Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 24:06
Welcome to the show. Well, thank you, Gabrielle, thanks for having me. Like I said before, I’m a huge fan, which makes me a little nerdy, but I am a huge fan. And you and I met in DC at the HHS building where they were about to announce the new dietary guidelines, right? And there you are. And what was so interesting is, each one of you, there’s nine of you on this committee, each one of you had your own specialty.

Dr. Tom Brenna 26:48
Should I say? Yeah, that’s right, we each worked on a rather narrow section of the well, the concepts that were being considered,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 26:58
and you worked on the 2015 it’s your 2015 and these last 2020 I guess it would be considered 2026 as well.

Dr. Tom Brenna 27:08
Yeah, it’s 2025 2030 I was also an advisor to 2010 Okay, so I’m kind of right.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 27:16
So you’ve been doing this for a long time, and as one of the nine people there there, I just want to get a sense of there’s a lot of noise on the internet about all of what transpired. And frankly, I just want to say one thing, I think you guys did a great job. I think that, and when I say you guys did a great job, I know that there is a different interpretation of the outcome of what you guys provided, but the questions that you asked and the answers provided, I think, were exceptional, and it is also available for people to read where you guys got your science and how that was all developed.

Dr. Tom Brenna 27:55
That fair to say, Yeah, that’s right, everything we did really is posted and publicly available. So if you really want to dig into it, it’s all there.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 28:06
Now I want to read something that I was quite surprised to see. One of the things that I’ve learned from you and others on the committee is that there is not necessarily a rhyme or reason, and that every five years they there’s no unifying process behind how the questions are asked and what is answered and when we are at the HHS is very exciting. We got to hold a sign of mistake. They did pick that for me and the American Society for Nutrition, which is one of the most well respected societies, and it really focuses on excellence in nutrition research. Published a commentary, and the title is, and this is news from the American Society for Nutrition, which anyone can look up, which will link RJ, we can link to the bottom. This is American Society for Nutrition calls for strong science in National Nutrition guidance. And I want to read one more thing. And again, I was, I was surprised at that statement, and then reading this says the following, the American Society for Nutrition supports ASN, supports the broad eating pattern in the newly released Dietary Guidelines for Americans, which are the dgas that emphasizes minimally processed, nutrient dense foods and limits added sugar, sodium and saturated fat, which are linked to an improved long term health outcomes dietary approaches that focus on whole foods and reduce reliance on highly processed foods and sugar sweetened beverages have demonstrated health benefits. That was very nice statement. At the same time ASN is concerned that departing from the established scientific review process undermines confidence in the dgas and nutrition science. Things contributes to confusion and distrust and obscures the opportunity for meaningful scientific discourse.

Dr. Tom Brenna 30:09
Well, I was a little bit surprised by that too. The there were several specifics that were leveled in terms of criticisms. One was questions about how folks were chosen? Well, there were nine of us, and two of us had been on previous dietary guidelines, so we were chosen by normal methods, whatever normal really means. And as you’ve already alluded, to, normal is different every five years. There is also a behind the scenes period for every one of these dietary guidelines. So when the report comes out from the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, the 15 or 20 scientists that get together and issue a report, that report goes to either FDA or USDA, depending on who’s the lead agency that year, and they seek input, but ultimately draft the Dietary Guidelines for Americans behind the scenes, and so I did not see the process this time as deviating as Much as perhaps other people did. We did not draft the Dietary Guidelines for Americans. We did a very limited, circumscribed job, and what we did is sitting online. And so I didn’t dream up to the upside pyramid. And for instance, I have to say that I only learned of what was going to be in the Dietary Guidelines for Americans just a couple of weeks before they were released, and I didn’t even learn 100% we only saw a draft, and we were quite happy with the draft, to be perfectly honest, but we weren’t asked to modify it. I mean, people make comments, so, so I just don’t think that it’s, it’s that different than it ever was.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 32:10
And again, there was a lot of noise around it, and the the outcome, and which I think is really moving in a positive direction, which is, you know, again, changing the protein guidelines, that’s major. It’s first time, I mean, that that’s ever happened, and they brought you on. So your background is your professor emeritus from Cornell. You did Nutritional Sciences, then you went into basic science and chemistry. You were lead scientist at IBM. I was a

Dr. Tom Brenna 32:40
scientist at IBM before I before I went to Cornell, pretty extraordinary.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 32:45
You’ve published quite a bit and really made some great contributions beyond the dietary guidelines, but in, you know, meaningful ways, through Infant Nutrition, childhood nutrition, pregnancy. So we’re going to come back to that, but that is perhaps one reason why you were chosen to answer the question or address saturated fat. Can you highlight, potentially, maybe frame up the difference between and you’ve been involved? Is it fair to say three dietary guidelines?

Dr. Tom Brenna 33:17
Yeah, I think that’s fair. Yeah. Three is good. Yeah. Three lines, four.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 33:20
That’s pretty great. What’s that three? That’s three, fourths three or 475, percent. Yeah, never good at math. But anyway, besides point. So how? As we just framed this up. So there’s the outcome, which I want to know how you guys how the questions were asked and the literature that was examined. But just briefly, how did that transition from the first time that you did it to the second time to the third time in terms of questions and just your task at hand?

Dr. Tom Brenna 33:55
Well, in 2010 I advised the Committee on fatty acids, and specifically omega three fatty acids, that what they asked me to talk about in 2015 the theme transition to what is known as dietary patterns. And so nutrients took kind of a back seat, and sort of overall. I mean, is it a diet? Is it a dietary pattern? There is a technical definition that’s that’s relevant, but, but the point is, the overall diet was what people were looking at this time. The the DGA, see, looked at a variety of things. Dietary patterns was part of it. There was equity involved, and food equity and that kind of stuff and but in this particular case, we were very specifically asked to advise on very circumscribed things. So saturated fat is what I worked on. I didn’t work on protein. I did. Work on sugar, I just worked on saturated fat. And we were given a task, and we accomplished a task, and we handed things in, and then we found out what they did with it, to be perfectly honest. Now, how are we chosen? You’re about to ask me that, and the answer is, each one of us had published on these things, but sort of makes sense to bring people in have been working on a topic, rather than folks that have not been working on a topic. So and so my work, I think, in this area, was pretty well known or pretty well knowable, and I don’t think that’s how I ended up being asked.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 35:43
And the primary, can you frame up a little bit about the history of the dietary guidelines from the saturated fat perspective? Oh my

Dr. Tom Brenna 35:51
so saturated fat is, let’s see. I feel a lecture coming on. There’s the saturated Oh, boy, you encourage me. The saturated fat story best I can tell may date into the 1800s 1870 is where I would I would start. And so the story of saturated fat versus vegetable oils really reaches back into the into the period before 1900 I would say. And it’s always been this, this competition for what we’re going to spread on our bread, and it’s, it’s going to be butter, or it’s going to be what was called oleomargarine, and it was, I’ll skip forward tonight. To 1902 and when, when a technique for making oils into solids was developed, and that’s partial hydrogenation. So that’s where the trans facts come from. Crisco indeed. So you know where the name Criswell Crisco comes from.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 37:04
Yeah, but I will say my mom used to make blonde brownies with Crisco every probably every month,

Dr. Tom Brenna 37:11
Crisco made the most beautiful baked stuff. The best Baker is in the 20th century. Use Crisco. Crisco was introduced around 1914 and it got its name from the material that was derived from in the process. So there was a lot of cottonseed oil around at the time, and when that cotton seed oil is partially hydrogenated. It assumes some crystalline properties, and so they picked out crystalline cottonseed oil Crisco. That’s where the name came from.

Unknown 37:52
You would be great on trivia or Jeopardy.

Dr. Tom Brenna 37:56
If the category is edible oils, I’ll be great, yeah,

Unknown 38:01
just throwing it out there. Guys,

Dr. Tom Brenna 38:03
okay, yes, terrific. I don’t want to deal with the other ones. All right, no one said you had to win mass spectrometry for the double jeopardy. Yeah, so and so. So Chris Crisco was a really, a tasty, nice product, and no one really understood the concept that it’s going to maybe cause heart disease in a whole bunch of

Unknown 38:26
years. Was it utilized to

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 38:31
limit, say, if something was very perishable, like butter or

Dr. Tom Brenna 38:35
something like that? Well, what you have is what? It’s an old story in it, in the food industry, not a bad story that when you, when you extract something from, from a an edible food, butter is one thing. There’s butter and there’s buttermilk. So you have butter and so there’s things that are left over. Well, do you throw it in the river, or do you try to make something out of it? So this is oil, cottonseed oil. And the question you might ask is, can we make something edible water? Can we use something and I also want to, it also makes it’s a point. I make a lot. Having inexpensive food is not a bad thing. It’s a good thing. And I you know, we don’t want to, we don’t want to sort of price food out of the reach of folks that don’t have a big budget. So now that’s what was going on in the United States. What was going on in Europe is actually much more remarkable, which is that they were partially hydrogenating whale oil from about the 1930s probably from before that to the 1960s much of the whaling that was done, depleting and basically wiping out the whales from the Southern Oceans was to generate whale oil that went into margarine as partially hydrogenated way. Oil. When we cleaned out the whales from the Southern Ocean, we then transitioned over to fish oils, and those were various kinds of fish from various fisheries around the world, and so partially hydrogenated fish oil became what the Europeans and others were using in their margarines. There is a nice video on the web, on YouTube, from about 1942 which is kind of like a almost an archeologist. How’s it made? And it’s the making of margarine. And they show the various oils that go in. One of them has a big sign on it that says, harden the whale oil. Wow, right? So people don’t talk about that. And there’s a reason. There is a reason right now. Why is that important for us here in 2026 The reason it’s important is because the studies that have been invoked, that are said to be studies of saturated fat come from that era. And when people say that they’re about saturated fat, the answer is, well, not exactly. So some of the most prominent studies were done in Europe in the 1960s and 70s, and one of my favorites actually says it estimates 40 to 50 grams per day of hardening marine oils were in the diet of the control group. So you take out this partially hydrogen, I say partially hydrogenated. I really should say that’s what we call trans we say trans fat. Now, if you think trans fat from from vegetable oil is bad, wait till you see trans fat from fish oil. I’ve analyzed it years ago. Can’t get your hands on it anymore, but I analyzed it years ago. You can’t imagine it looks like when you take a when you look at the chemical analysis, it looks like the the Alps with, instead of had nice, nice peaks that tell you any shiny acid is there just is a mess of these things. And so that is what people are calling saturated fat. And all the studies do it, every one of them wait.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 42:17
So that seems like a major mistake. Yes, I’m going to, like tell this back to you, for the listener, for the viewer. Basically, we are hearing an exponential amount of noise and concern regarding seed oils, vegetable oils, quote, animal fat, saturated fat. So there’s the animal fats. Again, people have been very concerned about this for a long time, and they group that into saturated fat. And then there’s the hydrogenated fat seed oils, which are also within the fair to say saturated fat,

Dr. Tom Brenna 43:01
I’m gonna call them trans. They’re hydrogenated. They’re trans,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 43:05
partially hydrogen. Is trans, partially hydrogen, trans. But that does not fall under the category of saturated

Dr. Tom Brenna 43:11
fat, some of it saturated, more of it saturated than was in the original product, but, but, but mostly what you’re concerned about is these weird isomers that are made

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 43:21
and and the reason I frame this up is because, again, the conversation talks about saturated fat and then insinuates that all of these things are saturated that is,

Dr. Tom Brenna 43:30
that is correct. They say it’s saturated fat

Unknown 43:33
and it’s not, and it’s not saturated fats. In the 60s,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 43:38
they started hydrogenating trans Oh, that we’re doing it in the 30s, and this valve is way more dangerous.

Dr. Tom Brenna 43:46
We know that now. And the other thing is that we spend most of our time talking about cardiovascular disease, but cardiac we’re more than just a heart. There’s a lot more stuff. So for instance, what we learned later is that those weird looking fatty acids that do not appear in nature to any degree when we eat those things, they go into the brain. They go into the retina. And it’s terrible. Yes, it is. And that’s that was what was going on back then. Now, if you are they illegal now? Yes, and they’ve been illegal for a long time, but a long time, decades. So I don’t like to do this as a good guy, bad guy thing, because in the war years, I wasn’t there, but in the war, great for how old would that make you? One of the nice things I like about the Omega field, maybe three field, is that is that the scientists live into their 90s. It’s how I really think it works. But anyway, it stuff started in the war years. There was not a lot of food around. And. And you had fish oil, whale oil, and if you could hydrogenated you could feed the population. And this is what they were doing in the UK. In Europe, they had two world wars to worry about. So the question that you can ask yourself even today is, do I want to risk a heart attack in 30 years or starve in three months, and it’s really good.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 45:23
I’ve never actually thought about it that way, and I don’t think that people have so sorry to interrupt you, I love the old rationing videos. Have you ever seen that? You sure? I mean, we are like, we’re real nerds now, like we’ve just exposed ourselves. There are a ton of videos on World War Two rationing, and the reason I was very interested in is the protein recommendations were actually higher. They were, it was the soldiers were getting a pound of meat. It was, it wasn’t necessarily calorie restricted, even on the home front before the at the same time as these Victory Gardens. And sorry to interrupt you, but from what I understand is that there they had to make this food. There had to be food.

Dr. Tom Brenna 46:12
I’m told in the UK during World War Two that everybody got fish. And that kind of stopped after the war ended, so they were probably better nourished during the war than after the war.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 46:25
And your statement, that which, again, I have never heard anyone say that, see, I knew I was excited for a reason, is that we didn’t think about the idea that there would be a starvation problem and then making foods less perishable, because obviously, canning and all that stuff happened. But it wasn’t about the next 30 years. It’s about how to survive.

Dr. Tom Brenna 46:49
That case, it’s war. Okay, so, and then the ships were being blown up in the Atlantic, and you can’t get food in but you have this thing that you might be able to eat if you can treat it somehow,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 46:59
and you can feed the population somehow that they didn’t know it was dangerous at the time, that’s fair to say. And then that trans fat made it into the general American diet. Is that

Dr. Tom Brenna 47:13
kind of, that’s kind of what happened, yeah, because you start out saying in Europe and it was oil oil, fish oil, but in the US, it would have been partially hydrogenated vegetable oil. Call it trans. That’s what that’s we call it these days, trans. So it would have been trans fat and and so the trans fats that would have been less expensive. And so if you say, Well, if we don’t know if there’s anything wrong with it, it’s not toxic, it tastes good. It makes wonderful pie crust. Here I am a friend. I am extolling the culinary virtues of Crisco, the original stuff with trans fat hair. But do you know that it really is not a great thing for your health. I make one other point. We talk about these things like, like, the world is a static place, like, there’s no other background. Those of us of a certain age remember when people were smoking two to four packs a day. Almost everybody in the 60s and 70s knew somebody who was a chain smoker lights one cigarette with the last one. And so think about what smoking is now known to do. And I scratch my head and I think, well, if I smoke four packs a day, maybe hydrogenated fat, who cares? Just making the point that it’s a different world now, so and the risks are different. So getting rid of smoking probably unmasked some risks, because smoking was was certain. It was not that unusual for people to have, particularly men, to have heart attacks in their 40s and 50s.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 49:03
So what you’re saying is, we, if I’m understanding you correctly, is that we created these dietary guidelines of, again, 10% saturated fat. Hasn’t that that’s been maintained since, what, 1980

Dr. Tom Brenna 49:14
probably, but that’s probably 90 at least. But the number was basically picked out of a hat. There isn’t, there isn’t some curve that somebody has made. So there’s a threshold. So, so the last I looked at which are not terrific numbers, it’s ask people what they eat and see what they say yesterday. Something, yeah,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 49:40
frequency questionnaires. Is that, right? I don’t know. RJ, what you eat? RJ, you probably know that you have protein waffle, pancakes. Well, the food

Dr. Tom Brenna 49:48
frequency questionnaire asks you how many times you ate it in the last month, and and a large fraction of people claim that they’ve eaten under 600 In calories, which means they would be dead. So, yeah.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 50:04
Anyway, so the rationale of the 10%

Dr. Tom Brenna 50:09
the rationale from

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 50:11
the cardiovascular disease risk reduction

Dr. Tom Brenna 50:13
from partially hydrogenated whale oil, that

Unknown 50:17
seems like a problem. I think

Dr. Tom Brenna 50:19
it’s a problem too. And I really wish the ASN would look very carefully at the studies, as some of us have, and would would really look carefully at what saturated fat would isn’t I actually don’t think there is a lot of data on saturated fat. I don’t think there is a lot of clean data on it. There is data on dairy and over the years, the word saturated fat has been a code word for dairy. So you say, well, saturated fat, and then people say, oh, what? Saturated fat, butter? Well, okay, yes, that’s true. You’ve just figured that out, but that’s where they were leading you when they said saturated fat. So, but what are the original data. People have looked at dairy, and you don’t see a great deal. You just don’t see risk here.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 51:09
So as we frame up this new dietary guidelines, again, the 10% saturated fat has not changed since,

Dr. Tom Brenna 51:18
actually, I have something else for great. Yes, terrific. The, let’s see, it’s the, it’s an, it’s an act that was passed unanimously in Congress and signed into law in January of this year. It’s the something like the whole milk school lunch at something like that, and that Act authorizes the use of full fat dairy in the schools, and it has a wonderful little line at The end. It says saturated fat in whole fat milk shall not be counted towards the 10% in other words, Washington has taken saturated fat off budget. They do that sometimes with the budget over the years, and what they basically said is the school lunch won’t count that. Well, all of a sudden there is no cap in school lunch.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 52:24
Is there? Wait, so explain this to me differently so I understand so saturated fat is at 10% for the dietary guidelines. Yes, that’s right. Okay? And then when it comes to clusters or groups or schools, then the whole milk saturated fat doesn’t count in the school lunch program, in the school

Dr. Tom Brenna 52:49
lunch program, so that saturated fat that comes in as whole milk could be flavored, but it comes in at Whole milk, it doesn’t count towards the 10% so you’re going to 10% and everything else. And then, as long as you’re drinking milk, you can go any number you want.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 53:04
Oh, explaining how that works, is that so I have a hamburger, but I mean, like, is that a good thing, that it doesn’t count? Is it sending confusing messages?

Dr. Tom Brenna 53:15
I’m making the point that the 10% isn’t made up. May have, well, it is made up number, but it may have been maintained, but it hasn’t really been maintained everywhere they’ve gotten around it in school lunch, I see that’s the point. I am pretty sure they didn’t want to keep it and but the Act that was signed by the President in January. I think it was around January 14, the Act that was signed by the president passed the Congress by unanimous consent. Everybody voted for it, nobody voted against it. Not a single person so saturate one is saturated fat, not saturated fat when it comes in as whole milk

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 53:58
in the school lunch program. Confusing, right? So if you’re thinking about and here’s the definition of saturated fat that I have, and this is of someone were to pull this up, let’s see where this is, I don’t know it’s AI, you know, Genesis, whatever saturated fat is, a fat found in animal products. Now this is, let’s just go here for a second, okay? Like fatty meats, beef, lamb, pork and full fat dairy, as well as tropical oils and many processed baked goods, pastries, fried foods. Pause there. It also says it typically, it is typically solid at room temperature and should be limited in the diet. Okay, let’s just pause. Saturated fat is a type of fat found in animal products like fatty meats, but from my understanding, and from looking at the data, almost 50% of the fat in, say, fatty meat, like beef, is monounsaturated.

Dr. Tom Brenna 54:50
There’s a lot of monounsaturated in there. Yes, that’s right.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 54:53
So now, if we’re thinking about science, and this is a whole. Ideas that we’re trying to to make the best decisions we can. This is information that I am reading and that it’s saying that it increases the risk of heart disease and that we should recommend replacing saturated fat with unsaturated fat from all boil nuts and avocados and then quickly, underneath that, there’s the American Heart Association that says live in saturated fat to less than 6% of total calories. This is 2024,

Unknown 55:28
how do we reconcile all this? Wow. How much time you have, at least two hours.

Dr. Tom Brenna 55:35
Well, may I ask, who said that? Which one

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 55:39
all of it? Okay? Well, the first one comes up with a Google and this is, I did this actually on purpose. Okay, this is what a person who is looking on the internet. Okay, this is put in Google use AI mode. Ai mode says it gives this information. And this comes from, this is a university. I don’t know if I’m going to say it, and then also the

Dr. Tom Brenna 56:04
American yeah, that’s all fine.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 56:07
One more thing, which I forgot to say in the beginning, all of your comments and opinions, they’re all your own. They’re not associated with any university. They’re not associated with any government agency or HHS.

Dr. Tom Brenna 56:19
Everything I say is my opinion, that’s right. Thank you very much for that. Yes, that’s correct. So I see what you did there, what you said is, well, I’m going to google it and see what comes up, and hear all this stuff that’s really confusing. And the I would agree it’s confusing and it is contradictory. And so if it’s contradictory, I can’t really explain it. I can only tell you what I think is right. Is right, which is where we’re going. So I think the 10% limit is not justified. I said that before we I think the 10% limit chases us away from highly nutrient dense foods and actually causes nutrients of concern. And give an

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 57:00
example of what this would be. Would that be zinc, selenium, B, 12, bingo,

Dr. Tom Brenna 57:05
all that stuff. And we we know that we can recover much of that by dairy, for instance, but if you’re scared of cheese and milk and things like that, then you’re going to stay away from it because you think it’s going to give you heart disease. Heart disease. One of the things that that really bugs me about this, and that I would look I would query more in that Google inquiry, is to get away from the cardiovascular story, because when we look carefully at whether saturated fat to find however you like I was gonna ask you, when we look at that in terms of total mortality, you don’t see effects. If you don’t see effects, why are we focusing on cardiovascular that was

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 57:57
so pause there. Let’s, let’s go a little bit deeper, because you’ve said a statement. I don’t want to gloss over it. Gloss over it everything. Most statements out there regarding saturated fat are related to heart disease, correct? The American Heart Association. Again, I am on now. I’ve switched to a search engine that I use called Open evidence. I have no relationship with them, but this is you have to have a medical license to be able to look at this. And this scours for you can put in criteria, but it’s typically journals. So it’s the new New England Journal of Medicine. It’s all academic journal of the American College of Cardiology, British Journal sports medicine. So they’re all these journals which will then provide you with synthesized information. Every single thing here points to the connection between saturated fat and heart disease. And the concerning component is we are making broad generalizations that affect our children, affect prisons, affect nursing homes, affect anyone that receives federal funding, and even more importantly, affect day to day decisions of moms like me. So what is the truth? No small task, but the truth on saturated fat. So the American diet right now, to best of our knowledge, is 11% saturated fat. What means it was 15%

Dr. Tom Brenna 59:31
saturated fat? Well, once again, if you count trans fat, which you shouldn’t, but if you do, then maybe those numbers are right from the from the early days, right? So the point I am really making is that the evidence for saturated fat being related to heart disease is actually so messed up. Related with trans fat that it’s impossible to separate. But if you look carefully at foods that are high in saturated fat, you find out that those relationships are just not there. So I don’t think the 10% makes any sense at all. I don’t think it’s justified. And when folks talk about this, they gloss over that, that there’s trans fat all over the place, in these in these studies that they’re citing. Okay, so let’s see. I also want to bring it back to the idea that we are not just the heart. We have lots of other organs, the most important of which, in my opinion, is the brain.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:00:50
Mine is muscle, and my husband, who’s in urology, is something else.

Dr. Tom Brenna 1:00:55
Okay, I can probably, I can probably find common ground with your husband. I’m sure I can find common ground with with the with muscle too. But the thing about, well, think about reproductive organs and and the brain, they have a lot in common. Actually, maybe three is a big deal, and probably at least part of the problem with low fertility in men in the United States, you give people Omega three, DHA, in their

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:01:25
in their motility. I want to Whoa. I want to come back to that. Because I, you know, we use the Omega index, Omega quant, yes, before I move on, I just want to read something to you, okay, because you’re gonna find this very exciting. So this is open evidence. And now this is from the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, 2020, and I asked open evidence, which is a medical, again, professional AI, what is the evidence of saturated fat and heart disease? Okay? And it said reducing saturated fat and replacing it with polyunsaturated fat reduces cardiovascular events by 17 to 30% with effects comparable to statin therapy. Why am I hammering this one, I’m annoying, and I’m sorry. And number two, this is the information that providers clinicians are being given to to then go out and put best practices in place. So I just, I want to say that, and not to be fair, I’ll read the next statement. So first statement, 17, 30% reduction comparable to statin therapy by reducing your saturated fat intake. However, this blows my mind. However, the evidence shows little to no effect on all cause mortality or cardiovascular mortality, and the benefit very, very substantially based on baseline cardiovascular risk. What are they like? What it what?

Dr. Tom Brenna 1:03:00
Well, well, you just got, you just said it’s related to cardiovascular events, but not to mortality. So what I get, did I get that, right? Yeah. Okay, so one of the things folks notice terrible to statin therapy. Okay, fine. One of the things that folks notice is that when you talk about mortality, you have a very clean outcome, because almost everybody can count bodies. However, when you assign events, you have to do a diagnosis. So is it a heart attack, or is it indigestion, or really bad case? And so it doesn’t make a lot of sense that there are more events than there is death. I I’m with you and and so that that’s a that is almost a smoking gun for for there being biased. Now I have another point to that’s very, important, and that relates to what we just did on dietary guidelines. We talked about randomized trials as being, being giving us the chance of identifying causal effects, as opposed to prospective cohort trials, which ask people what they eat at one time and then see how many people get sick later. And that’s just a natural kind of observational thing. But a randomized trial is only a truth teller if it is double blinded, or, as I prefer, the way the ophthalmologists call it double masked. And none of these trials are the least bit blinded from the 20th century. They’re not blind. Everybody knows what group they’re in. Everybody knows whether they are consuming the control or they’re consuming vegetable oil or whatever it happens to be. You can. Design trials like that, and I have recently published a trial that’s designed in such a way so that people didn’t know what they were eating. But it is not easy and it is not cheap, and so people, most of those studies, they left people on their normal diets. They said, Okay, you just eat whatever you’re normally eating, which happens to be 50 grams of hydrogenated marine oil. And then we have these other people over here, and we’re going to feed them all kinds of other things. We’re going to feed them polyunsaturated fats, and then, and then vegetable oils, or whatever happens to be. And then we’re going to blame all of the differences on saturated fat, which it sounds like they’re all eating, eating milk or something, and it’s not the case.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:05:45
So as this translates to so the question that you were designated to answer on these guidelines, what was that?

Dr. Tom Brenna 1:05:53
Well, it was about, it was about the relationship between saturated fat and cardiovascular mortality and the things that one usually looks at. And so one of the things that I Well, let’s say re verify for myself, is that the studies that are out there often lead with a statement that saturated fat causes more cardiovascular events. But then as you go through the paper, you find out, just kind of as a throwaway at the end, that there wasn’t any difference in total mortality. Okay, well, if there’s no difference in total mortality, isn’t that what people care about? Total mortality? Yeah, I think that’s what people care about. And so we turned it around, and we said, we’re going to talk about total mortality first, and then we will talk about the various kinds of mortality, coronary heart disease, coronary coronary, vascular cardiovascular disease, mortality and events, and look at those. And we found, with a very high level of confidence that total mortality is is not affected. And in the observational trials, which is really what there was in the other bed line, or this one? No, this is this one, because we did our randomized trial and we did prospective cohort trials. We did, we looked at both and and and in the prospective cohort trials, there was stroke as an outcome. And does it surprise people when there’s when these that saturated fat, what we call saturated fat, is protective against stroke. That’s what it looks like. That’s what the data say protective so is, is this whole thing? What do you want to die of? I hope not. If, if total mortality is not affected, and even if you say heart disease is worse, but if total mortality isn’t effective, then that means something else must be benefit,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:07:59
most benefit, you know, I’ve also seen, as we kind of wrap this piece up, it’s fair to say that we don’t know the number or percentage of saturated fat that would be detrimental, right? And then I want to take this one step further by talking about, potentially, the LDL conversation. So, but if we, if we’re just going to look at total mortality from cardiovascular disease, which is really the outcomes that people care about, there isn’t, is, again, there isn’t a strong relationship between the two. There’s not

Dr. Tom Brenna 1:08:35
a strong relationship. But I wouldn’t even even ask you, do people really care about total mortality due to cardiovascular disease, or they care about total mortality. Care about total mortality. I think they care about total mortality. And the data say there’s no effect on total mortality, even if you, even if you accept what is called saturated fat, which, which I’ve just got finished explaining, is not all saturated fat.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:09:00
So I it’s challenging because these, there are these guidelines, the dietary guidelines, now, this recommendation, which now essentially weaponizes animal based products because of the 10% number or less, I wouldn’t use

Unknown 1:09:17
the word weaponized,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:09:19
makes individuals potentially choose away from, quote, red meat or,

Dr. Tom Brenna 1:09:27
or, well, I mean, there’s also, there’s also another thing. And I’m not that well versed in this, but I will raise the, raise the point that much of the work that’s been done on red meat is not just red meat is red and processed meat. Well, this fresh red meat the same as processed meat. And if you throw in everything that’s processed is a, is a a nice roast or steak or hamburger, we really think that that’s exactly the same. And. Is a very process. I don’t want to pick on anything in general, specifically, but the cheapest, very processed kind of meat you can think of. Do we really want to put those things in the same category? I don’t know why one would want to put those in the same category. They may well both be fine, but the red meat part on fresh red meat, I don’t see a problem.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:10:23
And does this lead us to this moment where, well, we can all agree that we need more science behind what potentially we’re defining saturated fat, what the actual implications are.

Dr. Tom Brenna 1:10:36
We have to first have the folks who are saying that saturated fat is bad actually recognize that that is not what they’ve been talking about all these years. They’ve been talking about saturated fat plus partially hydrogenated oils. In other words, they’ve been talking about saturated fat plus trans, and the trans has been some of the worst trans that there is when

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:11:03
this data is, say, presented to these groups. Again, this is not about a person or any of those, those you know, entities, but what you’re saying and looking at, if someone were to pull this up and to look at the science of supplement the supplemental material, it’s hard to not acknowledge that. People don’t seem to have

Dr. Tom Brenna 1:11:24
any trouble not acknowledging it. So

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:11:27
what do you? And this is, again, just a personal question. Why do you is, do you think that there is, again, is it science questionable? Is what you’re telling me. Perhaps, you know, maybe it’s questionable or some other reason.

Dr. Tom Brenna 1:11:47
Well, as scientists, we have to describe what we’ve done, and we have to describe it with specificity. And when someone is calling something saturated fat, and it’s not saturated fat, I’m not sure how much further I have to go with that. I could go back and say, well, you’re just trying to raise money, or you’re selling something, or something like that, but I would prefer to just sort of say, Look, you have to recognize that people are mischaracterizing what they’ve what their data look like. They’re mischaracterizing we need to look more carefully. And there are data out there that address this. I just mentioned it.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:12:25
I mean, that’s really important, and I think that you imagine that that’s the next step. I mean, I think a lot of what the new administration is going to do, or the current administration, is it seems as if they’re going to allocate funding to try to explore that more so they say correct. They do say the next question that I want to tackle, and we’re all in the same RJ. RJ, Royal approved. Do you have questions? Moms at home? Do you guys have questions? So basically, what I’m hearing is that 10% saturated fat, while that number has been chosen. When it comes to mortality outcomes, we there’s not, you know, probably more dangerous to cross the street, yeah, start smoking and, well, it’s definitely more

Unknown 1:13:11
dangerous to start smoking margarine in Delaware.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:13:13
But the other thing, and, okay, which, that’s an important point. There’s a lot of discussion about that, I mean that I feel very comfortable with. And again, you’ve got some great papers. Will link, whichever one you choose, and my favorite is one with Arnie Astra. Am I seeing the Arnie paper?

Unknown 1:13:35
So I’m a huge fan. So if you want to put in a good word,

Dr. Tom Brenna 1:13:39
he’s doing terrific stuff. And Denmark, yes, I believe he’s in Denmark, and he that was really a terrific group that got together and discuss the whole story about saturated fat. You can read in that paper about the story of the trans stuff. And you can also that that paper was identified as one of the five best published that year in the Journal of American College of Cardiology, which is sort of the journal in cardiology. Yeah, there. It’s absolutely lovely, because all those papers have something they call a central diagram. And here in the middle of this cardiology journal is that the central diagram has got a slab of cheese, a bottle or a glass of milk, a hunk of a hunk of beef, and we don’t mind the chocolate either. Yeah, it’s pretty extraordinary.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:14:42
So that will link that anyway, put in a good word. Do you know fayden? Yes, Makos, so I did my training with him. Oh, he’s really a friend. I like that. He’s like, why are you calling me, asking me, Why are you calling me, asking me. Just. Thing. Come on. What do you think about this? He’s like, Oh, no, you know, it just goes on. He’s actually, he’s Greek, so that’s my fake just offended all my Greek friends. Sorry. Can we just touch on the LDL story? Okay, so reading again, what is available. And from my understanding, it’s complicated. And for some people, let’s say 20% of the population has an LDL cholesterol over 160 okay, that fair. I can look at something like that, yet we’re making the saturated fat recommendation for those potential 20% again, I’m just framing this up as to how one could intellectualize the statement that if you reduce saturated fat, then You will lower your LDL cholesterol, so you will okay and so this says replacing 5% of energy from saturated fat with polyunsaturated fat, again, reduces mortality by 27% where not

Unknown 1:16:14
sure. Down in Japan,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:16:17
not sure, but there is this relationship between saturated fat and lowering LDL cholesterol? My question is, what percent of the population? Is that meaningful, and is that reduction? Is it a linear reduction of LDL cholesterol with saturated fat to then have some kind of meaningful outcome for a mom like myself that wants to make sure my husband lives

Dr. Tom Brenna 1:16:45
longer than me. Well, we, we understand a lot about the the LDL story for for the extreme cases. So these are folks with the genetic mutation, yes, mutation that causes their cholesterol levels to be sky high. So we have a pretty good idea how that works. The question, I think that’s really relevant, is, to what degree do reductions in LDL cholesterol at the moderate level below 160 really help us out. And I cannot get past looking at the Japanese data. Now, usually people shut you down by saying, well, there’s hardly any Japanese who have high levels. Actually, there’s 100 million Japanese, and so there are plenty of them that have higher levels. And if you look carefully, the relationship between cholesterol and heart disease is the opposite of what it is in the United States. It doesn’t go up. It actually goes down a little bit. And those data were robust.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:17:49
Okay, so it’s I want to correct myself first. I just pulled up my notes for this episode, so and then I want to, I want to understand what you’re saying. The current average LDL in the US is 111 Okay, per deciliter. Someone can correct me, but this is what I found. Those who have an LDL above 130 that’s around 25% above 130 and above 160 is about 5%

Dr. Tom Brenna 1:18:18
5% above 160 Okay, okay, thanks.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:18:21
And so again, as we frame it up, if saturated fat intake is down from 15% let’s say we pick that number from the 80s, then there should be an average drop in LDL to mirror this, right?

Dr. Tom Brenna 1:18:36
But one of the points that the Astro paper makes is that decreasing LDL doesn’t always have a relationship with decreasing cardiovascular risk. So the question is whether one can make a blanket statement about this kind of reduction, and whether it makes any sense at all, and I think the answer is probably not. And what else to say? I can repeat myself by saying that we understand that that sky high cholesterol levels are a problem. We’re also recognizing these days something we didn’t recognize years ago, which is that triglycerides are a big deal also, and this is the other, the other fat in the blood, and this is an independent risk factor

Unknown 1:19:34
as well. How high? And I have

Dr. Tom Brenna 1:19:37
those numbers? Well, something like, if they’re above 500 milligrams per deciliter. Then, then I think they’re, they’re candidates for, I’m going to call it a pseudo pharmacological intervention. And when I call it pseudo pharmacological, it’s kind of a fish oil thing, and so something like

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:19:56
that here I got, I have some numbers for you. Okay, go ahead. Okay, hit me. Hit me. People with elevated triglycerides above 200 are closer to 70% 17% so people to LDL above 160 or greater are like between five and 7% of the population, which doesn’t seem like that much, right? People with elevated triglycerides above 200 are closer to 17% of the population. It’s a higher number, and this is, from my perspective, a carbohydrate issue.

Dr. Tom Brenna 1:20:29
Yes, I think it’s a carbohydrate issue, and it may well be an insulin resistance issue as well. Okay, so, and you don’t get numbers that high unless you’re not eating much for omega threes, omega threes won’t go that high. Omega three is lower. We’ve known this since the 80s, that omega threes lower fish the fish oil, essentially fish oil lower triglycerides. And that’s the irrespective of carbohydrate energy, pretty much. But now they’re going to basically lower it, because they turn on the turn on the genes that that burn fat, is what they do. And so Sign me up. Indeed, fish, fish, fish. Why don’t we get to talk about fish? We’re gonna talk about

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:21:09
we’re gonna move right on to that. And then I want to know dosing is that, like your normal four gram dose. I love it. I’ll switch that. I want to, again, close this out, because, you know, there’s the hearsay, there’s the game of telephone, like, oh, did you hear all this? You were literally there. Yeah, it was there. You were literally there. I got some great photos of you. Also have been contributing to dietary guidelines for quite some time. 10% saturated fat doesn’t necessarily make sense. We don’t have evidence from a mortality standpoint. You should hurry up and change that. I’m hoping ended up in the next one, and then also, consequently, the LDL cholesterol discussion, still, while it might link back to the saturated fat, might not be the primary

Dr. Tom Brenna 1:21:53
I think, I really don’t think it is. And I would also reference for you that once upon a time, we were so very sure that it was HDL that protected you, and LDL that was the problem. So good cholesterol, bad cholesterol and the HDL stuff all fell apart with the pharmacological interventions in the 2000s and everybody was scratching their head. Now, people are actually working on some classes. And do we really see reverse cholesterol transfer and those kinds of things? And that’s fine. The point, however, is that these gross measures are just that. They’re gross measures. There’s other things going on.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:22:35
So should we talk about another mistake? Sure, pregnancy and avoiding fish. Oh, god yes sir. Well, this is really fun. I’ve been pregnant twice. It’s not very fun. Not a huge fan of that. I just will say pregnant, yes, very high premises, grab it. Um, oh, my husband was active duty. I was alone in New York City, throwing up like all day. Okay, it was terrible. So that wasn’t fun. It wasn’t fun. But I actually it was one of the only periods of time I shifted away from reading about amino acids to reading about epigenetics, pregnancy, nutrition for pregnancy. And there’s actually not a ton of data from a protein perspective, which I suppose makes sense for pregnant women. However, looking at some of the data around omega three fatty acids, children, now we’re talking about something that could be really meaningful. You know that women are told many women avoid fish ready. I’m

Dr. Tom Brenna 1:23:48
right here with your best shot. It was, it was, it was in Russell, roughly 1999 that that an FDA commissioner was asked by a reporter, almost blindsided by a reporter, how come you’re allowing women to be poisoned with all this mercury and tuna and From the perspective, and there’s some subtlety here, but we do have a few nerds in the audience.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:24:27
At least two people listen to my test. Okay, mom, okay, great. My dad and, well, three of my husbands, and we’ve got like, we’re good,

Dr. Tom Brenna 1:24:35
okay, fine, perfect. So it was in the 1980s and 90s that analytical chemists perfected ways of analyzing metal. So you could see de minimis, tiny little bits of metals. And so it wasn’t very hard to see any kind of a metal in a natural product. And so if you looked in tuna, you could. See it, because the chemistry was really very highly developed. It took longer to develop it for organic molecules and those relevance.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:25:09
So you just lost me. RJ, did you get lost? Producer? RJ, do you get lost? Okay, so in

Dr. Tom Brenna 1:25:17
anybody can see Mercury in the 80s and 90s, if they looked for it, but you wouldn’t be able to see other small molecules. Well, metals you could only see, in other words, the technology, you can’t see microplastics, the tech, then, the technology for analyzing metals, was very well developed because it’s actually in a way, easier to measure metals than it is to measure organic molecules. When you measure metals, you blast the daylights out of everything and make a bunch of atoms, and then you detect the atoms. But if you try to do the same thing with organic molecules, you lose your organic molecules. So you have to be more nuanced and sophisticated and

Unknown 1:26:03
that kind of thing. And was there a reason why we were thinking about let me

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:26:07
ask you this, is it a mistake for pregnant women to avoid fish?

Dr. Tom Brenna 1:26:11
Absolutely a mistake. No doubt, 100% okay,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:26:15
how much fish should pregnant women have? And you’re gonna say, Well, what kind of fish and how much I actually am not

Dr. Tom Brenna 1:26:25
so since, since we’ll call it the 21st Century, we have been collecting data on The consumption of fish, specifically in pregnant women, and they the mental development of their kids. And what we find is that compared to women who eat zero fish, women who eat a little fish, their kids almost always do better on almost all the tests that we look at. And it keeps going up, and then it plateaus, and it depends on, then it starts to depend on what fish you’re eating. But we have gone up to 100 ounces a week. The recommendation is 12 ounces a week, at least from the from the government right now, we’ve looked at 100 ounces a week, 10 times whatever they fish out of the sea, in the in the Indian Ocean, in the Seychelles Islands, for example, and, and, and even there, you don’t even start to see coming down again, because, let’s say there’s mercury. The mercury is entirely below any kind of a detectable harm low. You only get benefit. You don’t get harm.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:27:45
Whoa, whoa. I was expecting you to say, only eat fish or tuna once a month. Is there a limit?

Dr. Tom Brenna 1:27:57
So I really don’t think there is a limit. I don’t think the evidence shows there’s any limit. There is a point where you plateau, you don’t get any more benefit. But it’s not like you if you keep going, you’re going to turn around. The people that eat the most fish in the world do not have kids who are mentally challenged. They just don’t. And you will understand that we know what mental mental defects looks like. I always invoke ID deficiency as being something that that we know what that looks like. You do? You see nothing like that. The kids just get smarter.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:28:37
So they’re the components, right? So pregnancy is, is pregnancy that one time to build the brain like is that that’s a critical component, versus post pregnancy into childhood,

Dr. Tom Brenna 1:28:52
we are putting DHA into our brain until we’re about 20 years old. So pre pregnancy, post pregnancy, one of the reasons why breastfeeding is so important, beyond the immune stuff, behind the bonding stuff and all that kind of thing, is that kids are getting omega three. They’re getting DHA in breast milk in 2001 we got it put into infant formula for the first time in the United States, anywhere and anyway, in other places, but not in the US. And no, the brain is remodeling consistently until at least age 20 and probably out to 25 so we are doing brain development all that time. Do you think

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:29:38
that it is that static? Because you know, when you think about Alzheimer’s and another cognitive problems, it if, if one avenue of science shows that it could be helpful, it would make sense that there might mitigate the DHA. And yes, I want you to explain what that is. Might mitigate some cognitive decline. Well, there’s,

Dr. Tom Brenna 1:30:00
there’s been a lot of hypotheses around that, and there have been some, there has been some work in reduction in or hypotheses looking at reduction in neurodegeneration towards the end of life. And the data are, I’m going to call it mixed. I’m going to eat fish until I’m in the ground, but And and so it isn’t going to cure it, but certainly the the underlying mechanisms, which we still have not identified, I’m working on some of that and other things I’m doing, but the underlying mechanisms, I’m quite convinced, are related to fatty acids and the extraordinarily high energy that we produce to run the brain, to run the retina and and the interaction between all that energy which throws off reactive oxygen species, which then oxidize these, these Highly oxidizable fats. So DHA,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:31:01
can you frame us up? What that is? The spectrum is omega three, Omega six, right?

Dr. Tom Brenna 1:31:08
So DHA is an omega three fatty acid. It’s actually, again, for the nerves in the audience, do cosa hexanoic acid. No cosa means 22 hexa means six. So it’s got 22 carbons and six double bonds. And I like to call this the year of DHA, because we’ve got two and I ignore the 026 so that’s 22 six. There we go. And at any rate, this is what we call an omega three fatty acid. The Omega three part is a part of the structure of the molecule. So if you draw the molecule on a blackboard, and then you name it according to organic chemistry, which you took then, then you will see that the last double bond is three carbons in from the back end. If you go to omega six fatty acids, you’ll find the last bubble bond is six carbons in from the last carbon Now, omega three and Omega six are special because they are processed by the same enzymes in the body. And so when there is a big imbalance between the two, you start to suppress one against the other. And that’s why a balance is actually quite important. What we have in the United States is a high amount of the Omega six fatty acid and vegetable oil is called linoleic acid. If you really want to read some dirty stuff, you can look at the dietary guidelines foundational report, which is posted, and I think it’s chapter five, which is a nice discussion of this stuff. There’s lots of other stuff, and there’ll be, there’ll be things on the web that you can you can see about this. There is no question, none, zero, absolutely zero. I’m sorry, let me, let me for emphasis, start over. There is no question, absolutely zero, none. That Omega six, linoleic acid, suppresses all the Omega threes metabolically everywhere. Wow. So that’s period, full stop. People say that’s not the case. It is the case. It is always the case. No exceptions. There the outcome.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:33:35
So then a clinical outcome to that would be or a metabolic outcome, or a biomarker outcome would show higher amounts of

Dr. Tom Brenna 1:33:44
well, it, I’m quite sure that it depends on genetics. And we’ve been working on those genetics, and you’ll have me back for another one of those. Suffice to say. How do I want to say this depends on genetics. I’ll leave it at that. But in in vulnerable folks, the Omega sixes in vegetable oils are actually enhancing a pro inflammatory state. We’re seeing, we’re seeing a response to Omega three is pushing down colorectal polyps. We published this already. What is the dose? 200 sorry, two grams a day. Not very much. Not very much. And if you’re of a certain genotype, it pushes down colorectal polyps at the end of the year by 50% is that good? Wow. It’s published in the American Journal clinic literature.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:34:43
Okay, so we’ll pull that up. RJ, gotta make a note of that. Pull that up, and then. So it’s based on genetics. Obviously, someone could probably run those SNPs. And yes, it’s

Dr. Tom Brenna 1:34:54
actually more complicated. It’s but it’s actually a it’s actually it’s more and less complicated. It’s an insertion deletion which is sitting in the fatty acid desaturates gene cluster. Now I really lost everything.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:35:07
Yeah, definitely. But there’s no downside for someone who would be wanting or interested in taking omega three fatty acids. But you said

Dr. Tom Brenna 1:35:21
it’s the balance. The balance is what you need. The balance is what you need. You have to be balanced. And in the diets that we have now, we’re we still have, we have an excess of omega six. Now the Omega six folks will say yes, but if you eat more vegetable oil that has more omega six, it pushes down cholesterol. Well, it does. But I we just got finished having that conversation about whether that actually benefits anything or not, and we always go back to the heart, but not the brain.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:35:49
So going back to the heart meaning, meaning individuals are looking at LDL cholesterol or total cholesterol, and saying, Well, this reduces your cholesterol, but that might be irrelevant to the if I’m understanding what you’re saying, Yeah, you are

Dr. Tom Brenna 1:36:07
actually not. You’re missing. You’re not you have it. You have it correct. In fact, working on the Omega three omega six story is what led many of us to start talking about saturated fats and start looking into that. Because if you say, Eat less Omega six, it’s got to be replaced with something. And so what should replace it with? Now, the best thing, I think, to replace it with is mono and saturate. So olive oil and well, we now have avocado oil, but, you know, we’re clear cutting the Amazon to make avocados, avocado trees, and there isn’t enough olive oil to supply more than a very small fraction of the demand in the United States. And so what I think we ought to be doing is what we learned how to do 20 years ago, which is to to make, effectively, a kind of an olive oil, but we can do it with sunflowers and safflowers and peanuts, because we’ve talked, we basically taught them how to make olive oil. From this perspective, they’re called high oleic oils, and there is a fundamental disagreement about what will happen with that, but i i Will

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:37:19
it be the same as the trans fats? Is that with the disagreement? No, no, I don’t think that.

Dr. Tom Brenna 1:37:23
I don’t think it will, I don’t think the trans fats will be relevant here, because the fatty acid profile in these hyalic oils is almost indistinguishable from olive oil. In fact, olive oil has a range depending on where you grow the olive trees, whether they’re in the hot area of North Africa or the cooler area in Tuscany, let’s say, and there’s there’s more linoleic as you go north, and there’s less and as you go into the hotter regions. And so there’s a range. And so these high oleic seal oils have are within that range. You know

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:37:55
that that’s fascinating. You’re talking about essentially the food matrix, but in a different way, the compounds of the food. And if you were to say, in an ideal world, would you say, I want you to have two grams of omega three fatty acids. I want you to have a component that is DHA, 200 milligrams. And I want you to have olive oil from Tuscany, because it’s up north. How would you think about getting granular? For someone who wants to just say, You know what, I’m going to do a tablespoon of monounsaturated fat from olive oil, and then I’m going to do three pills of omegas, because that’s going to be two grams. And then do jihad here.

Dr. Tom Brenna 1:38:40
So the other thing to recognize is that when, as the I just told you that omega six suppresses Omega three, if you push down the Omega six, you don’t need as much Omega three. The Omega three is actually more effective. We’ve never really calculated how effective, but, but I mean, you can actually push down if you have, if you have hyaline oleic acid, you’re creating a metabolic need for omega three in order to balance it. Any more of it, I would rather have a traditional diet. We didn’t have these amounts of omega six in the diet before roughly the year 1900 before, earlier than that. But it’s about that there were almost, there’s almost nowhere on the planet where we had these amounts of linoleic acid. There’s a there’s some that was in northern China with with rapeseed oil bike, but only a few 100 years ago. So this omega three, this omega six, business with high levels of linoleic acid is has been an uncontrolled experiment that we conducted from the 1950s and coming back here and saying, Well, we don’t want to do this new experiment by pushing it down. Well, no, that was the experiment. Was putting it so high,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:39:49
I see, and the Omega six would be things like corn. So here’s canola.

Dr. Tom Brenna 1:39:59
I’m glad you add. Me that question. So here’s the problem. It has not been for 20 years that being able to say the name of the plant that an oil came from tells you what to eat. We can’t. We can no longer do they can’t say soybean oil because there’s four different soybean oils that have been widely sold in the marketplace. There’s, there’s at least three sunflower oils, and they’ve all been intentionally bred. They have different fatty acid profiles, so I can’t just say for the very purpose that I’m describing, wow, and and part and the other reason is that the traditional oils, what we used to call the commodity oils,

Unknown 1:40:41
20 years ago, from Chicago commodities and the

Dr. Tom Brenna 1:40:44
Options Exchange. Yes, indeed. So they how many hard bodies do you want? Anyway, the these are drugs

Unknown 1:40:53
where we are collectively funding together, if you, if you,

Dr. Tom Brenna 1:40:59
if you push down the amount of omega six in the oil, it increases the shelf life in the frying life. And so we’ve been frying potato chips wheat lakes up in north of Dallas and everywhere else around has been using these hyalic oils for years because the frying life is longer. There’s fewer these peroxides that get formed during the frying process. And so they like it a lot better. Now I’m speaking for for lays, and they should hit me over the head, because I don’t know I’ve ever been set foot inside lays, but at any rate, I’m pretty sure that’s what they’ve been doing and and that, I think, has, has made the products healthier. I mean, what I used to like to say is, you know, if, if chips make you fat, that they have to make you sick too. And I, I had blazed potato chips the other day. So busted.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:42:04
That’s it. So you for the omega for the omega three fatty acids. When someone, I know, you don’t see patients, but is there a good ratio, if there is a physician out there? Again, we look at omega three, Omega six ratios. Many of our patients have higher 90 sixes, and there’s a

Dr. Tom Brenna 1:42:24
whole, yes, they do, and so and so you’re thinking that the you’re thinking of the mega quant, yeah, I think that. I think that what those folks have been using are pretty good, is a pretty good guide. So below four is is bad, and above eight is good, as the is a kind of broad guidelines. Yes, I think, I think there is, and I I watched that whole story develop since well before it started. I remember the discussions on it, and one person running with it. And I’m very, in a manner of speaking, proud of him for running with it. That’s very making, making it happen. There was one individual, yes, that’s right. And you can look on the website and for Bill, and, you know, it’s in we had conversations about, you know? Well, you know, we’re measuring cholesterol. What the heck does that mean? If we can only measure Omega three somehow, then we’ll give people a little bit of control, and we think that’ll have more control and be more important,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:43:30
I pulled this number. It says more than that, and I don’t know if this is accurate. Sure, more than 95% of people fall short of recommended DOJ intake. Yeah.

Dr. Tom Brenna 1:43:38
Well, that’s, that’s almost certainly true, but it depends on who’s recommending it, what it should recommending it, what it should be recommended?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:43:44
Absolutely. Kids. How much I think about my two little kids? Yeah, we have little fish oils and try to give them. That’s kind of interesting. But is that adequate? I know you’re gonna say something’s better than nothing, but it is. But you talk about the food matrix, yes. How much should it in an ideal world where you’re like, Okay,

Dr. Tom Brenna 1:44:07
well, look, my grandkids just stuff salmon into their

Unknown 1:44:19
mouths. We just have that. Okay, well,

Dr. Tom Brenna 1:44:21
I am kind of more of a Whole Foods guy, little W, little f, despite the fact that headquarters are over four blocks from Mike, I’m more of a guy who thinks that that the nutrient package is important. If you can’t have fishing people, you’ve got allergies and this kind of stuff, right? So, and we can talk about, you know, what has caused that, we ought to be introducing foods. I think pediatricians are getting the idea. Should be introducing everything very early on when you. New System is recognizing self and non self. But at any rate, I get my well, when she was three, I bring her over to Wegmans in Rochester and and she says she wants the salmon sushi. And then she we sit down, and she picks the salmon off the top, leaving the rice carcasses behind, and just shoves the rest of it down her throat. And so she’s taking in something like two weeks worth of she had Omega three, maybe more than that, in that little thing. And she’s giggling the whole time she’s gobbling it up.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:45:44
I mean, but you guys got, you guys got ahead of it. And you know my kids, they love salmon, but you know the other sardines also good sardines, absolutely. What about I’d love for you to just touch on this. People will say, Well, I’m getting my omega three from flax and chia walnuts.

Unknown 1:46:05
Would you just speak to that? Just very

Dr. Tom Brenna 1:46:06
quickly, sure. So this is a little bit of an example of something is better than nothing, but the data say that these plant based sources of Omega three are not the same as the launching omega threes. And I’m hesitant to call them animal sources, because there are vegetarian sources, naturally, natural. Yes, it would be. It would be from the from the single cell organisms from the ocean. So we call them algae oil. There’s, there’s other other things like that, and I am well aware that there are vegetarians in the world. I won’t say vegans, but I will say vegetarians. And even this is a nuanced thing, because if you decide you don’t want to eat animals, but it’s okay to eat dairy. For instance, that’s great if you start substituting high omega six oils for your dairy fat. That’s when things really go off the rails, because dairy fat is very low in omega six naturally, so you’re getting the least suppression of the Omega three is if you eat dairy, if you start eating high omega six sunflower oil, you’re suppressing the Omega threes you’re creating up creating a metabolic demand. And when we do studies in animals, and there’s lots of them out there, and I would just remind everybody that animal studies can be very well controlled, human studies are the worst controlled studies that there are. Okay, so forgive me, I’m doing my science here. Okay? And so when people don’t talk about well, controlled studies and they only rely on human studies, you can argue about things for seven decades, like this that we’re already in the buck. But at any rate, when you feed those oils to pregnant animals, you can look at almost anything going on in the brains of the offspring, and they are screwed up.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:48:15
Not I mean, I’ve never heard that as a technical term, but screwed up is a technical term, but you make a really good point. And to bring this up for people, people have been arguing about omega threes, Omega sixes. Should women, pregnant women, eat fish? Should kids eat fish? Avoid it because of metals. And what I’m hearing you say is really two things. Number one, we got saturated fat wrong. Yes, we did. And number two, omega three fatty acids, DHA, are necessary, amazing for brain development, important for pregnant women. And conversely, Omega six is not just safe and neutral. We’re just

Dr. Tom Brenna 1:49:04
going overboard with it. That’s all the Omega six. You have to have some omega six. And so when I have these conversations with people say sometimes they just go too far, and they say omega six is terrible. No, no, it’s not terrible. You need the balance. You need this much. And you do, and you really don’t want to go, you know, above this much, it’s really not that hard. I mean, a little is absolutely required. I mean, there’s actually human studies from the early days, from the ninth from 1961 where, where kids were put on omega three, Omega six deficient diets. Babies were put on omega six deficient diets, and they knew they were mega six deficient, and they develop skin lesions, which were rapidly reversed when they put them back on to the Omega six. We can’t do that anymore. It’s probably wasn’t a great idea, but, but it served. It served a purpose, to at least answer a question way back then. And so you have to have some omega six. It’s just not so much. Not as much,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:50:02
just two final questions. The last one is a bit robust. There is a lot of discussion about ADHD, mood, omega three fatty acids. Is there real science behind the utilization of omega three fatty acids and improving ADHD?

Dr. Tom Brenna 1:50:21
So I am told I know how to read this literature. I must say that I am not as up on the ADHD literature as I would like to be. To answer you definitively, people I know who have been working on this say that there is something to it, I but I’m not going to tell you that that giving fish oil to kids with ADHD is going to solve a problem, because I don’t know that that to be the case. I don’t think it’ll make it worse.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:50:54
I agree with you. I’m hopeful that it can help. It seems to have a lot of other things. Maybe my maybe not ad shape my last question. So beyond fish, mercury, saturated fat, nutrition policy information seems to really shape our thinking, and it becomes extremely, I don’t wanna say misinterpreted, but accepted as truth, when perhaps it’s not. And this is just from my curiosity, which I’m sure that other people are thinking, Is there something else also on the horizon that you’re thinking, Okay, this hasn’t been developed enough yet, and it’s going to come out well.

Dr. Tom Brenna 1:51:44
Let me answer it this way. I think the story of precision nutrition, precision medicine, precision nutrition is an under told story. It is one that doesn’t fit as well with the research paradigms that we have, you know, ask a huge number of people what they eat and then try to make correlations and that kind of stuff, but I think that we are going to have to get towards that. So when we have these conversations about one number for everybody, like in dietary guidelines, we need to be getting much more specific about that. We need to be able to say here are life stage issues, pregnancy, lactation, brain development and maintenance of brain health are all going to be going to have demands that are different than that 50 year old man that I was complaining about, and they are, as a matter of fact, there’s just no question that they are. And then there are, I am quite sure, differences due to genetics. We really should tighten up our genetics when we look at these things, I am more or less one trick pony on my genetics, because we identified something we think is actually a causal polymorphism that that defines requirements, but I’m still working on that and and I think we have not incorporated that into our research the way we should, and into our recommendations the way we should. A lot of genetics that is not an amino acid change, so they’re really obvious changes. A lot of the genetics we do is correlative or associated? Associated? We’ve heard of the nerds. Have heard of genome wide association studies, and the A Association is a cleaned up version of the word correlation, and we really need to move that needle towards things that will be causal insofar as that word is relevant in genetics. So I think, I think we have a long way to go to do personalized nutrition. That’s where I would like to see us move the whole thing forward beyond the general recommendations for everybody,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:54:22
and I’m looking forward to our next visit. I’m sure that you’ll have more to share, and also with the genetics, but also the metabolomics of the genetics, okay?

Dr. Tom Brenna 1:54:34
Well, metabolomics and lipidomics is a subset of that is something that is near and dear to my heart. In part because it is fundamentally a chemistry thing, and it is also something that has been devilishly difficult from a laboratory point of view. You always get correlations. You always get data. It. And as my advisor used to say, and not everything is an artifact. You hope so.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:55:12
Tom Brenna, you are a huge fan. I think you do great science. You’re a great human. And just it is so wonderful to have scientists like you that don’t mind teaching, are very personable and just willing to identify the science and also speak to it. Just thank you for all the work that you’ve done for all the years behind the scenes. Thank you.

Dr. Tom Brenna 1:55:36
It’s my pleasure. Thanks

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:55:40
so good. I could keep here forever. I’ll keep you on time, really, okay, I lose track of time. I That was awesome. I could have kept going, because I’m very interested in the metabolomics.