Smart Fats for Optimal Health with Jonny Bowden, PhD, CNS

Dr. Cates Hi there. I’m Dr. Trevor Cates. Welcome to The Spa Dr. Podcast. Today, we’re talking about fats. The good kinds, the bad kinds. I know there are a lot of myths out there about fats and our diet. I have a special guest to day to help us sort through this information.

My guest today is Jonny Bowden, also known as the nutrition myth buster. He is a nationally known board certified nutritionist and expert on diet and weight lose. He’s appeared on a number of TV shows such as The Dr. Oz Show, Fox News, CNN, ABC, NBC, and CBS. He’s contributed to articles in the New York Times, Forbes, The Huffington Post, Vanity Fair Online, Men’s Health Prevention, and dozens of other publications.

If you haven’t already heard about Jonny through major media, then you may have seen one of his best selling books. He is the author of fifteen best selling books, including The Great Cholesterol Myth, co-authored with Dr. Stephen Sinatra, and his latest book, he co-authored with Dr. Stephen Mosley, it’s, Smart Fat: Eat More Fat. Lose More Weight. Get Healthy Now.

On today’s show, we talk about the benefits of dietary fat, which kinds to eat, and which kinds to avoid, and other really important information about fat. We also discuss what other foods to get in your diet to ensure a balanced diet for optimal health and nutrition. Please enjoy this interview.

Dr. Cates Jonny, it’s great to have you on my show. Thanks for coming on.

Jonny It’s my pleasure to be here. At long last, I’ve been wanting to do this show for a long time. Thank you for having me.

Dr. Cates Yeah, absolutely. Today we’re talking about fats because there is a lot of misinformation out there about fat in our diet and what’s good fat, what’s bad fat. Let’s just dive right in and talk about what are good fats and what are bad fats? What is the difference?

Jonny Where did we go wrong in the first place and how did we get on this ridiculous bandwagon that fat was bad for us? Well in our book, Smart Fat, we actually do a different division of good and bad fats. Of course we all know that there’s really bad fats and of course we know that there are good ones but traditionally that dichotomy has been broken along the lines of whether it came from an animal or a vegetable. All the animal fats, saturated fats, bad for you. All the vegetable fats which are really seed oils more than they are vegetable oils but like the corn oils and the safflower oils and the sunflower oils and the canola oils, those are all good for us. That division is woefully out of date, completely past its expiration date and in need of a new typology of fat and that’s what we did in the book.

What we talk about is the difference between good fat and bad fat has only one dimension, is it toxic? If the fat is toxic it’s bad whether it came from an animal or a vegetable and if it’s not toxic it’s perfectly good whether it came from an animal or vegetable, has nothing to do with whether it came from an animal. What defines a toxic fat for us can be seen very clearly in the way we raise animals on feedlot farms.

On these huge agri-businesses of thousands of acres where the cows are kept in tiny little confined areas for a horribly grim life, they are fed antibiotics, they are fed steroids, they are fed Bovine growth hormone. They are fattened up again on antibiotics. They are eating grain which is not their natural diet which makes their stomach acid which means they need even more antibiotics. The grain is sprayed with every pesticide known to man, that all accumulates in their fat so of course that is, that meat and fat is a toxic waste dump but not because it came from an animal because if you take that same animal and raise them humanely on pasture, eating their natural diet and not fed antibiotics and steroids there is nothing that you need to fear from the fat of that animal.

Dr. Cates Right, right, absolutely. I think that this a time for us to shift and start realizing that we can eat differently, that it’s really about getting back to nature too and eating whole foods and looking at where our food comes from because I think we’ve become so separated from our food because we go the grocery store, we don’t go to markets any more, we don’t go see our local farmer, for the most part although it’d be great if we could do that. People forget where their food comes from.

Jonny Yes, that’s 100% true, 100% true.

Dr. Cates Let’s back up for a second, so you wrote this book with Dr. Mazley, right?

Jonny I did, right, guilty as accused.

Dr. Cates How did you guys come together to write this book? Where did the idea come from and why the partnership?

Jonny It’s a very odd couple. Everybody who meets us knows that this is definitely an odd couple. A Felix and Oscar if you will of nutrition world. Steven was the medical director of the Prinigin Program which as you know if one of the ultra low fat programs. It’s been around forever and it’s a very, very low fat program. He was the medical director for that. I was a consultant for the Atkins Foundation and for the Atkins diet and I went around the country telling people how to use this for health and all the good things about the Atkins diet which are absolutely still true. We could not really have been at more polarized parts of the nutrition spectrum.

He’s coming from very low fat, I’m coming from very high fat, we couldn’t have been more different. We met because I was interviewing Dr. Mazley for my column, Meet The Guru, which I write for Better Nutrition and his publicist and my publicist were the same person. She called and said, “I’ve got this great doctor, I think you’d really like him. You’ll probably find a lot in common with him. Why don’t you interview him for your column?” Which I did.

We had a wonderful very interesting hour of talk and interview and found that we had a lot of common ground and at the end of it I said, “Listen, you have any interest in doing a book? Are you free? Are you at liberty? Do you have a clause in your contract?” It turns out that he was free and he was interested and so the Smart Fat, Eat More Fat, Lose More Weight, Get Healthy Now was born.

Dr. Cates Yeah, so he really did turn around the way that he thought about fat because he came from a low fat. How does one go from one extreme to the other like that?

Jonny Well, I think a lot of it is for individuals, they try stuff and they see how they feel. Many people, I mean yes, people have lost weight on low fat diets. If you talk to them a year, 2 years down the road they frequently don’t keep it off, it’s very difficult to stay with, it doesn’t have a lot of taste or flavor, constantly eating tons of carbohydrates to replace the fat that they took out of the diet and that has a very strong affect on the fat storage hormone, insulin, so you’re constantly fighting weight because insulin is constantly being driven up by all the carbohydrates you’re eating. What that does is store everything that you eat as fat and then lock the doors to the fat cells so they can’t even release their fatty acids so you can burn them during exercise.

High levels of insulin caused by high carbohydrate diets are really the bane of the existence of anybody who want to lose weight.

Dr. Cates Right, so that’s a lot of the science behind why we need to make this change. It’s funny because recently I was at the grocery store and I was looking for eggs. Oh, actually it was like getting a bunch of eggs for a project or something my kids had to do.

Jonny Halloween.

Dr. Cates Yeah, so I was at the eggs place and somebody was looking over my shoulder like, “You’re getting a lot of eggs.” And then he said, “Actually my doctor told me that there’s this whole myth about cholesterol and eggs and now I realize I’ve got to eat more eggs rather than eat less.” I think that even just in the grocery store people are just seeing this, starting to talk about it. It’s just funny that it’s just starting to have this trickle down effect. The doctors are starting to talk to patients differently than they used to about cholesterol and things like eggs and fat. Let’s talk more about that. Let’s talk about the specific types of fat that you recommend, that Dr. Mazley recommends, that you guys talk about in the book.

Jonny Well we divided, as I said toxic fat is that bad fat, the dumb fat if you will. Smart fats are the fats that have been shown in research to have specific human health benefits. Those would be, for example, fish oil, olive oil has been shown to have that kind of an affect. We would call coconut oil a smart fat so these are fats that we actually want you to actively seek out and get a certain number of servings a day, 5, we have this program, 5, 5, 10. It’s 5 servings of smart fat, 5 servings of clean protein, 10 servings of fiber and I’ll get to that in a minute.

We actually want the smart fats to be things that you seek out so that might be dark chocolate, it could be any of the nuts, it could be coconut oil, it could be any of the ones we just mentioned. Then there’s neutral fats. Now neutral fats, and this is one of probably the only area that Dr. Mazley and I didn’t see eye to eye 100% on. Neutral fats are the fats that while there may not be strong enough human studies yet to show that they have specific health benefits, there is absolutely nothing to show that they are harmful on any level what so ever. That would include the saturated fat from grass fed beef, the saturated fat in grass fed butter, foods that maybe haven’t, at least to Dr. Mazley’s way of thinking weren’t strong enough human studies to say this has a benefit but there’s strong enough human studies to say it sure don’t hurt. We would remove the ban from all of those saturated fats from grass fed beef and things like that.

Dr. Cates Okay so you’re not necessarily saying that you want to go out and eat a bunch of lard but that it’s not as bad for you as we used to think. Is that kind of it?

Jonny No, in fact, rendered pork, real pastured pork, not pork that’s raised again with the antibiotics and steroids and hormones and all the other stuff but an actual health, the equivalent of grass fed pork, pigs don’t eat grass but the equivalent of grass fed would be pastured pork where they live much more in accordance with the way pigs are supposed to live. Pastured pork producing real rendered lard is a perfectly healthy fat. It’s certainly a neutral fat. It doesn’t have any damaging effect what so ever.

When we replaced it with all of these vegetable oils which oxidize at high heats and then we reuse them in restaurants a hundred times over but we tell everybody, “Oh they’re canola oil, it can’t be bad for you.” It’s very bad for you and I really with that they would go back to using real rendered lard from pastured animals.

Dr. Cates Okay, this brings up so many … I know, I can just hear peoples questions going through my head.

Jonny Bring them on.

Dr. Cates Toxic fat, canola oil, you mentioned that, what do we know about canola oil now that we use …

Jonny It’s so controversial you know. As you probably know in our space, in the integrated health community space there was some early writings by the great lipid bio chemist, Mary Ennig, in conjunction with Sally Valin from the Western Price Foundation. They talked about the con in canola and what the plant really is and how the Canadian government just had all this crappy rape seed plant around. They wanted to do something with it and they couldn’t sell rape seed oil because of the name so they changed it to canola oil, Canadian oil. It’s just a horrible oil. It requires very high heat for processing to make it edible and to make it, frankly, not smell like the highways in New Jersey. It’s a very, very smelly, ugly oil that requires enormous amount of processing to just make it edible, degumming, deodorizing.

There’s not much in it that’s of any great value so I never quite understood what all the fuss about canola oil was. I don’t even have it in my kitchen.

Dr. Cates No, no and then even worse would be the typical vegetable oil that people get at grocery stores that buy in mass quantities and cook with it. Like you said, restaurants, often times cook with this and reuse it in fryers and things.

Jonny Let me tell you, there’s really 2 things to say about the vegetable oils. I’m calling them vegetable oils, like we said they’re really seed and grain oils, like corn and soya bean, they’re not vegetables, they’re you know. The 2 misconceptions about those vegetable oils and using them to make healthy substitutes for saturated fat is this and it requires just a little bit of biochemistry and I promise to make this so your eyes won’t glaze over, promise.

Basically your body has a way of responding to events, that’s inflammatory or anti-inflammatory. Now people often ask, “Why do we need the inflammatory ones?” Well you need it, think about the healing reaction, think about if you stub your toe and you get a splinter. What happens? The area swells up, white blood cells go and surround the puncture wound trying to keep a microbe from starting an infection. There’s fluid around there. It sort of cordons off the area. That kind of inflammation is part of the healing response, you want that. It’s the same kind of thing that lets you have a fever to kill whatever it is that they’re trying to kill so these things are very important.

The problem is that they need to, these inflammatory processes need to be balanced with our ability to produce anti-inflammatory compounds. Now, the omega 6’s, the vegetable oils and the omega 3’s are the building blocks of these little hormones that are either inflammatory or anti-inflammatory. The omega 6’s for all intensive purposes are the precursors of the inflammatory army and the omega 3’s are the precursors of the anti-inflammatory army. The ideal relationship in the diet is about 1 to 1, maybe 4 to 1, up to 4 to 1 in favor of the omega 6’s, the vegetable oils. We’re consuming 16 to 1 to 25 to 1 so this is a setup for inflammation.

The first thing to know about the vegetable oils is the amount we’re consuming particularly when coupled with such a low amount of omega 3’s is a recipe for inflammation which as you know is part of every major degenerate disease from diabetes to cancer to Alzheimer to heart disease to obesity. It’s very much a pro inflammatory substance. The second thing to know about the vegetable oils is that when we cook them at restaurant temperatures they oxidize, they are very unstable oils. They do not stand up to high heat. You cannot fry a bunch of fries at McDonald’s in soya bean oil at 500 degrees and expect it not to go rancid and form carcinogens and all kinds of other compounds that are formed in the heating and reheating at high temperatures of these vegetable oils that were never meant to stand up to that heat.

On a couple of different levels the wholesale advice to just eat all the vegetable oils you want, put them in every thing, fry them with everything, cook them with everything, put them in every processed food, very big collateral damage from that dietary advice. The collateral damage, I would argue, is an outbreak of inflammation.

Dr. Cates Yeah, absolutely. You talked about cooking and how the oils oxidize, what are the better types of oils and fats to use for cooking? What do you recommend?

Jonny This is not my … Steven Mazley, my co-author is actually a trained chef. He actually took a year and studied at the Four Seasons while he was at medical school. It’s very impressive. He really is an expert on these oils and their heat. I’ll tell you a couple of things that I learned in working with him which is that many of the oils that we had been told and I had taught for years were perfectly wonderful at all kinds of high heat like coconut oil actually are not. Coconut oil has a pretty low smoke point, about 250 degrees so it doesn’t stand up to high heat very well. It’s a wonderful fat but you can’t just throw it up there at 500 degrees and expect it to still give you any kind of benefits because it’s going to become toxic at that level, it’s going to smoke.

The thing about all oils is the more you refine them the higher the temperature you can get but the less of the good stuff that’s in the oil you have to work with. You take out all that stuff that doesn’t oxidize or damage so easily, it can stand up to high heat but what you’re actually using is not anywhere as near as nutritious as the less refined ones. With coconut oil, refined coconut oil you can go much higher with but the unrefined coconut that has all the good stuff that you want can’t go that high in temperature.

Dr. Cates I think that that’s probably this misunderstanding that’s out there is people used to get refined coconut oil and were using that to cook and that was probably okay for cooking but then we all started talking about the benefits of coconut oil so we wanted the pure oil.

Jonny You can’t have it both ways. What you give up in the refinement you get this … You get the ability to cook at higher heat but you don’t get the nutritional value.

Dr. Cates What it really boils down to is we’re not really meant to cook food at high temperatures anyway.

Jonny I don’t know why anybody does that anyway to tell you the truth. We talk about what will stand up to frying, I have never fried anything in my entire life so it’s irrelevant to me what will stand up to the high heat of frying. Why bother to fry?

Dr. Cates Right, so but if we are baking, say we’re baking something, what kind of oils do we use in baking? Obviously don’t want to use vegetable oils and or canola oil in baking.
Jonny I’m going to play the fifth on this one because we did a whole bunch of recipes in Smart Fat, Steven actually did all the recipes. He was like his own stuntman in the movies, he did his own stunts, he did his own recipes. We very carefully considered the right smoke points and the right temperatures so that none of these oils would become toxic because one thing we don’t want to do is take a smart fat and then by cooking it at temperatures it wasn’t intended to be cooked at turn it into a dumb at.

Dr. Cates Right, okay. What do you suggest to people for cooking? What do you all recommend in your recipes in the book?

Jonny We use a lot of avocado oil, a lot of the nut oils, walnut oil, almond oil. Again, depending on the temperature and depending on whether some of these oils are better used cold and used as salad dressing. Some of them can stand up to a little bit of heat but all the nut oils, avocado oil like I said, olive oil of course, macadamia nut oil. I know I’m leaving some out. I like Malaysian palm oil a lot. Steven, that was one of the areas where we didn’t 100% see eye to eye. I would have called it a smart fat, he thinks the evidence isn’t quite there yet. He was willing to call it neutral. I’m pretty sure that in the next year or 2 you’ll see enough studies on the [inaudible 00:17:56] in palm oil to say that yes, there’s a health benefit to that.

Dr. Cates Okay and what about grape seed oil?

Jonny I’m not a fan. I don’t know really what the great rap about grape seed oil is. It’s very high in omega 6’s. It doesn’t have any particular nutrient composition that makes it distinguished in any particular way. The ratio of omega 6’s to omega 3’s, abysmal. I’m not sure what makes people, I mean these things are very trendy and they come and go and people get an idea that something is really healthy like pea protein but I don’t know that there’s any great advantage to grape seed oil at all, anything.

Dr. Cates I know for a while everybody was switching from canola oil to grape seed oil and then grape seed oil has fallen out of favor now, okay. Avocado oil, I really love that one.

Jonny Isn’t that a great one? That’s a find.

Dr. Cates It is and now it is refined though, the ones that I’ve seen.

Jonny A little bit, yeah.

Dr. Cates Yeah so because of that it is prepared so we can cook with it.

Jonny Very high heat, it goes to 520 which is the highest of any smoke point of any oil that I know of.

Dr. Cates Okay, great. You’ve been talking a lot about omega 3’s and really the best source of omega 3 is fish, right?

Jonny Absolutely, without finish.

Dr. Cates Yeah, fish, you got to love fish. What do you all recommend? Do you recommend taking fish oil supplements? Should we be eating a lot of fish? What do you suggest?

Jonny I’m a little bit more radical than Dr. Mazley. He likes to go with what the science says and what the bulk of the evidence says so he’s a little more conservative about that than I am. I think if you asked him he would probably say if you’re eating fish 2 or 3 times a week probably okay but both of us take fish oil supplements and we eat a lot of fish. Again I’m probably a little more radical, wide eyed than Dr. Mazely, I would like to see people taking 2 to 4 grams of combined EPA and DHA which are the 2 launching fatty acids found in fish oil.

It doesn’t matter if the capsule says 1000 milligrams of fish oil, what you want to know is how much EPA and DHA it has and that’s what you should probably dose 2 to 4 grams a day of combined EPA and DHA.

Dr. Cates Yeah, it’s really amazing the anti-inflammatory benefits, the benefits for your brain, your heart, your skin. There’s so many great benefits with fish oils. My only concern with fish is where people get it, that our waters are polluted. Do you talk about this in your book?

Jonny We have on our website, the Smart Fat website, we have some resources and Steven and I both are huge fans of Vital Choice, the company that actually packages and ships all their wild salmon and wild tuna and all the other fish that they get up there in pristine Alaskan waters that are tested every which way for impurities. They ship it in dry ice and that’s the only place I ever get my fish from so I sort of settled that for myself, that that’s the place. I can trust them, that’s what I get.

Dr. Cates Right, wild Alaskan fish is going to be really the best choice for people. Do you all have concerns about limiting the number of servings of fish that you have or the kind of fish like salmon versus tuna versus other types?

Jonny Well if you’re talking about mercury levels, look nobody is afraid of mercury as I am. It’s a neuro-toxin, it’s the worst heavy metal you can imagine. That said, there have been studies done where they compared the benefits versus the liabilities of not eating fish versus eating fish so eating fish you’re going to get a little bit more mercury, not eating fish this is what’s going to happen and every time they do a side by side study the eating fish wins out overwhelmingly. The benefits way outweigh the potential for a little bit of mercury and believe me I’m not making light of mercury but it is much more of a concern to pregnant women than it is to the average, you know, line backer. I don’t mean that it’s been exaggerated as something we should be concerned about but I do think that when you’re getting fish from wild pristine sources and your quality control like it is for example, for me with Vital Choice, I’m not that concerned.

In the Seychelles Islands they eat tons and tons of high mercury food, high mercury fish and they did not see any untoward effects and they finally figured out that one of the reasons for that is that their diet is very high in selenium which actually locks into some of these metals and chelates it and gets rid of it. It may be possible even with mild amounts of mercury exposure if you’re eating a healthy diet with the right anti-oxidants you’re probably can probably minimize whatever damage might have been there.

Dr. Cates Yeah and of course, we limit our exposure to mercury and other environmental contaminants when we do like what you were suggesting, getting our fish from Alaska or wild cod, those kinds of things. Also I usually recommend to people, salmon is a great one, especially the wild Alaskan salmon, my favorite and then also the smaller fish like sardines and anchovies.

Jonny Sardines are a health food in can. Nobody knows about sardines. They are the best food ever.

Dr. Cates Yeah, absolutely, instead of the bigger fish like tuna and shark, those kinds of thing where they’re higher up on the food chain, they’ve been eating all the other little fish and the mercury has been building up in them.

Jonny Not true with sardines, right.

Dr. Cates The little, the smaller fish and then it seems like salmon and those kinds of fish are better. That’s great. What are some other things … I diets aren’t just fats, right. What are some other things that you find that are really important, that you all talk about in the book about, other important aspects of diet?

Jonny Well one thing I really think sets the Smart Fat program apart is it’s the first high fat program that I know of that’s also high in fiber. I was, as I said, a consultant to Atkins for years and high fat diets have lots and lots of benefits but one of the them is not fiber. Every major epidemiology study ever done shows that the more fiber people eat the better outcomes they have. They have lower rates of diabetes, their blood sugar is more controlled, hormone balance is better, just everything. They’re not as obese, they don’t have as much risk for heart disease and, of course, weight loss is one of the main side effects of a high fiber diet.

What we did in Smart Fat is combine all the great benefits you get from higher fat eating with a high fiber diet as well. That’s our 5, 5, 10 program. That’s the 5 servings of smart fat, the 5 servings of clean protein and 10 servings of fiber or roughly 10 3 gram servings comes to about 30 grams a day.

Dr. Cates Okay, great.

Jonny It’s not an impossible goal for most people and it will pay off in enormous dividends.

Dr. Cates Give us some examples of these high fiber foods.

Jonny Beans, any bean on the planet. I tell you Trevor, it always drives me crazy how these dietitians have convinced the American public that the best sources of fiber are cereals and breads. All you have to do is go the supermarket, pick up your favorite high, wholegrain, whatever you think is the best bread in the pack and look and see how many grams of fiber there are. If there’s more than 3 per slice I will eat the plastic that the bread came in. You’re not going to find it. Beans, on the other hand, have 11 to 17 grams per either half cup or a cup serving. Avocados have 8 grams of fiber.

There’s so many more fiber heavyweights than there are cereals and breads. I don’t think we need them. I think on a risk benefit ratio there’s a lot of problems with those grains.

Dr. Cates Absolutely, okay, got it. I think a lot of times people think of avocados as just fat but there’s so much more to avocados than fat. I know you have an avocado on the cover of your book because it’s one of those great foods that I always talk about. Avocados being great for the skin too. It’s such a great food. Great, so those are some foods that are high in fiber, so vegetables too, right? I mean in general they’re going to be high fiber.

Jonny All the vegetables, all the nuts, these are all things we encourage copious amounts of on the Smart Fat program. It’s not a low carb diet, it’s a low junk diet so there’s very little … We allow some grains, we recommend that they not be very excessive, nothing like what the average American eats and we prefer that they be things like quinoa and steel cut oats and sweet potato occasionally and that’s about it.

Dr. Cates Great, great, sounds very similar to what I recommend to people.

Jonny I’m sure.

Dr. Cates That’s fantastic. All right, well you guys are doing some great stuff. I’m so excited about your book and all the information in there and really, it’s time for us to bust these myths about fats and oils and get to the real science and what’s really going to make an impact and all the great things that you talked about. The risk factors dropping with cardiovascular disease and certain types of cancer and also weight loss and healthy aging as well.

Jonny Yes, this 100% true. The big thing about how counter intuitive this is is that everybody thinks that if you eat fat it’s going to wind up on your hips, butt, thighs and stomach and in fact, as I pointed out earlier, the most important, the best kept secret about fat is that it does not affect your fat storing hormones and the fat storing hormones are what makes you fat. If you can keep those guys down, keep them in the zone, keep them silenced and not alert them to having to go up high all the time you won’t store as much fat, it won’t be as difficult to burn fat and you’ll be in a much better place.

Dr. Cates All right, well thank you so much Jonny. I truly appreciate all the information today.

Jonny Thank you so much.

Dr. Trevor: I hope you enjoyed this interview today with Jonny Bowden. To learn more about Jonny and the book that he recently coauthored with Dr. Steven Masley, visit my website, thespadoctor.com. Go the podcast page with this interview, and you’ll see all the information and links there. Also I invite you to join The Spa Doctor community on my website, or subscribe to the podcast on iTunes so you don’t miss any of our upcoming shows. Also if you haven’t done so already, I highly recommend that you get your customized skin profile at theskinquiz.com. It only takes a few minutes and you’ll get your own customized skin profile for free, just go to theskinquiz.com. Also, don’t miss out on glowing skin and vibrant health tips. Join me on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram, join the conversations. I hope to see you there. I’ll see you next time on the podcast.