 There's a myth that saturated fat is good for you. Most of the folks in the paleo and keto communities think that the more saturated fat that you eat, the better. In fact, this was first posited as the cause of heart disease back in the 1950s by a very famous nutrition researcher from the University of Minnesota by the name of Ansel Tees. He published a very famous study called the Seven Countries Study that purported that animal fat, the more saturated fat that people ate, the higher their risk of heart disease. Now, he presented his findings to the World Health Organization, and the World Health Organization believed what he said. And so the low fat movement came about. Now, I've looked at Ansel Tees, all of his studies, I looked at them over and over again. And interestingly enough, Ansel Tees is tied for the longest living nutritionist on record. And Ansel Tees, I've had the pleasure of interviewing as housekeeper, ate huge amounts of olive oil. Now, olive oil is not a saturated fat. What happened with Ansel Tees was people took his data and they thought he was demonizing fat. He wasn't at all. He was demonizing animal saturated fat. So what I've looked at Ansel Tees' data and my own data in that animal fats are associated with animal protein. And it was actually the animal protein that was the big mischief maker in the animal fat, the saturated fat hypothesis. Now, so having said that, the more olive oil that I can get into you, the better your longevity and the better your brain health. I've got a lot of tricks in the longevity paradox to tell you how to use olive oil or the polyphenols in olive oil to maximize your brain health and your lifespan. The idea that you should be cramming down the bacon or the sausages or the really marble meat in a paleo or a ketogenic diet is quite frankly detrimental long term. It turns out that animal protein, and it doesn't matter if the animal's a fish. It doesn't matter if the animal's an egg. If it doesn't matter if it's cheese, animal proteins absolutely cause you to age quicker. And absolutely in the case of beef, lamb, and pork, increase your risk of developing cancers. One of the interesting things about the blue zones, and I'm actually the only nutritionist who has actually spent most of their career living in a blue zone, and that's Loma Linda, California. And I can tell you that the unifying principles of the blue zones, in other words what their diets all share, is not the common things that you're told about. All the blue zones do not eat whole grains. All the blue zones do not eat beans. That's a myth, in fact, that is not a unifying feature of the blue zones. And as I talk about in the longevity paradox, the whole grains that some of the blue zones eat, and the beans that some of the blue zones eat, are actually a negative part of their diet that's overcome by other very positive parts of their diet, including generous use of olive oil in three of the blue zones. But the unifying feature of the blue zones, which was common to Loma Linda, it's common to Sardinia, it's common to Crete, it's common to Echiroli, it's common to Kittavins, is very, very little animal protein. That's actually the uniting factor. And as I talk about in the longevity paradox, one of my colleagues, Gary Frazier from Loma Linda, has shown that the vegan adventists are actually the longest lived of all of the long lived adventists. And again, the unifying feature of all the blue zones is not the grains and beans, it's actually limited animal protein. Does that mean you have to give it up? No. In fact, I'm going to give you a bunch of tricks in the book on how to have your cake and eat it too, in this case, how to have your meat and eat it too. Are you able to recommend the ketogenic diet plant-based and, you know, avoiding? Yes. Because usually that's, it's good. Yeah, I think that's the major mistake that people associate with a ketogenic diet or a paleo diet. These are all variations of basically the Adkins diet. And people think that a high protein diet, avoiding carbohydrates and keeping the fat that's associated with animal protein is a ketogenic diet. And I measure ketones in all of my patients. And the vast majority of patients that I see who say they're on a ketogenic diet, in fact, aren't because they're eating primarily a heavy protein diet. And this was actually one of the mistakes that Dr. Adkins made. And I know because my original book, Dr. Gundry's Diet Evolution, was done by Random House, who had done all the Adkins diets and all the South Beach diet books. And Dr. Adkins didn't know that we have no real storage system for protein. We need it for wear and repair, but that's about it. So we don't waste energy. So we convert protein into sugar, gluconeogenesis. And he actually died a fat man. And so many people in the ketogenic community don't know that protein will turn into sugar. So to get back to your question, I basically tell my patients that I want them to become a gorilla who lives in Italy. Now, you have to think about that for a second. Gorillas only eat leaves and twigs. And why I want them to live in Italy, because I want them to consume a liter of olive oil per week. And that's a huge amount of olive oil. It's about 12 to 14 tablespoons a day. But there's a very interesting Spanish study of 65-year-old people who were followed for four years. And I'll briefly summarize it. One group had to have a liter of olive oil per week for four years and have a Mediterranean diet. A second group ate a low-fat Mediterranean diet. And the original study was to look at memory. And I'll forget about that. But the women in the olive oil group had a 67% less incidence of breast cancer over that time period than the women in the low-fat Mediterranean diet. So if you eat a liter of olive oil per week and avoid animal proteins, you're basically on about an 80% fat diet. And the carbohydrates that you're eating are basically leaves as a mechanism to get olive oil into your mouth. So that's what I do with my patients. Now, I'm not successful entirely. A lot of people will not give up animal protein. But the more I can diminish animal protein, the more successful I am with this program. And among other things, what I want to do is get the gut bacteria participating in educating the immune system. Most of the low-carb diets, whether they're a paleo diet, an Adkins diet, a keto diet, work because they're eliminating most of the lectin-containing foods, which are primarily in the vegetables and the grains and the beans that were eliminating in those diets. So there wasn't anything miraculous about the high protein or the high-fat diet. It was actually what was miraculous was the lectin elimination that they didn't talk about because they actually didn't know that that's why they worked. In fact, when my first book, Dr. Gundry's Diet Evolution, was bought by Random House 11 years ago now, they had done all the Adkins diets and all the South Beach diets. And I had figured out what was wrong with those diets. And one of the things that was common in both of those diets is you eliminated grains and beans from phase one. After phase one, you reintroduced grains and beans, and invariably people gained weight. So the answer was, well, go back to phase one where you eliminate grains and beans. And it didn't click in any of the editor's minds that the reason you had to go back to phase one was not to be low carb again, but to get rid of the lectin-containing foods that were the grains and beans. So that was one of the observations that I made that made that such a successful book. You know, a lot of people that are doing the ketogenic diet actually think all fats are the same. Like they don't really decipher really good fats from bad fats a lot of time. And so really the reason why I wrote this book was to really dive deep and try to understand, is there a difference between, let's say, the fat in an avocado or the fat in wild seafood and let's say the fats in bacon or butter? And it turns out there is a big difference. And so, you know, really that's what the book is all about, trying to pick the healthiest foods that provide the fats to actually make you a better fat burning machine. So you mean there is a difference? I shouldn't eat a stick of butter every day if I'm on a ketogenic diet? That's not good for me? Correct. I mean, I'm honestly in a thunder of that. Like a few years ago, I was probably putting too much heavy cream in my coffee and I started gaining weight. And so that's when I realized I need to really research the different types of fats to see how they metabolize in your own body. So just take for example, omega-3 fats. They actually increase your fat burning genes in the liver. So if you and I are sitting here and we're consuming 3 or 4 grams of omega-3s from, let's say, fish oil or we're getting it from wild seafood, we are literally our beta-oxidation, our fat burning in the liver, is 20% higher. And if we're exercising our beta-oxidation in our liver or our fat burning goes up by 30%, simply by consuming more omega-3s. And so it's almost like if you swap out and replace butter with omega-3s, it's almost like swapping out a V4 engine for a V8 engine. You are literally more efficient and better at burning fat. And so that's just one key that really SuperFuel dives into.