May 20, 2025 • 46 mins
In this conversation, Chef Andrew Gruel discusses the impact of omega fatty acids on health, particularly the imbalance of omega-6 and omega-3 fatty acids in the American diet. He emphasizes the prevalence of omega-6s in processed foods and the importance of making healthier choices, such as cooking with better oils and making homemade condiments. The discussion also touches on the role of government in food regulation and the need for individuals to take charge of their health by being more informed about their food choices. Wellness Unmasked with Dr. Nicole Saphier is prt of the Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Podcast Network - new episodes debut every Tuesday & Friday.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
Hey, everyone, Welcome to Wellness on Mass.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
I'm doctor Nicole Saffaire, Board certified position mom and forever
truth seeker well as someone who delivers a cancer diagnosis
just about every single day as my day job. Of course,
I have to talk about cancer. Everyone knows someone who
has either themselves or a family member or a friend
or someone who's been affected by cancer, because it really
(00:26):
is just so prevalent. And while we could talk about
cancer probably for a year straight, that's not necessarily what
I want to get into today.
Speaker 1 (00:34):
You know.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
One of the big things for me when it comes
to Wellness on Mass I really want to shine a
light on the science that really matters. And there was
exciting research that came out of Cornell University looking at
something very specific from a molecular level when it comes
to cancer risk. But again, this episode is going to
touch on cancer, but it's not entirely about cancer. One
(00:57):
of the questions I have had is how is being
overweight related to cancer? Undoubtedly, we know that the more
excess body fat you have, it can increase your risk
of cancer. In the United States, about seventy four percent
of adults are overweight or obese. About twenty one percent
(01:19):
of kids adolescents are also overweight or obese.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
That's a pretty.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
Terrible number, and in fact, I think that's underestimated because
as I look around at our kids, everyone's kind of
packing on a little extra weight, just like the adults.
So one of the biggest questions that I have is
is it the fat in the body and its effect
on our body that's leading to cancer or is it
something specific in our food that not only does it
(01:47):
make us fat, but it itself is toxic and is
resulting in cancer Or is it a little bit of both,
and what can we.
Speaker 1 (01:55):
Do about it? So let's kind of review what we
do know.
Speaker 2 (01:58):
It is settled signs excess body weight is linked to
a higher risk of cancer. It is what it is,
and the fact that the United States is the most
overweight country in the entire world, it's not surprising that
we also have higher cancers. Why is that, well, fat
(02:18):
cells themselves. The fancy term is adipose cell, but we
can just call it fat cells. This excess fat tissue
secretes pro inflammatory cytokines or hormones, inter leuken six, tumor
necrosis factor. These are hormones that as they go throughout
the body, in your bloodstream, in your tissues.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
It just causes chronic inflammation.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
What does chronic information do well, It damages DNA and
it can inhibit something called apoptosis.
Speaker 1 (02:50):
Apoptosis the way.
Speaker 2 (02:51):
I remembered it in medical school pop pop is when
a cell explodes on itself and it kind of dies,
and you want that to happen. Your body is supposed
to be able to see when cells are going rogue,
or cells are getting too old, or cells are going
bad and they pop on their own, they kind of
get rid of it.
Speaker 1 (03:09):
Apoptosis.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
Well, if you have chronic inflammation, it's not necessarily recognizing
those bad cells and that whole program cell death isn't occurring,
and that can facilitate cancer development. We also know those
adipose cells are hormonally active in themselves, so yes, they
secrete some chemicals that can lead to inflammation, but they
(03:31):
actually convert androgens in your body into estrogens because they
have a specific enzyme in them, So these fat cells
create more estrogen in the body. Estrogen is linked to
certain cancers. Hormone sensitive cancers like breast cancer, endometrial cancer,
and ovarian cancers also can be linked to liver, cancers
(03:54):
and others. And then on top of it, the more
cancer or the more fat cells you have in your body,
the more insulin resistant your body is. So now you
have higher levels of circulating insulin, it's not really working
on your body. And this also can stimulate tumor cell growth.
There are other things that excess fat does in your body.
(04:17):
It alters your metabolism, higher levels of insulin, like we're
just saying, also inhibit that apoptosis or the program cell death.
It can change your microbiome. The excess body weight can
can change the composite of your gut microbiome. We'll be
talking about gut microbiome a lot on this podcast because
(04:38):
your gut is kind of the center.
Speaker 1 (04:39):
Of your health.
Speaker 2 (04:41):
So if you get rid of the good bacteria and
you have all the bad bacteria, that's also going to
lead to more inflammation, could also lead to more cancers,
and it also impairs your immune system. Having more fat
cells dampens the activity of your immune system.
Speaker 1 (04:56):
Let's think about COVID.
Speaker 2 (04:57):
What was one of the first things we noticed with
COVID people that weren't doing well early on during the
COVID pandemic. The elderly, severely immunocompromise, and those that were overweight.
Why is that, Well, I just laid.
Speaker 1 (05:11):
It out for you.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
Having excess body fat is terrible for you. Your body
is in a state of chronic inflammation, and so when
you get an infection or you're sick from whatever it
may be, that chronic state of inflammation makes it so
you can't fight things off. So excess body weight bad
(05:31):
for you. Bottom line, excess fat can lead to excess cancer.
We know this, Like I've said, it's settled science. But
what is less settled is does the foods we eat
directly cause cancer in addition to indirectly causing cancer by
leading to the excess fat. Well, that's one of the
things that Cornell looked at. They took it to the
(05:53):
molecular level to look at whether a particular substance, and
in this case, lineleic acid, was able to cause cancer
to develop and grow. So again we're talking about are
the foods we eat not just poisoning us because they.
Speaker 1 (06:09):
Make us fat?
Speaker 2 (06:10):
Are they actually just poisoning us as well because there's
something bad about them? So this study was funded by
the NIH. It was done by postdoc researchers at Cornell
my colleagues, I'm on staff at Cornell as well. They
do some great research there. What they discovered they were
feeding mice linal liic acid. Line liic acid is an
(06:30):
Omega six fatty acid. We'll talk about that later. So
they were feeding lineleic acid. This is a fatty acid
that we get.
Speaker 1 (06:39):
From our diet.
Speaker 2 (06:40):
Our body doesn't make it, so the only way we're
ever exposed to this is by consuming it. What they
did was they took mice. They fed mice who already
had a triple negative breast cancer. Triple negative breast cancer
is the most aggressive, difficult to treat breast cancer. It's
a really difficult from our perspective. And when you see
(07:03):
someone with a younger person with breast cancer, they tend
to have triple negative breast cancers deadlyest formed the disease.
So they took mice who have triple negative breast cancers
and they fed them a diet high in lineleic acid.
And then they compared it to a placebo group, so
mice who had breast cancer but they weren't being fed
this high lineleic acid diet. What did they find Well,
(07:26):
they found those that consumed the oil the lineleic acid,
their tumors grew larger and faster than those that didn't
consume lineleic acid. They also looked at humans too, so
there was a link to humans as well, that there
was elevated levels of that lineleic acid in the blood
samples from triple negative breast cancer patients.
Speaker 1 (07:48):
So what does that mean? Okay, well, let's talk about
what exactly.
Speaker 2 (07:52):
Lineleic acid is, because if I were just to read that,
I would have no idea what it was. Linealleic acid
is an essential omego omega six polyunsaturated fatty acid that
again that we have to get from our diet, meaning
we don't make it ourselves.
Speaker 1 (08:06):
The only way we're exposed to it is through consumption.
Speaker 2 (08:09):
And in the United States, our Western diet, we have
a lotted added oils. I know you've heard OURFK Junior
talk about it. That's where we're going with this. Yes,
we're talking about those vegetable oils, those seed oils. Polyuns
unsaturated omega six fatty acids are found abundantly in those
(08:29):
vegetable oils, soybean oils, corn oils, sunflower oil, saft flower oils.
I don't even know what saff flowers are, but apparently
that's one of them. But again, those are all of
those seed oils that you hear RFK Junior talking about,
and all of a sudden you're hearing the fast food
restaurant saying, oh, maybe we should take some of these
(08:50):
unhealthy oils out of the diet. Listen, there are benefits
to some of the fats in these oils, but we
have to balance them. So you have omega six fatty
acids which come from like lineleic acid and these seed oils,
and then you also have your omega three fatty acids.
(09:10):
When you hear someone me, for instance, saying, hey, you
got to get in your omegas, I'm saying you have
to get in your healthy omega threes because those fats
are so crucial for your brain health, for your heart health,
and just overall wellness in your immune system. You get
those healthy omega three fats from salmon.
Speaker 1 (09:31):
Sardines, other things.
Speaker 2 (09:33):
Just like that, You're supposed to have a balance in
your body of omega six to omega three balance. The
healthy place to be is having a ratio of five
to one, meaning five of the omega sixes to one
of the omega threes. The problem is, in our Western
diet we have exceeded that ratio threefold. We're at like
(09:56):
fifteen to one. And this is why our inflammatory process
disease are all skewed. This is why we have so
many metabolic conditions, so many more cancers, so much more overweight.
It's a problem. And so while a moderate intake of
liic acid and those omega sixes supports our normal physiological functions,
(10:18):
very high intakes, especially if you don't have an adequate
amount of those omega threes that we are talking about
in study after study have shown that you have increased
markers of inflammation and higher risk for chronic diseases, including
certain cancers, which we're talking about today.
Speaker 1 (10:36):
So bottom line, excess fat leads to excess cancers. But
also we are what we eat.
Speaker 2 (10:43):
If we are intaking high levels of in this particular case,
lineleic acid, lineal. Liic acid itself is probably fueling tumor
cells that are just waiting to grow in our body.
So not only is it causing xx fat, but in
itself may be causing these cancers to grow rampantly. That's
what we saw in the myce studies, and we also
(11:03):
saw women with these highly aggressive breast cancers. They had
high levels of liteleic acid circulating in their bloodstream.
Speaker 1 (11:11):
So if they had had a.
Speaker 2 (11:12):
Lower consumption of these unhealthy seed oils, the question is
would their cancer have been so aggressive or would they
even develop that cancer at all. I mean, that's where
the research is still ongoing, and we need to know
that while we've gotten so good at detecting cancers finding
them at earlier levels, we've gotten great when it comes
(11:33):
to treating a lot of cancers. People are living longer
with cancer. You can have stage four cancer these days
and you can still live ten twenty thirty years because
of our treatments. It's really quite remarkable what we've done.
There's still a lot of work to do because there
are some cancers pancreatic cancer, glioblastoma multiform, and the brain
that we still have very limited treatment options for. So
(11:57):
the quest continues to make sure we can treat all
of these cancers, but we also need to focus on
how can we be preventing these cancers, because we want
to make sure that we have enough funding for people
who still get the cancers that we don't know how
to treat. Right now, we are spending a lot of
research on treating cancers that could have been prevented. In
(12:18):
my book Make America Healthy Again, which came out in
twenty twenty, I have an entire chapter talking about how
over fifty percent of all cancer may be prevented if
we had just adopted some very basic lifestyle changes. Sometimes
it's a little too late for that the damage can
be done. But looking ahead, we have to find ways
(12:40):
that we can decrease chronic chronic inflammation in our body
and try to prevent the risk of disease, specifically cancer.
I am so excited today that I am able to
bring on chef rule. He is a restauranteur, He is
involved in his local politics, and he is all about
healthy living. He was one of the first people I've
(13:00):
ever heard talking about how these seed oils and omega
sixes are unhealthy. He was talking about it before the
whole Make America Healthy Again movement, before it was cool
to talk about it. He was in the forefront in this,
and he started removing seed oils from his restaurants, from
his cooking again even before COVID. So excited to bring
(13:21):
him on Today. We're going to talk about these seed
oils and we're going to give you some tips on
what you can do to just replace some of the
basic things, because you may have some things that have
high levels of lineleic acid, whether in your pantry, in refrigerator.
You don't even realize it that you have these potential
toxins because we use them every day. And why don't
(13:42):
we use them every day? Well, they're cheap and they
last long, they have long shelf lives, and we're so
used to using them, but we don't realize the potential
danger that's lurking. Luckily, Chef Gruel is going to give
us some tips on what we can do to easily
swap them out for healthier alternatives. Coming up next, Chef
Andrew Kruhl is going to give us some tips and
tell you everything you need to know. All right, Well,
(14:06):
there is no better person to help us kind of
cut through all of the toxins and everything that we're
talking about. We are what we eat, right, So the
things that we are eating is that what's making us unhealthy.
I can tell you study after study about being overweight
and not exercising and certain things that you consume. You know,
maybe it's not going to make you unhealthy, but how
(14:27):
do we actually take that information and live a healthier life?
So I am so pleased to introduce Chef Andrew Groul.
Speaker 1 (14:35):
You all know him.
Speaker 2 (14:36):
If you've been watching Fox News, you see him. He's
all over the place. I mean, he is so active
these days. Restaurant owner city councilmen in Huntington, California did
some incredible work after the wildfires. Chef Andrew, Girl, I'm
so happy to have you today on wellness.
Speaker 1 (14:49):
I'm asked.
Speaker 3 (14:51):
It's an honor to be here. Thank you so much so, Chef.
Speaker 2 (14:54):
We've been talking about, you know, lifestyle and how it
is directly correlated with some chronic illness. And one thing
specifically that I find myself still even getting a little
bit confused about is when we're talking about essential omega
polyonsitch saturated fatty acids.
Speaker 1 (15:11):
First of all, what are they do? We need them?
Talk a little bit about.
Speaker 3 (15:15):
Them, definitely, Well, you know, you've got the good fats right,
And I always talk about like the good fats. I
think when we ask anybody on the street, what are
the good fats? Most of people know, you know, the
fats you find in seafood and olive oils, et cetera.
But then we start creeping in the omega sixes and
trying to understand whether those are the good fats are
not things like seed oils and some flower seed oil,
(15:37):
vegetable oils, also certain types of nuts. And then furthermore
where it can get a little bit confusing is the
meats that we're eating, because you know, carnivor and keto
has been huge. Do some of those meats are they
hiring the omega sixes? Right? The theoretically the more unhealthy
fats when they're when you eat too much of them,
in relation to the omega threes that are in the
feed of a lot of the commercially processed meats that
(15:59):
we eat chicken, beef, et cetera. Which then would lead
me down the conversation about more grass fed meats. So
you know, I'm not a doctor. I'm just a chef.
So you know, I can't get into the granular particulars
and the chemistry as to how it all kind of
reacts in your body. But what I bring to the
conversation is, you know, I have a background in a
world of seafood and understanding seafood, and it came to
(16:22):
my attention early on I started a nonprofit. Actually, first
time I moved from California out to or sorry, from
New Jersey out to California was to start a nonprofit
in the seafood world. And that was where I learned
about this imbalance of your omega sixes and your omega
threes and how it's leading to a lot of the
chronic inflammation and metabolic issues that we've seen in the
Western diet.
Speaker 1 (16:42):
So that's right.
Speaker 2 (16:43):
So there is supposed to be you're supposed to have
some omega six omega six is, you're supposed to have
some omega threes, and there is kind of a sweet
spot ratio. From what I know, it's like a five
to one ratio, But if you look at our American diet, we're.
Speaker 1 (16:57):
Like a fifteen to one ratio.
Speaker 2 (16:58):
Like all of a sudden, we have so many omega
sixes in our diet. Now, it's important to remember we
don't make omega sixes, like, our body doesn't produce them.
The only way we're exposed to them is by consuming them.
So you mentioned some of those hot spots of where
we actually get those Omega sixes. And by the way,
Omega six is that linilaic acid that we've been talking about.
(17:21):
So where do we find that in our foods?
Speaker 3 (17:25):
Everywhere? And I think that's the point that we should
probably emphasize everywhere. And that's where I started to have
this Eureka moment and I said, wait a minute. You know,
these illnesses have gone up over the years, and I've
personally experienced it myself with just a lot of like
stomach issues and body issues. And I'm an athlete. I've
always been into fitness. So when I watch what's happening
(17:47):
to my body and I'm working out and I'm doing
all the right things, but it's not getting better, I
kind of had this moment where I said, well, what's
in all of my foods? Because naturally, when you go
to any doctor and you say, hey, look i've got
this stomach issue or I don't feel right that they
a lot of times they move you into this food
elimination stage where you're looking at everything you're eating and
you're kind of removing something, removing an item or an ingredient.
(18:10):
When I go across the portfolio of products that I
was consuming at the time, and most Americans do. I
realized there's seed oils and absolutely everything right processed food,
all the seed oils. I mean you even to go
to get a bag of nts and their seed oils
right they're roasted in canola oil. Like everything has this
in omega six fatty acid seed oil in it. And
(18:34):
it's not just the seed oils right, Like, it's also
a lot of what I mentioned earlier, where the animals
are feeding on the grains or the low quality products
that are higher in these Omega six fatty acid, so
it's coming through in their feed. So when we were
studying the seafood in the aquarium, and I was going
through this whole health element trying to get people to
eat more seafood. Our goal of this entire program was
(18:56):
to get people to eat more seafood and also more
the right types of seafoodo W gets you more into
kind of the sustainability element, which was a big piece
of my culinary manifesto. And I realized, like so many
of the bleeding causes of death can be alleviated by
some degree by consuming moral Mega three fatty acids or
at least breaking that ratio down as you mentioned, and
so while I was having these issues personally, while going
(19:18):
through the kind of seafood element of this conversation, I realized, whoa,
it's not just we can't be eating you know, salmon
and sardine's breakfast, lunch, and dinner. So there needs to
be an amalgamation from a strategic perspective of not just
increasing our healthy threes, but decreasing our sixes. And then
it was at that point that I realized, wait a minute,
I'm consuming all of these unhealthy omega six Is that
(19:40):
in products that I would think would be healthy, right,
low fat vinegrats or just generally pervaded or pitched as
healthy processed foods, right, the almond crackers, right, things that
you go to Whole Foods and you get and you're like, oh,
I'm getting the better choice.
Speaker 1 (19:56):
Is it supposed to be healthy? Right?
Speaker 3 (19:58):
Right? But that's so and we laugh. But that's really
been the north star, I think in so many ways,
especially for working parents and people who are trying to
start a career, it's like, well, as long as I'm
shopping at this better outlet, then it's going to be
better for me. And that's always obviously not the case.
So it's funny. When I started to cut out all
the seed oils and neo mega six is way back
(20:19):
in twenty ten, my stomach problems got better, my body
started to feel better. I actually started sleeping better, my
skin got better and I and then for me it
was like, Okay, even though it's anecdotal, I've got this
evidence for something that's working in my body. And then
really dove deeper into that.
Speaker 1 (20:34):
So here's the question I have for you.
Speaker 2 (20:36):
So you are obviously very well educated, and you put
in the research. You probably did a food diary to
figure out what it was you're eating, and you were
really able to look at that for people listening who
probably are not going to sit down and create a
food diary, although I'll tell you I think that's one
of the best things that we as individuals can do,
because we talk so much about living our healthiest lives
(20:57):
and trying to be better versions of ourselves. But you
are what you eat, and so if you don't know
what you're consuming, then how could you even start the
journey of trying to live healthier. But if for people
who are just kind of looking at their diet, what
do you think are like the five biggest culprits out
there that most people are probably that's where they're consuming
(21:18):
the most amount of these unhealthy omega six fatty acids.
Speaker 3 (21:22):
Great question, So I would say just generally processed food,
because all processed food has got the omega sixes by
virtue of the seed oils in there, right, because they
want to fulfill that nutritional profile that the processing requirements mandate,
and the nutritional requirements if you're a food manufacturer, so
it's like you got to have these omega sixes also
fat as flavors. So a lot of times these food
(21:44):
manufacturers put the omega sixes in there by way of
these different seed oils to make the food more appetizing
and to give it more of that kind of wholesome
finish by way of the fat on your palate. Right.
So any process food, and by that I'm talking like
granola bars and these you know, quasi healthy crackers, chips,
the going out to eat fast food. Anytime you go
out to eat at any restaurant. And I hate to
(22:06):
say this because in a way I'm kind of hedging
against my own industry, but anytime you go out to
eat any restaurant, they are caking everything in soybean oil.
They call it liquid margarine, which to me is kind
of ironic because margarine is actually just solidified seed oil.
So it's effectively liquid margarine is just seed oil. But
it's these bake butter products that restaurants are using because
(22:26):
they're cheap, and they're not doing it because they're trying
to get you sick. So anytime you go out to
eat at a restaurant, everything is caked in those those
Omega six is. Even things that taste rich and buttery,
a lot of times they're like a margarine butter combo.
So you know, you're having these mashed potatoes thinking it's
whole butter and it's healthy, and it's just potato and butter,
which is rich and decadent. But a lot of times
(22:47):
that's seed oils in there. I say, going out to eat, right,
all these highly processed foods and then even things even meats, right,
you know a lot of these fatty are cuts that
we love because they're so marbled and that's what gives
you that unctuous bite and that beautiful finish when you
see that ribi with like the beautiful marbling on the inside.
Those are highly grain fed animals that could be high
(23:08):
in omega sixes by way of all that grain that
they're eating, you know, soybean refused, what have you in
a commercial setting. So that's where I started moving to
more of the kind of healthier it can be grade
grain fed or grass finished even will actually bring down
that six profile. So you know, chips, processed foods, restaurant foods,
and then like things like vinaigrettes, right, vinaigrettes sauce, his condiments.
(23:32):
These are the things that we consume every single day
that we don't think about. But that's where you're gonna
find a bevy of these these unhealthy oils. You know,
if you broke down like a hidden valley ranch. I
just saw reel on Instagram or something. It was like
they took the bottle and they actually built the ingredients
without it being emulsified, and they poured everything in there
and it was three quarters of the way it was
(23:53):
just straight low quality canola oil. And then you know
a bunch of zantam gum and karagene and some of
these other chemicals in there that could also be questionable.
Speaker 2 (24:02):
Well, you know, so if we start looking at these
ingredients and actually really pay attention because you're absolutely right.
If you look at a vinigarrette, you're like, well, this
is going to this is perfect.
Speaker 1 (24:11):
It's an oil and it's a vinegar. How can this
be bad for you?
Speaker 2 (24:14):
But as you're saying, you know, these are these mass
product you know, industrial production from low cost, long shelf life.
If it's going to stay in your pantry and not
go bad for a long time, it's probably not healthy
for you. But what can we actually do, Like what
are just easy to do replacements that are maybe healthier versions,
(24:34):
Like I mean, I would guess so instead of like
the store bought vinegarrette, just get your own olive oil
and vinegar.
Speaker 3 (24:41):
Yeah, I mean, it's really that simple. And this has
kind of been the genesis of my more approachable content
towards getting families in the kitchen and getting individuals in
the kitchen and really just having one more meal a week,
or having one ingredient that you make at home that
you utilize throughout the week, whether it's a vinegarrette, whether
it's a sauce, it's a condiment, because those are the
(25:01):
things that we put on all of our foods. So
once again, even if you were keeping a food diary
a lot of times because I caught myself doing this.
I'm writing, you know, chicken sandwich, right, but I'm not
thinking like, oh, well, there's probably an ouncer announced and
a half a mayonnaise on there, which is realistically ninety
percent just soybean oil. Right. So when you're chugging a
shot of soybean oil five times a day, that's adding
(25:21):
up picking some of those ingredients that you can put
back in your fridge that you make at home. So
using a vinaigrett as an example, and once again I
should stay on the vinegrette a lot of times. Most
olive oil this is marketed is like an olive oil vinegrette.
It's ninety percent canola oil ten percent olive oil because
there's no mandate, like you can call it an olive
oil vinagrett as long as there's some olive oil in there.
So you're hard pressed to find a pure olive oil vinegrett.
(25:44):
So that's something that you can do at home. Olive
oil avocado oil, which is much lower on that little
loic acid scale, and vinegrette is the simplest thing in
the world. It's two parts. I used to do three
parts oil to one part vinegar. But in my later days,
where my palate's gotten more specific, I'm doing about two
two and a half parts oil right an extra virgin
olive oil or one of those healthier oils, to any
(26:04):
high quality vinegar. Just put it in a jar, a
little dash of Dijon mustard, which will actually act as
a natural emulsifier. Most of the commercially produced products have
like xantham gum and other artificial mulcifiers in there, but
I'll use Dijon mustard, which is an mulcifier fresh herbs,
any herbs in there that you want to add, Shake
it up, it'll come together, and that djon will hold
(26:25):
it and stick it right in the fridge. I'm not
even kidding. It's a five minute process that will cut
out so much of those bad fats from your diet.
Speaker 2 (26:35):
Well, everyone listening knows that I'm a huge fan of
natural herbs. You know, we're both from or I live
in Somerset County. You're from Somerset County, New Jersey. So
I have huge herb gardens and I absolutely love it.
But I need to put my mom hat on for
one second. I'm going to remove the doctor one put
my mom one on because you just mentioned mayonnaise, which
I mean, I've never thought mayonnaise was healthy for you.
(26:56):
I mean, let's be real, but I didn't realize how
unhealthy it was for us.
Speaker 1 (27:00):
And I have one kid who refuses.
Speaker 2 (27:02):
To eat sandwiches without mayonnaise on it, So what can
I do to substitute that?
Speaker 3 (27:08):
That's a great question. And I have four kids who
refuse to eat a sandwich without mayonnaise on it. So
I'll tell you what I did. Trick two of my
kids into eating sandwiches without mayonnaise by making compound butters.
So I would take just a good grass fed butter,
soften it a little bit, and then i'd mix in
like some chopped garlic and some fresh herbs. One of
them didn't like the herbs in there, so I just
started doing like a little bit of lemon juice to
(27:29):
make the flavors pop. And then as long as I
spread it on the sandwich at room temperature, they don't
necessarily know the difference because it's fulfilling that role of
kind of coating the palate and making all the flavors
a little bit richer. For the other kids that I
couldn't do if you will. I just started making mayonnaise
at home. I mean it's really easy to do. It's
the exact same approach that you would use for the vinagrette. Right.
(27:51):
So mayonnaise is really nothing more that it's an emulsion
between vinegar and oil, right, And that's what I just
described with the with the vinaigrette. The only difference is
that you actually use an egg yolk as the emulsifier
because the egg yolk will pull it together and it'll
also add richness. So making a mayonnaise at home is
really easy. You can do it in a blender, you
(28:11):
can do it in a bowl. I do one egg
yolk and then I do like one lemon and roughly
a cup of avocado oil, and I just whisk it
until it's fully emulsified and pulled together with Once again,
I'll add a little bit of Dejon mustard in there,
and you've got your own mayonnaise with the avocado oil.
It's really simple. I've got it all over my channels
because I was trying to impress upon everybody how easy
(28:33):
it was to make. And it costs, you know, I mean,
it ends up costing like two fifty three dollars, but
you know, one of those jars of avocado mayonnaise is
like nine dollars or ten dollars, and it's actually a
much higher quality product too. My kids absolutely love it.
I taught them how to make it, which is fun
because it's a two person job. One can whisk whisk
the oil in and the other one. And you know
(28:54):
how much kids love kind of playing in the kitchen,
whether it's fresh made, making a mess in the kitchen,
making a mess, making a huge mess. But you know what,
you know what, I've realized there's going to be a
mess inevitably, like you can have an empty kitchen and
somehow they make a mess.
Speaker 2 (29:08):
True, But you know what, then they get to clean
it up. And that's another lesson learned. You make a mess,
you get a clean up. Parenting takes a galore here
on Wellness Unmasked. You know, one more thing I wanted
to talk to you about is because I've heard you
talk about this before, and I, honest to goodness, I
had never heard about beef tallow prior to the last
few months. I mean, I know, I know, I don't
(29:28):
know why I don't know about this, but all of
a sudden, I'm hearing about beef tallow everywhere.
Speaker 1 (29:33):
Can you please just give me a rundown on what
this is?
Speaker 3 (29:36):
Well, it comes down to that six and three that
we're talking about, right, Everything comes back to this, it
seems like. So for us, I'll give you a little
story and an answer your question. So we actually switched
in all of our restaurants way back in like twenty eighteen,
twenty nineteen, away from all of the segos, the soybean oils,
the canola oils because of what I realized and I
knew I needed like more of the saturated, high quality
(29:58):
fats animal fats, right, so butter or a gee duck fat.
We were using a lot of schmaltz. We were using
a lot of our rendered poor fat from different products,
so like a natural lard. And then the beef towel
was incredibly cheap at the time, and I'm like, oh, well,
it makes complete sense to cook in beef toalle. So
we tried frying in all these different oils, and I
liked beeftel the most because it actually was the lightest
in the finish, in the flavor, but it also was
(30:20):
pretty rich. So that was what we started doing years ago,
which is why I love now that finally things have
caught up. I felt like I was a crazy guy
doing this in twenty eighteen, twenty nineteen. So what it
does is is that because you're not getting that bitter
after taste that you otherwise would get from the Omega
six fatty acids, all those oils are so highly processed,
and you can I don't recommend you do this, but
(30:41):
if you want to, you can do a taste test
where you actually taste like butter and then rinse your
mouth out and then do like a little bit of
seed oil, and your palate will be finished with this acrid,
highly processed bitter taste in your mouth that will linger
for probably five minutes. Well, from a chef's perspective, we're
trying to get rid of those types of negatives when
it comes to the palate and the taste finish. So
(31:02):
I switched over to the beef tallow and no unnatural
lingering off flavors. It was just the cleanest right so
from strictly from a culinary perspective, for me, that was
the right fat to use. It was higher quality, much cleaner.
So we made the switch. But then I started having
customers come to me immediately and they're like, why can
I go to your restaurant, eat your fries, eat your
(31:24):
fish and chips, whatever it is that's being fried. And
I don't feel heavy, and I don't feel full afterwards,
you know, they feel full, but they don't just kind
of drag themselves through the rest of the day. And
then I was like, it's the beef tallow. And so
I think a lot of people have, because of this
conversation about the seed oils, have moved over to these
animal fasts and they've tasted and they've realized the change
(31:44):
that they feel in their body and both the palate
and an ultimately kind of the culinary mind. So it's
moved America into this quasi obsession with the beef tallow,
which I frankly believe is a good thing.
Speaker 1 (31:58):
Well, you know, it kind of reminds me of like
one eye.
Speaker 2 (32:00):
So this last year we took our kids to Italy
for the first time. It was an amazing trip, obviously
the food and the sites, but you could eat pasta
three meals a day there. Yes, you're walking more, but
you don't feel that same heaviness because I mean, it
has to be the fact that obviously the pasta is
made fresh, the dose made fresh, the vegetables are fresh.
(32:21):
I mean, they're literally like in a garden out back,
So you're not having that heavily processed stuff that we
see here in the United States.
Speaker 1 (32:29):
But you know one thing that you said earlier that
really caught my attention.
Speaker 2 (32:33):
You said, you know, the restaurants and the food industries,
they're using all of these unhealthy seed oils, but you said,
they're not trying to make us sick, right, I mean,
and that's kind of the conversation right now. You start
hearing a lot of people saying, oh that the industry
they're trying to keep us sick, because you know, the
healthcare industry just likes to treat disease. And unfortunately, I
(32:54):
can as a physician, I can appreciate what people are saying.
We certainly do practice reactive us in we're all about
treating the disease and we're less focus on preventing the
disease in the first place. But just like you're saying,
it's like the food industry, specifically here in the United States,
adopted these seed oils kind of industrialize them because they're
cheap and they last long. Unfortunately, there's just consequences.
Speaker 3 (33:20):
It's all bottom line, right, So you know it's not
triple bottom line. I say, triple bottom line is people
planet profit. It's single bottom line. So you're right, it's
the shelf life which ultimately leads to a better bottom line.
Let's turnover on inventory. And then for the restaurants, it's
like always trying to keep that cost of goods in line.
And you know, we get marketed too. So starting when
(33:41):
I started owning and operating restaurants all the way back
in two thousand and six, two thousand and seven, you know,
we were just getting heavily marketed these wonder oils that
were only fifteen dollars for a jib, which is a
jug in a box forty five pounds, and it's like, wow,
we can really, you know, we can use this on everything. Now,
we can replace our olive oils and we can place
our butters. And then we had the kind of medical
(34:03):
industrial complex telling us, no, this is great, these are
wonderful alternatives because the saturated fats are going to lead
to heart disease and high cholesterol, etc. We can speculate
as to the conspiracy behind any of that, I'll leave
that up to other people. But strictly from the restaurant
tourist perspective, I mean, we weren't thinking about the health
at the time. It was always about really serving the
best food or what we were educated upon as being
(34:25):
the best food at the best price. Now, once again,
you know some of the some of the I don't
want to call it evil, but perhaps some of the
negative intent was coming through the supply chain by way
of the massive food manufacturers that were marketing it to us.
We don't have times as chefs who are working fourteen
sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, to be
(34:46):
able to go into these deep nutritional deep dives on
all the products. So I think that's where it just
became kind of the muscle memory, if you will, or
the culinary muscle memory, to just constantly be using those
seed oils. Now, fast forward to today, where a lot
of restaurants are trying to switch over. The supply chain
is so broken that many of them we've been doing
it for years, so it was already in our in
kind of our business calculus. Many of them are now
(35:09):
not able to operate at a in a profitable or
even a break even setting. By using some of these
highly saturated fasts, which are we're now learning our higher
quality even from a culinary perspective. So that's kind of
the quandary that we're in right now from a food
service perspective. And that's why I say it's not like
restaurant tours are out there trying to make you sick.
(35:29):
They don't want to and they want to be on
the front end of what's right. But we just need
to be able to clean up the supply chain to
make those products available.
Speaker 1 (35:38):
Well, so what is I mean?
Speaker 2 (35:40):
Obviously you're a chef, but you're also a counselman, so
you are someone who's tasked with making change, Like, what
is the path forward? How do we other than you know,
the government stepping in and saying you're not allowed to
serve this anymore. But as you're saying, that doesn't necessarily
fix the problem because then you're going to have restaurants
going out of business and people at a job.
Speaker 1 (35:58):
So how do we fix this? What the path forward?
Speaker 2 (36:00):
Because I can tell you from a scientific research perspective,
it is clear to us that there is some correlation
between the seed oils and some of the other unhealthy
ultra processed foods that we're consuming and chronic illness. The
science is there, it's a known fact. Okay, there's correlation
between disease and our consumption, but what is actually that
path forward?
Speaker 3 (36:21):
Well, I don't think the government should step in more
than they've already done, right, because the bigger the government's got,
the sicker we've gotten. So I think we need to
recognize that perhaps the government is part of the problem,
and that could be an aptitude, or it could part
of it could be intentional, or there's just some financial
incentive within that kind of decision making process. Well, I
would say the government also should not be banning any
(36:43):
products because I think that's a slippery slope and SE's
a pretty dangerous precedent. What I think the government can
and should do is they should look at it strictly
from incentivizing, change the incentive structure. Right, you want to
fix a problem, change the entire incentive structure. So why
are we incentivized to only use seed oils because it's
cheap and it's readily available. Well, there you go, Right,
those are the two things that we need to target
(37:04):
in on. So if we can take all these other
healthy fats, which funny enough, now are by products. They're
not available because they're expensive. It's because they've now been
stitched into so many other industries pet food, biofuels, right
that they're being used in those industries as buy products,
(37:24):
cheap by products. So the government can actually incentivize financially
a way in which we get all of those products
back into the food chain, not all of them, right,
we can still fulfill the demand for some of those
other industries, get them into the food chain so that
we increase the supply of those products, make them get
it so that they're easier to receive from a restaurant
tourist perspective, which is and you're probably thinking right now, well,
(37:47):
how do you do that? Very easy? Right? I mean
the government literally, whether it's through the USDA or any
subsidiary agencies, they can actually get those products, right, pork
fat or lard beef. Tallow get to the ranchers, get
to the farmers and the processors of those fats, and
get them directly to one of the three massive food
purveyors in the United States, which is Cisco, US Foods
(38:09):
and PFG perhaps or some of the other guys and
make them available within the next month, which can be
done to the restaurant community and the food service community,
especially large food service. The era marks of the world,
you know, the airports, the hospitals, et cetera. Which hospitals.
We can have a whole other conversation another time. So
that's number one, and the number two. If they have
(38:29):
to subsidize this, subsidize it. Because I've always said, right,
like especially now being in city council. It's so funny.
I'm like a libertarian at heart, but now here I
realize in my role as a city councilman, we get
our revenue through taxes. So I'm just consistently conflicted. But
you know, we can subsidize certain industries as long as
we can prove that there's going to be an equal
offset with a little bit of you know, a little
(38:50):
bit of a gain. Right, And I think just the
purpose for the purposes of looking at our healthcare costs, right,
if we get healthier. Right now, we're spending twenty percent
of our entire fed federal budget on healthcare, and that's
only going up at a rapid pace. If we get healthier,
those costs are going to come down and in the
long run, we're going to save a ton of money.
So if you've got to subsidize the fat industry within
(39:13):
the restaurant or food service world and food manufacturing to
get the right fats into the right products to make
them more approachable for the manufacturers and the US producers,
well then you do that, because that's how we got
into this problem in the first place, was by subsidizing
all of these commodity products corn, soybeans, right and creating
cheap buy products. That's exactly how we got here in
(39:34):
the first place. So if anybody in government wants to
tell me, well, I don't know how we're going to
do that economically, you know exactly how you're going to
do that.
Speaker 2 (39:41):
Well, I mean, I think it's really interesting that, first
of all, talking about incentivizing when it comes to people's
health and healthcare, I mean, you're preaching to.
Speaker 1 (39:48):
The choir there.
Speaker 2 (39:49):
One thing is that for me personally and my family
and kind of some of the stuff that I like
to publicly talk about is you have to do what
you can to eat healthy at home as much as
possible so that you can can go out to restaurants
and you.
Speaker 1 (40:02):
Know, maybe that is not where you have to overly regulate.
Speaker 2 (40:04):
You can go and you can have your everything in
moderation meal as long as the rest of the days
of the week you're at home, not having the seed oils,
not having built to process foods. You know, I don't
think that we need to eradicate things altogether, but we
need to be more transparent in the things that we
are consuming. People need to be educated on that, and
we have to make sure that it's affordable and specifically
people who you know, are in the lower income areas,
(40:26):
that they have access to the healthier foods because unfortunately,
they rely more on these processed foods because they're cheaper,
because the longer health shelf lives, and the fast food. So,
I mean, it's a big problem right now. It seems
like RFK Junior and the administration obviously that this is.
Speaker 1 (40:42):
In the forefront of make America healthy again.
Speaker 2 (40:44):
They're tackling it, as you're saying, by their kind of
going after removing some of the things from the industry.
Speaker 1 (40:50):
I also worry.
Speaker 2 (40:51):
About government overreach a little bit, but I'm glad to
at least see that the conversation is being had.
Speaker 3 (40:57):
Yeah, and I think that the things that they're changing
are actually they're removing government overreach. A lot of times
people are like, well, you know, kind of some of
the hard right anti government folks are saying, well, look
look at what they're doing to change this and change this.
That's government overreach. No, they're undoing government overreach. I mean,
look at the gross loophole. I think that's amazing that
that was already that they're closing that gross loophole, because
that was really the window through which they were slipping
(41:19):
in so many of these bad products. And for those watching,
the gross loophole, which was generally recognized as safe, was
kind of a way in which you could get basic
products into foods without having to go through the government
the regulatory gauntlet of getting them approved. But originally it
was intended for things that we know right generally recognize
as safe, so flour, vinegar, salt, pepper, right like those
(41:40):
very basic pantry items. And then they started slipping in
more and a little bit more, and then ultimately the
food manufacturers realized that, hey, if we write some of
our own studies, we can slip some of these chemicals
in there under the gross loophole. And that's how all
of those products got into the food the government kind
of turning a blind eye. If we make the research
more transparent and we kind of have an even playing
field and we remove some of the special interest, we're
(42:02):
actually decreasing the size of that government kind of construct
and we're getting people healthier at the same time. Because
I think that what's lost in all of this, and
that's a great point you bring up about just pay
attention to what you're cooking at home. I think that
people forget we have agency, right like this personal agency,
this ability to decide for ourselves and make decisions for
ourselves and our families. We don't need kind of an
(42:25):
a priori government to be our secondary brain. We can
do it ourselves, so long as the information is clean
and transparent.
Speaker 2 (42:34):
Absolutely, and you just hit the nail on the head
there the fact that in Europe when it came to food,
they had to essentially prove that substances were safe before
it was allowed to go into the food. Here in
the United States, because of the loopholes, we essentially said
anything can be added into it. If it turns out
to be not safe, then we'll have that discussion. I mean,
(42:54):
it is so backwards and here we are, and as
we have seen, once something gets through that loopholes really hard.
Speaker 1 (42:59):
To under that.
Speaker 2 (43:00):
And finally, I am feeling optimistic that that maybe we're going
to be doing that, And as we continue to get
more data talking about the things that we consume and
how they.
Speaker 1 (43:10):
Are directly correlative to disease, I.
Speaker 2 (43:12):
Think people are finally going to start taking charge of
their health and hopefully be able to make some informed
decisions about their health.
Speaker 3 (43:19):
Yeah. I agree, the food marketing machine has been you know,
they've done well. I got to say that, but I
think like just packaging and marketing and all of the
claims that we see on the outside, right like all
natural and low in saturated fats, and you know, those
things sell right like that to my parents, like you know,
who are constantly asking me like should I buy this?
(43:40):
Should I not buy this? And what we grew up
on as kids. I grew up in you know, the eighties,
and it was like, oh well, this is healthier, right,
Like this TV dinner it says it's nutritious and it's healthy.
And I too, working parents and you know, eating pizza
every single night in New Jersey. It was like, oh well,
it's healthy, right, like it's the way to be funny enough,
I was actually a runner, so it was like we
(44:01):
grew up on high carbs. It was like bage old
and waffles for breakfast, and pasta lunches and pasta dinners,
and it was like carb carb carb, So that could
have also had something to do with my metabolic issues.
Speaker 2 (44:15):
Well, Chef Andrew grow, thank you so much for joining
us today. I am certainly going to make my own vinaigrette. Now,
I'm going to try that mayonnaise. We'll see if I
can slip it into some sandwiches. But I'm telling you,
as a food connoisseur, you have to put together a
cookbook to tell us what we can do to get
rid of these seed oils and these healthy alternatives.
Speaker 1 (44:31):
Because, let me tell you, when it.
Speaker 2 (44:33):
Comes to like mayonnaise, it wouldn't occur to me to
make my own mayonnaise. And you make it sound so simple,
although I'm sure it's not as simple as you may
think it is. But I'm willing to give it a try.
Speaker 3 (44:43):
All right, wonderful. I appreciate that well, and I'll send
you I have Andrew Grul's Family Cookbook. We did fifty
recipes that are just for like the family. The kids
did them all seed oil free. I'll make sure I
get one out to you.
Speaker 1 (44:54):
I can't wait.
Speaker 2 (44:54):
Thanks so much, you're listening to Wellness and Mass. We'll
be right back with more.
Speaker 1 (45:01):
So listen.
Speaker 2 (45:02):
You know, after having this conversation, I think everyone's probably
a little scared of these Omega six fatty acids lineleic acids.
Speaker 1 (45:09):
Bottom line. The findings of the study.
Speaker 2 (45:11):
They do not warrant blanket avoidance of all seed oils.
But just like I've said at nauseum, everything in moderation
and selectivity, especially for those with high risk individuals, those
who are trying to decrease their risk of cancer and
disease and get to a healthier weight. Maintaining a healthy
weight via balanced nutrition, regular exercise. It's one of the
(45:31):
actionable steps that you can take to not only you know,
improve your cardiovascular and metabolic disease risk, but also your
cancer risks. I want to thank my colleagues at Cornell
for doing this important study and bringing light to some
of the toxins that we have in our everyday food prep. Also,
I want to thank my friend chef Andrew Group for
giving us some tips on how to avoid this potential
(45:53):
cancer causing ingredient. I'm doctor Nicole Saffhire, your host of
Wellness Unmasked
Hey, everyone, Welcome to Wellness on Mass.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
I'm doctor Nicole Saffaire, Board certified position mom and forever
truth seeker well as someone who delivers a cancer diagnosis
just about every single day as my day job. Of course,
I have to talk about cancer. Everyone knows someone who
has either themselves or a family member or a friend
or someone who's been affected by cancer, because it really
(00:26):
is just so prevalent. And while we could talk about
cancer probably for a year straight, that's not necessarily what
I want to get into today.
Speaker 1 (00:34):
You know.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
One of the big things for me when it comes
to Wellness on Mass I really want to shine a
light on the science that really matters. And there was
exciting research that came out of Cornell University looking at
something very specific from a molecular level when it comes
to cancer risk. But again, this episode is going to
touch on cancer, but it's not entirely about cancer. One
(00:57):
of the questions I have had is how is being
overweight related to cancer? Undoubtedly, we know that the more
excess body fat you have, it can increase your risk
of cancer. In the United States, about seventy four percent
of adults are overweight or obese. About twenty one percent
(01:19):
of kids adolescents are also overweight or obese.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
That's a pretty.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
Terrible number, and in fact, I think that's underestimated because
as I look around at our kids, everyone's kind of
packing on a little extra weight, just like the adults.
So one of the biggest questions that I have is
is it the fat in the body and its effect
on our body that's leading to cancer or is it
something specific in our food that not only does it
(01:47):
make us fat, but it itself is toxic and is
resulting in cancer Or is it a little bit of both,
and what can we.
Speaker 1 (01:55):
Do about it? So let's kind of review what we
do know.
Speaker 2 (01:58):
It is settled signs excess body weight is linked to
a higher risk of cancer. It is what it is,
and the fact that the United States is the most
overweight country in the entire world, it's not surprising that
we also have higher cancers. Why is that, well, fat
(02:18):
cells themselves. The fancy term is adipose cell, but we
can just call it fat cells. This excess fat tissue
secretes pro inflammatory cytokines or hormones, inter leuken six, tumor
necrosis factor. These are hormones that as they go throughout
the body, in your bloodstream, in your tissues.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
It just causes chronic inflammation.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
What does chronic information do well, It damages DNA and
it can inhibit something called apoptosis.
Speaker 1 (02:50):
Apoptosis the way.
Speaker 2 (02:51):
I remembered it in medical school pop pop is when
a cell explodes on itself and it kind of dies,
and you want that to happen. Your body is supposed
to be able to see when cells are going rogue,
or cells are getting too old, or cells are going
bad and they pop on their own, they kind of
get rid of it.
Speaker 1 (03:09):
Apoptosis.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
Well, if you have chronic inflammation, it's not necessarily recognizing
those bad cells and that whole program cell death isn't occurring,
and that can facilitate cancer development. We also know those
adipose cells are hormonally active in themselves, so yes, they
secrete some chemicals that can lead to inflammation, but they
(03:31):
actually convert androgens in your body into estrogens because they
have a specific enzyme in them, So these fat cells
create more estrogen in the body. Estrogen is linked to
certain cancers. Hormone sensitive cancers like breast cancer, endometrial cancer,
and ovarian cancers also can be linked to liver, cancers
(03:54):
and others. And then on top of it, the more
cancer or the more fat cells you have in your body,
the more insulin resistant your body is. So now you
have higher levels of circulating insulin, it's not really working
on your body. And this also can stimulate tumor cell growth.
There are other things that excess fat does in your body.
(04:17):
It alters your metabolism, higher levels of insulin, like we're
just saying, also inhibit that apoptosis or the program cell death.
It can change your microbiome. The excess body weight can
can change the composite of your gut microbiome. We'll be
talking about gut microbiome a lot on this podcast because
(04:38):
your gut is kind of the center.
Speaker 1 (04:39):
Of your health.
Speaker 2 (04:41):
So if you get rid of the good bacteria and
you have all the bad bacteria, that's also going to
lead to more inflammation, could also lead to more cancers,
and it also impairs your immune system. Having more fat
cells dampens the activity of your immune system.
Speaker 1 (04:56):
Let's think about COVID.
Speaker 2 (04:57):
What was one of the first things we noticed with
COVID people that weren't doing well early on during the
COVID pandemic. The elderly, severely immunocompromise, and those that were overweight.
Why is that, Well, I just laid.
Speaker 1 (05:11):
It out for you.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
Having excess body fat is terrible for you. Your body
is in a state of chronic inflammation, and so when
you get an infection or you're sick from whatever it
may be, that chronic state of inflammation makes it so
you can't fight things off. So excess body weight bad
(05:31):
for you. Bottom line, excess fat can lead to excess cancer.
We know this, Like I've said, it's settled science. But
what is less settled is does the foods we eat
directly cause cancer in addition to indirectly causing cancer by
leading to the excess fat. Well, that's one of the
things that Cornell looked at. They took it to the
(05:53):
molecular level to look at whether a particular substance, and
in this case, lineleic acid, was able to cause cancer
to develop and grow. So again we're talking about are
the foods we eat not just poisoning us because they.
Speaker 1 (06:09):
Make us fat?
Speaker 2 (06:10):
Are they actually just poisoning us as well because there's
something bad about them? So this study was funded by
the NIH. It was done by postdoc researchers at Cornell
my colleagues, I'm on staff at Cornell as well. They
do some great research there. What they discovered they were
feeding mice linal liic acid. Line liic acid is an
(06:30):
Omega six fatty acid. We'll talk about that later. So
they were feeding lineleic acid. This is a fatty acid
that we get.
Speaker 1 (06:39):
From our diet.
Speaker 2 (06:40):
Our body doesn't make it, so the only way we're
ever exposed to this is by consuming it. What they
did was they took mice. They fed mice who already
had a triple negative breast cancer. Triple negative breast cancer
is the most aggressive, difficult to treat breast cancer. It's
a really difficult from our perspective. And when you see
(07:03):
someone with a younger person with breast cancer, they tend
to have triple negative breast cancers deadlyest formed the disease.
So they took mice who have triple negative breast cancers
and they fed them a diet high in lineleic acid.
And then they compared it to a placebo group, so
mice who had breast cancer but they weren't being fed
this high lineleic acid diet. What did they find Well,
(07:26):
they found those that consumed the oil the lineleic acid,
their tumors grew larger and faster than those that didn't
consume lineleic acid. They also looked at humans too, so
there was a link to humans as well, that there
was elevated levels of that lineleic acid in the blood
samples from triple negative breast cancer patients.
Speaker 1 (07:48):
So what does that mean? Okay, well, let's talk about
what exactly.
Speaker 2 (07:52):
Lineleic acid is, because if I were just to read that,
I would have no idea what it was. Linealleic acid
is an essential omego omega six polyunsaturated fatty acid that
again that we have to get from our diet, meaning
we don't make it ourselves.
Speaker 1 (08:06):
The only way we're exposed to it is through consumption.
Speaker 2 (08:09):
And in the United States, our Western diet, we have
a lotted added oils. I know you've heard OURFK Junior
talk about it. That's where we're going with this. Yes,
we're talking about those vegetable oils, those seed oils. Polyuns
unsaturated omega six fatty acids are found abundantly in those
(08:29):
vegetable oils, soybean oils, corn oils, sunflower oil, saft flower oils.
I don't even know what saff flowers are, but apparently
that's one of them. But again, those are all of
those seed oils that you hear RFK Junior talking about,
and all of a sudden you're hearing the fast food
restaurant saying, oh, maybe we should take some of these
(08:50):
unhealthy oils out of the diet. Listen, there are benefits
to some of the fats in these oils, but we
have to balance them. So you have omega six fatty
acids which come from like lineleic acid and these seed oils,
and then you also have your omega three fatty acids.
(09:10):
When you hear someone me, for instance, saying, hey, you
got to get in your omegas, I'm saying you have
to get in your healthy omega threes because those fats
are so crucial for your brain health, for your heart health,
and just overall wellness in your immune system. You get
those healthy omega three fats from salmon.
Speaker 1 (09:31):
Sardines, other things.
Speaker 2 (09:33):
Just like that, You're supposed to have a balance in
your body of omega six to omega three balance. The
healthy place to be is having a ratio of five
to one, meaning five of the omega sixes to one
of the omega threes. The problem is, in our Western
diet we have exceeded that ratio threefold. We're at like
(09:56):
fifteen to one. And this is why our inflammatory process
disease are all skewed. This is why we have so
many metabolic conditions, so many more cancers, so much more overweight.
It's a problem. And so while a moderate intake of
liic acid and those omega sixes supports our normal physiological functions,
(10:18):
very high intakes, especially if you don't have an adequate
amount of those omega threes that we are talking about
in study after study have shown that you have increased
markers of inflammation and higher risk for chronic diseases, including
certain cancers, which we're talking about today.
Speaker 1 (10:36):
So bottom line, excess fat leads to excess cancers. But
also we are what we eat.
Speaker 2 (10:43):
If we are intaking high levels of in this particular case,
lineleic acid, lineal. Liic acid itself is probably fueling tumor
cells that are just waiting to grow in our body.
So not only is it causing xx fat, but in
itself may be causing these cancers to grow rampantly. That's
what we saw in the myce studies, and we also
(11:03):
saw women with these highly aggressive breast cancers. They had
high levels of liteleic acid circulating in their bloodstream.
Speaker 1 (11:11):
So if they had had a.
Speaker 2 (11:12):
Lower consumption of these unhealthy seed oils, the question is
would their cancer have been so aggressive or would they
even develop that cancer at all. I mean, that's where
the research is still ongoing, and we need to know
that while we've gotten so good at detecting cancers finding
them at earlier levels, we've gotten great when it comes
(11:33):
to treating a lot of cancers. People are living longer
with cancer. You can have stage four cancer these days
and you can still live ten twenty thirty years because
of our treatments. It's really quite remarkable what we've done.
There's still a lot of work to do because there
are some cancers pancreatic cancer, glioblastoma multiform, and the brain
that we still have very limited treatment options for. So
(11:57):
the quest continues to make sure we can treat all
of these cancers, but we also need to focus on
how can we be preventing these cancers, because we want
to make sure that we have enough funding for people
who still get the cancers that we don't know how
to treat. Right now, we are spending a lot of
research on treating cancers that could have been prevented. In
(12:18):
my book Make America Healthy Again, which came out in
twenty twenty, I have an entire chapter talking about how
over fifty percent of all cancer may be prevented if
we had just adopted some very basic lifestyle changes. Sometimes
it's a little too late for that the damage can
be done. But looking ahead, we have to find ways
(12:40):
that we can decrease chronic chronic inflammation in our body
and try to prevent the risk of disease, specifically cancer.
I am so excited today that I am able to
bring on chef rule. He is a restauranteur, He is
involved in his local politics, and he is all about
healthy living. He was one of the first people I've
(13:00):
ever heard talking about how these seed oils and omega
sixes are unhealthy. He was talking about it before the
whole Make America Healthy Again movement, before it was cool
to talk about it. He was in the forefront in this,
and he started removing seed oils from his restaurants, from
his cooking again even before COVID. So excited to bring
(13:21):
him on Today. We're going to talk about these seed
oils and we're going to give you some tips on
what you can do to just replace some of the
basic things, because you may have some things that have
high levels of lineleic acid, whether in your pantry, in refrigerator.
You don't even realize it that you have these potential
toxins because we use them every day. And why don't
(13:42):
we use them every day? Well, they're cheap and they
last long, they have long shelf lives, and we're so
used to using them, but we don't realize the potential
danger that's lurking. Luckily, Chef Gruel is going to give
us some tips on what we can do to easily
swap them out for healthier alternatives. Coming up next, Chef
Andrew Kruhl is going to give us some tips and
tell you everything you need to know. All right, Well,
(14:06):
there is no better person to help us kind of
cut through all of the toxins and everything that we're
talking about. We are what we eat, right, So the
things that we are eating is that what's making us unhealthy.
I can tell you study after study about being overweight
and not exercising and certain things that you consume. You know,
maybe it's not going to make you unhealthy, but how
(14:27):
do we actually take that information and live a healthier life?
So I am so pleased to introduce Chef Andrew Groul.
Speaker 1 (14:35):
You all know him.
Speaker 2 (14:36):
If you've been watching Fox News, you see him. He's
all over the place. I mean, he is so active
these days. Restaurant owner city councilmen in Huntington, California did
some incredible work after the wildfires. Chef Andrew, Girl, I'm
so happy to have you today on wellness.
Speaker 1 (14:49):
I'm asked.
Speaker 3 (14:51):
It's an honor to be here. Thank you so much so, Chef.
Speaker 2 (14:54):
We've been talking about, you know, lifestyle and how it
is directly correlated with some chronic illness. And one thing
specifically that I find myself still even getting a little
bit confused about is when we're talking about essential omega
polyonsitch saturated fatty acids.
Speaker 1 (15:11):
First of all, what are they do? We need them?
Talk a little bit about.
Speaker 3 (15:15):
Them, definitely, Well, you know, you've got the good fats right,
And I always talk about like the good fats. I
think when we ask anybody on the street, what are
the good fats? Most of people know, you know, the
fats you find in seafood and olive oils, et cetera.
But then we start creeping in the omega sixes and
trying to understand whether those are the good fats are
not things like seed oils and some flower seed oil,
(15:37):
vegetable oils, also certain types of nuts. And then furthermore
where it can get a little bit confusing is the
meats that we're eating, because you know, carnivor and keto
has been huge. Do some of those meats are they
hiring the omega sixes? Right? The theoretically the more unhealthy
fats when they're when you eat too much of them,
in relation to the omega threes that are in the
feed of a lot of the commercially processed meats that
(15:59):
we eat chicken, beef, et cetera. Which then would lead
me down the conversation about more grass fed meats. So
you know, I'm not a doctor. I'm just a chef.
So you know, I can't get into the granular particulars
and the chemistry as to how it all kind of
reacts in your body. But what I bring to the
conversation is, you know, I have a background in a
world of seafood and understanding seafood, and it came to
(16:22):
my attention early on I started a nonprofit. Actually, first
time I moved from California out to or sorry, from
New Jersey out to California was to start a nonprofit
in the seafood world. And that was where I learned
about this imbalance of your omega sixes and your omega
threes and how it's leading to a lot of the
chronic inflammation and metabolic issues that we've seen in the
Western diet.
Speaker 1 (16:42):
So that's right.
Speaker 2 (16:43):
So there is supposed to be you're supposed to have
some omega six omega six is, you're supposed to have
some omega threes, and there is kind of a sweet
spot ratio. From what I know, it's like a five
to one ratio, But if you look at our American diet, we're.
Speaker 1 (16:57):
Like a fifteen to one ratio.
Speaker 2 (16:58):
Like all of a sudden, we have so many omega
sixes in our diet. Now, it's important to remember we
don't make omega sixes, like, our body doesn't produce them.
The only way we're exposed to them is by consuming them.
So you mentioned some of those hot spots of where
we actually get those Omega sixes. And by the way,
Omega six is that linilaic acid that we've been talking about.
(17:21):
So where do we find that in our foods?
Speaker 3 (17:25):
Everywhere? And I think that's the point that we should
probably emphasize everywhere. And that's where I started to have
this Eureka moment and I said, wait a minute. You know,
these illnesses have gone up over the years, and I've
personally experienced it myself with just a lot of like
stomach issues and body issues. And I'm an athlete. I've
always been into fitness. So when I watch what's happening
(17:47):
to my body and I'm working out and I'm doing
all the right things, but it's not getting better, I
kind of had this moment where I said, well, what's
in all of my foods? Because naturally, when you go
to any doctor and you say, hey, look i've got
this stomach issue or I don't feel right that they
a lot of times they move you into this food
elimination stage where you're looking at everything you're eating and
you're kind of removing something, removing an item or an ingredient.
(18:10):
When I go across the portfolio of products that I
was consuming at the time, and most Americans do. I
realized there's seed oils and absolutely everything right processed food,
all the seed oils. I mean you even to go
to get a bag of nts and their seed oils
right they're roasted in canola oil. Like everything has this
in omega six fatty acid seed oil in it. And
(18:34):
it's not just the seed oils right, Like, it's also
a lot of what I mentioned earlier, where the animals
are feeding on the grains or the low quality products
that are higher in these Omega six fatty acid, so
it's coming through in their feed. So when we were
studying the seafood in the aquarium, and I was going
through this whole health element trying to get people to
eat more seafood. Our goal of this entire program was
(18:56):
to get people to eat more seafood and also more
the right types of seafoodo W gets you more into
kind of the sustainability element, which was a big piece
of my culinary manifesto. And I realized, like so many
of the bleeding causes of death can be alleviated by
some degree by consuming moral Mega three fatty acids or
at least breaking that ratio down as you mentioned, and
so while I was having these issues personally, while going
(19:18):
through the kind of seafood element of this conversation, I realized, whoa,
it's not just we can't be eating you know, salmon
and sardine's breakfast, lunch, and dinner. So there needs to
be an amalgamation from a strategic perspective of not just
increasing our healthy threes, but decreasing our sixes. And then
it was at that point that I realized, wait a minute,
I'm consuming all of these unhealthy omega six Is that
(19:40):
in products that I would think would be healthy, right,
low fat vinegrats or just generally pervaded or pitched as
healthy processed foods, right, the almond crackers, right, things that
you go to Whole Foods and you get and you're like, oh,
I'm getting the better choice.
Speaker 1 (19:56):
Is it supposed to be healthy? Right?
Speaker 3 (19:58):
Right? But that's so and we laugh. But that's really
been the north star, I think in so many ways,
especially for working parents and people who are trying to
start a career, it's like, well, as long as I'm
shopping at this better outlet, then it's going to be
better for me. And that's always obviously not the case.
So it's funny. When I started to cut out all
the seed oils and neo mega six is way back
(20:19):
in twenty ten, my stomach problems got better, my body
started to feel better. I actually started sleeping better, my
skin got better and I and then for me it
was like, Okay, even though it's anecdotal, I've got this
evidence for something that's working in my body. And then
really dove deeper into that.
Speaker 1 (20:34):
So here's the question I have for you.
Speaker 2 (20:36):
So you are obviously very well educated, and you put
in the research. You probably did a food diary to
figure out what it was you're eating, and you were
really able to look at that for people listening who
probably are not going to sit down and create a
food diary, although I'll tell you I think that's one
of the best things that we as individuals can do,
because we talk so much about living our healthiest lives
(20:57):
and trying to be better versions of ourselves. But you
are what you eat, and so if you don't know
what you're consuming, then how could you even start the
journey of trying to live healthier. But if for people
who are just kind of looking at their diet, what
do you think are like the five biggest culprits out
there that most people are probably that's where they're consuming
(21:18):
the most amount of these unhealthy omega six fatty acids.
Speaker 3 (21:22):
Great question, So I would say just generally processed food,
because all processed food has got the omega sixes by
virtue of the seed oils in there, right, because they
want to fulfill that nutritional profile that the processing requirements mandate,
and the nutritional requirements if you're a food manufacturer, so
it's like you got to have these omega sixes also
fat as flavors. So a lot of times these food
(21:44):
manufacturers put the omega sixes in there by way of
these different seed oils to make the food more appetizing
and to give it more of that kind of wholesome
finish by way of the fat on your palate. Right.
So any process food, and by that I'm talking like
granola bars and these you know, quasi healthy crackers, chips,
the going out to eat fast food. Anytime you go
out to eat at any restaurant. And I hate to
(22:06):
say this because in a way I'm kind of hedging
against my own industry, but anytime you go out to
eat any restaurant, they are caking everything in soybean oil.
They call it liquid margarine, which to me is kind
of ironic because margarine is actually just solidified seed oil.
So it's effectively liquid margarine is just seed oil. But
it's these bake butter products that restaurants are using because
(22:26):
they're cheap, and they're not doing it because they're trying
to get you sick. So anytime you go out to
eat at a restaurant, everything is caked in those those
Omega six is. Even things that taste rich and buttery,
a lot of times they're like a margarine butter combo.
So you know, you're having these mashed potatoes thinking it's
whole butter and it's healthy, and it's just potato and butter,
which is rich and decadent. But a lot of times
(22:47):
that's seed oils in there. I say, going out to eat, right,
all these highly processed foods and then even things even meats, right,
you know a lot of these fatty are cuts that
we love because they're so marbled and that's what gives
you that unctuous bite and that beautiful finish when you
see that ribi with like the beautiful marbling on the inside.
Those are highly grain fed animals that could be high
(23:08):
in omega sixes by way of all that grain that
they're eating, you know, soybean refused, what have you in
a commercial setting. So that's where I started moving to
more of the kind of healthier it can be grade
grain fed or grass finished even will actually bring down
that six profile. So you know, chips, processed foods, restaurant foods,
and then like things like vinaigrettes, right, vinaigrettes sauce, his condiments.
(23:32):
These are the things that we consume every single day
that we don't think about. But that's where you're gonna
find a bevy of these these unhealthy oils. You know,
if you broke down like a hidden valley ranch. I
just saw reel on Instagram or something. It was like
they took the bottle and they actually built the ingredients
without it being emulsified, and they poured everything in there
and it was three quarters of the way it was
(23:53):
just straight low quality canola oil. And then you know
a bunch of zantam gum and karagene and some of
these other chemicals in there that could also be questionable.
Speaker 2 (24:02):
Well, you know, so if we start looking at these
ingredients and actually really pay attention because you're absolutely right.
If you look at a vinigarrette, you're like, well, this
is going to this is perfect.
Speaker 1 (24:11):
It's an oil and it's a vinegar. How can this
be bad for you?
Speaker 2 (24:14):
But as you're saying, you know, these are these mass
product you know, industrial production from low cost, long shelf life.
If it's going to stay in your pantry and not
go bad for a long time, it's probably not healthy
for you. But what can we actually do, Like what
are just easy to do replacements that are maybe healthier versions,
(24:34):
Like I mean, I would guess so instead of like
the store bought vinegarrette, just get your own olive oil
and vinegar.
Speaker 3 (24:41):
Yeah, I mean, it's really that simple. And this has
kind of been the genesis of my more approachable content
towards getting families in the kitchen and getting individuals in
the kitchen and really just having one more meal a week,
or having one ingredient that you make at home that
you utilize throughout the week, whether it's a vinegarrette, whether
it's a sauce, it's a condiment, because those are the
(25:01):
things that we put on all of our foods. So
once again, even if you were keeping a food diary
a lot of times because I caught myself doing this.
I'm writing, you know, chicken sandwich, right, but I'm not
thinking like, oh, well, there's probably an ouncer announced and
a half a mayonnaise on there, which is realistically ninety
percent just soybean oil. Right. So when you're chugging a
shot of soybean oil five times a day, that's adding
(25:21):
up picking some of those ingredients that you can put
back in your fridge that you make at home. So
using a vinaigrett as an example, and once again I
should stay on the vinegrette a lot of times. Most
olive oil this is marketed is like an olive oil vinegrette.
It's ninety percent canola oil ten percent olive oil because
there's no mandate, like you can call it an olive
oil vinagrett as long as there's some olive oil in there.
So you're hard pressed to find a pure olive oil vinegrett.
(25:44):
So that's something that you can do at home. Olive
oil avocado oil, which is much lower on that little
loic acid scale, and vinegrette is the simplest thing in
the world. It's two parts. I used to do three
parts oil to one part vinegar. But in my later days,
where my palate's gotten more specific, I'm doing about two
two and a half parts oil right an extra virgin
olive oil or one of those healthier oils, to any
(26:04):
high quality vinegar. Just put it in a jar, a
little dash of Dijon mustard, which will actually act as
a natural emulsifier. Most of the commercially produced products have
like xantham gum and other artificial mulcifiers in there, but
I'll use Dijon mustard, which is an mulcifier fresh herbs,
any herbs in there that you want to add, Shake
it up, it'll come together, and that djon will hold
(26:25):
it and stick it right in the fridge. I'm not
even kidding. It's a five minute process that will cut
out so much of those bad fats from your diet.
Speaker 2 (26:35):
Well, everyone listening knows that I'm a huge fan of
natural herbs. You know, we're both from or I live
in Somerset County. You're from Somerset County, New Jersey. So
I have huge herb gardens and I absolutely love it.
But I need to put my mom hat on for
one second. I'm going to remove the doctor one put
my mom one on because you just mentioned mayonnaise, which
I mean, I've never thought mayonnaise was healthy for you.
(26:56):
I mean, let's be real, but I didn't realize how
unhealthy it was for us.
Speaker 1 (27:00):
And I have one kid who refuses.
Speaker 2 (27:02):
To eat sandwiches without mayonnaise on it, So what can
I do to substitute that?
Speaker 3 (27:08):
That's a great question. And I have four kids who
refuse to eat a sandwich without mayonnaise on it. So
I'll tell you what I did. Trick two of my
kids into eating sandwiches without mayonnaise by making compound butters.
So I would take just a good grass fed butter,
soften it a little bit, and then i'd mix in
like some chopped garlic and some fresh herbs. One of
them didn't like the herbs in there, so I just
started doing like a little bit of lemon juice to
(27:29):
make the flavors pop. And then as long as I
spread it on the sandwich at room temperature, they don't
necessarily know the difference because it's fulfilling that role of
kind of coating the palate and making all the flavors
a little bit richer. For the other kids that I
couldn't do if you will. I just started making mayonnaise
at home. I mean it's really easy to do. It's
the exact same approach that you would use for the vinagrette. Right.
(27:51):
So mayonnaise is really nothing more that it's an emulsion
between vinegar and oil, right, And that's what I just
described with the with the vinaigrette. The only difference is
that you actually use an egg yolk as the emulsifier
because the egg yolk will pull it together and it'll
also add richness. So making a mayonnaise at home is
really easy. You can do it in a blender, you
(28:11):
can do it in a bowl. I do one egg
yolk and then I do like one lemon and roughly
a cup of avocado oil, and I just whisk it
until it's fully emulsified and pulled together with Once again,
I'll add a little bit of Dejon mustard in there,
and you've got your own mayonnaise with the avocado oil.
It's really simple. I've got it all over my channels
because I was trying to impress upon everybody how easy
(28:33):
it was to make. And it costs, you know, I mean,
it ends up costing like two fifty three dollars, but
you know, one of those jars of avocado mayonnaise is
like nine dollars or ten dollars, and it's actually a
much higher quality product too. My kids absolutely love it.
I taught them how to make it, which is fun
because it's a two person job. One can whisk whisk
the oil in and the other one. And you know
(28:54):
how much kids love kind of playing in the kitchen,
whether it's fresh made, making a mess in the kitchen,
making a mess, making a huge mess. But you know what,
you know what, I've realized there's going to be a
mess inevitably, like you can have an empty kitchen and
somehow they make a mess.
Speaker 2 (29:08):
True, But you know what, then they get to clean
it up. And that's another lesson learned. You make a mess,
you get a clean up. Parenting takes a galore here
on Wellness Unmasked. You know, one more thing I wanted
to talk to you about is because I've heard you
talk about this before, and I, honest to goodness, I
had never heard about beef tallow prior to the last
few months. I mean, I know, I know, I don't
(29:28):
know why I don't know about this, but all of
a sudden, I'm hearing about beef tallow everywhere.
Speaker 1 (29:33):
Can you please just give me a rundown on what
this is?
Speaker 3 (29:36):
Well, it comes down to that six and three that
we're talking about, right, Everything comes back to this, it
seems like. So for us, I'll give you a little
story and an answer your question. So we actually switched
in all of our restaurants way back in like twenty eighteen,
twenty nineteen, away from all of the segos, the soybean oils,
the canola oils because of what I realized and I
knew I needed like more of the saturated, high quality
(29:58):
fats animal fats, right, so butter or a gee duck fat.
We were using a lot of schmaltz. We were using
a lot of our rendered poor fat from different products,
so like a natural lard. And then the beef towel
was incredibly cheap at the time, and I'm like, oh, well,
it makes complete sense to cook in beef toalle. So
we tried frying in all these different oils, and I
liked beeftel the most because it actually was the lightest
in the finish, in the flavor, but it also was
(30:20):
pretty rich. So that was what we started doing years ago,
which is why I love now that finally things have
caught up. I felt like I was a crazy guy
doing this in twenty eighteen, twenty nineteen. So what it
does is is that because you're not getting that bitter
after taste that you otherwise would get from the Omega
six fatty acids, all those oils are so highly processed,
and you can I don't recommend you do this, but
(30:41):
if you want to, you can do a taste test
where you actually taste like butter and then rinse your
mouth out and then do like a little bit of
seed oil, and your palate will be finished with this acrid,
highly processed bitter taste in your mouth that will linger
for probably five minutes. Well, from a chef's perspective, we're
trying to get rid of those types of negatives when
it comes to the palate and the taste finish. So
(31:02):
I switched over to the beef tallow and no unnatural
lingering off flavors. It was just the cleanest right so
from strictly from a culinary perspective, for me, that was
the right fat to use. It was higher quality, much cleaner.
So we made the switch. But then I started having
customers come to me immediately and they're like, why can
I go to your restaurant, eat your fries, eat your
(31:24):
fish and chips, whatever it is that's being fried. And
I don't feel heavy, and I don't feel full afterwards,
you know, they feel full, but they don't just kind
of drag themselves through the rest of the day. And
then I was like, it's the beef tallow. And so
I think a lot of people have, because of this
conversation about the seed oils, have moved over to these
animal fasts and they've tasted and they've realized the change
(31:44):
that they feel in their body and both the palate
and an ultimately kind of the culinary mind. So it's
moved America into this quasi obsession with the beef tallow,
which I frankly believe is a good thing.
Speaker 1 (31:58):
Well, you know, it kind of reminds me of like
one eye.
Speaker 2 (32:00):
So this last year we took our kids to Italy
for the first time. It was an amazing trip, obviously
the food and the sites, but you could eat pasta
three meals a day there. Yes, you're walking more, but
you don't feel that same heaviness because I mean, it
has to be the fact that obviously the pasta is
made fresh, the dose made fresh, the vegetables are fresh.
(32:21):
I mean, they're literally like in a garden out back,
So you're not having that heavily processed stuff that we
see here in the United States.
Speaker 1 (32:29):
But you know one thing that you said earlier that
really caught my attention.
Speaker 2 (32:33):
You said, you know, the restaurants and the food industries,
they're using all of these unhealthy seed oils, but you said,
they're not trying to make us sick, right, I mean,
and that's kind of the conversation right now. You start
hearing a lot of people saying, oh that the industry
they're trying to keep us sick, because you know, the
healthcare industry just likes to treat disease. And unfortunately, I
(32:54):
can as a physician, I can appreciate what people are saying.
We certainly do practice reactive us in we're all about
treating the disease and we're less focus on preventing the
disease in the first place. But just like you're saying,
it's like the food industry, specifically here in the United States,
adopted these seed oils kind of industrialize them because they're
cheap and they last long. Unfortunately, there's just consequences.
Speaker 3 (33:20):
It's all bottom line, right, So you know it's not
triple bottom line. I say, triple bottom line is people
planet profit. It's single bottom line. So you're right, it's
the shelf life which ultimately leads to a better bottom line.
Let's turnover on inventory. And then for the restaurants, it's
like always trying to keep that cost of goods in line.
And you know, we get marketed too. So starting when
(33:41):
I started owning and operating restaurants all the way back
in two thousand and six, two thousand and seven, you know,
we were just getting heavily marketed these wonder oils that
were only fifteen dollars for a jib, which is a
jug in a box forty five pounds, and it's like, wow,
we can really, you know, we can use this on everything. Now,
we can replace our olive oils and we can place
our butters. And then we had the kind of medical
(34:03):
industrial complex telling us, no, this is great, these are
wonderful alternatives because the saturated fats are going to lead
to heart disease and high cholesterol, etc. We can speculate
as to the conspiracy behind any of that, I'll leave
that up to other people. But strictly from the restaurant
tourist perspective, I mean, we weren't thinking about the health
at the time. It was always about really serving the
best food or what we were educated upon as being
(34:25):
the best food at the best price. Now, once again,
you know some of the some of the I don't
want to call it evil, but perhaps some of the
negative intent was coming through the supply chain by way
of the massive food manufacturers that were marketing it to us.
We don't have times as chefs who are working fourteen
sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, to be
(34:46):
able to go into these deep nutritional deep dives on
all the products. So I think that's where it just
became kind of the muscle memory, if you will, or
the culinary muscle memory, to just constantly be using those
seed oils. Now, fast forward to today, where a lot
of restaurants are trying to switch over. The supply chain
is so broken that many of them we've been doing
it for years, so it was already in our in
kind of our business calculus. Many of them are now
(35:09):
not able to operate at a in a profitable or
even a break even setting. By using some of these
highly saturated fasts, which are we're now learning our higher
quality even from a culinary perspective. So that's kind of
the quandary that we're in right now from a food
service perspective. And that's why I say it's not like
restaurant tours are out there trying to make you sick.
(35:29):
They don't want to and they want to be on
the front end of what's right. But we just need
to be able to clean up the supply chain to
make those products available.
Speaker 1 (35:38):
Well, so what is I mean?
Speaker 2 (35:40):
Obviously you're a chef, but you're also a counselman, so
you are someone who's tasked with making change, Like, what
is the path forward? How do we other than you know,
the government stepping in and saying you're not allowed to
serve this anymore. But as you're saying, that doesn't necessarily
fix the problem because then you're going to have restaurants
going out of business and people at a job.
Speaker 1 (35:58):
So how do we fix this? What the path forward?
Speaker 2 (36:00):
Because I can tell you from a scientific research perspective,
it is clear to us that there is some correlation
between the seed oils and some of the other unhealthy
ultra processed foods that we're consuming and chronic illness. The
science is there, it's a known fact. Okay, there's correlation
between disease and our consumption, but what is actually that
path forward?
Speaker 3 (36:21):
Well, I don't think the government should step in more
than they've already done, right, because the bigger the government's got,
the sicker we've gotten. So I think we need to
recognize that perhaps the government is part of the problem,
and that could be an aptitude, or it could part
of it could be intentional, or there's just some financial
incentive within that kind of decision making process. Well, I
would say the government also should not be banning any
(36:43):
products because I think that's a slippery slope and SE's
a pretty dangerous precedent. What I think the government can
and should do is they should look at it strictly
from incentivizing, change the incentive structure. Right, you want to
fix a problem, change the entire incentive structure. So why
are we incentivized to only use seed oils because it's
cheap and it's readily available. Well, there you go, Right,
those are the two things that we need to target
(37:04):
in on. So if we can take all these other
healthy fats, which funny enough, now are by products. They're
not available because they're expensive. It's because they've now been
stitched into so many other industries pet food, biofuels, right
that they're being used in those industries as buy products,
(37:24):
cheap by products. So the government can actually incentivize financially
a way in which we get all of those products
back into the food chain, not all of them, right,
we can still fulfill the demand for some of those
other industries, get them into the food chain so that
we increase the supply of those products, make them get
it so that they're easier to receive from a restaurant
tourist perspective, which is and you're probably thinking right now, well,
(37:47):
how do you do that? Very easy? Right? I mean
the government literally, whether it's through the USDA or any
subsidiary agencies, they can actually get those products, right, pork
fat or lard beef. Tallow get to the ranchers, get
to the farmers and the processors of those fats, and
get them directly to one of the three massive food
purveyors in the United States, which is Cisco, US Foods
(38:09):
and PFG perhaps or some of the other guys and
make them available within the next month, which can be
done to the restaurant community and the food service community,
especially large food service. The era marks of the world,
you know, the airports, the hospitals, et cetera. Which hospitals.
We can have a whole other conversation another time. So
that's number one, and the number two. If they have
(38:29):
to subsidize this, subsidize it. Because I've always said, right,
like especially now being in city council. It's so funny.
I'm like a libertarian at heart, but now here I
realize in my role as a city councilman, we get
our revenue through taxes. So I'm just consistently conflicted. But
you know, we can subsidize certain industries as long as
we can prove that there's going to be an equal
offset with a little bit of you know, a little
(38:50):
bit of a gain. Right, And I think just the
purpose for the purposes of looking at our healthcare costs, right,
if we get healthier. Right now, we're spending twenty percent
of our entire fed federal budget on healthcare, and that's
only going up at a rapid pace. If we get healthier,
those costs are going to come down and in the
long run, we're going to save a ton of money.
So if you've got to subsidize the fat industry within
(39:13):
the restaurant or food service world and food manufacturing to
get the right fats into the right products to make
them more approachable for the manufacturers and the US producers,
well then you do that, because that's how we got
into this problem in the first place, was by subsidizing
all of these commodity products corn, soybeans, right and creating
cheap buy products. That's exactly how we got here in
(39:34):
the first place. So if anybody in government wants to
tell me, well, I don't know how we're going to
do that economically, you know exactly how you're going to
do that.
Speaker 2 (39:41):
Well, I mean, I think it's really interesting that, first
of all, talking about incentivizing when it comes to people's
health and healthcare, I mean, you're preaching to.
Speaker 1 (39:48):
The choir there.
Speaker 2 (39:49):
One thing is that for me personally and my family
and kind of some of the stuff that I like
to publicly talk about is you have to do what
you can to eat healthy at home as much as
possible so that you can can go out to restaurants
and you.
Speaker 1 (40:02):
Know, maybe that is not where you have to overly regulate.
Speaker 2 (40:04):
You can go and you can have your everything in
moderation meal as long as the rest of the days
of the week you're at home, not having the seed oils,
not having built to process foods. You know, I don't
think that we need to eradicate things altogether, but we
need to be more transparent in the things that we
are consuming. People need to be educated on that, and
we have to make sure that it's affordable and specifically
people who you know, are in the lower income areas,
(40:26):
that they have access to the healthier foods because unfortunately,
they rely more on these processed foods because they're cheaper,
because the longer health shelf lives, and the fast food. So,
I mean, it's a big problem right now. It seems
like RFK Junior and the administration obviously that this is.
Speaker 1 (40:42):
In the forefront of make America healthy again.
Speaker 2 (40:44):
They're tackling it, as you're saying, by their kind of
going after removing some of the things from the industry.
Speaker 1 (40:50):
I also worry.
Speaker 2 (40:51):
About government overreach a little bit, but I'm glad to
at least see that the conversation is being had.
Speaker 3 (40:57):
Yeah, and I think that the things that they're changing
are actually they're removing government overreach. A lot of times
people are like, well, you know, kind of some of
the hard right anti government folks are saying, well, look
look at what they're doing to change this and change this.
That's government overreach. No, they're undoing government overreach. I mean,
look at the gross loophole. I think that's amazing that
that was already that they're closing that gross loophole, because
that was really the window through which they were slipping
(41:19):
in so many of these bad products. And for those watching,
the gross loophole, which was generally recognized as safe, was
kind of a way in which you could get basic
products into foods without having to go through the government
the regulatory gauntlet of getting them approved. But originally it
was intended for things that we know right generally recognize
as safe, so flour, vinegar, salt, pepper, right like those
(41:40):
very basic pantry items. And then they started slipping in
more and a little bit more, and then ultimately the
food manufacturers realized that, hey, if we write some of
our own studies, we can slip some of these chemicals
in there under the gross loophole. And that's how all
of those products got into the food the government kind
of turning a blind eye. If we make the research
more transparent and we kind of have an even playing
field and we remove some of the special interest, we're
(42:02):
actually decreasing the size of that government kind of construct
and we're getting people healthier at the same time. Because
I think that what's lost in all of this, and
that's a great point you bring up about just pay
attention to what you're cooking at home. I think that
people forget we have agency, right like this personal agency,
this ability to decide for ourselves and make decisions for
ourselves and our families. We don't need kind of an
(42:25):
a priori government to be our secondary brain. We can
do it ourselves, so long as the information is clean
and transparent.
Speaker 2 (42:34):
Absolutely, and you just hit the nail on the head
there the fact that in Europe when it came to food,
they had to essentially prove that substances were safe before
it was allowed to go into the food. Here in
the United States, because of the loopholes, we essentially said
anything can be added into it. If it turns out
to be not safe, then we'll have that discussion. I mean,
(42:54):
it is so backwards and here we are, and as
we have seen, once something gets through that loopholes really hard.
Speaker 1 (42:59):
To under that.
Speaker 2 (43:00):
And finally, I am feeling optimistic that that maybe we're going
to be doing that, And as we continue to get
more data talking about the things that we consume and
how they.
Speaker 1 (43:10):
Are directly correlative to disease, I.
Speaker 2 (43:12):
Think people are finally going to start taking charge of
their health and hopefully be able to make some informed
decisions about their health.
Speaker 3 (43:19):
Yeah. I agree, the food marketing machine has been you know,
they've done well. I got to say that, but I
think like just packaging and marketing and all of the
claims that we see on the outside, right like all
natural and low in saturated fats, and you know, those
things sell right like that to my parents, like you know,
who are constantly asking me like should I buy this?
(43:40):
Should I not buy this? And what we grew up
on as kids. I grew up in you know, the eighties,
and it was like, oh well, this is healthier, right,
Like this TV dinner it says it's nutritious and it's healthy.
And I too, working parents and you know, eating pizza
every single night in New Jersey. It was like, oh well,
it's healthy, right, like it's the way to be funny enough,
I was actually a runner, so it was like we
(44:01):
grew up on high carbs. It was like bage old
and waffles for breakfast, and pasta lunches and pasta dinners,
and it was like carb carb carb, So that could
have also had something to do with my metabolic issues.
Speaker 2 (44:15):
Well, Chef Andrew grow, thank you so much for joining
us today. I am certainly going to make my own vinaigrette. Now,
I'm going to try that mayonnaise. We'll see if I
can slip it into some sandwiches. But I'm telling you,
as a food connoisseur, you have to put together a
cookbook to tell us what we can do to get
rid of these seed oils and these healthy alternatives.
Speaker 1 (44:31):
Because, let me tell you, when it.
Speaker 2 (44:33):
Comes to like mayonnaise, it wouldn't occur to me to
make my own mayonnaise. And you make it sound so simple,
although I'm sure it's not as simple as you may
think it is. But I'm willing to give it a try.
Speaker 3 (44:43):
All right, wonderful. I appreciate that well, and I'll send
you I have Andrew Grul's Family Cookbook. We did fifty
recipes that are just for like the family. The kids
did them all seed oil free. I'll make sure I
get one out to you.
Speaker 1 (44:54):
I can't wait.
Speaker 2 (44:54):
Thanks so much, you're listening to Wellness and Mass. We'll
be right back with more.
Speaker 1 (45:01):
So listen.
Speaker 2 (45:02):
You know, after having this conversation, I think everyone's probably
a little scared of these Omega six fatty acids lineleic acids.
Speaker 1 (45:09):
Bottom line. The findings of the study.
Speaker 2 (45:11):
They do not warrant blanket avoidance of all seed oils.
But just like I've said at nauseum, everything in moderation
and selectivity, especially for those with high risk individuals, those
who are trying to decrease their risk of cancer and
disease and get to a healthier weight. Maintaining a healthy
weight via balanced nutrition, regular exercise. It's one of the
(45:31):
actionable steps that you can take to not only you know,
improve your cardiovascular and metabolic disease risk, but also your
cancer risks. I want to thank my colleagues at Cornell
for doing this important study and bringing light to some
of the toxins that we have in our everyday food prep. Also,
I want to thank my friend chef Andrew Group for
giving us some tips on how to avoid this potential
(45:53):
cancer causing ingredient. I'm doctor Nicole Saffhire, your host of
Wellness Unmasked
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Clay Travis
Buck Sexton
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