Chris Masterjohn

And they weren't statistically significant.

But it was because there was a lot of—people were coming in and out of the trial.

It kind of weakened the results.

But the atherosclerosis results and the correlations that were buried in those boxes show that when you look at the data from that angle, the seed oils look a lot worse.

And I think what you're seeing there, this is one of the reasons why there's so much material to work with to make controversy out of this, is that you see that people with higher cholesterol when they're younger are more likely to go on to have a heart attack.

But when you use seed oils, which...

lower the cholesterol in the blood, but increase the amount of these easily damaged fatty acids that carry the cholesterol, and they get damaged and they drive the atherosclerotic plaque, that's why you see this divergence.

That correlation exists there, but not everything that you do with your diet to change it, to try to make the correlation work in your favor does you good.

In general, you are going to have higher cholesterol if you're eating less fiber, right?

Yeah, I think I mean, this this is a great tie back to the things we were talking about before, because.

The clearance of cholesterol from your blood is driven by the mitochondrial energy production that gives your brain the signal that you are in a state of abundance and should put that cholesterol toward good things.

And you have a bunch of hormones that communicate that.

Leptin, insulin, thyroid hormone are all involved.

What is ultimately driving this is your brain, especially in the hypothalamus, is taking information in that says, are you getting enough food for me to consider this a state of abundance where I ramp up your digestion, I ramp up your libido, I ramp up all these things.

And we tend in nutrition science to think that this is about calories or it's about carbs, and it is about those things.

But if you are half as good at mitochondrial conversion of food to ATP as the next guy over, you know, is your hypothalamus going to give you full credit for the food you ate in terms of calculating your state of abundance?

It's not.

It's going to dock you by half.

And this is because the hypothalamus takes all these signals and then it looks at inside the hypothalamic cells, it looks at, okay, how well do I convert

that those food molecules into ATP using my mitochondria.