House Call With Dr. Hyman

“Dr. Hyman, I just started your Eat Fat, Get Thin plan, and I’m feeling great, but I have a lot of fear around my upcoming social schedule,” writes a Facebook reader. “How can I maintain my newfound health during the holidays? “

I get this all-to-common yet excellent question from folks as they confront their holiday eating fears.

Eating well is not about perfection. We are human, so perfection is impossible. A better approach involves honoring your body and knowing what works best for you and just as importantly, what doesn’t work.

If I go to a party and eat tortilla chips or sugar-laden treats, I’ll definitely feel the aftereffects. I’ll feel sick, tired and bloated. Obviously, that’s not how I want to spend my time or how I want to feel.

Just like anything in life, preparation is key to staying lean and healthy during the holidays. I’ve found these 10 strategies help my patients stay on track in even the toughest social situations.

“Dr. Hyman, I’m so confused about what fats to cook with,” a reader recently wrote. “For so long I’ve been using vegetable oils because I heard they were best to cook with, and now I hear that we can cook with butter or coconut oil.”

I completely understand your confusion, especially with rampant misinformation about fats and nutrition in general. For instance, the American Heart Association (AHA) recommends adults get no more than five percent of their calories from saturated fat, urging people to use vegetable oils instead.

They also advise people to eat at least five to 10 percent of their calories from polyunsaturated fat (PUFAs). Unlike saturated fat, the AHA rationalizes the linoleic acid in PUFAs lower LDL cholesterol levels.

As a result of this and other poor nutrition advice, the average intake of this omega-6 fatty acid has risen sharply: Americans consume at least twice the amount of linoleic acid today than they did in the 1960s.

Increased consumption of omega-6 vegetable oils, which are highly inflammatory to the body and unstable, has subsequently increased inflammatory diseases. Over-consuming omega-6 fats and under-consuming omega-3 fats increases numerous health issues including cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, obesity, pre-diabetes, IBS, arthritis, asthma, cancer and autoimmune diseases.

That’s because omega-6 fats fuel your body’s inflammatory pathways and counteract the benefits and availability of anti-inflammatory omega-3 fats, creating even more inflammation.

These ubiquitous omega-6 fats like vegetable oils (soybean, safflower, sunflower, and canola oils) undo any health benefits from consuming omega-3 fats.

This misguided dietary advice to swap traditional omega-3-rich fats for inflammatory omega-6 fats, although it may have begun with good intent, has yielded disastrous results. Consuming too many omega-6 fats also increases mental illness, suicide and homicide. In fact, studies show a connection of mental health with inflammation in the brain.

We need to eliminate these highly processed vegetable oils that are so prevalent in the standard American diet. Instead, I suggest using more plant-based and animal-stable fats such as butter, coconut oil and even lard.

The First Step to Your Best Health: A Kitchen Makeover by Mark Hyman

When we decided to put together another Fat Summit, I knew that I wanted my friend Dr. Carrie Diulus to co-host with me. I’ve only known her for a year, but it feels like I’ve known her forever.

Dr. Diulus is the medical director of an amazing center in Ohio called the Crystal Clinic Spine Wellness Center. She is one of the only female board certified orthopedic spine surgeons in the country, and one of the only surgeons I have met who encourages people to choose alternatives to surgery when they can. When the decision is made to pursue surgery, she uses a Functional Medicine approach to help people prepare for and heal from the procedure. That’s the type of surgeon I want in my court!

You probably remember from the first Fat Summit that Dr. Diulus is dealing with type 1 diabetes; so, she knows a lot about fat, diet and carbs. As a special sneak preview, I wanted to share with you our new interview from The Fat Summit 2.

In this early expert talk with Dr. Diulus, you will learn:

- Types of diabetes and the differences of and treatments for each

- What a diabetic really should be eating

- The importance of ketones

If you want to see the rest of our interviews, be sure to register now for the Fat Summit 2. But hurry – the Summit begins on Monday, November 7th!

We want the facts! We want an unbiased analysis of research and we want to know what works.

That is exactly why I had to interview my friend and colleague Chris Kresser, M.S., L.Ac for my original Fat Summit. He is a globally recognized leader in the fields of ancestral health, Paleo nutrition and Functional and Integrative Medicine. Chris in an investigator and pioneer in his field. In the first Fat Summit, Chris and I got the chance to talk about personalized medicine, cholesterol, Paleo diets, vegan diets and myths around heart disease and fat. You can read the transcript here.

I wanted to dig into the research and science around meat consumption, so I invited Chris back for our upcoming Fat Summit 2: Separating Even More Fat from Fiction. We recently talked about meat and ended up discussing into how science is often for sale and how we should read all studies with a grain of salt. We also had the chance to dig deeper into fat, heart health and much more. My new interviews with Chris and over 30 other experts will air during Fat Summit 2 – November 7 to 14.

In the meantime, check out our first interview. Hope you enjoy it!

Is butter back? What is the deal with coffee? What exactly is biohacking? Does calorie counting actually work? What fats should we eat? Which fats are harmful?

My friend Dave Asprey and I had the chance to sit down this past February, during our first Fat Summit, to answer these important questions. Dave is the founder of Bulletproof and the author of the New York Times Bestseller, The Bulletproof Diet. He is also the master of optimizing the body and the brain. Our conversation was fascinating, to say the least.

After the first Fat Summit, the New York Times released an article discussing the idea of a “cursed” metabolism. I knew that I wanted to sit down again with Dave to talk about this because he is living proof that you CAN reset your metabolism. There are so many myths out there about metabolism, calorie counting, what we should eat, what to stay away from, how best to exercise and the list goes on and on.

So I brought Dave and over 30 other experts together again for The Fat Summit 2: Separating Even More Fat From Fiction so we could dive deeper into these vital subjects.

The Fat Summit 2 goes live on Monday, November 7th.

Many of you asked me how I gave up being a nice-aholic, which I talked about in a previous blog titled Is your Kindness Killing You? If you’ve been following my writing, then you know I had a bad habit of not saying what I really thought in some important relationships and then ended up suffering the consequences. I had the habit of getting into conflicts or disappointments with people and then complaining to my friends or coach about it, while not saying what I really wanted to the source of my frustration – all of which lead me to being increasingly unhappy about the whole situation! I used to have a weird experience of feeling right or justified about complaining. But this approach really took me far away from dealing with the real situation in front of me.

That’s until I learned what I could do about it. All the coaches on my coaches team – the Handel Group – teach this step by step process and help you work through your most difficult relationships with you. If you are interested in this kind of support, you can get a free 30-minute consultation on how the Handel Method works and find out what coaching program could be right for you.

The way you eat, how much you exercise, how you manage stress and your exposure to environmental toxins all contribute to things like high cholesterol, high blood pressure, high blood sugar and of course, heart disease.

The current way doctors treat heart disease is misguided because they treat the risk factors not the causes. To think we can treat heart disease by lowering cholesterol, lowering blood pressure and lowering blood sugar with medication alone is like mopping up the floor while we leave the faucet running as the sink overflows.

Instead, we need to ask what is causing the high blood pressure, high blood sugar or abnormal cholesterol in the first place. Spoiler alert: These are not medication deficiencies! We treat these problems with medication, but studies have increasingly shown that treating these risk factors has very little benefit if any at all. Research shows changing your lifestyle can be a more powerful intervention to prevent heart disease than any medication.

In February of this year, I released The Fat Summit and was so honored to interview more than 30 leading health experts about dietary fat, sugar, chronic disease and the truth about heart disease.

One of those experts was Dr. Aseem Malhotra who is truly a leading thinker in cardiology and has challenged the status quo around fat, calories and conventional wisdom around statin use. During our interview, Dr. Malhotra and I got a chance to talk about why heart disease is on the rise; the benefits of a higher fat, lower carb diet; and much more. It was such a fascinating discussion, I decided to re-share Part 1 today to keep the conversation going.

I am excited to announce that the conversation on fat is just beginning! Dr. Malhotra and 30+ other experts have come together again to continue our discussion of the fat we eat, the fat on our bodies, chronic disease, and definitely a lot more about heart health. I hope you enjoy Part 1 of my conversation with Dr. Malhotra, and to see Part 2 (plus more interviews), sign up for The Fat Summit 2: Separating Even More Fat From Fiction. It starts November 7th, and I hope to see you there!

I once had a fear of fat while growing up. I subscribed to the antiquated “all calories are the same” myth, a mentality that demonizes fat. After all, eating fat makes you fat, right? End of story.

From a caloric perspective, that makes sense. Dietary fat contains nine calories per gram, versus the four calories per gram for carbs and protein. If you eat less fat, you will eat fewer calories, and you will lose weight – easy and done, right?

Unfortunately, that theory doesn’t work for many reasons. The theory that all calories have the same impact on your weight and metabolism remains one of the most persistent nutrition myths that keep us fat and sick.

Earlier this year, I brought together some of my favorite doctors, scientists, researchers and health experts to discuss the idea that food is information and that the information in fat is actually beneficial for our health, despite what we’ve been told for decades. My goals for the original Fat Summit were to clear up the confusion around this misunderstood nutrient and prove that it has a place in our diets.

I was really lucky to have Dr. Christiane Northrup join the Fat Summit and share her expertise on women’s health, hormonal health, cholesterol and the idea that food is information and that food is medicine. It was such a great interview that I wanted to share it with you, and use this opportunity to announce that the conversation about fat is just beginning!

Creating The Fat Summit was one of the highlights of my career! I enjoyed delving into this subject with all of the experts and found that we were only scratching the surface. So, I decided to continue the conversation and launch The Fat Summit 2: Separating Even More Fat from Fiction.

Check out my talk with Christiane from the first Fat Summit, and if you find it as compelling as I do, then you will for sure want to hear more about what it takes to get healthy and stay healthy. Don’t miss out – continue to hear these amazing conversations with world-renowned experts by registering for the Fat Summit 2.

I am so excited to announce to that we are launching The Fat Summit 2: Separating Even More Fat from Fiction this coming November.

During the first Fat Summit, we brought together physicians, health experts, researchers, journalists and scientists to tell us the truth about what makes us sick and fat, and guess what? It’s not the fat that is the culprit!

We dove deep into subjects like cholesterol, brain health, heart disease, hormones and so much more, but the conversation was only just beginning, which is why we decided to bring you The Fat Summit 2. We are bringing back some of our favorite experts and introducing some new ones, too.

Before we launch this new summit, we want to take you back to some of the highlights from the original summit. So, over the next five weeks, I’ll be sharing some of the amazing conversations we had to give you the skinny on fat.

This week, I’m sharing one of my favorite interviews with Dr. David Ludwig. For 20 years, Dr. Ludwig has conducted basic and clinical research into novel dietary approaches for obesity, diabetes and heart disease. And, he was one of the greatest sources of inspiration for my book, Eat Fat, Get Thin.

Let’s keep this conversation about fat going. Do you have any questions or comments about dietary fat? Comment on my Facebook page.

Be sure to sign up for the Fat Summit 2 here. It all starts on Monday, November 7th!