Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 045: Saturated Fat DEBUNKED

Episode Date: March 18, 2015

For years we have been told that saturated fat is a major contributor to heart disease and obesity. People listened and cut saturated fat from their diets, yet, during this same period the incidence of heart disease and obesity skyrocketed. Is saturated fat really as bad as we have been lead to believe? In this episode Sal, Adam and Justin debunk common misconceptions about saturated fats.

Hey MindPub listeners, go to MindPumpRadio.com where you can check out the Maps Enabolic Workout program and the Nutrition Survival Guide both available at a massive discount. MindPumpRadio.com. If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mind, I'm mind, up with your hosts. Salda Stefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. All right, welcome to Mind Pump. This is the fitness show with a heart.

Oh, stop it, bro. Yeah. I made a joke. No, I just thought of something like funny. Yeah, that was weird. I don't like it to get sensitive. I like when you do things like cockadoodle-doo. Yeah, I feel like my estrogen level is just like rise up there.

We're like a heart. Yeah. Where'd he go, Sal? There goes another 500 listeners. All right, so this is Sal the Stefano. I'm here with Adam Schaefer. Woo-woo. And Justin Andrews.

Yeah, I'm here. Here, and he's here. I want to talk about, now, here's, this is a good subject because more recently, we talked about this in a previous episode. We talked about how the government was reversing or getting ready to reverse its stance on cholesterol or dietary cholesterol. Yes.

And I predict maybe not now, but in the future, in the near future, that they will also reverse what they've said about saturated fat, about how it's bad for you. In relation to like omega six, like vegetable oils and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, because look at the difference between. Yeah, because for the longest time,

what have we been told about saturated fat? Well, I mean, let's be honest, it's so closely related to the cholesterol thing too. And what we have found, it's the living in a surplus for a long period of time that's gonna put all this bad weight, it's all the bad weight to start in the clog arteries and do things like that.

It's not the things that are in the food. If you eat anything in moderation or living in a deficit, that stuff is getting utilized. That's a lot of it. Yeah, that's a lot of it. And all the positive things, I know you're gonna get nerdy and label them all off for saturated fat, but all these things,

without even you going off, I could tell you right now, there's a lot of benefits from saturated fat so that we get and it's something that you wouldn't want to cut out of your diet so it needs to be in your diet. It's just that you got to be careful because it's dense, you know, it's a lot of calories. So obviously if you sat down a bacon and ribeye steaks all day long, like you get to your over your surplus. Well, dude, so for the longest time, and I'm going to go into that by the way, what you just said, but for the longest time, we've'm gonna go into that, by the way, what you just said, but for the longest time,

we've heard that they're, first of all, fat is bad, and then it changed, and then they said, there's good fats and bad fats, right? But, and which is true, there are bad fats, there are bad fats, however, it's not the ones that they're sick, because what do they say that are bad fats, saturated? And they say the good fats are all avoidable.

That's just what you're saying. Yeah, monosaturated, polyunsaturated fats are good, and saturated fats are bad. And at the moment the official guideline is that you consume less than 10% of your diet, excuse me, less than 10% of your fats should be saturated, is what they're saying. But some more recent studies have just come out that have completely blown out out of the fucking water, completely blown out of the water. I've got something down here. I want to go over a little bit.

First and foremost, when it comes to saturated fat, they've better studies have come out and they've done these huge metadata studies, which are basically with a compile all these studies together done on saturated fat. They tease out the controls and they analyze all of them. So these huge metadata studies are awesome to look at because they look at so many different studies. And so a lot of times you get the truth out of that easier than you would with an individual study that maybe missed control

or maybe had a small sample size, for example. And what they found was that saturated fat intake was not connected to heart disease at all. Oh wow. It was not going to attract that. I read that in another study. Yeah, it was, you know, before we go on, we should kind of talk about what a saturated fat is.

You know, so saturated fats are found mostly in animal proteins. Most animal related. Animal, you can get imvegable sources coconut, oil, palm oil has saturated fats. A saturated fat is a fat that contains saturated fatty acids, which basically mean it's got no double bonds and it's saturated with hydrogen atoms. So there's nothing available. Basically it's full of hydrogen atoms.

So that's what a saturated fat is. So enough of that, that extremely nerdy stuff. There were studies in the past that were really bad studies that showed that saturated fats were bad for you. However, I'm going to go over some of those. So there was a study where, and a lot of these were animal studies and they used rabbits for whatever reason Because we're so much like rabbits right yeah Rabbits are herbivores. What do you think's gonna happen if you take a plant-eating animal and you're a shitload of saturated batting cholesterol? Right something bad. I love all these old studies back because you know why dude people just got to understand this like especially Studies back then the so many of them were were written and geared to be biased for a reason.

There was a desired outcome of that study. They wanted to show you that it was bad because guess what? Whoever was having that study paid for, more than likely was tied to somewhere that was making money off this new campaign that we were about to do with saturated facts. Do not be fooled people. Well, check this out. So you're gonna love this. So I was doing a lot of research on the subject.

It's a subject that I find very passionate about. And there's a few studies that indicate a correlation, which by the way, correlation does not mean causation. So I'll give you an example. Every time it rains, the 49ers tend to win, for example. This is not true, but I'm just saying. That doesn't mean that the rain is somehow making them win. Exactly, affecting. Right, or if it rains somewhere else, or for example, when, you know, every time I wash my car at rains,

that doesn't mean I'm causing it to rain, it's just a correlation. It doesn't even mean, it doesn't mean they're connected. But anyhow, when they find the few studies that show a correlation between reducing your fat intake and reducing coronary heart disease, first and foremost, the reduction is very small. However, they don't ever make it sound like it's small. So let me give you an example. Let's say you have a 1% chance of dying from doing something

and then you change that to doing something else and now you have a 2% chance. There's two ways I could say I could talk about that. One is doing this new thing will increase your chance of death by 1%. The other way is by saying it doubles the risk. Sounds crazier, right? Brown's crazier. So a lot of these studies will do that. So it'll be like a 2% difference difference and they'll say, oh, it's 20% more, which sounds a lot, but it's really not. However, when you look at these studies, they don't tell you the full story.

And what you find is these low fat diets, even in these studies that show a small correlation between lower fat intake and better heart health, also have an increase. You're gonna love this in deaths from cancer, brain hemorrhages, suicide, and violent deaths. So, if you actually look at overall mortality, you actually live longer. In most studies, you show that you live longer if you eat more fats.

Isn't that great? I love that. It's such a crazy, yeah. I love that kind of stuff. So, in 2012, researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, they looked at the health and lifestyle habits of more than 52,000 adults between 20 and 74. So, this is a huge study, huge sample size. And what they found was that women with high cholesterol, which is higher than 270 milligrams per, you know, in terms of blood cholesterol, which by the way, anything over 200, a doctor would usually try and prescribe a drug to you to lower it, right?

So that's high cholesterol. They had a 28% lower mortality risk than women with low cholesterol. Oh, wow. So that there's your cholesterol run right there. In 2013, there's a prominent London cardiologist, his name is a seam malhorta, and he argued in the British medical journal that you should ignore the advice to reduce saturated fat intake,

because he says it's actually increasing your risk for obesity and heart disease, and they did do a massive study, and you were talking about how excess calories make you fat, which is true. However, calories are not all equal, and we're discovering that more and more. Calories not a calorie is not a calorie.

No, and they take these huge studies where they take two groups of people, and they say, okay, we don't want you to watch your calories, but what we want to do with this group is you eat a low-fat diet. And this group over here, we want you to eat a low carb diet. And then they follow them for like five years. The low carb diet, people always lose more weight and have better markers of health all the way around. And if you look at like American history, when we went on our low fat craze, which kind of

kicked off in the 60s, 70s and really got popular in the 80s, what happened to obesity and heart disease in America? I jacked up, man. Exploded. Exploded. To me, it's kind of obvious with that one too, that when you think about it, if you're low carbon, this is where the calories, not a calories of calories. Right.

When you're taking in carbohydrates, it's going to directly affect your blood sugar levels. And when it affects your blood sugar levels, now you're messing with insulin. And when insulin's present in the body, it puts you in a state of storing. So your body is prime for storing. So let's say you weren't on a high, you're on the low fat diet, but you're on the high carb, you'll high carb shoot your blood sugar out, then you're

insulin. So then your body, even though you might be eating within the same calories, but your body is prime to store now. It's raised to where the the flip is true on the people that are in the high the high fats, high fats and low carbs, they're low carbs, they're keeping their blood sugar levels significantly low. So even though when they go to eat the steak and they had previously just ate maybe a half hour before that, their levels are not as elevated as somebody who just slammed 400 calories with carbohydrates.

Well, so that's exactly what they're finding. Is it's these excess carbohydrates, these processed carbohydrates? And by the way, there are fats that are bad for you. It's the it's these excess carbohydrates, these processed carbohydrates, and by the way, there are fats that are bad for you. It's the... Well, I was gonna kind of mention, yeah. Oh, perfect. As far as like the vegetable oils

and why that really is bad for you, and why, you know, these types of fats are something to really be the ones to consider eliminating. Well, it's the highly processed vegetable oils, like corn oil, can be oiled. Cotton seed. No business in your diet. No business. There is no reason you can have that shit. Well, it's the highly processed vegetable oils like corn oil can oil cotton So business in your diet. No, there's no reason you can have that shit You can anything you can do with that. They have to they have to heat it the extreme temperature

Just to extract the oil from it to begin with and that's what makes it bad and then they then they have to bleach it They have to digum it. They have to you know strip it of all these things just to get that clarity in the oil and What are you left with at that point? Right. If you want it's not natural. If you want to consume vegetable fats, then they need to be available in natural form like olive oil. So like if you take an olive and squeeze it, oil comes out. Coconut oil, very healthy palm oil, very healthy.

Those are both saturated fats, by the way, you know, fats and avocados and nuts and whatnot, those are all healthy. But what I was going to say is, I don't know if you guys knew this, but Sweden, the country of Sweden, officially changed its national guidelines for diet. They now recommend a high fat low carbohydrate diet. This is their national guideline. Because they found that the other way around

was causing more illness, more death, more cancer, more mortality. So they're saying, no, eat butter, eat red meat, eat your heavy creams, eat the fatty foods, don't eat lots of the starches, lots of the processed foods, lots of those types of things. I'm sure they're farming industry is a little different than ours out here too. Oh, we have a huge wheat industry. Yeah, yeah, yeah, subsidized here that are just killing our health.

Massive. Massive. And that's, and that's the reason why it, you know, it goes back to what we said earlier about how you guys are going to get misinformation forever. That's never going to let's just that's no one's that we're always going to. It's it's what we're all about and why we do what we do right now is that we're just here to, to, to yell truth. Let me make this clear too. It's sad. I was talking about we're, and we're all agreeing on this too, how important saturated fat is. This doesn't mean that we're telling you

to go have five meals tomorrow that are all steak with butter on top of it, because technically, those things are really good for you, because that's not an ideal, because going back to your being at calorie surplus, you also want to balance and live in a deficit. And you don't want to overdo it. So anything excess is not going to be a good idea. a good water. You want broccoli. Yeah, you need water

Well, guess what happens if you drink too much water you die. Yeah, you know, your cells will drown That's a fact and also you strip out iodine also don't be don't be full too by we were saying saturated fat So it's good so then if you flip like or flip a big Mac burger around and you see that it's high in saturated fat That's not what we're talking about either because there's a bunch of shit That's also yeah, it's the process than the preservatives and oh my god. Whatever the fuck else to the main lab if you get your saturated fat from like you know Grass that beef you know whole eggs there it is from you know whole dairy, but you know It's the corn fed. That's really that's an issue man. Yeah, it changes the fat as the profiles They get sick, you know, they have to pump them with antibiotics just to keep them healthy. They put them all together.

I mean, it's all part of this industrial kind of complex. Well, so I've been experimenting with this. And for those of you that follow me on Instagram, you've seen I've made a few posts about this. But you guys know what I've been doing with my diet. Yeah. Yeah. So for the past, I'd say three, four weeks, you know, the whole cholesterol thing came out. And so I started doing more, four weeks. You know, the whole cholesterol thing came out, and so I started doing more research.

I found I read these studies that showed that cholesterol intake increases athletic performance in health. So I dramatically bumped up my cholesterol intake, and I changed, and I'm eating much more saturated fats than I normally do. Now my calories aren't really that different, but the breakdown is different. But you're alternating that though, right? You're doing it like three times a week. Well, so here's what I'm doing.

So I'm making sure to have at least 600 to 700 milligrams a cholesterol every day, but there are days which much higher. And there are a couple days where it's lower than that. So I've increased my cholesterol, increased my saturated fat, holy shit, stronger, I'm building more muscle. I'm in the gym. I'm working out I worked out with the producer Doug the other day and we hadn't worked out for about two weeks and He's like dude you look you look crazy like you look bigger and you're the same you're just as lean as you were before

And it's it's all from that. That's all I did was increase do those two things Here's something else I discovered eggs Eggs I typically couldn't eat many of them because they would bother me. They bother my stomach. I'd have almost like an intolerance to them. Well, it's the egg whites that I have an intolerance to. So I eat just the yolk. No problem whatsoever. And that's actually where all the good stuff is anyway. But that's not, I mean, that's not everybody. That's just your own bio- That's just me. Yeah. So, so and what's funny is I did a little more research

and they actually recommend egg yolks and raw egg yolks to people with gut issues. Uh-huh. Because it's very, very easy to digest apparently. So for those of you that have digestive issues, egg yolks are fantastic. And they give you all of your, they give you a good amount of certain fat soluble vitamins,

which if you have gut issues, you probably have an issue absorbing anyway, right? So it's a good idea to do that now that all being said There's there's a lot of healthy ways to eat because like we've talked about in previous episodes about these blue zones Where people live to a hundred and beyond there's some of these cultures that are vegetarian yeah And so there isn't I'm not saying that this is the only best way to do it. I think the, I think if you're going to go with natural whole foods and you're not going to overeat, you kind of can't go wrong. You know what I'm saying?

Whether you're vegetarian or whether you eat lots of it. And just make sure you manage the prep of it, right? Yes. Yeah, watch all that oil and everything added in. Well, and this is the reason why too why our workout programs are Nutrition guides are we refer to them as guides and phases, right? No, it's not this is the answer This is the way you're on path. Yeah, this is a guide to teach you how to do these steps

And that was the whole idea behind that while that's also why to you guys don't hear us talk a lot about that because we didn't do it to push it and And be that way we did it did it for those that asked. When you ask and you need help new guidance and learning how to pick foods right or you need the right steps how you should start to build a training program. That's why these phases and these guys were built. You have to establish a decent knowledge of what you're doing and then that way you can apply it and then you're going to have a healthier relationship with food which is then going to help you to then expand on that.

So now we talk about these other concepts that might be a little more advanced, but guess what? If you go through the process and you understand on a very basic level how to approach nutrition correctly, then guess what? You can experiment more in the future. Now, those of you who are listening who do eat meat and have no problem with animal products, you can experiment with this. As long as you don't have,

there are certain medical conditions and they're not very common, they're quite rare, where you do have to watch things like saturated fat and cholesterol, but most of us are okay with it. Increase your cholesterol intake and watch how your performance increases. And of course, increase it from things like organ meats and egg yolks. Those are probably the best sources.

But I'm going to talk about one more study. This was a study that kind of blew me away. So researchers from A&M University took three groups of healthy individuals between 50 and 69. And they went through 12 weeks of resistance training. So an older age group who went through about 12 weeks of exercise, one group ate less than 200 milligrams of cholesterol a day, which was the old recommendation. The other group, another group ate 400 milligrams and then the third group ate 800 milligrams

of cholesterol a day. The high cholesterol group gained 250 percent more strength than the low cholesterol. 250 percent more strength than the low cholesterol 250% more strength. They gain more than double the amount of strength than the low cholesterol So the people who ate 200 milligrams had less than half the strength gains in the ones eating 800 milligrams So crazy and all health by the way they were testing and you know other health parameters and not only was their diet Their blood cholesterol not really affected their good cholesterol up. The people who ate the most cholesterol. And they crushed them. Reading that study, I read some more interesting information

that I did not even know, this is what I love doing about this, is it leads me down this web of like information, I start reading so learn more. I'm open in the box. So did you know that there's research that shows after an intense workout, your blood cholesterol immediately drop. And then as you eat cholesterol, they come back up to normal. So it's like your body's utilizing that cholesterol.

And it is cholesterol is important in making hormones, but it's also important in getting cells to adapt. And so right after a workout, cholesterol will drop immediately. And if you eat cholesterol throughout the day, this helps the recovery process. With that other study that I just had quoted, I forgot to tell you guys, those three groups ate the same calories. They all ate the same calories. The muscle gain group, excuse me, the muscle gain on them wasn't really that different.

However, the strength was much higher. So the researchers basically concluded that most of the strength gains came from the central nervous system adaptation. So if you're a strength athlete or you're in a weight class and you can't go up in a weight class, don't increase your calories, bump up your cholesterol. And you just get stronger because your central nervous system's gonna be firing that much harder. Remember, this is what I told you guys. I told these guys when we first started, I would love for us to get some young athlete like up and coming and like just teach them nutrition and train him from the, like early in his career. Like I know, so if you're listening to this and you're like 25 roads too late, sorry.

I don't want you. I want a young ambitious like high school kid who's like really like wrestling or MMA or something like that and teach him how to diet correctly and kick over his flexibilities. And use some of these things. Oh yeah, and train him like to tie a diet correctly and kick over his flexibilities. And use some of these things. Oh yeah, and train him like from ground up.

Oh, I would love it. And you know, speaking as we're talking about this, you know, I know Justin, you're a big fan like I am of the old time weightlifters and strongmen. What did they all tell you to eat and all those liver and cholesterol? Lots of liver and eggs in heavy cream and cream. What people don't realize, when you look at some of these old-time strong men, people like Arthur Saxon and Eugene Sandau,

a lot of these guys were doing crazy strength feats into their 50s and 60s. So awesome. It wasn't just in their 20s and 30s. And they were eating like all these heavys. Because it lasts, man. The strength was there for a long period of time. And I think, you know, that we've changed

the way people eat, you're starting to notice more of a decline in people as they age. And I'm thinking they probably need to eat more of those foods. I mean, yeah, it's starting to look that way, huh? Yeah, so those old timers kind of, I think they knew a lot of what they were talking about. And like I said, I noticed a big difference myself.

Yeah, I mean, their physique obviously were different, but I think that, you know, they definitely had something right. Well, they looked impressive, and this was pretty, forget steroids, this was pretty crating. Right. There was no protein powder. No, no, no.

Like, they just ate food and left it with them. Yeah, just food and did make certain levee up. You got me all excited to do it. And you were asking me there a day, like, you need to do this, you need to start this. I have a plan already, and I'll tell you what I'm gonna do, because for me, I have my meals that I like to eat before my workout, I've tested so many different meals.

So my pre-workout meal, in a sense, that I eat at my breakfast spot, is my six to seven ounce steak. I've got four or two slices of wheat toast, small bowl of fruit, and then egg whites that I eat every single morning before I go lift. And what I'm gonna do, because now I'm in contest prep, when I get done with a show, it's perfect, because I'm completely cleaned out,

I've been very structured and systematic about what I'm eating and everything like that. Then the way I'm going to reverse diet out, I'm gonna increase my, only my calories through cholesterol. Yeah, so cholesterol is in those saturated fats. Yes, so that's how, and that's going to, I know what it feels like to come out of a show, I know what it feels like to come out of a show,

either going on a hundred percent clean, going to all kinds of food, but I'm going to just, I'm going to do it, I'm going to inch it up by just solely using saturated fats cholesterol and see how I feel. Oh, yeah, it'll be awesome. And pairing that with the fact that I already know that coming off of that, like, You're already in a ball with 30-cell, I'm pretty excited affects cholesterol and see how I feel. Oh, yeah, it'll be awesome. And pairing that with the fact that I already know that coming off of that, like,

You're already in a ball with 30-feel in a ball? I'm pretty excited to think like the possibilities where it could be, you know, hopefully, hopefully, I get the same effect that you get from it. In addition to already feeling in a ball, I'm pretty pumped to get to that point. You know, as far, you talked about the whole week toast, as far as carbs is concerned,

I've always told clients this, I've always said your carbs should match your activity. So, and for most of you, you're not that active. Even if you go lift weights at the gym three days a week. No, not at all. You probably don't need a small window of your day. Yeah, you don't need tons of carbs. Now, if you go no carbs or super low carbs,

you will experience a drop in athletic performance. So when I say low carb, you know, I'm talking, you know, like I said, matches your activity level. Now, I probably average around 200 grams a day, which isn't a lot, but it's also not nothing. And so I think if you match your active level with your car or your car, your car is your active level, then you're going to be, going to be okay. If you're an endurance athlete, you obviously going to need more, more of those carbohydrates.

So, yeah, definitely. Yeah, so, yeah, so basically that's it. If you know, do your own research, look it up yourself, guys. Yeah, sure, yeah. They're about breaking stuff, man. They're about to change their policy on cholesterol and saturated fats are next. Mark my words, you'll see.

Well, this is what nutrition guide number two or three that you're working on right now with all that. So that'll come later. Yeah, we're gonna break it down. We're crafting, baby. Thank you for listening to Mind Pump. For more information about this show and to get valuable free resources from Sal and I'm in Justin, visit us at www.minepumpradio.com. Until next time, this is Mind Pump.