Cate Shanahan > Quotes

“Vegetable oil’s tendency to oxidize has implications for everyday aspects of life that medical science has ignored.”
― Cate Shanahan, Dark Calories: How Vegetable Oils Destroy Our Health and How We Can Get It Back

“The cell actually has its own defense against this sort of damage, but activating the defensive mechanism comes at a cost. That defense is to take steps to spend less time burning body fat and spend more time burning sugar.”
― Cate Shanahan, Dark Calories: How Vegetable Oils Destroy Our Health and How We Can Get It Back

“unrefined cottonseed oil is still used as an insecticide).”
― Cate Shanahan, Dark Calories: How Vegetable Oils Destroy Our Health and How We Can Get It Back

“In addition to these irregularities, Dr. Keys and the AHA also failed to warn the public that smoking might be an important factor driving heart attacks, going so far as to downplay the connection between smoking and heart disease even though they certainly knew about it. According to a short book called The Seven Countries Study: A Scientific Adventure, by the first five-year analysis in 1963, Dr. Keys knew that smoking twenty-five or more cigarettes daily increased heart attack fatalities by 400 percent, making smoking the most powerful predictor of death by heart attack by far.17 But he did not include this link between smoking and heart attacks in his 1963 publications. Nor did he do so in the ensuing years.”
― Cate Shanahan, Dark Calories: How Vegetable Oils Destroy Our Health and How We Can Get It Back

“Overdosed America: The Broken Promise of American Medicine. The author, John Abramson, MD, described in a clear”
― Cate Shanahan, Dark Calories: How Vegetable Oils Destroy Our Health and How We Can Get It Back

“Crude vegetable oil contains hydratable and non-hydratable gums, free fatty acids, [partly oxidized] coloring pigments like carotenoids, moisture, [toxic] oxidative components like aldehydes and peroxides, metallic elements, waxes and other impurities.”10 That’s a lot to clean up.”
― Cate Shanahan, Dark Calories: How Vegetable Oils Destroy Our Health and How We Can Get It Back

“After restaurants started making the changeover from trans fats, they dealt with fumes that formed a kind of lacquer on the walls and ceilings that couldn’t be cleaned until the industry invented powerful new chemical solvents.”
― Cate Shanahan, Dark Calories: How Vegetable Oils Destroy Our Health and How We Can Get It Back

“Dying with lower cholesterol levels is not the goal. Not one human clinical trial has shown that lowering cholesterol produces a beneficial effect. At least not any trial that reported its data truthfully, as I want to show you”
― Cate Shanahan, Dark Calories: How Vegetable Oils Destroy Our Health and How We Can Get It Back

“Fatty acids are the “building blocks” of all dietary fats, including vegetable oils, fruit oils, dairy and animal fats—and our body fat. The three major types of fatty acids are saturated, monounsaturated, and polyunsaturated (often referred to as PUFA). Saturated fats are the most chemically stable. Polyunsaturated fats are the least stable because they are prone to reacting with oxygen—a process called oxidation. Monounsaturated fats resist oxygen reactions and are far more stable than PUFAs.”
― Cate Shanahan, Dark Calories: How Vegetable Oils Destroy Our Health and How We Can Get It Back

“The gist of it is this: The toxins in seed oils promote a state of cell imbalance called oxidative stress. Over time, oxidative stresses deplete our bodies of antioxidants. Once that happens, our own cells can become a source of additional toxin formation. At that point, we start to develop inflammatory and degenerative diseases. Indeed, oxidation reactions might even explain one of life’s deepest mysteries—death. A RADICAL NEW THEORY”
― Cate Shanahan, Dark Calories: How Vegetable Oils Destroy Our Health and How We Can Get It Back

“Initially, P&G sold its solidified, hydrogenated cottonseed oil as Ivory soap. But when the company modified the process slightly, the product came out softer, more spreadable—actually, it looked a lot like lard.”
― Cate Shanahan, Dark Calories: How Vegetable Oils Destroy Our Health and How We Can Get It Back

“forty different reaction chambers, each connected by what must amount to miles of tubes. I can’t imagine that any ingredient requires more intensive processing than vegetable oil.”
― Cate Shanahan, Dark Calories: How Vegetable Oils Destroy Our Health and How We Can Get It Back

“Before Bernays, many advertisers tended to tout the practical, rational aspects of their products, things like durability and effectiveness. Bernays taught advertisers to manipulate people’s emotions instead. He’d learned about the power of emotions from an uncle he’d grown up admiring, none other than the father of modern psychiatry, Sigmund Freud.”
― Cate Shanahan, Dark Calories: How Vegetable Oils Destroy Our Health and How We Can Get It Back

“The stomach releases ghrelin into the bloodstream around our normal mealtimes. Ghrelin travels to our appetite regulation center, located in a brain structure called the hypothalamus. When ghrelin stimulates our appetite center, it registers as hunger that feels nothing like hangry. It’s a gentle reminder: “Hey, it’s about time to eat—I’m ready when you are,” often accompanied by a mild grumbly feeling in the stomach as it releases acid and other digestive juices. If we don’t eat, all this shuts down after a few minutes and we no longer feel hungry, especially if we get distracted. Normal hunger can actually be energizing, because the ghrelin helps us burn fat—and if your cat or dog starts acting wild around feeding time, that’s from the extra boost of fat burning, which gives them extra energy. It might seem surprising that a hunger hormone energizes us, but nature programs us this way because, for most of life on Earth, hunting or gathering food requires expending a good deal of energy. Today, many people take frequent hunger as a sign of a healthy metabolism. But, as we’ll see, more often than not, it’s actually the opposite. This new, unhealthy hunger doesn’t go away until we feed it, and it actually originates not in the stomach but in the brain. This new hunger is all about satisfying our brain’s demand for energy.”
― Cate Shanahan, Dark Calories: How Vegetable Oils Destroy Our Health and How We Can Get It Back

“So here we are today, where we have toxicologists and experts in food safety who disagree with the AHA’s position on the safety of polyunsaturated fats, and, because the AHA’s vast influence gives it control over nutrition thought, these professionals have trouble getting necessary work funded. Meanwhile, the AHA continues to actively promote seed oils, and it continues to support those, like Dr. Walter Willett, who dismiss or discredit experts like Dr. Chris Ramsden who are producing evidence to the contrary. In other words, the AHA is effectively blocking progress in medical science, and, perhaps most egregiously, it is promoting a diet that’s actively harming our cardiovascular health. In the beginning, however, the association’s culture was very different. When the AHA was founded in 1924, it was supported only with annual dues from a small collection of doctors concerned about the growing problem of heart disease. Heart attacks skyrocketed after World War I, and the organization felt the pressure of knowing there was so much to learn but such little funding to do the necessary research. In 1942, AHA executive director H. M. “Jack” Marvin, a New Haven, Connecticut, cardiologist, made an ambitious proposal to solve the AHA’s “chronic fiscal problems.” Lack of funds stood in the way of two of the organization’s highest-priority goals: sponsoring research and establishing public health and lay education programs. Without fundraising, the organization would be limited to utilizing the small pool of government funds to achieve its goals. And that pool had just grown a little too crowded for the AHA’s tastes.”
― Cate Shanahan, Dark Calories: How Vegetable Oils Destroy Our Health and How We Can Get It Back

“But toxicologists have tested restaurant frying oils. One of the most well-studied type of toxins is called alpha-beta unsaturated aldehydes, now thought to be the most carcinogenic agents in cigarette smoke. In 2019, a paper in the prestigious journal Nature reported that a five-ounce serving of french fries cooked in vegetable oil (from a well-known franchise, mind you, not one of those smaller restaurants lacking protective protocols) contains twenty-five times more of these dangerous aldehydes than the World Health Organization’s tolerable upper limit for exposure.”
― Cate Shanahan, Dark Calories: How Vegetable Oils Destroy Our Health and How We Can Get It Back

“The toxins in vegetable oils develop as a result of the oxidation of the oil itself.”
― Cate Shanahan, Dark Calories: How Vegetable Oils Destroy Our Health and How We Can Get It Back

“Who Funds the AHA? The story of how the American Heart Association came to dominate nutrition thought begins with the very first industry to fund the AHA. As we’ll learn, the AHA was effectively launched with a large sum of money that came straight from the vegetable oil industry. The AHA used this money to support Ancel Keys’s cholesterol theory—and to convince the public to start eating vegetable oils. The AHA continues to receive money from industries selling vegetable oil, and the AHA’s practice guidelines continue to support the vegetable oil industry today. Today, our massive processed food industry depends heavily on vegetable oils, as do the companies that grow most of our foods. The AHA’s top corporate donors now include heavy hitters from Big Ag and Big Food, including Conagra, Monsanto (before the company closed in 2018), LibertyLink, Kellogg’s, Quaker, Tyson, FritoLay, Campbell, and Subway.22 The AHA’s website states that 80 percent of their $1 billion plus annual revenue comes from non-corporate sources. Nevertheless, in 2021, drug and device companies donated just over $40 million, and “other” corporations donated more than $140 million.23 The AHA uses this money in part to support scientists interested in exploring the benefits of vegetable oils, the harms of cholesterol, and new ways to use drugs that lower cholesterol—and to publish and publicize their findings. The money also goes to lobbyists who influence public health policy at the state and national levels.24”
― Cate Shanahan, Dark Calories: How Vegetable Oils Destroy Our Health and How We Can Get It Back

“making it far more susceptible to oxidation than saturated fat. This is why vegetable oil is far more susceptible to oxidation and toxin formation than butter, beef fat, and coconut oil, which contain mostly oxidation-resistant saturated fat.”
― Cate Shanahan, Dark Calories: How Vegetable Oils Destroy Our Health and How We Can Get It Back

“That’s why I ask you to start tracking the eleven symptoms of pathologic hunger that we learned about in Chapter 3. Those eleven symptoms mean your body is not producing energy efficiently, your mitochondria are being damaged, and your cells are experiencing inflammation. And their absence means that you’ve prevented mitochondrial damage and inflammation.”
― Cate Shanahan, Dark Calories: How Vegetable Oils Destroy Our Health and How We Can Get It Back

“Its low price made cottonseed oil attractive to Procter & Gamble. If the company could figure out how to turn it into soap, cottonseed oil would represent a low-cost source of fat to replace increasingly expensive tallow. By 1907,”
― Cate Shanahan, Dark Calories: How Vegetable Oils Destroy Our Health and How We Can Get It Back

“industries, soapmaking and confined animal feeding operations.”
― Cate Shanahan, Dark Calories: How Vegetable Oils Destroy Our Health and How We Can Get It Back

“So why not sell it as a lard substitute?”
― Cate Shanahan, Dark Calories: How Vegetable Oils Destroy Our Health and How We Can Get It Back

“Thus, vegetable oil has a unique history of being released into the food supply as a byproduct of two separate”
― Cate Shanahan, Dark Calories: How Vegetable Oils Destroy Our Health and How We Can Get It Back

“me introduce you to Dr. Thomas Seyfried. Dr. Seyfried should be a household name. To the elite group of medical doctors who know his work, he is a rock star. To the many hundreds of patients who still walk this Earth today thanks to Dr. Seyfried’s work, he is a miracle worker. Dr. Seyfried is a professor of biology at Boston College, but when you listen to him talk, you might be reminded more of a street-smart, seasoned cop than an academic. He’s been studying metabolism, genetics, and cancer for more than forty years, and he has hundreds of publications to his name, plus a few books. He came to cancer research by a rather indirect route, having started out studying the genetics of epilepsy.”
― Cate Shanahan, Dark Calories: How Vegetable Oils Destroy Our Health and How We Can Get It Back

“what did the research team do? Dr. Keys and his collaborators gathered up the data, slides, and other evidence, packed it into a bunch of file boxes, and kept the boxes in a basement. Decades later, a savvy scientist working for the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Chris Ramsden, MD, noticed that a grant had been approved for a one-of-a-kind experiment to test the diet-heart hypothesis back in the 1960s, but he couldn’t find where the final data had ever been properly published. After some clever detective work, his team managed to locate the basement where the files lay hidden, stashed away by one of the study authors who’d recently passed away; his family hadn’t yet gotten around to selling his home in Minnesota. Some of the data was missing, but there was more than enough to draw some very important conclusions.”
― Cate Shanahan, Dark Calories: How Vegetable Oils Destroy Our Health and How We Can Get It Back

“Indeed, side effects printed on the package insert taped to bottles of brand-named statins include headaches, sleep problems, vision problems, memory problems, depression, pancreatitis, liver inflammation, skin rashes, a kind of nerve damage that causes tingling or burning pains, dizziness, weakness, fatigue, and digestive problems, including constipation, diarrhea, or bloating. On top of the sheer variety of potential problems, the symptoms may take a while to start. Or they may fluctuate. Moreover, statin drug side effects overlap with symptoms of aging—including fatigue, muscle weakness or stiffness, memory problems, mood changes, and word-finding difficulties. All of this makes it difficult for people to mentally connect starting the drug to the start of their new discomfort.”
― Cate Shanahan, Dark Calories: How Vegetable Oils Destroy Our Health and How We Can Get It Back

“Antioxidants can stop the chain reaction of toxicity,”
― Cate Shanahan, Dark Calories: How Vegetable Oils Destroy Our Health and How We Can Get It Back

“To release its oil, the cake travels into a solvent treatment chamber to be”
― Cate Shanahan, Dark Calories: How Vegetable Oils Destroy Our Health and How We Can Get It Back

“The generic term chemists use for all these toxins is lipid oxidation products, or LOPs for short. Think of LOPs as lopped off pieces of PUFA.”
― Cate Shanahan, Dark Calories: How Vegetable Oils Destroy Our Health and How We Can Get It Back