Hi Paul, again I am writing from memory, as it was a long talk which I listened to this morning, certainly felt it was worth my time to do that as he touches on several interesting topics, but with regards to the seed oils he was saying the problem is the linoleic acid that builds up in the body from them to toxic amounts, and this I believe (from memory) was one of the drivers to insulin resistance he talked about. I only eat butter and cook with butter, and only eat 1-ingredient foods - animal meat, pasture eggs, grassfed butter, raw grassfed milk, a tiny bit of raw honey - so I’m not concerned for myself regarding the seed oils. But for someone who does keto who likes to eat salads and may be unaware that their dressings (if they use them) could contain seed oils. He also spoke about olive oil and avocado oil having about 15% linoleic acid. There were a great deal of other topics he spoke about in detail as well, I thought it was well worth a listen.
Dr Paul Saladino - Metabolic health, Organ meat, Evolutionary Programming
Hi Bob, Dr. Paul Saladino also mentioned that the seed oils are very high in linoleic acid (up to 50% I think it was, olive and avocado oil about 15%) versus butter, tallow and such fats being very low, like 2%, and that the problem is when linoleic acids build up to toxic amounts in the body.
Paul, this is a big problem. Pretty much everything has a high PUFA content these days, even things you think don’t (like olives stored in sunflower oil). There’s no way to disentangle high carb from high PUFA, since often they are one in the same.
Very interesting talk for sure, but I don’t agree with everything. Dr. Paul Saladino thinks chicken are pork are inferior meats because they’re fed grains and soy, that be as it may, I love both pork and chicken, and they are staples in my animal based WOE. And he tends to think all meats must be grassfed and grass finished, which of course he can afford, but most of us can’t. Then he touched on pepper being unhealthy, I actually don’t like pepper, it tends to make me nauseated, but my Aberdeen Angus burgers have it added, as well as salt, I could’ve done without the pepper as I don’t like it, but I don’t think it should be a problem. I only eat my Aberdeen Angus burgers once a week, but why oh why, can’t they have a version where only salt has been added, it would surely taste a lot better. Oh well, I’ve got 2 packets of ground beef for the rest of the week. I can make my own patties.
What was really fascinating to me, as a woman, and being of a certain age, I’m the same age as the lady in the video, 39, but will turn 40 this September, was the talk about how vegetables or rather certain compounds in the vegetables cause problems with thyroid, causing goiters. I don’t have a goiter, but my energy levels are still lower than I would like, and it did make me wonder.
I can well believe there are valuable micronutrients in organ meats, and I do get if I don’t want to eat them raw cooking them will reduce some nutrients, but I’m not quite ready to embrace the cavewoman in me yet, eating organs raw. I will look for some grassfed and grassfinished organ meats from my local butcher, but that is all I can afford to buy. I certainly can’t afford to buy all the meats grassfed and free range.
Paladino is off the deep end for some of this. Did he say you had to eat eggs raw, but only the yolk and not the white?
The pork and chicken aspect are because these animals are what they eat. So, if they eat corn and seed oils, their fat will have PUFAs in them. Unlike ruminants (cows, mainly), which have a rumen to convert PUFA to saturated fat or MUFA. PUFA content in beef is low even in corn-fed beef (and cows only eat very small amounts of “corn”, even when corn-fed; they eat the stalks, etc., instead).
And I don’t know why he ignores that most long-term carnivores don’t eat organ meats or only eat them rarely, yet are perfectly fine.
Energy levels and thyroid are tough. Thyroid, in particular, requires a large amount of tests, and someone who knows what he/she is looking at.
Hi Bob, I don’t agree with what he says about eating eggs raw, or organ meats raw, and I certainly wouldn’t do it. Nor would I eat it in pill form. I’m a firm believer in getting everything I require from the food. But I am going to get some grassfed and grass finished organs such as beef liver or organic free range chicken liver, and well, try it. No idea what to expect. My SO thinks I won’t like it, but we’ll see.
Regarding cows being low in PUFAs, I did not know that. So thanks for the information. I don’t tend to feel anywhere near as good when I eat chicken or pork as when I eat beef, and I had of late begun to have an aversion to the fat on pork, but I still love beef, and really currently like the combination beef and eggs. And sheep meat is delicious. Truly decadent. Perhaps this is why then. Even bacon had begun to taste off to me, I thought that was because of the nitrites and nitrates. But my tastes and preferences have changed. So these are the foods I now eat, and I would love to eat goat meat, but it’s difficult to come by, and drink raw sheep and goat milk.
The only thing I consume which I don’t believe has any benefits is coffee. As to the caffeine boost it doesn’t seem to work that way for me. It is literally just that I love the taste of it, a pleasant warm drink with my raw milk in, to enjoy morning and afternoon.
I have also read that a number of doctors who treat patients with a ketogenic diet are starting to believe that the body uses thyroid hormones more efficiently on keto. This because their patients tend to have lower thyroid levels but are still fine. I guess this could easily complicate an already complicated situation. (And interestingly, patients on a high-carb diet often have “normal” thyroid numbers but still have hypothyroid symptoms.)
@never2late I also have a harder time with pork and chicken. I’ve actually tossed some fatty pork that we had where the fat tasted – bad. On the other hand, I got 1/2 a pig from a local farmer, which uses a particular cross-breed, and feeds the pigs very well. That fat is great, and my wife loves it. It’s just really expensive.
If I buy store-bought pork, I try to buy lean meats without much fat.
I also get some chickens from a different local farm, and they taste so much better than store-bought. Smaller, though. Sometimes, a lot smaller. And, of course, more expensive.
I wouldn’t mind trying goat meat, but I’ve never seen it in a store, even our fancy store that has rabbit, duck, goose, etc. I have had it in St. Croix, but in soup.
Ah, I think a morning routine with coffee you love is a benefit. 
@PaulL I think Amber O’Hearn says the reverse T3 will be lower on keto/carnivore, and when I had a fancy test taken for thyroid, that was the one item marked as low.
But all of this is pedantic, because when I go see a general practitioner, they’re clueless. TSH is all you get for thyroid, for instance, and I had to beg for insulin and HbA1c. I’d LOVE to have a keto doctor, but all the ones I could find have left for other jobs.
To me, it tastes sweeter than beef or pork. And to find any in our area, you’d have to go into Bridgeport and find a Jamaican or a halal butcher.
When I worked in Jamaica, we had curried goat. I think it’s really good. However, the custom there is to chop up the meat fairly fine, small bones and all. Along with my co-workers, I felt that, "Hey, when I want to eat, I want to eat, not be picking or spitting out little bones.
I don’t even remember the goat, once the beef farm had it… It’s even harder to get than mutton and that is tricky enough… But it wasn’t nothing special. I remember the Racka sheep, that was AMAZING, better than the beef from the same hard and there was no problem with the beef (okay, I bought cheaper cuts…) but the mutton was something else!
Rabbit is easy as our “egg lady” raises them. We ate one lately and still have one in the freezer. It’s not expensive at all. Ruminants are expensive, rabbit is at pork chuck level.
I start to forget about beef, the last time I ate some was several months ago. Now I eat deer instead (occasionally), lovely, tender, cheaper. I prefer mutton over beef but the availability is a problem.
Fortunately I very strongly prefer pork over beef, I like my occasional rabbit, chicken and turkey and now we eat good farm pork occasionally…
My opinion is that seed oils (sometimes called vegetable oils) are terrible for you and must be avoided. Olive oil and coconut oil are less bad, and can be eaten without too many issues, but in my opinion are still not great for you. It’s probably best to avoid oil if you can, and use butter or ghee instead.
Hi Eve, Dr. Paul Saladino wouldn’t think any of them good to use, and I myself only use butter, but the safest I believe were olive and avocado oil, as they were lowest in the linoleic acid which he believes is very toxic when it builds to certain amounts in the body. To my memory, the olive oil and avocado oil have about 15% linoleic acid, and butter or lard or tallow, any of the saturated fats really, have about 2%. But I have to listen to the talk again, to remember it all properly. Dr. Paul Saladino touched on quite a few subjects. All very interesting.
As @Alecmcq mentioned, the fruit oils—avocado, coconut, olive, and palm—are minimally processed and contain much less of the polyunsaturated fatty acids, some of which were unknown to the human body 200 years ago.
Animal fats—butter/ghee, bacon grease, lard, and tallow—are mostly saturated and mono-unsaturated fatty acids, which (believe it or not) are actually more healthful than the polyunsaturates, despite what we’ve been told for the past 50-60 years. It could hardly be otherwise, since the human race has been eating them for hundreds of thousands of years (at least) before the invention of agriculture.
Here are some comparative figures:
| Fat source | % Saturated fat | % Monounsaturated fat | % Polyunsaturated fat | % Other |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Butter | 54 | 30 | 4 | 12 |
| Canola oil | 10 | 52 | 31 | 1 |
| Coconut oil | 77 | 6 | 2 | 15 |
| Cottonseed oil | 27 | 19 | 54 | 0 |
| Lard | 41 | 47 | 12 | 0 |
| Olive oil | 14 | 77 | 9 | 0 |
| Palm oil | 51 | 44 | 4 | 1 |
| Safflower oil | 9 | 12 | 78 | 1 |
| Soybean oil | 15 | 24 | 61 | 0 |
| Sunflower oil | 11 | 20 | 69 | 0 |
| Tallow | 51 | 44 | 4 | 1 |
If you want to know the reason that the American Heart Association touts seed oils, it’s because they received a very large donation from Crisco Oil in 1948, and they have been loyal ever since. Before 1948, they were a small, insignificant organisation. Crisco put them on the map.
Yes, my absolute biggest disappointment with goat, at least Jamaican style, all those bits of bone.
I spent time on a farm as a kid and those pastured chickens and pigs, freshly slaughtered … Had I not participated in the process I would not have recognized the meat as anything I knew. Same with the cow-fresh milk and cream. Soooo good.
I hadn’t realised that what you have all been calling seed oils are the vegetable oils. And so that makes more sense, plus the explanations of why they are not healthy - thankyou Paul for the information. I only use olive oil and coconut oil as well as butter and ghee, but will decrease the 2 oils and use more butter and lard.
Sorry—that’s what the industry that makes them calls them. “Vegetable” oil is a marketing term. Nina Teicholz describes the manufacturing process in The Big Fat Surprise and in several lectures available on YouTube, and if you look at a seed oil refinery from the outside, it is indistinguishable from a petroleum refinery (and uses similar processes).
Rather than post the image again, this post in the Humour thread will give you the idea:
Why is it called vegetable oil when they aren’t from vegetables…?
We don’t have such an odd term in Hungarian… (But don’t worry, we have many other odd, incorrect terms… My “fav” is chicken thigh for the drumstick. That’s the “bottom thigh” here, apparently… The two together is thigh too. “Leg” is the part below them with no meat, we don’t have a word for chicken foot, leg has a “foot” meaning too. But English call various cuts some kind of butt, that was very confusing too.)
Marketing: vegetables have a health halo.
This labelling really makes me laugh now. I now know that vegetables are terrible for your health, and so are seed oils, so the labelling is highly appropriate. 