Dr. Ben Bikman

Hunger always wins.

Yeah.

Yeah, you got to eat, you got to fuel the body.

So you can't be in that kind of chronic low calorie state.

So my view on, so saturated fats is one of the more polarizing topics.

And I'm very comfortable talking about it because my entire postdoctoral fellowship was looking at, I shouldn't say entire, my biggest paper ever published was looking at the degree to which different fatty acids are capable of causing insulin resistance through the conversion into ceramides.

And I'm going to upset some people, but in cell cultures, if you treat cells with saturated fat, palmitate, which is the main saturated fat in the body, you get insulin resistance very quickly.

Now, if you block ceramides, you resolve that insulin resistance.

If you treat those cells with monounsaturated fatty acid, no insulin resistance.

If you treat those cells with polyunsaturated fatty acid, no insulin resistance.

So as much as there is, and I believe it's justified, a very heavy focus on seed oils, I approve of that focus.

I think they're pathogenic.

But I grimace when people invoke them as a primary cause of insulin resistance because the data do not support it.

Again, I think they're very harmful.

But not when it comes to insulin resistance, because you can, in fact, we would treat cells with palmitate, cause insulin resistance, co-treat them, co-incubate the cells with either oleic acid or linoleic acid, and we would reverse the insulin resistance.

Now, I do not mean to give seed oils a pass.

I think they're highly pathogenic, but not within... Well, there's other dietary sources of linoleic acid.

There are, and you can't even avoid them, really.

Yeah, and meat.

I mean, literally any animal source of fat, any animal food has some linoleic acid in it.