 Welcome back to the perfected health podcast. Ladies and gentlemen, this is episode four. I have the pleasure of speaking with Mr. Tucker Goodrich today. He is a technology executive in the financial industry who designs, runs, and debugs complex systems in high-risk environments. His areas of expertise include risk management, system management, and cyber security. After experiencing some personal health crisis and realizing that the solutions offered by modern medical professionals weren't working or addressing causation, he started applying the same approach in research and evaluation of data to his own health issues to determine root causes. His interests have focused on dietary and environmental drivers of chronic disease, including carbohydrate, wheat, and various classes of fat, mostly vegetable oils. Specifically, he's attempting to understand and popularize understanding of the mechanisms driving the diet-derived explosion in so-called chronic diseases, also known as diseases of civilization. He is active on Twitter at Tucker Goodrich and has a blog called Yelling Stop, is an expert advisor for the nutrition startup Nutrita and has been a guest on numerous podcasts. Most recently, Ivor Cummins, and I had Ivor on our first podcast. So, Tucker, thank you again for joining me today. How do you perfect your health? It's a pleasure, Frank. Thank you very much for asking me to do this today. Perfecting health, this was not something that I ever pursued as a goal. I was one of these guys who thought I was doing everything right. I was basically following, eating to the food pyramid. As I used to refer to myself as Mr. Whole Wheat, and nevertheless, as very active, I would run and ski and mountain bike and hike and work out on the gym and do everything that you're supposed to be doing or so I thought at the time. And what I discovered was I discovered the hard way that I had numerous significant health problems that resulted in me being hospitalized repeatedly, starting in my 30s. And over the course of that, I started to realize what was, to learn and to realize what was driving that I could change things in my diet that would have these dramatic effects on my health in the short term. And what I found as I pursued that was that multiple health problems that I had had, including things that I didn't think were health problems that I just thought were genetic, were in fact susceptible to perfection or at least resolution. So I had, when I was 38, I had a, what at first appeared to be a stroke that put me on a stroke ward for four days. Not a fun place to be if you've ever been there. I had medical students sitting there saying, you're so interesting. We never see anybody your age in here. Wonderful, lucky me. I'm special. Yay. And then a couple of years later, I came down with acute diverticulitis. When I was 40, I had, I'm sitting there in the ICU at the hospital reading up on acute diverticulitis and the website says, typically starts occurring to people after their 40th birthday. This was two weeks after my 40th birthday. I'm like, you gotta be kidding me. So what I realized, when I started understanding that my nutritional approach had been counterproductive, let's just say, I started seeing, I resolved my, the stroke was later re-diagnosed as migraine. It was bad enough to leave me with a minor speech impediment. So migraines can be a lot worse than most people think. And I started to realize that I could bring on these conditions through dietary. Once I cleaned up my diet and then I would eat them again, these conditions would come back immediately. At the time, what was your version of like, how did you get sucked out of this modern medical thing? Like what were you eating and what were you testing? Were you like going really outside of convention or? Well, so I had a lot of dental problems growing up. I had a lot of cavities, I had eight teeth pulled. My mother had bad teeth, her mother had bad teeth, so I just assumed it was genetic, right? I had, when I was probably 19, my dentist told me, you should stop eating sugar and then you won't be getting these cavities and I listened to him and he was right. And I didn't get another cavity for 20-odd years until they put a candy bowl in the office. So in probably 30 years, I've had one minor cavity after growing up with lots of cavities. So I was sort of amenable to the idea that some of these conditions could be addressed with diet, but a friend of mine sent me a link to Stefan Guine's blog, Whole Health Source. And it was a post that said, Stefan started out by looking at Western Price and trying to verify if what Price had said back in the 20s and the 30s had been verified by Modern Science. So he did this long series of blog posts about what you call dental malocclusion, which is when your teeth don't come in properly, right? I had prices growing up, I obviously had a real poor problem with malocclusion. Yeah, facial development issues. Right, exactly. And he showed in multiple populations that people would go from perfect teeth to major dental problems in one generation. Okay, so it can't be genetic, right? And then he, as Price had, looked at what did these people start eating? And they started going on basically the standard American diet, right? Wheat flour, sugar. Just so people know, Western Price was a dentist in the 1920s and 30s. He went around to indigenous people, native groups that were essentially still living off of the land, eating lots of quality animal foods, wild foods, absent of refined sugar, vegetable oils. And these people had a certain level of physical development that was consistent across all populations. Then when they go to the modern foods, that's where we see issues. Right, and even more significantly, he wasn't just a dentist, he was the head scientist for what became the American Dental Association. So he was the leading dental scientist in the United States at the time. And he did what an engineer would do. He thought like an engineer, right? He said, okay, all of my patients have these horrible dental problems. What is causing it? And he realized what nutritional epidemiologists today still don't seem to understand. If you're trying to figure out what's causing a disease, you have to go look at people who don't have a disease and then figure out what the differences are, right? This is the same thing you do in, you know, when you're debugging any complex system. If I have two computers, one of them has a problem, the other one doesn't, you gotta figure out what the differences are, right? Is it, you know, did one of them get a patch and an update to the software? Did the inputs change, right? There's gotta be some difference between the two. What went wrong along the way? We started chugging corn oil. No, that was one of the things. So, you know, this, Stefan's blog post blew my mind because I suddenly realized that all of my nightmare visits to the dentist growing up were optional, right? It didn't have to be that way, absolutely blew my mind. So I started reading his blog and following all the links and reading all the research that he posted because I didn't know if he was full of it or not, right? It sounded like a good story, but, you know, you can't just take anybody at the word. You gotta go, especially in my business, you gotta confirm what people say to you. So I did that and probably five months later, he had the two main things that he was harping on was wheat and vegetable oils. And as I said, I refer to myself as Mr. Whole Wheat. I thought it was a flake about that. So one day I went down, but, you know, the seed oil stuff that he posted was pretty interesting. So one day I walked down... Seed oils, we mean, you know, a lot of these seed oils are referred to as vegetable oils, but we mean like soybean, canola, rapeseed. Yeah, that's a good point. It's generally, they're called vegetable oils. I like to distinguish between olive oil, which is actually made from the fruit of the olive, not the pit, which is the seed, for instance, and things like corn oil or peanut oil that are actually made from the seed, right? So I refer to seed oils. Just to distinguish between avocado and olive oil are actually made from the fruit rather than the seed, and those are much healthier. So one day I walked down to the cafeteria and I was in the salad bar line. I got to the end of the salad bar and I looked at all of these squeeze bottles of salad dressing and I thought to myself, these have got to be the worst, nastiest, cheapest oils known to man in this cheesy office cafeteria. What happens if I just stop eating them, right? Now at that point, I'd been sick for 16 years with IBS. I had had acute diverticulitis twice in my life. An acute diverticulitis is when you have a diverticula, which is a pouch that forms in your colon, ruptures, and you have your feces leaking into your abdomen, which is obviously not a good thing. So I've been sick pretty consistently for 16 years, and I said, okay, fine, I'm gonna try this experiment, see what happens. But this has been essentially, you're supposed to be Mr. Healthy. You're doing what everyone's telling you to do, you're exercising, you're eating whole wheat, you're low fat, you're avoiding cholesterol. Seed oils are a major recommendation from the authorities for a healthy diet. I guess so. Right, so I said, okay, I'll just try it, see what happens. Two days later, my chronic diarrhea stopped for the first time in about 16 years. So you were consuming these vegetable oils, were you having like coffee made in your coffee in the morning? No, I wasn't into coffee made, I didn't get, cause I've always kind of had an evolutionary help bent. So I knew that like people had been eating saturated fat for all of history. So I didn't worry too much about saturated fat consumption, I put half and half in my coffee cause it tasted good and coffee made taste nasty. Sorry guys. But yeah, so, and I've gone back and looked at the, stuff on was great about answering questions and giving me some advice. And I've gone back and read the email that I sent to him and I was like, this is unbelievable, I've been sick for years. And in a couple of days, you know, it's resolved. This is just mind boggling. Now what was interesting and which we'll get into my two main mechanisms of why seed oils cause a lot of these problems. So for a week, I had tried to go low carb before cause I was, you know, 20 odd pounds overweight at that point I was the typical putting a pound a year on guy. You know, I'd grown out of all of my clothes that I wore when I was in my 20s. So, and I couldn't get over carbohydrate cravings when I tried to go on a low carb diet. So it didn't work for me. But over that first week, all of a sudden I just forgot to eat carbohydrates, right? I didn't make an effort to do it. It wasn't part of the experiment, but I just forgot to. So at the end of the week, I went and had a sandwich on whole wheat bread, of course. And I had this horrible reaction to the bread at which point, you know, having been prepped by Stefan's blog, I was like, oh my God, am I one of these people who's gluten sensitive? So Ben and I started the second part of the experiment which was go another week without eating any wheat and then, you know, a week later two pizzas and I thought I was having a heart attack. It put me on the sofa with my chest pounding and my head dizzy and, you know, so in over the course of two weeks, my entire diet turned upside down. I mean, I remember at that point, whenever Stefan put up a new blog post, I'd get the cold sweats because I was like, oh my God, what's he gonna tell me now that I got to change? But it, you know, and I had a panic attack. I was like, I'm not, I was like, if I can't eat wheat, what am I gonna eat? I'm gonna start today. And I made some, you know, in hindsight, stupid decisions, but I didn't know what I was doing. You know, I started, so I lost my carb cravings and then discovered I couldn't eat wheat. And so I just didn't eat any wheat and I wasn't eating any seed oils. So basically I'm eating protein, vegetables and no fats and no carbs, which is the recipe for rabbit starvation, right? So I got rabbit starvation about three weeks later, which, you know, for those who don't know, if you eat protein, you have to eat it with carbohydrates or fats. You have to eat it with an energy source. You can't just eat all protein, right? Or you get this sickness that's called rabbit starvation because rabbits are very lean. They don't have any fat on their bodies. So if all you eat is rabbits, you get sick. So basically, I didn't get sick. I just, one afternoon I got this mad craving for fats, like this insane craving for fats. So on the way home, I drove to a health food store and bought a jar of coconut oil because at this point I'd, you know, okay, that's supposed to be one of the healthy fats. Went home and started eating it with a spoon. Oh my God, it was heaven. It was heaven. And then again, you know, three weeks later, again, repeat the experiment, go back to not eating any fat. And the second time was I cooked up a pound of bacon and the bacon tasted so unbelievable, eating all that fat at one go when you're in rabbit starvation. So at that point I realized I had to start adding fat. You were aware of what rabbit starvation was at the time? Oh yeah, I've read old books, you know, about Arctic explorers, which is where the term comes from. So I knew what it was. I just didn't realize that it would be that easy to give to yourself. So, and then, but now here I am. Everything, you know, so, you know, as time went on, I realized that when I ate, so I started doing more experiments because I wanted to figure out, you know, like, beer. Beers, so if you're gluten sensitive, the gluten protein, it's the protein in the wheat that causes the problems mostly is in wheat, barley and rye. So barley and rye are what they make beer and scotch from mostly, right? In hindsight, I looked back and I realized that wheat beer had always made me ill, right? So in hindsight, when I started thinking about this, I was like, oh, this is probably why I've never been in. I had always avoided wheat beer because it made me feel so bad. And I was like, okay, now I get it. But, you know, I didn't want to give up beer. So I tried some beer experiments and very distinctly remember my favorite beer was the Sierra Nevada Pale Ale and the last one of those that I had left me up all night with agonizing stomach pains. So that was the end of beer. Gave my beer and scotch away to my friend, you know? And, but I wasn't happy just doing this. I wanted to understand why all this stuff was happening, right? Another thing that happened a few weeks after I stopped seed oils is I went on a ski trip and was out in the sun all day. I hate using sunscreen and I didn't get a permit, right? Now I would always burn. I'm very, you know, as you can see, very susceptible to sunburn, as again, was my mother. So my ex-wife was Colombian and more your coloration, right? She would get... Italian? Well, no, she was Colombian. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But no, she passed. Everybody thought she was Italian. So she's very much your coloration. She would go to the beach and come back, not brown, I would come to the beach like a lobster from a nuclear reactor, right? So then the two of us went out to this event in New York City in Central Park and it was pretty much our first time out in the sun other than the ski trip for the spring. It was in April before the leaves came out on the trees. So we were standing side by side in the sun and, you know, we got home that night and she came up to me and she said, look at the burn I got. And I said, look at me, I didn't burn. Now I had read one account of a guy who said that on Mark Sisson's website, who said that, you know, his susceptibility to sunburn went away. So I was like, had that fact in my head. And I was like, wow, this is really, you know. So then I started, then a little later we went down to Disney World, four days in the Florida sun, no sunscreen, no sunburn, you know, that was almost 10 years ago now. I've worn, you know, I lived in Texas for a year. I'd go out running for three and a half, four hours in the sun, you know, I mean, beginning of the season I'll get pink and then it'll turn to brown and that's pretty much it for the rest of the season. Initial adjustment. Right. And it's, you know, it's been life-altering for me because I would avoid going outside because I would get these horrible sunburns in like 45 minutes. And now it takes six or seven hours for me to get a decent sunburn. So I was just fascinated by what was causing all of these things. And once I started learning more and more about it, I realized, you know, I had a colleague at work who, as I read more and more, I had a colleague at work, for instance, who had a diabetic daughter. And I said, well, you know, you should try, at that point I'd heard about Dr. Richard Bernstein who came up with a low-carb treatment for diabetes. I said, well, you should try what he's doing. And, you know, he said, okay. And, you know, he came back a few weeks later. He's like, you know, my daughter's been able to cut her diabetic meds in half. He was like, this is great. She's thrilled. So that's when I started realizing that, you know, I could not only fix my own health and my family's health, but start, you know, helping other people and that it was, you know, everybody needs a hobby. This has become my hobby. But, things that, you know, in terms of perfecting health, things that I thought, things that changed, let's just put it that way. My chronic IDS went away and has been gone for 10 years. My diverticulitis has been gone for 10 years. Either one of those, I can reproduce it will by eating weed or seed oils. They have slightly different symptoms. The combination really seems to throw me for a loop. The, my gingivitis went away. I mean, I wasn't getting cavities, but, you know, my teeth would always bleed when I brushed my teeth. That's completely gone away for 10 years. I've been weight stable for 10 years. The low carbohydrate stuff, I used to get what they call reactive hypoglycemia, you know, where you eat sugar and then your blood sugar goes low and you, you know, get the sweats and the shakes and everything. That's been completely gone with low carbohydrate intake. The, you know, my first half marathon, I bonked at like mile 10, the Brooklyn half, as a matter of fact. Now I can go run, you know, five and a half hours without food and it's just not a big deal. That's crazy. Do you do hydrodol when running? Yeah, yeah. But I mean, I can go three and a half, four hours without water, even in the summer. You know, depending on the humidity and pace, obviously, but my allergies are completely gone. They used to be whenever I would clean a dusty room, I would have to take pseudo-fed or something for the allergies. I mean, I spent, a couple of years ago, I spent like three months cleaning the house and nothing, not a hint. You know, it's hay fever season now, just not even a hint of hay fever. And I was hospitalized as a kid for allergy reactions, allergic reactions. Asthma's completely gone, exercise-induced asthma's completely gone. You know, I used to get the cold-induced asthma where you go out and exercise in cold weather and I would be, you know, doubled over wheezing after 10 minutes. And, you know, again, I can go out for, I went out for a run when it was eight below zero for four hours and nothing. The, my hair's gotten thicker, my fingernails got thicker. You know, I used to always get torn fingernails gone 10 years. Yeah, pretty much, I mean, I don't bother going to doctors anymore. I'm on no medications, no prescriptions. I don't take any pills. My pain tolerance has gone up to a frightening extent to the point where at one point I was genuinely concerned about I was in a ski house and I got up in the morning and went up to make the coffee, came back downstairs and I slipped and fell down the stairs, right? And when I got home that night, I went to take a shower and I looked in the mirror and I had this huge welt across the back of my arm and I hadn't felt it. It didn't hurt. And I was like, what is going on here? Basically, it meant something like me and Doto who fell off a cliff and then got back up and started chasing after an elephant again. Well, no, but I'm a history student. You read about these guys in these old battles who were getting sliced up by swords and you're like, how can they tolerate that? And now I kind of get it because I've had mountain biking accidents where I trash my knee and it's bleeding all over the place and it's just like, eh, finish the ride. There's a drastic difference in resilience that we seem to have lost on the modern diet. But one of the main things and that I have to credit you for is just turning me onto the whole, little like acid omega-6 being a predominant cause of disease. Right, right. A lot of you guys also discovered this the same way. I did watching Tucker on Ivor Cummins podcast talking about the negative effects of seed oils and how dangerous they are, you know. So yeah, that's what I, you know, when I started off trying to understand what was going on, cutting out seed oils that obviously had an immediate effect for me, right? So that was flagged. Wheat obviously had an immediate effect for me. So that was also flagged. Sorry to interrupt, but did you ever try like, einkorn wheat or heirloom varieties of wheat? I bought a bag of einkorn flour early on and I was afraid to actually try it. Because- Yeah, I can't blame you because of how severe the symptoms were. Well, the stroke symptoms are I go partially blind and I can't talk for several hours and it's, you know, and sometimes I get vertigo, you know, it's scary and my fear has always been that, you know, so far it's always reversed, but my fear is one of these times it will do damage and I won't recover from it. So yeah, I had the einkorn sitting in there and I tried sourdough bread early on because I'd heard that, you know, certain kinds of sourdough, the gluten's all digested by the bacteria that didn't work. No. I mean, supposedly you can make it work, but, you know, it got to the point where it just wasn't worth the trouble because I got out of the habit of eating it. That's what us Italians have gone crazy over the past 1000 years of high wheat consumption. Well, and that's an interesting point because all the leading researchers on celiac disease and wheat poisoning are Italian, right? Which, and if you go to Italy as I have done, you just, what is it? I think it's son celiaco, I am celiac, and the restaurants immediately know what to do, right? Unlike in the United States where they have no idea what you're talking about. You know, I mean, when your server says, is there wheat in flour? No, no, no, listen, I used to work in New York City restaurants, it's a different world over here. Yeah. So, I started off by looking at sugar, because again, I've been sugar-free for a long time and I was like, okay, so that's, that can't be the whole thing because I got sick with it without eating sugar. And then I started looking at carbohydrates, which was a big focus of step-ons at the time. And you pretty quickly find these populations, you know, like the Japanese who traditionally ate a lot of carbohydrates, the traditional Japanese diet was like 70, 80% carbs, but they didn't get high rates of heart disease. They didn't get, they got some carbohydrate-related diseases, like they tended to be short because carbohydrates are not particularly nourishing. They don't have all the vitamins and minerals and everything else that your body needs, but they didn't get fat, right? Even today, the Japanese have the lowest rate of obesity in the industrial world. So that didn't really work. So then I started, you know, I couldn't find the research that really pointed me in the right direction with linoleic acid. I mean, I knew that it had a huge effect on me and there were certain indications. So there are two different types of, you know, I would find things like, there are two different types of cancers that in animal models, when they try to induce cancer in animals, they can only do it if they include seed oils in the diet, right? So they were, it was cold, and you know, for sunburn and skin cancer, skin cancer is one of those cancers where you basically can't give an animal skin cancer if you don't give it a certain amount of seed oils. Saturated fat is protective. So that was, you know, that's an amazing finding. That was the thing that really prompted me to stop that in the first place. And then there are relationships between bowel diseases like what I had and linoleic acid that you can find in the literature. But I didn't really understand what was going on until I was reading Neenah Teakholz's, and I always misspeak. Teakholz, I always misspeak, that's your last name. Her book, Big Fat Surprise, and she had a little chapter on seed oils and mentioned how when you cook them, they turn into these toxins. And I asked myself, I said, you know, I'm curious. I wonder if that happens in the body too. And it does. And all of a sudden I started being able to connect the dots between all these chronic diseases and figuring out what the common denominators were, right? So it turns out that a natural human diet is pretty low in linoleic acid. If you go look at hunter-gatherers or, you know, there's a group down in the, a group called the Tsimani in the Bolivian jungle, where they've actually gone and looked at their linoleic acid levels. And they're much lower than what you see in Americans. And they don't have any of our chronic diseases. They don't get, they 75% carbs. They don't get heart disease. They don't get diabetes. They don't get obese. They don't get high blood pressure, right? The whole suite of diseases are absent down there. They do get malnutrition because they're on a high-carb diet. They moan about how they can't eat enough, can't get enough meat to eat, right? So, you know, a high-carb diet, despite what the dietary guideline says, not fix if you're looking to perfect your health. But, so what happens is, as you eat more seed oils, right? It concentrates in various different tissues in your body. And as it concentrates and as the percentage goes up, it starts breaking down into these toxins, right? Now, this process of, just to make a point here that Omega-6 fats are in all natural foods, basically, everything that I've ever looked at. Even things like coconuts have tiny amounts and fish. So this isn't something that you wanna try. You can't completely eliminate this from your diet outside of a lab. These are essential fats that your body needs to function correctly. But the actual amount that you need, so for instance, they did a study with a human infant who is sick and in the hospital and got what they call essential fatty acid deficiency from not having any Omega-6 fats. And what they discovered was the actual amount of Omega-6 fats that the baby needed was like a half a percent a day, right? Whereas in the United States, we're eating 7 to 15% of our daily calories are coming from seed oils, either in salad dressings or in processed foods. So somewhere in that spectrum, you go from it being healthy, right? To unhealthy, right? And this is something that takes a period of time. And this is why a lot of times when we see plant-based dieters try to say that these vegetable oils and polyunsaturated fats reduce your risk of heart disease, it's in that short-term period of time between... There's no evidence that they ever reduce your risk of heart disease. They're just mistaken about that. But, you know, back to the, just there's something that you need to understand in nutrition, which is the idea that you shaped curve, right? So all nutrients have a U-shaped curve. The high points are high mortality. The low point is low mortality, i.e. health, right? Typically too little of something gives you high mortality, too much of something gives you high mortality. Water, no water, you die. Too much water, you die, right? You wanna be in the middle, right? Same as true for oxygen and for every other nutrient that I've ever studied. So part of what you wanna do in order to perfect your diet is try and get all of those nutrients down at the low point, right? With seed oils, a low point appears to be a very low point, like, you know, 1% of your diet every day, which is what you would get if you weren't eating any processed foods or any animals that were raised eating processed foods like pigs or chickens. Now... That's because when you feed the animal corn or soy, you guys might be thinking it's okay just to avoid vegetable oils, avoid seed oils. When they're feeding these seed oils to animals, the fatty composition of the animal, of the pig, of the fish, of the chicken becomes composed of little egg acid. So by consuming a high fat pork product or chicken product that wasn't raised properly, it's akin to consuming a vegetable oil in a way. Well, it is, you are consuming the vegetable oil. It's just packaged in a chicken instead of in a bottle. And they did a fascinating study where they fed salmon soybean meal and salmon, like a chicken or a pig, concentrated the fat and then they fed it to mice and the mice got sick, right? So it can go up the food chain. But, you know, so yeah, Omega-6 fats, you wanna keep it in the sweet spot. You don't wanna, don't go crazy trying to get rid of it because you can't and eating real foods and understand that you just wanna have a fairly low amount. So for instance, in the two cancer models that I mentioned before, what they found was that no Omega-6 fats prevented the cancers from propagating. And that was in a breast cancer model and a skin cancer model. Cancer incidents increased up to around 4% of the diet. Beyond that point, there was no increase in cancer from more sea oils, right? So when you look at a lot of these, you know, if you go look at epidemiology now as dietitians will tell you, oh look, we're looking at all of these populations and we don't see any difference in the population from different amounts of seed oils. They're all above that percent. They're all above that level, right? Every industrial society is above that level. In order to do a decent epidemiological study, you'd have to include these hunter-gatherers in the Amazon who are probably down at the 1% to 2% level and they're not getting any of these diseases, right? But if you're looking at, you know, Italy versus America versus Mexico, we all eat a lot more than we should. So anyway, so that- I mean, the body does have a tolerance to the taxes and depending on the person's genetics, different people can, you know, just like the resilience thing of our, you know- Right, right, yeah. Yeah, it's, this is a basic function of your body, right? It's handling the breakdown of omega-6 and omega-3 fats. A lot of folks may have heard of this antioxidant glutathione. Glutathione's job is to handle when omega-6 fats in your body break down into toxins, right? That's what it's for. So this is not, you know, you know, I just, it drives me crazy when I hear people saying, well, I have to avoid all omega-6 fats. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Bad idea. Don't try to do that. A, you'll go crazy. And B, you'll probably wind up drinking something that looks like soilent for all your food. Yeah, just, just a little touch on, you know, what causes oxidation? It's usually referred to as ROS, reactive oxygen species. This could be anything from smoking, environmental pollution, pollutants, lack of sleep, stress, all things that are kind of related to metabolic syndrome that cause inflammation. Right, right. And the body has an ability to fix these things, essentially, with antioxidants. Glutathione, the primary one. You guys might know vitamin C, vitamin E is antioxidants, but the level that those have in the body, it's limited. Your body can only produce so many antioxidants and deal with so much oxidative stress. So the only way to really fix the issue is, get the inflammation to a percentage that the body can deal with. Exactly right. So, and just, which is a perfect segue into the two main mechanisms, I think, for omega-6 fats having a negative effect on our health. The first one is sort of the shorter one, so I'll cover that first. As I mentioned, when I cut seed oils from my diet, I lost my carbohydrate cravings, right? Almost immediately. It turns out that there was a human anti-obesity drug called Ramonobon, which was introduced back in 1996, and very quickly pulled off the market because it, Ramonobon blocks the endocannabinoid system, which is basically, among other things, the food reward system. So it blocked food cravings, right? Unfortunately, food reward is like one of the things that makes life worth living. And it turns out that if you turned that off, a lot of people decided that life wasn't worth living and they would commit suicide. So Ramonobon was fairly quickly pulled off the market, but it's a fascinating drug. So it turns out that the mechanism for Ramonobon, and they've confirmed this in several different animal studies that I've seen, is when you eat seed oils, the linoleic acid, which is the basic omega-6 fat in vegetable oils, it's the simplest one, it's one that the human body can't make, is converted into a fat called arachidonic acid, which is the fat that, you know, the omega-6 fat that you find in meat, and it's very beneficial in the right amount, right? And the climate's remediator. Well, it has a lot of functions, right? But I mean, your brain is made of arachidonic acid. Just like your brain needs DHA to function, it also needs arachidonic acid to function every day. Right, that's right. And babies that don't get enough of it don't develop properly. So it's very important that you get it. But like everything else, there's a right amount and a wrong amount. So it turns out that linoleic acid turns into arachidonic acid. Arachidonic acid turns into an endocannabinoid, right? The endocannabinoid system is called the cannabinoid system after marijuana, right? Cannabinoids are chemicals in marijuana that have various effects on your body, even when everybody's the most interested in it is THC, which is the one that has the effect that some people find pleasant for marijuana. Now, THC also has, so arachidonic acid turns into a chemical called 2-A-G to arachidon oil, if I'm getting that name correct, which is your body's natural version of THC, right? Now, what THC and 2-A-G both do is, does anybody, if any of you folks out there have ever smoked pot and gotten the munchies, THC is what gives you the munchies, right? So in animal experiments, they can take a rat and feed it until it stops eating, it's satiated, and then they inject either THC or 2-A-G into the rat's brain and it will start eating again. It is literally a signal to the body that the body is not eating enough, right? So it turns on that process of wanting to eat. And what's fascinating is, anybody who's ever gotten a munchies nose, you don't crave steak, you crave junk food. And similarly, the rats crave sweetness and carbohydrates. I've always been asked on the topic of the carnivore diet, why do some people gain weight, why do some people lose weight? And the answer I've always given is, a lack of nutrient density in the diet, alteration of the omega-3 to omega-6 ratios can greatly affect satiation. I did not know about this mechanism. So now my answer to that question is probably going to be along the lines of, when you have a high omega-6 intake, arachidonic acid along the leg, acid gets thrown off, that can alter your hunger signal. That might actually play a bigger role than the nutrient density, than the fat content of the diet. That might be the soul. Well, I don't know about soul. Maybe not soul, but it's a bigger role than I anticipated. So what this drug Rolanibin does is blocks the body from taking up, it blocks the endocannabinoid receptor in your cells from taking up 2AJ or THC, right? And now to the whole, a lot of you folks may have heard about the concept of food reward. This is literally a major food reward pathway. If you give monkeys cocaine, they will, you know, we all know what happens with cocaine, right? You start mega-dosing, unless you give them Rolanibin. And that blocks the reward pathway and turns off the reward that they get from taking cocaine. So this is a fundamental, really important pathway in the body per obesity. Interestingly, if you give, and this part isn't very well understood, if you give Rolanibin cures obesity, right? So if you have a fat rat on a lab diet, which are virtually always high in seed oils and you give it Rolanibin, it cures the obesity, right? So as far as candidates for why are we all fat go, this is, I think, a really strong one. You know, the fact that it's already been a human, it was a human-approved drug, strongly indicates that this is a fundamental thing that's going on in humans and all, the animals around us that are getting fat. So that's a fairly short story, right? Also, in obese humans, they find that they have high levels of circulating arachnodic acid to your question about earlier about arachnodic acid and the levels in the body. Obese kids tend to have high levels of arachnodic acid and obese people in general have two levels, high levels of 2-A-G in circulation. So, you know, the other pathway is a little more complicated, but kind of more to the point of perfecting your health, right? And this requires a little bit of backstory, so bear with me here for a second. So almost every cell in your body has what is known as mitochondria, right? Your body is basically, your body somewhat alarmingly is not just you. Your body is a partnership between you and these bacteria called mitochondria that partnered up, you know, a billion years ago or whatever to allow complex life to evolve. Mitochondria make the power in your cells, right? If you're, okay, how important are mitochondria? Everybody's sort of cyanide and that kills you instantly. Well, cyanide works by turning off your mitochondria. Obviously, you die instantly, right? They turn off the ability for your mitochondria to produce power, therefore you keel over. It's like hitting a light switch. So, mitochondria contain a unique kind of fat called cardiolipin. Cardiolipin is made up of four fatty acids and they can be a variety of different fatty acids and the body being a complicated thing, the types of fatty acids that your body wants to make cardiolipin out of vary in different tissues. So your brain is gonna look different from your heart which is gonna look different from your liver which looks different from your muscles. Cardiolipin is important because the composition of cardiolipin, the facts that your body uses to make cardiolipin depends on your diet to some extent, right? So in rats, they can take, you know, if they feed rats a lot of seed oils, they will change the composition of the cardiolipin inside the mitochondria. It will, the seed oil content, the linoleic acid content will go up and the other fats like the oleic acid content, the fat that's in olive oil that's a healthy fat goes down. So what happens when you do that? Well, all of a sudden that causes your mitochondria to become susceptible to oxidative damage and oxidative stress. So while you will often read or hear people talking about oxidative stress in terms of the reactive oxygen species, the raws being produced in the mitochondria, the actual mechanism is the fat composition of cardiolipin. So cardiolipin that are made of linoleic acid are uniquely susceptible to breakdown from raws, right? If you take the cardiolipin, if you take the cardiolipin and you replace say linoleic acid with oleic acid, all of a sudden they become almost impervious to oxidative damage, right? Now I found a great paper that's from like the 1990s in the 1990s where they took some mice and they gave the mice some vegetable oils and they looked at what happened to their cardiolipin and their mitochondria and sure enough, cardiolipin started breaking down, right? So they had two groups of mice, one on a high carb, low fat diet, which is the standard mass diet and another on the same diet to which they added seed oils. The seed oil diet caused the cardiolipin to break down, it caused their mitochondrial function to go down, it caused mouse diabetes, they became insulin resistant, they became leptin resistant and they became fat, right? Bingo. Now mouse diabetes is different from human diabetes because mice don't get hyperglycemia. So they gave the mice a drug to give them hyperglycemia and at that point, the combination of seed oils and hyperglycemia, which is basically the modern American diet in a nutshell, caused their mitochondria to collapse and cause them to be unable to use sugar for fuel and it caused heart failure and necrosis in the hearts, right? So all of a sudden, you're looking at a whole range of the pathologies that typify American health, done from a simple diet with foods that everybody eats, right? So as I've researched this, what I realized is this process in literature, they call it mitochondrial dysfunction is found in every aspect of the chronic diseases, right? It's in Alzheimer's, it's in heart disease, it's in atherosclerosis, it's in non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. When you get fat, what happens is the omega-6 fats and your cells start breaking down and your fat cells start breaking down and it causes this pattern that you see in every tissue that is suffering from one of these diseases. The cells become inflamed because the toxins, specifically HNE that seed oils break down to, cause inflammation directly, right? They also cause, you know, we hear a lot about apoptosis. Oh, the other thing that that study looked at, the premise for the study was that seed oils would reduce apoptosis and this would be beneficial for the heart, right? So the seed oils did indeed reduce apoptosis. Apoptosis is a, call it sort of an orderly cell death, right? It's like a samurai doing how to kitty, you know, cutting his stabbing himself in the gut with a sword. But then his organs would get donated to someone and used for something else. Right, so when you- The components of cells in apoptosis are used to make other cells, actually. Right, so basically apoptosis is a cell saying to the body, guys, I'm broken, my mitochondria are no longer working the way they're supposed to. I'm broken, I need to die and be discarded, recycled, right? So that's what happens. That's a nice orderly process. What this study found was that increasing the seed oil content and seed oils plus hyperglycemia caused necrosis. Necrosis is a disorderly cell death. It doesn't have the time to wave the flag and say, guys, come take me out of here, I'm done. It just splats, right? It breaks down, the cell collapses and it spews all the toxins in the cell out into your system, right? So what happens in all of these diseases, in obesity, in heart failure, in fatty liver disease, in Alzheimer's is the cells start dying. They spew out their contents. This causes the body's immune cells which interpret these cellular contents as a bacterial infection to come and start trying to clean things up, right? So for instance, atherosclerosis, this is what happens. You get these breakdown products from the chronic cells and the macrophages come in and try and clean the mess up, right? But they can't clean the mess up because every day you're going out and you're eating more of the stuff that seems to be what's causing the problem. So the researchers who study mitochondria observe that mitochondrial dysfunction can cause pretty much diseases in any part of your body which makes perfect sense because every part of your body is dependent on mitochondrial function, right? So if they're not working correctly, you can get, you know, you get the whole suite of diseases. So make this very rudimentary. You can, I'll give it a shot. You consume vegetable oils. Your cells are literally composed of lipids, sugars and proteins, you know, everything in your body. So when you consume vegetable oils, the fats in your body literally start turning into vegetable oils. This causes massive amounts of oxidative stress, cell death in every cell in your body. And depending, then there's a timeline here. You were saying earlier that different parts of the body uptake linoleic acid at different rates. So it might take, you know, five, six, seven years for your brain to start becoming composed of more linoleic acid. Or even longer because Alzheimer's is a late stage one, but you might get fatty liver disease as a kid and then get diabetes a few years later and then Alzheimer's disease when you're in your 50s. All right, I remember you said on one of your posts when they gave people in the hospital intravenous vegetable oil versus like intravenous fish oil, the vegetable oil almost instantly caused fatty liver and the fish oil got rid of it very quickly. There were organs in the body that when they come under this level of oxidative stress from the linoleic acid, they deteriorate very quickly. You know, we're seeing very high rates of pancreatic cancer. We're seeing very high rates of breast cancer. And I think multiple things tie in there. I think the pancreatic cancer is a result of combination of linoleic acid, carbohydrate consumption, stress on the pancreatic cells to produce enzymes to digest starch. It's like feeding a dog a vegan diet. You're not meant to, the dog doesn't have the pancreatic capability to deal with that stuff. When you have the breast tissue, breast tissue requires iodine every day to function. If maybe you have this oxidative stress and a lack of iodine, it exacerbates the issue. So there's multiple tie-ins here, but it's very difficult to justify a lot of cancer and chronic diseases without the presence of the vegetable oil. Yeah, and then when you start looking at, you know, there was a great, to get back to breast cancer, there was a great epidemiological study where they looked at Asia versus America in terms of breast cancer incidents. And what they found was that when in Asia, who moved to America over a couple of generations, their rate of breast cancer would go up sevenfold. I might have the Polynesians, too. Yeah, they've done another one in Polynesia that showed the same thing, that their rate of breast cancer went up sevenfold. And if you go back, you know, not the first generation, but the second generation, which, you know, we know immigrants, typically the first generation holds onto their traditions and their dietary patterns. And then by the time their kids and their grandkids come around, the grandkids are completely American. They're beautiful. Yeah, yeah, maybe. So, you know, and if you go back and then look at, okay, well, what have seed oil rates been doing in Asia? They've been going up like this. And they're, you know, they're seeing the emergence, you know, like in China now, China has a worse obesity and diabetes problem amongst children than America does. And they've switched almost entirely off their traditional fats, which was, you know, naturally raised lard from pigs to vegetable oils and their rates of these chronic diseases, it's just skyrocketed. You know, one thing I bring up a lot is on vegan diets, when they're deficient in, you know, protein and they have high homocysteine levels in the blood, you know, that causes oxidative stress, that combined with the vegan diet high in plant oils causes oxidative stress. So there's a lot of parallels to be made here. And this is, this is kind of the tip of the iceberg, but if you don't have an understanding of the negative effects of these seed oils, then there's no other real starting point here. Yeah, one important thing to understand about oxidative stress, the raws, the reactive oxygen species, they don't get out of your mitochondria, right? Your mitochondria were designed to handle those. When they break down omega-6 fats into the toxins, those toxins can then lead to leave the mitochondria and affect the rest of the cell and adjacent cells, right? That process can be self-sustaining. So you wind up with, you know, there's a couple of disease states where you see this death spiral happening in practice where you get this out of control, this happens in sepsis, for instance, you get this out of control propagation of oxidative stress via omega-6 fats. The markers for oxidative stress are oxidized omega-6 fats. I think just two final things to touch on would be just clarifying heart disease and skin cancer a bit as those are two major concerns for people. So when you have the heart disease, you mentioned it briefly, this same thing happens in the arterial wall. Your LDL, your HDL cholesterol become composed of linoleic acid. It causes massive cell dysfunction when the macrophages and the white blood cells try to fix this and take away all the dead cell particles. They get stuck in the arterial wall. You keep consuming vegetable oils. It keeps building up. That's essentially a clogged artery. In the case of skin cancer, I'm assuming that when you go out in the sun, those cells that are metabolizing vitamin D3, you know, the sun essentially... Well, this is independent of... Nitric oxide, right? D3, no, you have the two major fats in your skin is something called squalene and linoleic acid. And linoleic acid is super susceptible to breakdown by light, right? So the linoleic acid is the leading cause of blindness. A type of blindness cause called age-related macular degeneration, which is caused by blue late hitting your eyes. In your skin, it's mostly ultraviolet light, which again breaks the fats down into these toxins and damages the cells. You know, it's a fairly clear mechanism what's causing this. They've also done... You know, I found back in the 50s, they did this crazy study where they were trying to figure out what caused radiation damage and it was oxidized omega-6 fats. They would shoot the rats up with oxidized linoleic acid and it would kill them, right? So, yeah, it's a basic mechanism and it's something that I don't think you can ignore. I mean, there was a fellow Semia message from South Africa. He was a long-distance runner, an ultra-runner and he'd gone low-carb after, you know, Tim Noakes' celebrity down there and but he would get really bad burns on his runs and then he started listening to me and he sent me this unsolicited, this message saying, I'm so much less susceptible to sunburn now that I've cut the omega-6 fat side of my diet. This is fantastic. It will not make you sunburn proof. Just let me be totally clear about that but if you can go from, like I did, 45 minutes, five or six hours, it's a huge difference. Think about our ancestors. When spring came around and it got sunnier outside, their skin gradually adjusted to the sun over those few months of spring. You can't just go outside in the middle of August and go to Jones Beach and blast yourself for eight hours. You'll get burned but your skin will be able to heal quicker and more efficiently. Tucker, I can't thank you enough for joining me today. I guess let's just give a brief summary of what you think a healthy diet would look like and then let people know where they can find you. Yeah, so I think the thing to understand about the basics of a healthy diet is it's really what you're avoiding, right? So you want to avoid seed oils, obviously. You want to avoid refined carbohydrates, like, you know, sugar and flour. If you have autoimmune diseases and obviously if you're susceptible to gluten, then you definitely want to be avoiding wheat like I do. And then after that, you know, meat, vegetables, some fruit, you know, dairy if you tolerate it. But the main thing that distinguishes, you know, a healthy ancestral diet from the modern diet isn't what they ate, it's what they didn't eat. And we know very well what they weren't eating. It's the hyper-processed foods. Tucker, they can find you at TuckerGoodrich on Twitter. Guys, please drop in the follow-up or Frankie, the face is gonna come find you. You also have the blog called The Yelling Stop. If you guys want to read a lot of really good information on, you know, these studies, metabolic processes, a lot of the studies and mechanisms that we've referred to in this podcast, definitely check out The Yelling Stop. That's where he has all this stuff posted in-depth. Yeah, and there's a, that's Yelling-Stop at, or Yelling-Stop.blogspot.com. Yeah, we'll have everything down in the comments below, guys. Yeah, and there's a link to that off my Twitter profile. All right, so thanks again for joining us today, guys. We finished the perfect time. Everyone outside decided to start talking. Thank you, Frank. It's been great. It was an honor. Tucker, no, this was really amazing. I hope we help a bunch of people out and give you guys an idea of how to really explain this in an easy way to other people if they're willing to listen. You guys enjoy the rest of your week. That's cool. All right, just tell them how tall you are. I'm 5'8". So they believe, they believe me now. And I'm not wearing heels, so he looks a little tall. Oh, wait. Oh, he's gonna say that. That's not fair. Ha, ha, ha, ha.