Cooking with Lard vs Seed Oils | Layne Norton, Ph.D.

Is there a precautionary principle? Uh if someone says, "You know what, Lane, I've heard everything you've said. I can't poke holes in it, but it just why should I go out and eat seed oils? " You know, um what would you say to that person? — I would say, okay, if you don't want to consume seed oils, fine, but find something to displace the saturated fat in your diet with. So, uh, leaner cuts of proteins of meats, um, you know, lower saturated fat sources of protein. And I guess, you know, while monounsaturated fats don't seem to have the same effect on LDL cholesterol as polyunsaturated fats, they do lower it when exchange for saturated fats. And um, they do appear to be cardoprotective to a certain extent. doesn't appear to be as cardioctive as polyunsaturated fats. But if you are concerned and you're not going to listen to logic that we've laid out here for three hours, um, okay, try and find some monounsaturated fats like olive oil, um, avocado oil. There there's other sources of oils that you could use that are still relatively cardiorotive or beneficial. And the other thing I think I should I didn't point this out when talked about the processing. It should be pointed out that this is unique in that when oil when these oils are in a large volume that the rate of oxidation is low even with heating right uh and by the way all the heating in the processing these oils is done under a vacuum which means there's no oxygen which means v virtually no chance for oxidation even when heated. In restaurants, however, when you are frying something, especially if you are frying in a thin layer of oil, the research shows like going from like a I want to say it's like a 1 cm to like 5 cm of oil, huge difference in how quickly oxidized and u negative products will start to form. And if you are having oil that you are frying, reffrying in over and over, yes, they're within certainly with a thin layer, within 20 30 minutes, you can start to have significant amounts of these negative products accumulating. And then if you have it in a vat and it's being heated all day, yeah, you're probably going to have significant comp amount of oxidized trans fats. So, would we be better off when it comes to heating oil using lard? In other words, if I'm going to have French fries, should I at least have my French fries made in lard as opposed to polyunsaturated fat and seed oil? — So, here's what I'd say. Both are bad, right? — Okay, but let's just say I understand that French fries are hyper caloric and let's just put that aside. I'm going to have French fries sometimes, right? So, when I do, do I want McDonald's going back to lard or do I want them sticking with whatever seed oil they're using? — That's kind of a hard question to answer, right? Because again, it's you have competing mechanisms at play here. And if we don't have a like a human RCT looking at frying with one way versus frying with another way, and I'm not aware of any, but maybe there will be some. Maybe a young potential scientist listening to this would want to do this. Um but looking at okay what happens with LDL and then the components of LDL — but you're answering this purely through an LDL lens. Right. Right. — Yeah. Is there any other reason to care? There must I just it just feels to me intuitively that at least when you heat up the saturated fat you're not you're less likely to introduce more ROSS and other things. And by the way, if I can control my LDL through other means pharmacologically, do I really care about my saturated fat consumption? — Good question. So, we'll we'll touch on that here in a second. So, yeah, the saturated fats less prone to oxidation. Again, when we're looking at balance, what's going to have the what's going to negatively affect cardiovascular disease the most? I don't know. Um, what I would say is this really is probably if you're going to have French fries, just have the French fries. And if you want to have it fried in lard, okay, fine. Whatever. You can decide what you want to do. — But you're basically saying don't treat my fries in lard as health food. — No. And I think that that's actually a really important point you bring up is you have to understand people think food companies care about which foods you buy. They just want you to buy. And so the kind of the pivot to, oh, we're gonna have tallow or lard or whatever. Food companies don't care. Okay. Well, we'll just make those then. That's fine. Oh, you don't like red dye 40? Yeah, we'll take that out and then we'll market about how healthy our cereal is now, right? Oh, we're marketing how healthy our French fries

are. And so the danger becomes, not that again, I think this really only becomes a problem if you're like consuming French fries pretty regularly, right? And then we have to ask the question, all right, which is worse out of these two really bad options. But when you're marketing as some kind of victory, then okay, we're using beef tallow or using lard or whatever it is as opposed to seed oils. If you're not having this sort of communication, people the what they are going to interpret that as is, oh, these are actually healthier now. And so I'm just I can eat more of them. And so I think that's one thing I've realized as a being so in tune with the public and you know reading comments on social media over years and years. I realize how if I'm not extremely careful with how I word things, how misinterpreted it can get. And so I think as communicators, like in a format like this, this is great. And when you say like how do people navigate on social media, that's where it's really tough because it's not this, right? It's 30 seconds. How can I hook somebody in? Five reasons why seed oils are toxic, right? Like that's going to get a lot of attention. And they're going to list things that there is an element of truth to every single thing that they say, but they are leaving out all of the context that we just put multiple hours into covering, right? And who's [snorts] going to I mean, I hope this podcast gets listened to by, you know, hundreds of millions of people, but the likelihood is pretty unlikely, right? Um, what's more likely is somebody puts up a Tik Tok and it goes viral and 10 million people see it. And so I think it's very difficult to communicate this stuff with the public when it to them there are so many mixed messages, right? And Peter, I hear this all the time where people say, you know, I don't trust scientific research because one study says this and one study says that and they all contradict each other. And what I say to people is I say, "Did you actually read the study or are you just looking at the social media hottakes? " Because my guess is you're probably looking at the hot takes because what we just did going into those studies when they seemingly have a weird outcome, I can tell you almost any time, 99% of the time when I've seen a headline or a social media hottake on a study that I go, "That doesn't make sense. " and then I go and read the actual study. 99 times out of 100 I walk out going, "Oh, okay. I see why they found what they found. " Right? Either the way the control group was designed or um the difference in levels between groups or or whatever. My PhD adviser used to say, "If I wanted to design a study to show no effect or the study to show an effect, easiest thing in the world. " And so again, this is why we look at converging lines of evidence. We look at what does all the evidence state and what do the most high quality, most rigorously controlled studies find. And so yes, there are elements of truth to the criticisms of seed oils. But on balance, when we look at these hard outcomes, what we are very sure we know to be true, again, you can never I think one of the things to point out in science, you can never prove anything, right? Like we can only disprove things, but we can have relative degrees of confidence in various data, right? And I would say I have a relatively high degree of confidence that apo containing lipoproteins are aogenic based on everything I've read, the converging lines of data, especially the mandelian randomization studies, especially the statin trials. I feel relatively confident about it. Now, could I change my mind? Sure. But it would take a lot of data over a long period of time. Right now, you asked one question I want to circle back to. Why care about nutrition if you can just control this with statins? Right. Or Yeah. No, that was in the context, I think, of uh why care about the effect on LDL if you can pharmacologically regulate that anyway and therefore should we be focused on other potential negative health benefits in the case of the frying? That was really my question. — Oh, I see what you're saying. So, so let's take care of the LDL piece and then now oxidation or aldahhides or whatnot become more important. That's a — it I was asking that specifically in the context of the frying oils. — That makes sense. Yeah. and [clears throat] cooking. — And so, yeah, I don't have a great answer for that because like I think one of the other frustrations with the general public is when we put out limitations of studies

you know, you and I know like we're not necessarily saying, "Hey, these researchers are idiots. They did it wrong. They should have done it this way. " Every study has limitations. every single study that's ever been done in the history of mankind. There is no unifying study that explains the entire universe. Right? So pointing out limitations is not necessarily saying that a study is bad. It's just pointing out, okay, we got to be careful how much interpretation we give to this, right? How broadly we interpret it. And yes, there are studies that are more well-designed, well conducted, that have more statistical power, that are um that have better measurements, and scientists try to account for that when they look at, okay, how much weight am I going to give to something? But again, at the end of the day, if I have to give a recommendation for people on this stuff, I would say when it comes to seed oils, if you don't want to consume them, okay, I would just say try to limit your saturated fat, eat enough fiber, but outside of that, there's so many bigger levers that you can pull for your health than just worrying about seed oils. You know, I put up a thing a while back. I said the average calorie consumption in the United States is 3,500 calories per day, and the average physical activity is less than 20 minutes per day. — And you're spending all this time worrying about what your fries get fried in, — right? Not you specifically, but just people in general, right? — It's like we're stepping over $100 bills picking up pennies, you know? And so I again I'm not saying don't worry about the little stuff but you got to keep it in context of what really is driving so much disease in the developed countries. And a lot of it really is an energy toxicity issue.