steven Rofrano [00:35:03]: Yeah, exactly. They can have the palm oil, like, go ahead. Right. I was in El Salvador about a year ago and the. We were, we learned basically the country is just overflowing with coconut palm trees, but they don't have the infrastructure to turn that into, you know, oil and other coconut food products. It's just, but it's an entire country, hundreds of millions of acres. I don't know. Millions.

Ben Greenfield [00:35:23]: Yeah. That could produce tons of oil. Yeah, tons of oil. Palm oil doesn't fit into the category of the high linoleic acid oil. It's tropical oil.

Steven Rofrano [00:35:29]: It's highly saturated. Yeah. That being said, it's production, deforestation. There are other implications, but from a, from what we're talking about here, palm oil is not unhealthy.

Anthony Gustin [00:35:38]: The, the thing I don't understand here is that there are foods that if you want to eat fat, and I don't need to prescribe anybody a high fat, low fat, like I, I think humans are omnivores and they have a wide range of where they feel good with between high fat and low fat. Suddenly there's like one magical human diet. But if you want to consume any sort of fat, whether it be animal or plant based fat, there are naturally occurring, easy to obtain ways to get that fat. All of avocado, like avocados, palm, like you can, you can press the fat out of these things sometimes with your hands, other times with like a simple mechanical press. Obviously animal fat is like straight outta the animal. You don't have to do anything to it.

Ben Greenfield [00:36:15]: So dude, even with that, if I didn't buy any oil, cause, cause extra virgin olive oil and avocado oil, macadamia nut oil, it is kind of expensive and it's kind of a pain in the ass just trying to figure out how to like press your own nuts to make oil. If I had no oil, you guys. And again, we're an omnivorous family. There is so much like bacon grease left over from my son's making breakfast, to drippings from the meals we make at dinner at night, to the fat from the different beef cuts, chicken cuts, chicken skin, et cetera, I don't actually have to buy oil. I do it because it's convenient. But just for our small family, there's enough fat to go around for days just from our normal cooking processes. I just think a lot of people maybe don't have the education or the know how about how to just like save it, preserve it, put it in a Pyrex glass containers, toss it in the fridge, Some of it's fine on the countertop. Like it's not that hard to have enough fat to go around.

Steven Rofrano [00:37:04]: No, they just throw it out. Right. Which is exactly what happens at a massive scale in our agricultural system.

Anthony Gustin [00:37:09]: Right.

Steven Rofrano [00:37:10]: They just throw out the beef fat. I mean, if you get a chuck roast, which is one of the cheapest Cuts of beef you could possibly obtain, cook that in the oven once a week, you'll have more than enough tallow leaking off of it as you cook it for the entire rest of your cooking and the entire for the rest of the week.

Ben Greenfield [00:37:22]: Right, and probably half your personal care products.

Steven Rofrano [00:37:24]: Yeah, exactly.

Steven Rofrano [00:37:25]: The hard part as well is I think we had a bifurcation when Ancel Keys had a seven country study come out and we started demonizing saturated fat. Because what happened is we started, we now have 60, 70 years of a food system that uses these oil byproducts as food ingredients. And even McDonald's until the 90s used tallow. There was a supply chain for it. But because we went so far away from that. Now farms, when they produce cattle and slaughter them, like Steven said, like Cargill buys all this stuff. We don't have the farm animal fat to consumer pipeline and distribution system set up the same way. We have the seed to seed oil distribution set up like we do now.

Steven Rofrano [00:38:09]: So our food system is very hard forked in one direction. And that's going to be an enormous problem. Which is why Steven and I both wanted had impact on supply chains with the businesses we're doing so that we can get back to using more traditional fast.

Steven Rofrano [00:38:22]: Yeah, there's, there's no issue with raw materials. It's merely an issue of the infrastructure and the institutions that humans have built over the past seven decades do not allow us to make good use of the raw materials that we have available to us. And like Anthony said, like, part of what we have to do is go rebuild that so that instead of setting off the fat for biodiesel, we can put it in jars, stick it in restaurant fryers, and, you know, not to worry about this anymore. Wow.

Ben Greenfield [00:38:48]: I want to go back to biochemistry and biology for a second. And the whole calories in, calories out equation. Because briefly, a thought crossed my mind was when Anthony was describing how linoleic acid can kind of, you know, gum up metabolic machinery, to use the highly scientific term, that that could potentially imply that someone who is consuming seed oils could be eating the same number of calories as someone who is consuming no or less seed oils and burn those calories less efficiently. Am I on the right path here?

Anthony Gustin [00:39:22]: There, there's. So when you talk about like fat gain in general, is that sort of where we're going here? It's like, I think just taking a step back and understanding that the flux of fat in and out is not as simple as calories in, calories out. But, but even if it were. There is a very clear mechanism. Even if we're taking out this, like, machine, like the metabolic machinery getting destroyed, causing insulin resistance, damaging the fat cell, which, again, there's like, very clear evidence on that. Even if we take all that out, we have yet another mechanism in which high amounts of linoleic acid lead humans to eating more food.

Ben Greenfield [00:40:05]: Okay, you mean like an appetite control mechanism or it's affecting leptin or ghrelin somehow?

Steven Rofrano [00:40:10]: Yeah, there's this study. Michael Eads talks about this. He has a great little talk on YouTube where he. Part of it. He goes into the study where they fed a bunch of kids different combinations of carbs and fat. So there was a carb plus either a saturated or an unsaturated fat, canola oil or butter, basically. And he told the kids, hey, eat however much you want and then tell me when you're full. Stop eating when you're full.

Steven Rofrano [00:40:33]: And they measured the amounts of calories that the kids ate, depending on, you know, what the combination was, and they found about a 300 calorie difference in the amount that people ate. Not the kids. Kids again, not even adults. 300 calorie difference in the amount that kids ate when it was carb plus saturated fat versus carb plus unsaturated fat. And of course, the kids ate 300 calories more of the unsaturated fat. The canola oil plus potato combination. Um, but when they had butter and potatoes, they ate 300 calories less. So imagine a 300 calorie differential and the amount you need to actually feel satisfied.

Steven Rofrano [00:41:06]: You know, if it's an adult, maybe it's 400. Who knows how many calories it is? Three times a day, seven days a week, Every single day. Every single week of your entire life, you're. You're eating more in order to feel full.

Ben Greenfield [00:41:16]: Yeah. And that's intuitive to me. Like, saturated fat could be more satiating than unsaturated fat. I've certainly experienced that. But what I'm asking is if I'm eating a high seed oil diet, and let's say we have some of that two to four year bioaccumulation you're talking about, maybe cardiolipin has changed, or the mitochondria of cell membranes, does that affect how efficiently I can burn the calories I'm consuming, such that if one person is eating 2000 calories a day in a high seed oil diet, another person's eating 2,000 calories a day, and a low to moderate seed oil diet that the former person would have a more difficult time burning those calories.

Anthony Gustin [00:41:57]: Yeah, it's a, it's a good question, I would say. Yes. I mean I, I think that Brad, Peter, Tucker, Goodrich, et cetera, would be able to go into like exactly how, with the mitochondria breaking, that would tie out. But even when you look at how like I wish we had very clear human RCT data and we can talk about like the broad issues with having enough inputs and outputs from a data perspective for seed oils. One of the big things here is we don't have a population that hasn't e eaten seed oils compared to a population that has in some of these markers.

Ben Greenfield [00:42:34]: And even if it's difficult to replicate in long term research, you could do a 12 week study and I don't know how much you chili.

Anthony Gustin [00:42:40]: So for example, like if, if we all smoked for 30 years and then one group stopped smoking and the other group kept smoking, and then we compare lung cancer rates between the two of them, they would be the exact same. Conversely, if we took two groups that had never had any exposure to cigarettes and they smoked for a year, there would be no, also no difference in lung cancer rates. And that's kind of like what we're looking at here for seed oils. Like it's not an acutely toxic thing to have all this oxidation in your body at one time. Same thing like smoking a pack of cigarettes for a year is probably not going to be that damaging to most people because our body has ways to process and deal with these downstream issues. But then there's a threshold in which we have oxidative stress where we, we no longer can deal with all of this stuff with, with all of the H and E buildup, with all of the 13HOD buildup and NDA and all these other toxic metabolites that increase over time. But even beyond that, I was talking about with the, the ad libitum feed feeding which is the, which is how people eat. Like people don't eat in a metabolic war.

Anthony Gustin [00:43:41]: People eat like very few people track all of their calories and do that that way. That's not how people generally lose fat. Again, my clinical experience is anytime I would ever try to have people like a very strict tracking their nutrition, no one would do that. It's like the compliance rate is so incredibly low. People are busy, they don't have time. So people eat generally ad limitum. Like when are they full, when are they not full? And there's direct mechanisms here of when you have increased linoleic acid which converts to arachidonic Acid, which converts to 2 Ag and AEA, which activate then our CB1 or endocannabinoid system the same exact way THC does, which upregulates appetite and basically gives you the munchies. The same exact pathway.

Ben Greenfield [00:44:22]: Wow.

Anthony Gustin [00:44:23]: And so that. This is why like a difference between saturated.

Ben Greenfield [00:44:26]: So, so like that.

Steven Rofrano [00:44:27]: What is it?

Ben Greenfield [00:44:28]: Snoop Snoop Dog that has the new THC dusted Doritos chip brand. That's like the worst of both worlds for appetite satiation. It's a great business move, probably high.

Anthony Gustin [00:44:39]: So being oil for something like that. Double whammy.

Ben Greenfield [00:44:42]: Yeah. The.

Steven Rofrano [00:44:42]: The theory that I'm familiar with, to answer to, from my perspective on the question Ben, is from Dr. Kate Shanahan, her book Dark Calories. Uh, the theory I'm familiar with to answer this question is that when you put polyunsaturated fats, linoleic acid in your mitochondria, all of these oxidation byproducts are very toxic. They're damaging. They destroy cellular infrastructure, the mitochondria. The mitochondria get damaged, so they're not able to operate at full capacity. And so as mitochondria are unable to produce as much energy as they should be, and they know that this toxic fat is causing them to become further inefficient, they end up, the cells for lack of energy, end up pulling glucose from the blood. And because they had a pulling glucose from the blood, blood sugar drops.

Steven Rofrano [00:45:26]: And then you feel this hunger or pang. You need to eat, right? You know, hypoglycemia, all that stuff. And then you have this constant war with your mitochondria. Your cells are trying to get energy, trying to burn the fat that you're eating. They can't do it well because they either, you know, tear themselves apart, these little turbines blowing themselves apart. You can imagine. And so then you end up stealing more and more blood sugar from your blood. And then that feeds this whole chain of insulin resistance and whatever else.

Ben Greenfield [00:45:49]: Yeah, that's. That. That makes sense. It's. I don't think it's rocket science to understand how it would affect appetite satiation and insulin resistance. My mind was just going to. Whether or not long term you see an appreciable decrease in metabolic rate, very similar to what you'd see with something like thyroid dysregulation. Right.

Ben Greenfield [00:46:08]: That would result. That would result in. In kind of a defiance of the whole SECO equation.

Steven Rofrano [00:46:12]: Well, I think we do. And so the interesting thing I learned about this a few months ago, Everyone knows what's your body temperature? 98.6 degrees. Right. That's the standard human body temperature. That's actually not true anymore. That was true in 1905 or 1907, when the Harvard whoever was measuring average human body temperature. Average body Temperature today is 97.5 degrees. In America.

Ben Greenfield [00:46:35]: Whatever.

Steven Rofrano [00:46:35]: In the. In the west, people on the whole have gotten. I think, whatever that is, 15 to 20% colder.

Ben Greenfield [00:46:41]: I can't. Everybody's doing cold plunges now, bro.

Anthony Gustin [00:46:43]: Yeah.

Steven Rofrano [00:46:44]: Yeah, that's it. Um, so, yeah, people have gotten colder, which is one of the better ways or one way of measuring average basal metabolic rate. And so everyone's gotten colder to such an extent. You know, I'm not necessarily claiming that seed oils are the heavy, are the only cause of this drop in body temperature, but clearly something is going on with humans where we're much less metabolic than we used to be.

Ben Greenfield [00:47:06]: Yeah. But if you were right, Steven, it would be fascinating because maybe the body's down regulating its temperature. So the seed oils that they're getting more of cause less damage back. We talked about that. We get. Which I. I highly doubt, but, yeah. Okay.

Ben Greenfield [00:47:21]: So over Thanksgiving, I was. I was down my mom's coffee shop, and she's notorious. I love my mom. She listens to some shows. She knows I love her when I say stuff like this. But she's notorious for saying, I got this. It's organic. You can eat it, like, any.

Ben Greenfield [00:47:34]: It could be like a cigarette. This cigarette is organic. It's fine. And so she's like, I have these great organic tortilla chips. And I'm like, mom, go look at the label. And she's like, why? I'm like, you have to look beyond organic. You know, what kind of sugars are added? What kind of fillers are added? Is the corn GMO or non gmo? What kind of oils are added? And sure enough, we look at the label. You know, it's corn O oil.

Ben Greenfield [00:47:57]: I think it was three. Corn oil, sunflower oil, and safflower oil. And chips are obviously a notorious source of oils that are high in these linoleic acids that we talked about, you know, these vegetable oils and processed seed oils. So when it comes to chips, Steven, this. This question is probably perfect for you. There's some new ways that chips are being made that I do want to dive into, because I've got potato chips and tortilla chips now at my house that are, like, freaking crack. Everybody leaves my house and, like, steals a bag because they're so incredible. And I want to know what goes into these actual bags.

Ben Greenfield [00:48:36]: Because I think you're kind of like the mastermind behind this seed oil free chip project.

Steven Rofrano [00:48:41]: Yeah. So. Good question. I mean obviously there's, there's more to it or there's a lot of things to it. Fillers and all these things you mentioned. But chips have three main ingredients. There's a carbohydrate, there's an oil they're fried in and then there's whatever seasonings you got, salt, peppers, whatever. So like you mentioned, you know, you want organic angle corn.

Steven Rofrano [00:49:00]: As for tortilla chip for example, all that's great. Nixtamalize it which is the ancient, you know, Mesoamerican practice of making corn more.

Ben Greenfield [00:49:06]: What'd you say?

Steven Rofrano [00:49:07]: Nixtamalization. Nixtamalization is the ancient Mesoamerican practice of boiling corn with limestone basically which makes it more digestible. It's similar to how you might soak nuts or sourdough ferment wheat to make bread. Nixtamalizing accomplishes the same, you know, phytic acid and micro, you know, anti nutrient reduction that you know, it's important when eating seeds and grains.

Ben Greenfield [00:49:33]: So that would be like, like nixtamalizetamalization to corn would be like sourdough is to bread.

Steven Rofrano [00:49:38]: Exactly.

Ben Greenfield [00:49:38]: Or like fermentation is to bread.

Steven Rofrano [00:49:40]: Yeah. Or soaking is to nuts exactly the same.

Ben Greenfield [00:49:42]: Okay.

Steven Rofrano [00:49:42]: So yeah, all that's important. But the main thing that you know, the reason why we're talking about this is the oils. So virtually all chips are fried in seed oils. Not only are they, it's, it's so crazy to me how like you mentioned the bag of chips had you know, sunflower and, or safflower and or corn oil. Like they don't even know what's in their own chips. All these oils are such.

Ben Greenfield [00:50:04]: Right, you're right, it does say and. Or we don't know, but there's oils.

Steven Rofrano [00:50:07]: It's literally such indiscernible, indistinguishable trash that they might as. It might as well be one, it might as well be the other. No one cares, you know, because it's it. They're all the same garbage. And these people like these giant factories pump out chips by the God knows how many billions of bags a month and no one even knows what's going into them, which is insane. Yeah, all those oils are high in linoleic acid. So instead for, I believe, if I had to guess, the chips that you were speaking about, moss chips, we fry them in grass fed beef tallow, which is important for two reasons. First of all, it's not linoleic acid, it's not unsaturated fat, it's saturated fat.

Steven Rofrano [00:50:41]: And saturated fats do not have this oxidation problem like unsaturated fats do. So we don't have any of those downstream effects. You know, the 4hne, all of the oxidative byproducts like the metabolic disorders order, all this, the satiety, all these things we talked about don't apply to a saturated fat like beef tallow. The other thing is that beef tallow is a nutrient dense food. Seed oils in addition to being toxic, have no vitamin content of note. There's nothing to write home about. Plant oils.

Ben Greenfield [00:51:09]: Think about that.

Steven Rofrano [00:51:10]: Yeah, plant oils in general.

Ben Greenfield [00:51:11]: So like beef tallow would have more like vitamin A, D, E, K. The same stuff you're eating, whatever liver for.

Steven Rofrano [00:51:16]: Same same thing that you're eating. Any beef products. Wow. Yeah. With conjugated linoleic acid which is not.

Ben Greenfield [00:51:21]: That's funny that there was conjugated linoleic acid in my pre workout energy drink this morning. Cuz it's used as a, as a workout aid.

Steven Rofrano [00:51:27]: It's not the, the bad kind. That's found mostly in dairy fats and stuff. But yeah. So not only does it not have the toxic stuff, it's also, it also has vitamins. It's like you're eating your SMB fat from a steak or something. So that is the original frying fat. Right. If you think about Belgian french fries, Belgian cemented french fries in the 1800s, what do they use? They used beef tallow because that was what was available and that.

Ben Greenfield [00:51:49]: So RFK is trying to get McDonald's choose again.

Steven Rofrano [00:51:51]: That's why McDonald's became so popular. And this is an important dimension because people will talk, you know, people like us will talk about others. Healthy is not healthy all day. But what matters for the 95% of say normal people is that the food they eat tastes good and satisfies them. And so while there may be people who are interested, you know, in health above all else, which is great and fine and that's, you know, I think a lot of us here, the average everyday person is going to eat what tastes good and stuff fried and beef tallow tastes way better than a corresponding.

Ben Greenfield [00:52:20]: Yeah, it's kind of dangerous because your chips are not only like way thicker, so the mouthfeel is incredible and they don't get soggy but they do taste really good. Like calories are calories. I'm still conscious when I grab a handful of chips. I'm like these things I will mow through a bag if I'm not careful.

Steven Rofrano [00:52:35]: Yeah, yeah. And they taste good, which is, I think, great. Because if we're replacing this in the diet, you know, if we're replacing the crappy chips in the diet of, you know, 95% of Americans with something like this, yeah, they'll eat them, it's. They'll snack on them, that's whatever. But they won't be, it won't be actively contributing to their metabolic dysfunction, causing their low metabolic rate and the obesity and all this other stuff. And they'll enjoy it too. Right. One of the hard sells about diets in general to people, whether it's keto or gluten free or carnivore or vegan or whatever, is that the diet doesn't taste good.

Steven Rofrano [00:53:06]: You know, you have to have extreme amounts of willpower and some amount of, you know, masochism almost in order to maintain yourself in some diet that's unpleasant. Um, some people can do it, most people won't do it. And so if we want the mass of people to be healthy, their health foods have to also actually taste good and satisfy them.

Ben Greenfield [00:53:22]: So if I get the Masa original flavor, let's say, I think it's like a red, red and white bag.

Steven Rofrano [00:53:27]: Yeah.

Ben Greenfield [00:53:27]: What are the actual ingredients on the label?

Steven Rofrano [00:53:29]: Organic corn, grass fed beef tallow and sea salt.

Ben Greenfield [00:53:33]: And what do you do as far as the sea salt goes? Because some people talk about, you know, microplastics, metals, things like that in sea salt.

Steven Rofrano [00:53:39]: Yeah, well, we use, there's, there's no one salt that will satisfy everyone. Right. Um, we use Redmond sea salt, which is microplastic free. Cause it comes from.

Ben Greenfield [00:53:49]: That's a good brand, huh? Yeah, I've, I've seen some of the lab strict analysis from them. It's good, it's clean.

Steven Rofrano [00:53:54]: Yeah, I mean we, we like it. I think it tastes very, I think it tastes good as, as much as salt can taste different from other salt, I think it tastes good. Um, but yeah, it's pure ancient sea salt. There's no microplastics or anything. Um, and yeah, the, the organic corn, at least as of right now, is all grown in New England, which I think is somewhat important because not only you can have organic fields anywhere, but part of the issue that organic farmers face is if your neighbors are all pesticide farms, their pesticides will blow onto your land. And so it's a huge.

Ben Greenfield [00:54:21]: Do you have to like choose the state so that you're not near farms or using herbicides and pesticides.

Steven Rofrano [00:54:26]: It's definitely something that we have to think about. Yeah.

Ben Greenfield [00:54:28]: Wow. Wow. It's crazy. Anthony, have you tried the potato chip? Because the mosses are the tortilla, but then they have the Vandy. Have you tried those?

Anthony Gustin [00:54:36]: Absolutely, dude. Yeah.

Ben Greenfield [00:54:37]: What do you think?

Anthony Gustin [00:54:38]: I try to keep that stuff out of my house. Not because it's. Not because it's bad for me, but because I will open a bag and then it will be gone within five or 10 minutes.

Ben Greenfield [00:54:48]: Yeah. And correct me if I'm wrong, Steven, but it's a similar philosophy. Use the beef tallow, but then you're using. You're. You don't have to nixtamalize.

Steven Rofrano [00:54:54]: No, you don't have to nixtamalize them. You don't nixtamalize potatoes. Yeah, it's just we. We rinse them to get some of the excess starch off, which can. If it gets. If it's in the fryer, it'll get brown and kind of burnt. And so there's some, you know, you don't necessarily want to eat too many, like burnt things.

Steven Rofrano [00:55:09]: So we do a little bit of rinsing to the potatoes in filtered water, of course. But the potatoes come from Idaho. And we get our potatoes thus far from the, like the longest standing organic potato farmer in Idaho.

Ben Greenfield [00:55:23]: Oh, no. Wow. I was born in Idaho, moving back to Idaho in about 20 days. So you know what I figured out the other night because I was making burgers, a friend showed me, this is way back in college. He's like, check this out. He took crackers. In this case, they were just saltines. And he crumbled them up in his scrambled eggs.

Ben Greenfield [00:55:40]: And he made scrambled eggs with crackers. And it tastes incredible. It makes it more fluffy and that increases the density and the mouth feel. And it was later in college, I try it with hamburgers and actually crumbled up not the crackers, but chips, potato chips. I think I was just using whatever the lay's or whatever in the hamburger. Incredible. So then two weeks ago, I took about half a bag of the Vandy's original flavor potato chip because now you have. What's the second flavor?

Steven Rofrano [00:56:11]: Smokehouse. It's a barbecue flavor.

Ben Greenfield [00:56:13]: Yeah, yeah, Smokehouse. My wife says you guys gotta do sea salt and vinegar.

Steven Rofrano [00:56:16]: We're working on it.

Ben Greenfield [00:56:17]: But anyways, crumbled a bunch of that up, rubbed it into the burger, formed the patties and made the burgers. Dude, you guys so good. Because it's something about the texture and the flavor of the potato chips kind of seeps into the burger. While you're making the hamburger. It's incredible.

Anthony Gustin [00:56:34]: With a side of chips as well or what?

Ben Greenfield [00:56:36]: Oh, of course.

Steven Rofrano [00:56:36]: Oh, yeah, Yeah. I like here.

Ben Greenfield [00:56:38]: Even when I was in high school, one of my favorite things to do was I make a sandwich. And the very last thing I do is I line the right underneath the top layer of bread with it, a couple of stacks of chips, crunch it down. So every bite of sandwich is just crunchy chip goodness.

Steven Rofrano [00:56:52]: That's awesome.

Ben Greenfield [00:56:52]: Yeah, it is kind of cool because it's kind of like when that company, they're not perfect, they actually do have some sunflower oil in them. But when that company, Magic Spoon, came out with healthier for you cereal, it was awesome because I could go back to my nostalgic cereal flavors again and be doing, you know, Frosted Flakes or Fruit Loops, but a healthier, high protein, low sugar version of that. This is similar for me. It's like, whoa, I'm back to before I understood what actually goes into processed foods. And I'm able to have chips again. And now I've got guacamole and salsa in the refrigerator again. And now I'm, you know, I'm crunching the chips. Well, for me, now I make wraps instead of sandwiches, but I crunch the chips into my wrap, and so they're amazing.

Ben Greenfield [00:57:30]: The spices thing, is that something you'd be concerned about, though? I thought you might know this, Steven, because, you know, like, I like Traeger, but they'll send me these rubs kind of like done for you rubs. Obviously, people will get spices like Morton's, and I forget, the other one's super popular from the grocery store with the spices. Is that an issue, like. Or spices. Just spices.

Steven Rofrano [00:57:52]: I mean, it's definitely an issue. I do want to clarify, though, that the amount of spices in any product is always so small relative to, say, the 25% of all calories or whatever. Whatever it is. I forget what Anthony said. Um, the. The large percentage of all calories that we eat that are seed oils. Right? Like, that's a big deal. If the dose makes the poison, that's the biggest dose of anything that we get.

Steven Rofrano [00:58:13]: So, I mean, yeah, I. I am of the personal philosophy that I want to optimize and tweak every single thing and make it perfect. However, to be completely fair, spices are a very small portion of whatever it is that you're eating. But just to give you an example for, like, lime, you know, after we had the original flavor, I thought, okay, let's do lime chip. Everyone has lime Chips, you know, late July's lime chip, Siete's lime chip, Tostitis lime chip. Okay. People want lime tortilla chips. So I went about looking for organic lime powder because I don't want, you know, other weird ingredients in it.

Steven Rofrano [00:58:43]: And I couldn't find a single vendor of pure organic lime powder. And I was like, this is weird. How do other companies do this? Like, surely there's lime powder. It's. Limes are everywhere. Shouldn't. Shouldn't be that hard. Um, I looked at some other brands.

Steven Rofrano [00:58:55]: I'm not going to name names, but people can figure out for themselves. Uh, one. One brand was citric acid and lime essential oil was their lime flavor on the ingredient label. Another brand was lime juice powder and maltodextrin for their flavor. Um, and there's variants of all this, but I couldn't find a single brand.

Ben Greenfield [00:59:13]: One was a picture of a lime on the label. Plug your nose and imagine it tastes like lime, literally.

Steven Rofrano [00:59:17]: Right? I mean, so for the lime and citric acid, it's like the lime oil is the fragrance flavor, and then you get the citric acid for the sourness. And so I'm like, I don't. I. I can't tolerate this. Like, we're not gonna do that. Um, I had already ordered all the green bags for the lime flavor, though. So, like, we're already committed. We have to make this recipe work.

Steven Rofrano [00:59:32]: So we ended up buying cases and cases of organic limes from our local health food distributor, slicing them with a deli slicer by hand and then dehydrating them, grinding up the dehydrated lime discs into a powder and then sprinkling that on the chips. Like, that's. That's what we had to do. I literally could not buy a lime powder. And so the. We're facing the same issue. You mentioned salt and vinegar chips. Same issue with vinegar.

Steven Rofrano [00:59:55]: Right. It turns out that it's very difficult to turn liquids into, or certain liquids into powder, because if you evaporate them, there's not any. You know, there's nothing solid to really, like, sprinkle on a. On a chip. So to turn vinegar, it's like pixie dust, huh?

Ben Greenfield [01:00:09]: It's like pixie dust.

Steven Rofrano [01:00:10]: Yeah, exactly. Right. Like, if you dehydrate, if you boil a pot of vinegar, it might leave a film of something vinegary on the surface of the pot, but you can't. There's no powder. You can't put that into a chip. So it's incredibly difficult to try and figure out for a Lot of these liquids. Vinegar is another example. And then also dairy products.

Steven Rofrano [01:00:27]: Right. Like the cheeses. How to turn those into a spice that does not have any other, like, weird fake fillers and ingredients. It's not trivial by any stretch of the imagination. Again, does it matter that much? Is a little bit of spices going to kill you? Probably not, but I want to be perfect about it. And so we're, we're taking our time to figure out how to do this the right way.

Ben Greenfield [01:00:47]: Well, I mean, the flavor is incredible, you know, and I didn't know you guys were doing a potato chip. When a potato chip showed up at my house, it was over the moon because I like potato chips even better than tortilla chips. So in case people didn't get the name, the. I'll link to it in BenGreenfieldLife.com seed oil. But the tortilla is Masa and the potato one is Vandy.

Steven Rofrano [01:01:05]: Masachips.com m-a-s-a and then Vandy v-a-n-d-y crisps.com.

Ben Greenfield [01:01:13]: Okay. And there's two flavors of Vandy's.

Steven Rofrano [01:01:14]: Yeah. Right now. Yep.

Ben Greenfield [01:01:15]: And what are the four flavors of the five flavors of the Masas?

Steven Rofrano [01:01:18]: Masa's original, blue corn, lime, carbonara, which is a spicy, savory, kind of like a Dorito flavor. And then there's churro, which is quickly becoming a very, a very big fan favorite.

Ben Greenfield [01:01:32]: Churro crumbled up on top of coconut Vanilla ice cream. You guys tried that?

Steven Rofrano [01:01:36]: Yeah, yeah, we. Churro and ice cream. We did.

Ben Greenfield [01:01:39]: You can literally dip a churro in the ice cream, like salsa and have like a dessert chip.

Steven Rofrano [01:01:44]: It's. It's far too good. Yeah. There was a grocery store in New York that makes healthy soft serve ice cream. The only place I've ever seen that has soft serve ice cream without your crappy.

Ben Greenfield [01:01:53]: Which is soft enough to not break the chip.

Steven Rofrano [01:01:55]: Yeah. And they, they served it with, you know, like if you go to Italy, you get the gelato. You have that waffle cracker thing in the cup of the ice cream. Yeah, they put a churro chip in the ice cream was very good.

Ben Greenfield [01:02:03]: Dude, guys, it's only like 11:45 and I want to go eat lunch now. Well, obviously a lot here, especially when it comes to the science. And Anthony, you mentioned you'd be kind enough to send me some studies. I will totally put those in the show notes. If people go to BenGreenfieldLife.com/seedoilpodcast. I'll put links to the man, Mandy the masa and the vandy stuff to some groceries. Is it Whole Foods yet?

Steven Rofrano [01:02:29]: Not yet. We'll be in a few in the Northeast in Whole Foods early next year.

Ben Greenfield [01:02:33]: Amazing.

Steven Rofrano [01:02:34]: Not yet.

Ben Greenfield [01:02:34]: You know, people at Whole Foods talk to people because they need to be there.

Steven Rofrano [01:02:37]: Yeah.

Ben Greenfield [01:02:38]: My opinion.

Steven Rofrano [01:02:38]: Yeah, please.

Ben Greenfield [01:02:39]: So. So yeah, check out the show notes and Anthony, just like email me the studies and I'll put them in there as well. You guys, this has been incredible. You answered so many questions in a very concise and efficient manner. So I really appreciate it.

Anthony Gustin [01:02:53]: Thanks for having us on.

Steven Rofrano [01:02:54]: Yeah, thanks. Appreciate it.

Ben Greenfield [01:02:56]: All right folks, well, I'm Ben Greenfield, one with Steven from Ancient Crunch and Anthony from all over the health world signing up from BenGreenfieldLife.com/seedoilpodcast. Have an incredible week to discover even.

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