AUTOIMMUNE THRIVER

Why Fat is Necessary Plus More Healthy Eating Myths and Misunderstandings Exposed

Discover why you need to be metabolically flexible to thrive.

“We can’t even overcome a pain response without good fatty acid synthesis. And our cells are starving.”~Dr. Nasha Winters

Enjoy this excerpt from Diet and Health: Myths and Misunderstandings Exposed; The Autoimmune Hour Show’s Interview #167 with Dr. Nasha Winters, ND, FABNO, L.Ac, Dipl.OM. Dr. Winters is the co-author of ‘The Metabolic Approach to Cancer and a pioneer in integrative medicine.

SHARON SAYLER: I’m glad research is finally paying attention to the fact that it’s the “what we eat.” When I stray from “my best foods,” the ones where I feel best, I am shocked at how fast I feel poorly.

DR. NASHA WINTERS: Exactly! And that segues into the third part of this discussion of the common denominator. The common denominator of a healthy diet across the board today allows you to be metabolically flexible. And what I mean by that is be a “hybrid [energy] burning engine.”

Today, [the media] call this a “low-carb diet.” You, guys, this is the normal carb diet.

When we think we are eating low carbs, it’s not low carb. A normal carb diet until about the 1850s was consuming an average of 50 to 75 grams total carb per person. Today, it is 125 grams at least.

That’s a very high-carb diet, and we’re calling that “low carb” today.

Most people have had their carbs by breakfast. Everyone thinks that oatmeal is good with dried cranberries or dried raisins. Today, it’s hard even to find [breakfast items] not additionally sweetened. And then, we have our glass of OJ or maybe our whole-grain toast and perhaps a banana with some low-fat yogurt.

That whole meal is one giant sugar bomb ─ all of it!

If you put that into my fitness chronometer, that was probably about 300 grams of carbohydrates in what I just listed. That’s more than three days’ worth of sugar by the end of breakfast.

I was just at a cancer conference, and I fasted through the whole weekend because it was sugar on sugar on sugar. And everyone thought they were eating a very healthful diet.

So it’s fascinating. When people talk about a ketogenic diet, they think of it as a fad.

SHARON: You read minds! That’s where I was going with my question because “keto” is all over social media. What is keto and or ketogenic?

DR. NASHA: Let’s get really simple here. If you are functioning metabolically appropriately ─ meaning, how your mitochondria need to thrive (which are the powerhouses of your body) ─ you should be able to finish your last meal in the evening and have your next meal between 12 and 16 hours later.

That amount of time is the appropriate window of time to wait to have a healthy fast (so overnight through your sleeping time as well). You should be naturally in a ketogenic state. You should be showing trace ketones.

And that’s not altering your diet in any shape or form. That is just normal.

We’ve functioned as a hybrid engine since the beginning of time. We always have. At different times in our ancestry, we would go into deep states of ketosis when food was unavailable at certain times and seasons of the year and the amount of energy we had to put out to find our food or hunt our food.

And we needed that dual fuel source to stay alive and aware so that we could find our next meal. Our metabolically flexible place — that’s a natural state of being.

SHARON: This rest period where you say a healthy person should be able to go about 12 to 16 hours… I’ve heard from others females are more along the lines of the 12 hours and males are more along the line of the 16 hours. Is that true?

DR. NASHA: It’s not black or white. It’s not fact or not fact. There are variations because it depends on a lot of factors. It depends on your output of energy. It depends on your stress level ─ that’s a key.

It depends on your hormonal balance. It depends on your sleep cycle. It depends on how much blue light you’re exposed to ─ that’s why I’m wearing my blue-light blocking glasses when I’m on camera at certain times of the day.

It depends on your epigenetics. It depends on a lot of factors that help determine the most appropriate timing of your meals. So there isn’t a “one size fits all.”

When we talk about ketogenic, there are times and places where we use it like a sword or a scalpel, like an absolute therapeutic approach to create a metabolic shift and have the desired outcome.

Whenever people ask me, “Can you be on a ketogenic diet all the time forever?” You can absolutely thrive with that, but you don’t need to. We never did ancestrally.

Now, if I’m working with you and you’re dealing with a very aggressive [problem] ─ such as brain tumors. Most of my brain tumor patients will be on a ketogenic diet for the duration of their life.

And, hopefully, it’s a very long life because it [the brain] is a very sensitive organ to metabolic instability; and ketones keep things very smooth in the system.

If I have someone who has diabetes or obesity, or other issues, it can be a potent tool to push those conditions back as well.

But, most of the time, most of us, if we finish our last meal and get up in the morning and have our next meal at a nice delay ─ 12 to 16 hours ─ most of us will be that hybrid engine we were talking about….

All those factors we wove in will determine how well a person will do.

So a clue to me if somebody’s metabolic inflexible is they can’t comfortably go more than four hours without a meal. If people tell me they get the “hangries,” and they get shaky, confused, irritable, that tells me they’re metabolically unstable.

If they have any personal or family history of polycystic ovary syndrome, obesity, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, prediabetes, pancreatitis, pancreatic cancer, that is also just a big red flag for metabolic instability.

Those are the people who will do well to push back their carbohydrate intake drastically and make their only carbs be beautiful leafy green veggies. That’s really the key there.

And then, the people who say, “Oh, keto is bad,” again, they’re taking it in as a particular fad or diet. Just remember, this has been a natural part of our physiology since the beginning of humankind.

We started using a ketogenic diet therapeutically in the 1920s at Harvard for epilepsy. Today, it’s still the best treatment for epilepsy. And that also has led to a lot of core research around using it for any neurological disorder of any kind. And the fastest-growing disease process in the western world today is neurological disease.

We’re dismantling our brains. Why?

It’s because we’ve been on a fat-free kick for decades.

SHARON: Okay, that got my attention — dismantling? Our brains…?

DR. NASHA: Yes, we’re just fatheads. Those sheaths that wrap around our nerves are a hundred percent fat. And we’ve been putting ourselves on low-fat, fat-free diets for a long time.

And what did we do to offset that?

We kicked up the sugar. We’ve been frying our brains and nerves for decades now and metabolically throwing us off — so most people will not be in ketosis if they go 12 to 16 hours of fasting.

If that isn’t enough, you have to get them into a state of high fat, super low carbohydrate, and even low protein intake to push them back into being that dual-engine again.

Once they adopt, then they easily go back and forth as needed. It’s a powerful way to take you back to a natural state where we’ve always been as human beings.

SHARON: A question about fat, though, we’ve been told to be terrified of fats. What’s good fat and what’s bad fat?

DR. NASHA: Let’s keep it simple. We’ve all been very fat-phobic for a very long time.

Again, our nerves, our nervous system, our brain can’t function without it. Our immune system is also dependent on fatty acids synthesis.

We can’t even overcome a pain response without good fatty acid synthesis. And our cells are starving.

We’re really overfed and undernourished on the majority of the planet today.

So when I think of a really good fat that’s kind of across the board and seemingly safe for all population, think “olive oil.” But real olive oil, because most of the stuff we buy in the grocery store is cut with canola and other cheap omega-6 high-fat vegetable plant oils. Make sure it’s a hundred percent olive oil. That is super good for the membranes of your cells to function correctly. That’s a really good one.

Another really good one is the macadamia nut oils and the hazelnut oils. These are oils that are higher in the omega-3s versus the omega-6s than many other seeds and nuts. Avocado and avocado oil ─ fabulous oil! Coconut oil ─ those are also really key.

I have my folks eat a bunch of olives, a lot of coconut, and unsweetened dried coconut flakes. These are great snacks to have.

SHARON: Is eating an avocado or whole hazelnuts the same way to get fats as having the oil? Maybe we get a little fiber in there…?

DR. NASHA: Exactly ─ a little fiber, but there are carbohydrates in some of those. So you don’t want to go too overboard on them. But, yes, absolutely!

Get the whole plant into your body.

It’s the same thing when it comes to animal fats. For instance, eggs ─ we’ve gotten into this place where we’re just doing our egg whites. If you’re still doing egg white omelets and whatnot, you’re getting a lot more oxidative damage that way. You need that yolk. You need the fats to soothe the inflammation that the pure albumin protein ─ which is the white ─ you need that fat.

The cholesterol is what’s protective.

A quick lesson to your listeners: Cholesterol is the mother hormone. Out of cholesterol, we make our neurotransmitters, and we make all of our sex hormones. How you think and feel is based on fat.

We bastardize cholesterol as well. And so, when we get scared of cholesterol, that’s, most often, the last of our worries. Again, the research has come around full circle to say that we should worry less about cholesterol and much more about inflammation and sugar intake.

That’s key! Key, key here! Inflammation and sugar intake.

But when it comes to good fats, the other things we’ve [erroneously] pulled out are ghee and butter. These are hugely powerful fats.

Historically, we got all of our fat before we went on our fat-free craze was from animal fat ─ lard, tallow. Our parents and our grandparents and great grandparents ─ I remember the drippings, the little container under the sink that captured every little dripping, the base of everything they baked, everything cooked, everything fried was that oil over and over again.

SHARON: Though, I remember that my grandparents worked more physical labor than I do now.

DR. NASHA: Americans sit an average of 20 hours a day. We’re either sleeping or sitting. Actually, it’s probably a bit more than that. We’re also outside less than fifteen minutes a day. We are not living the lifestyle that our parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and so on were living.

All of these factors come in. So when people get really weird and dogmatic and militant about which is the right diet, it’s so much more than that. There are even researchers out there who say that it’s not even so much about what you eat, although it does matter, I promise you that; it’s when you eat.

If you’re eating late at night when your body should be in the healing-processing-repair mode and you’re trying to digest at that time, that will cause some harm to your microbiome and how you digest those nutrients.

It’s much more complex than this diet is good, and this diet is bad. Ultimately, stick with real food and plant-based food. And if you’re going to have animal protein, you’ve got to make sure it is super clean.

First of all, the myth around the ketogenic diet is that it’s a high-protein diet. In fact, it’s not. It’s, in fact, a low-protein diet.

It’s a high-fat diet. The protein in our country today ─ in the west ─ tends to be a lot of protein, and you don’t have to have that much protein to rebuild the tissues. So this shouldn’t be a meat-based diet for anybody.

SHARON: I think people get confused on what is a lot of protein and what isn’t a lot of meat protein. We go into a restaurant, and there are ounces and ounces — slabs of meat offered to you. What is the standard serving that you suggest is appropriate if you’re going to eat animal protein?

DR. NASHA: A good general sense is if you’re not an uber hardcore athlete, you don’t need more than 5.8 grams of protein per kilogram.

Lean body mass ─ that’s what we’re leading to.

To simplify this, most women, let’s say, with an average of 150 pounds, are likely getting about 50 grams of protein a day, and men may be upward….

To get a sense of that, a serving, a few ounces, or a few grams of meat would be about the size of a deck of cards.

Whether that’s fish and there’s nothing better than the omega-3s in fish, anchovies, and sardines, good quality Alaskan salmon, things like that have super high-quality fats that we’re all very deficient in.

It’s a smaller piece of salmon or a little piece of free-range chicken breast. I’m just trying to give people ideas that even when I say “meat,” it’s fish, chicken, turkey, poultry, eggs, and dairy. I’m just lumping it all together ─ animal protein.

I work with many folks who are vegetarian and going on a low carb or a keto diet or intermittent fasting, low carbohydrate diet. We can do this very well if you bring eggs and butter on board. You can do a lot with that to get your protein needs and your fat needs met.

And then, of course, all those fats we talked about earlier are easy to access, no matter if you are eating meats or omnivore or a vegetarian or a vegan. Those fats are all “user-friendly” across the board.

SHARON: There’s another fad out there — the acid-alkaline diet — including drinking things like apple cider vinegar. Is it good for you? “Can we change the pH of our body, and does it even matter?”

DR. NASHA: This is such a good question because my co-author Jess Higgins Kelley and I try to debunk this myth of pushing the body into an alkaline state.

First of all, different tissues of our body at different times of the day and night need to have a different level of acidity and alkalinity to be at their most efficient and effective. So there’s no “the body needs to be alkaline” or “the body needs to be acidic.” That’s a myth in and of itself.

If you push yourself too hard by going overzealous with alkaline water, it’s something that can actually cause damage there. So alkalosis is just as bad as acidosis. So be careful!

Here’s the reality. It is very hard to push yourself in either direction, especially into the alkaline, because we have so many inner signals that are saying, “Oops, the pH is too high or too low.” It’s constantly adjusting to that equilibrium.

This is the amazing thing about our body.

SHARON: Thank you, Dr. Nasha! I agree! Our bodies are the most fantastic healing machine once we give them the right things it needs to heal.

This short Q&A is from The Autoimmune Hour’s show #167: Diet and Health: Myths and Misunderstandings Exposed with Dr. Nasha Winters. The above has been lightly edited for written clarity and length.

The information provided on UnderstandingAutoimmune.com, Life Interrupted Radio.com, and The Autoimmune Hour and it’s media and social media outlets is for educational purposes only. Always seek sound medical, legal and professional advice before beginning any health or medical information.

If you’d love to know how your body language is being judged, I have a gift for you: “Five Things To Focus On To Help You Feel Better When You Have An Autoimmune Condition” e-book (outside Medium link). Some might surprise you! Enjoy!

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In the complete interview, Dr. Nasha Winters answers food, nutrition, and diet questions we’ve received from our Understanding Autoimmune community. She will help us unwind conflicting nutritional information, especially around healing from an autoimmune condition…. The questions included: • What is a healthy diet when you have autoimmune? • What is metabolically flexible, and should we aim for it? • What is ‘keto,’ and is it a fad? • Is filtered water worth it? • Raw vs. cooked? • Can we change the PH of our body, and does it even matter? And did I hear her say I can have a bit of butter again? Plus so much more….

More About Dr. Nasha Winters, ND, FABNO, L.Ac, Dipl.OM: She is the co-author of ‘The Metabolic Approach to Cancer. And, she is a walking encyclopedia of integrative medicine and a visionary in diet and health. With more than 25 years of experience in the healthcare industry, she has emerged as one of the thought leaders in personalized precision medicine. Learn more about Dr. Nasha at https://www.drnasha.com/

COMPLETE INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS:

What’s fake news and what’s real news around our diet and the confusion about different kinds of diet, another of Sharon’s all-time favorite guests, Dr. Nasha Winters, will share her take on it.

0:04:49.7 Being a big advocate of the ketogenic diet, Dr. Nasha explains clearly that it’s not a fad but that this has been around since the beginning of humankind. She goes to enumerate the common denominators of a healthy diet: that it’s eating natural foods that are in season and locally available whenever possible; that it’s a plant-based diet; and that it’s a diet that allows you to be metabolically flexible ─ meaning, you can be a “hybrid burning engine.”

0:21:38.3 At this point, Sharon asks her, “What’s a good fat and what’s a bad fat?” And she tells us not to get scared of cholesterol because research says that we should worry less about cholesterol and much more about inflammation and sugar intake. She talks about the myth that the ketogenic diet is a high-protein diet. And it’s not. It’s a high-fat diet.

0:30:15.9 When asked about changing our body’s pH and if it matters, Dr. Nasha says that she and her co-author Jess Higgins Kelley have been trying to defunct this myth of pushing the body into an alkaline state, and she explains why.

0:34:27.3 During the show’s last ten minutes, they talked about “cooked or raw,” eating seasonally and locally, water filters, bone broth, blue blockers ─ and, of course, Dr. Nasha’s book, social media pages, and website.