Dark Calories 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Bernays not only knew how to manipulate people, he knew how to get people excited about being manipulated, a process he describes in detail in his 1947 book, The Engineering of Consent. The book enumerates a variety of persuasive techniques, including propaganda, advertising, and other forms of mass communication, that he used to create seemingly any desired response from the public.”
― 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

“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

“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

“this oxidation scenario threatened his idea. Cigarette smoke by its very nature could be presumed to exert toxicity through some kind of oxidative process, and by the 1950s, intense investigation into what elements in smoke caused this oxidation had already been underway for some time.21 If oxidation was the mechanism behind heart disease, too, this would present Dr. Keys’s ideas with a fatal mechanistic flaw. Remember, saturated fat is almost oxidation proof. Polyunsaturated fatty acids, however, are extremely prone to oxidation, and once PUFA oxidation starts, it can spread until it oxidizes any nearby cholesterol. The oxidized cholesterol stays put in arterial plaques, making it look like a guilty party to anyone without the necessary biochemistry expertise, while the PUFA—having been oxidized—no longer exists. Given his background in biochemistry, Dr. Keys would certainly have known all of this. If cigarettes could be linked to heart attacks, then so could oxidation, and researchers with biochemistry expertise would recognize that blaming saturated fat makes little mechanistic sense—and his theory could easily be disproven. His entire argument rested on correlational data, which, without a plausible mechanism, would be dismantled.”
― 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

“be clear, when the AHA endorsed the cholesterol theory of heart disease, it had no data to support its validity. Instead of data, it offered innuendo. This suggests the strong possibility that when they funded Dr. Keys’s trips to seven countries around the world, the results were a foregone conclusion, and that Dr. Keys went through the motions for the sole purpose of making the endeavor look valid. That could explain why he didn’t bother to create protocols for systematically collecting and presenting information.”
― 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

“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

“Good Cholesterol, Bad Cholesterol You’ve probably heard the terms “good cholesterol” and “bad cholesterol.” These terms refer to two subtypes of lipoproteins, those tiny amphibious vehicles that carry fats throughout our circulatory system. One subtype, called low-density lipoprotein (LDL), is said to be the “bad” cholesterol. Another subtype, high-density lipoprotein (HDL), is said to be the “good” cholesterol. These terms are imprecise, at best, since there is only one molecule called cholesterol, and that molecule is the same in all our lipoproteins. Where did they come from? Way back in 1958, a doctor at Cleveland Clinic named Angelo M. Scanu coined the term “good cholesterol” when he observed that people with high HDL tended to have lower heart attack risk.3 He hypothesized that HDL might clean up the cholesterol that LDL seemed to deposit in our arteries. At some point, people started calling LDL “bad cholesterol” based on these ideas. But by the 1990s, accumulating evidence suggested that LDL does not, in fact, deposit cholesterol in our arteries—unless it’s oxidized.4 What’s more, we’ve also discovered that HDL can harm our arteries, too, when it’s oxidized.5 It seems time to abandon these imprecise, outdated terms and focus on the real “bad player”: oxidation.”
― Cate Shanahan, Dark Calories: How Vegetable Oils Destroy Our Health and How We Can Get It Back

“Cholesterol is the body’s equivalent of duct tape. It’s one of the most versatile nutrients our cells have and they use it for solving all sorts of problems. And it’s more than just a problem-solver; it’s also a building block: • It enables cell division. The rapidly dividing cells in our intestinal tract, skin, and bone marrow need it more than most other kinds of cells in our bodies. • It enables cell transport and communication. Cells need cholesterol to create structures called “lipid rafts” that are essential to responding to hormones and to moving large molecules into the cell, out of the cell, and from place to place within the cell. • It’s the precursor for vitamin D, which forms when ultraviolet light rays strike cholesterol in the skin. Vitamin D helps our bodies absorb calcium. • It provides waterproofing for our skin and other boundary layers within our bodies. • It helps our brains and nerve cells conduct electricity. The brain is 15 percent cholesterol by dry weight, a higher proportion than any other organ in our bodies. • It’s the precursor to numerous hormones, called steroid hormones. These include the well-known sex hormones testosterone, estrogen, and cortisol—which give us energy. And there are dozens more, including the supplements many people buy for health and performance enhancement, such as DHEA and adrenal extracts. Doctors know all this, but the”
― Cate Shanahan, Dark Calories: How Vegetable Oils Destroy Our Health and How We Can Get It Back

“Fat comes from your body fat, which can’t get into your brain—so that doesn’t help. Ketones should come from body fat, but insulin blocks ketone formation, and when we’re insulin resistant, we may not be able to make enough. That leaves sugar. Only sugar can help rescue us from the internal discomfort caused by pathologic hunger, so the body has to find a way to raise your blood sugar. One way, of course, is making you urgently hungry—that was plan A. The other way is to keep pumping out stress hormones, which can help your liver release stored sugar into the bloodstream while also completely changing our moods—that’s plan B.”
― Cate Shanahan, Dark Calories: How Vegetable Oils Destroy Our Health and How We Can Get It Back

“If blood sugar stays low, the liver starts releasing ketones. Ketones quickly get into the brain and are one of the brain’s favorite fuels, so all is well—even if you don’t eat for hours. But as we just learned in chapter 3, when we are insulin resistant, all our cells have a harder time getting energy from fat, and need to use more sugar. Insulin resistance also disrupts the process of making ketones from body fat, leaving our brain with no good fuel sources.2 This is why this kind of hunger can feel like an emergency; in insulin resistance, it is an emergency. Our tiny cells contain just about twenty seconds of energy reserves.3 When our mitochondria can’t generate enough energy, cells can start to die.”
― 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

“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

“It’s important to point out that the results of the Italian experiment and Dr. Racker’s predictions also jibe with the rules of chemistry we’ve already learned. Chemistry tells us that uncontrolled oxygen-PUFA reactions invariably generate free radicals and oxidative stress. When these reactions occur inside our mitochondria, our mitochondria can’t produce energy normally and will start leaking free radicals. This process of leaking free radicals consumes antioxidants, too—which the body can resupply, but it can take a while. Meanwhile, mitochondrial energy output will not be optimal, and the cell will be exposed to damaging oxidative reactions, toxin formation, and the general mayhem previously discussed. All of this is sometimes called mitochondrial oxidative stress, and mitochondrial oxidative stress is known to promote a variety of diseases for which medical science currently has no effective cures.”
― Cate Shanahan, Dark Calories: How Vegetable Oils Destroy Our Health and How We Can Get It Back

“As this continues, the body gradually elevates its blood sugar set point and in the process becomes insulin resistant.”
― Cate Shanahan, Dark Calories: How Vegetable Oils Destroy Our Health and How We Can Get It Back

“Vegetable oil gives us high-PUFA body fat with inflammatory properties. 2. When cells try to burn inflammatory body fat, they end up not getting enough energy. 3. To supplement their energy, cells use more of the limited amount of sugar in our bloodstream, causing low-blood-sugar symptoms. 4.”
― 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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