This solo episode reframes how we think about fast food and junk food, revealing that the real danger is not the meat but the overwhelming proportion of plant-derived ingredients. A typical fast food meal, when broken down by calories, is over 90% plant-based, meaning the standard Western diet is functionally a hyper-vegetarian diet loaded with refined carbs, seed oils, and sugars. This perspective challenges the mainstream narrative that blames dietary fat and meat for chronic illness.
The episode draws on human clinical trials, including the Minnesota Coronary Experiment with nearly 10,000 participants, to show that replacing animal fats with polyunsaturated vegetable oils increased deaths from heart attacks and strokes in a dose-dependent relationship. Replicated animal studies further link seed oils to skin cancer development, while research by Dr. Robert Lustig connects fructose to diabetes, metabolic syndrome, and fatty liver disease. Given that over 90% of diseases treated today are non-communicable and diet-driven, these findings carry serious implications for long-term health and children's development.
Key Takeaways
- A typical fast food meal derives over 90% of its calories from plant-based sources such as refined carb buns, seed oil sauces, deep-fried potato products, and sugary drinks, making it functionally a hyper-vegetarian diet rather than a meat-heavy one.
- Replace seed oils and polyunsaturated fats (high in linoleic acid) with saturated animal fats: the Minnesota Coronary Experiment showed that substituting animal fats with vegetable oils lowered LDL but increased heart attack and stroke deaths in a dose-dependent relationship across nearly 10,000 participants.
- Avoid dietary fructose from sugars found in fast food drinks and sauces, as Dr. Robert Lustig's research links it directly to diabetes, metabolic syndrome, and fatty liver disease, all of which can be reversed by removing fructose from the diet.
- Prioritize whole animal foods, especially fatty meat, to meet children's full nutritional requirements for physical and mental development, since nutrient deficiencies from plant-heavy or processed diets can prevent kids from reaching their genetic potential in growth and cognitive performance.
- Fast Food Is Actually a Plant-Based Diet: Why Meat Is the Saving Grace
- Standard American Diet Is Hyper-Vegetarian: 70%+ Calories From Plants
- Seed Oils and Polyunsaturated Fats Linked to Skin Cancer and Heart Disease
- Minnesota Coronary Experiment: Vegetable Oils Increased Heart Attack Deaths
- Fructose, Sugar, and Processed Carbs Drive Diabetes, Fatty Liver, and Metabolic Syndrome
- Nutrient Deficiency From Junk Food Harms Kids' Development and Causes Chronic Disease
This is an auto-generated transcript from YouTube and may contain errors or inaccuracies.
So, could your diet be leading to a slow death? Well, if you're eating a lot of processed food and junk food, then the answer could be yes. But, before I get to that, I just want to let you guys know about an event I'll be at in Bozeman, Montana for a July 4th with Bella Steak and Butter Gal, that if you can make it, will be a great time. So, there's going to be fireworks, a panel, and other sorts of events that you can take part in. And of course, we're all going to be there interacting and hanging out with people. And obviously, there's going to be a lot of meat, uh specifically from McCafferty Ranch right there in Montana. From what I've heard, it's absolutely fantastic. So, I'm really looking forward to that as well. There will be people such as myself, obviously Bella, Dr. Baker, and my fiancee L, and many others. So, if you're able to make it down, it would be great to see you there. And you can get your tickets at sbg.events, and hopefully see you there. If you think about fast food options, these are things like burgers and fries and drinks and things like that. And people focus on the meat, and they say, "Well, this fatty meat that can be bad for you, and that's why you shouldn't eat junk food, fast food, things like that." But, that's completely backwards. The thing is is that the meat that's in there is probably the only saving grace in the entire operation. The majority of that meal is actually plant-based. If you think about it, you have tiny little meat patties that are probably only a couple of ounces, depending on what you've ordered. And then it has processed buns with refined carbohydrates. It's got sugary sauces filled with seed oils. And then lettuce, tomatoes, and maybe some pickles. And then you've got nightshades such as potatoes deep fried in seed oils. They used to be deep fried in trans fats, but those seed oils can actually convert into trans fats and also become rancid and horrible for you as well. Then you have a sugary drink. So, if you think about it, a fast food meal is actually nearly vegan. If you just take out that little sliver of meat, now it is vegan. So, over 90% of those calories are typically from plants. So, this is a plant-based processed food diet and can be very, very harmful to you. It's strange for people to think about that that a fast food meal might be actually vegetarian or even practically vegan. But, the definition of a hypercarnivore is any animal that consumes over 70% calories from meat, such as a polar bear or a shark. And so, having over 70% calories from plants is by definition not only vegetarian, but hyper-vegetarian and practically vegan. So, if your calories are over 90% plant-based, then this is a very, very strongly plant-based diet. The average calories consumed in America are actually over 70% calories from plants. Most of that from carbohydrates. And then filling in the gaps with seed oils and plant oils, plant fats, and things like that. So, the standard Western diet, standard American diet, is actually a plant-based diet. Not only that, it's a hyper-vegetarian diet. So, things like seed oils, sugars, processed carbs, deep-fried oils, sugary drinks, these sorts of things, these make up the mainstay of fast food, and these things are highly dangerous to your body and to your health for a number of different reasons. And they also are just devoid of the essential nutrients that you need, and that is something that people don't think about nearly as much as they should. Just the lack and absence of appropriate nutrients, such as those you find in fatty meat, can cause serious harm. So, realistically, the meat has nothing to do with why fast food is harmful. Again, that's the only saving grace and redeeming factor in these meals, which is why many people, if they go to fast food, they don't even bother with all the bun, the drinks, and the fries. They just get stacks of the meat patties all on their own. And the quality of meat there can't actually be good. It depends on where you're going. I know of several fast food places that use grass-fed finished hamburger meat. It's just all the other stuff they add on to it is the problem. And I've even spoken to ranchers that work for McDonald's for instance, and McDonald's is very very careful on how they source their ingredients so that they get the exact grade and quality of product that they want. So, I've spoken to ranchers that say they get quality control checks by McDonald's all the time. They're sort of frustrated by it because they're sort of always under the thumb of McDonald's. And to me, I was like, great because I at least know that there are good quality standards for the meat going into the product. I just wish that McDonald's and other fast food chains had as much cognizance over the quality of the rest of the meal as they did for the quality of the beef that they're getting. So, highly processed foods and ultra-processed foods have consistently shown strong associations with elevated chronic disease, poor developmental outcomes and learning outcomes, and performance outcomes for kids. These highly refined and processed carbs, sugars, seed oils have all been associated with or even shown to cause harm in human randomized control trials in the past. And these make up the vast majority of the foods found in fast food. We have studies in hairless mice that has been replicated multiple times over the decades that has shown when you have two groups of hairless mice that are given the same food, but they just have different fat sources, either polyunsaturated fats which we were told that super healthy for us, or saturated fats which which were told are harmful to us, which we know that they are not because we have umbrella reviews and systematic reviews looking at randomized control trials and meta-analyses of randomized control trials published in the top cardiology journal in the world, the Journal of the American College of Cardiology in 2020, that increased saturated fat consumption is actually protective against having a stroke and does not increase your risk of heart disease. So, the vilified saturated fat in the study with mice actually showed protection against getting skin cancer. They take these hairless mice, they give them the same food except for the different fats, and then they expose them to the same amount of UV light radiation exposure. And it was only the mice that had the polyunsaturated fatty acids or seed oils, like in many cases corn oil, that actually developed skin cancer. And in the saturated fat group, oftentimes, since they saw no increase in skin cancer, they actually swapped the diet because maybe there was something wrong with the mice, put them on the polyunsaturated fat diet, and all of a sudden they started developing cancers as well. This same experiment has been replicated at least five times. I've found numerous examples of these replicated data. They can use all sorts of different kinds of saturated fats as well. They've used animal fats, tallow, things like that, but they've even just hydrogenated vegetable oil or hydrogenated the corn oil. So, the same corn oil that was associated with increased cancer in the mice studies, they then just hydrogenated that, meaning that they turned it into a saturated fat. So, it was saturated corn oil instead of polyunsaturated corn oil. And the saturated corn oil, again, the mice didn't develop skin cancers. So, this unstable multi-double bond structures of these polyunsaturated fats seems to be unstable and unhealthy when we're trying to rebuild and regrow tissue. We have these unhealthy fats that may cause increased oxidative stress and DNA damage, mitochondrial damage and dysfunction and actually increase your risk of cancer at least in these studies. In human trials, we have things such as the Minnesota coronary experiment and the Sydney heart trial which replicated this the Minnesota coronary experiment. They showed that when you replace animal fats with polyunsaturated vegetable oils and margarine that yes indeed LDL did decrease, but that more people died of heart attacks and strokes as a result in a dose-dependent relationship. Meaning the lower the LDL went, the more people died of heart attacks and strokes. And then people say, "Well, this is just because those vegetable oils were high in linoleic acid." What's your What What's your point? That's exactly what we're saying. Things like linoleic acid, things like like seed oils which are very high in linoleic acid cause harm. And in this case, we're showing an experimental data set in humans in a randomized controlled double-blinded placebo trial with nearly 10,000 participants in the Minnesota coronary experiment, for example, that this actually caused harm. So, just replacing animal fats with vegetable oils and polyunsaturated fats caused harm in experimental human data sets. And those are the majority of the fats that you'll find in fast food. Then Dr. Lustig from UCSF he's written multiple books and over a dozen studies and papers showing how harmful fructose from sugar actually is on the human body, how it can lead to diabetes, metabolic syndrome, fatty liver disease, and how this can actually be reversible when you remove fructose. And we have thousands of randomized controlled trials in humans and even more in animals showing the benefits of ketogenic diets where you remove all carbohydrates. And again, the majority of the calories coming from fast food are from processed carbs and sugars. And then of course you have all the artificial additives, preservatives, and other sorts of texture modifiers and gums and things like that that change the sort of the mouthfeel and texture of these foods and help preserve them that are associated with harmful outcomes. The best you can say about these things is that we haven't seen them in the diet long enough to see if they are safe long term or if they cause harm long term, but many of them are actually associated with harmful outcomes. And so at worse, these could be causing harm as well. So take home is just eat whole foods, avoid excess carbs, be ketogenic if you can, and don't be afraid of meat because this is the nutrition that we're designed to eat and thrive on. And a major issue with junk food or plant-based alternatives or just the standard diet in general is that it is very much devoid of these essential nutrients that can only be found in meat and animal fat. And without those, you and your kids are not going to do as well as you could or should, and especially for your kids' development, both mentally and physically, it is essential that they get the full body of nutrients that they require, not just some in the background and not just some from supplements. They need full real nutrition or else they will not develop to their genetic potential and they won't be able to excel in the ways that they normally would. When you consider the fact that over 90% of the diseases that we treat nowadays as doctors are these non-communicable chronic diseases that can be fully reversible or preventable by dietary changes and that nearly 90% of the deaths being caused in Western countries and 74% of deaths worldwide are from these non-communicable chronic diseases. What you choose to eat or don't eat can actually prove fatal. Maybe not today, but it can degrade your body and break you down, and you can get sick over time and be unwell for years or even decades and lose years and decades off your life. So, think about this for you and your kids, and don't take it for granted. Thank you very much.