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Protect Your Arteries from Saturated Fat with These Foods

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If you’re going to have something unhealthy, is there anything you can eat with it to help mitigate the damage it may cause? If you compare the artery function of vegetarians and meat-eaters, the healthy ability of arteries to dilate and let more blood flow is significantly better among those eating a vegetarian diet. And not just by a little—we’re talking four times better, as you can see below and at 0:24 in my video Foods to Help Protect Your Arteries from Saturated Fat . Vegetarians do tend to be younger, smoke less, be slimmer, and have lower rates of diabetes, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and heart disease. But the researchers controlled for all that and only let healthy nonsmokers into the study. They also recruited a group of meat eaters who were similarly slim, with comparable blood pressure and nearly identical cholesterol levels. Yet the really healthy cohort of omnivores still got their arteries handed to them by the vegetarians, and the longer someone was me...
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Can Exercise Counteract a High-Fat Meal?

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There is a window of time in which sufficient physical activity can help mediate some of the damage caused by eating an unhealthy meal. I’ve previously discussed studies that show a single meal high in saturated fat can impair artery function in men, as measured in the arm, but what is more concerning is blood flow to the wall of the heart. Researchers randomized men to eat either a high-fat meal that was more than 60% fat, half of it saturated, with more than an egg’s worth of cholesterol, or a low-fat meal that was mostly carbs, less than 10% fat, and had 50 times less cholesterol. Below and at 0:47 in my video Exercising to Protect Your Arteries from Fast Food , you can see a Doppler recording of the left anterior descending coronary artery, known as the widow-maker, before the high-fat meal (top). Its nice strong signal was squeezed down within hours after eating; the image (bottom) was taken five hours after the high-fat meal. The coronary flow reserve decreased after a sin...
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How a Single Meal Can Cripple Your Arteries and Lungs

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What happens within hours of eating a high-fat meal? We are only as old as our arteries. What can we do to preserve arterial function as we age? A poor diet and sedentary behavior can lead to adverse aging processes, like impairment of the little power plants in our cells, which can result in free radical formation, oxidative stress, and inflammation, which lead to the artery dysfunction that can end in cardiovascular disease that ends us. In a series of videos I did about a decade ago, I discussed landmark research showing that a single high-fat meal could cripple artery function within hours of consumption, compared to no change with a low-fat meal, as you can see below and at 1:04 in my video Saturated Fat Causes Artery and Lung Inflammation . In the study, the high-fat meal that so crippled artery function included Sausage and Egg McMuffins from McDonald’s. How do we know the sausage, egg, or cheese was to blame? What about the crappy carbohydrates in the biscuits or somethi...
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What Is the Best Poop Position?

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The Squatty Potty is put to the test. Previously, I’ve talked about the potential efficacy of prunes and dried figs to keep us regular. What influence does body position have on defecation? While squatting continues to be the traditional position for people in Asia and Africa, Westerners have become accustomed to sitting on toilet seats. When we do that, we sit upright, and our poop is forced to make a nearly 90-degree turn, the “anorectal angle,” which you can see below and at 0:37 in my video The Best Poop Position for Constipation . Now, that’s a good thing in terms of keeping us from pooping our pants every time we sit down. But when it comes to doing our business, toilet posture defeats the purpose of our body’s brilliant design—like trying to drive a car without releasing the parking brake. Yet, many physicians are hesitant to discuss “such an unmentionable bodily function,” or they may just be ignorant. Doctors don’t know squat. Of course, this is coming from someone who ow...
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Can Ultra-Processed Foods Be Fixed by Tweaking Their Nutrients?

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What happened when ultra-processed foods were matched for calories, sugar, fat, and fiber content in the first randomized controlled trial? In the United States, “junk food” is often used to describe less-healthy foods, like candy, ice cream, and chips, but there isn’t a consistent definition, so nutrition researchers came up with the concept of ultra-processed . The term “ultra-processed food”—if you want to call it that— describes industrial formulations that are typically seen in those long list of ingredients, which, besides salt, sugar, and fat, aren’t typically found in any cookbook, like various flavors, sweeteners, colors, emulsifiers, and other additives used to imitate real foods or to hide undesirable qualities of the final product. This roughly corresponds to my idea of “red light foods” in my traffic light system, in which, ideally, we should maximize intake of green light foods, minimize yellow light foods, and avoid red light foods. Indeed, most of what people eat a...
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How the Fight to Ban Trans Fat Was Won

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What was the secret to the public health community’s triumph when past attempts to regulate the food industry failed? There are three broad approaches to mediating the ruin of risky choices: inform people (like using labeling), nudge people (for example, by offering financial incentives), or directly intervene to make the activity less harmful. Which do you think prevented more car fatalities: mandating driver education, labeling cars about crash risk, or removing the human element altogether by just making sure airbags are installed? There are public education nutrition campaigns, ranging from “sugar pack” ads on public transit that inform consumers about the amount of sugar in soft drinks to “Hot Dogs Cause Butt Cancer” billboards that educate about the link between processed meat and colorectal cancer, as shown here and at 0:52 in my video How We Won the Fight to Ban Trans Fat . But is there a way to make products nutritionally safer in the first place? The ban on trans fats...
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Why Healthy Fast-Food Menu Options Can Backfire

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Adding a healthy option can actually drive people to make even worse choices, thanks to a mind-blowing glitch of human psychology. In 2017, and to much fanfare, menu labeling for calorie counts began to be mandated in national chain restaurants. Consumers should have the information needed to make healthy food choices outside the home, right? It makes sense that caloric information on menus will help people limit their food intake to stay within their daily energy needs. But it didn’t work. It turns out calorie labels are not effective, shaving off an average of eight insignificant calories per meal. You could have totally predicted that. Why? Just as one might divine the value of front-of-pack traffic light labeling from the ferocity of the industry response against it, one could probably gauge the futility of calorie labeling by the ease with which some regulations have been passed. McDonald’s voluntarily started publishing calorie information nationally back in 2012 after a...
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