What If Fat Isn't The Enemy?

[00:00:00] Speaker A: We were told that fat makes you fat, clogs your arteries, and will kill you. But what if that was the biggest lie we've ever been told? [00:00:10] Speaker B: From government guidelines to grocery store shelves, Big Food and Big Pharma teamed up to replace natural fats. And we've been paying the price ever since. [00:00:21] Speaker A: In this episode, we want to break down how we got here and where we're going and how real farmers are actually leading the rebellion in bringing back fat into our diets. Welcome to the Dust or Mud podcast, episode number 123. Hi, I'm Shelly. [00:00:39] Speaker B: I'm Rich. [00:00:40] Speaker A: Hey. We like to talk about food freedom and farming, and today we're going to talk about food and freedom. And our freedom was taken from us back in about the 1950s. And we'll get to that by lying to us and telling us that real food is bad for us. [00:00:55] Speaker B: Yeah. In 2019, we transitioned away from the standard American diet and started a journey into the ketogenic diet, Carnivore, Basically something else other than the lies that we've been told. So we've been doing that for six and a half years now, and we have never been healthier, never felt better. We want to talk to you guys about where fat comes into that whole equation. [00:01:23] Speaker A: One of the things that I like to say to my kids and say all the time is eat things that, you know, they. They are what they always were. And we're going to get to that in episode. In episode, huh? In. In section five here, when we talk about how you can bring real food back into your diet. And that's going to be the key to, you know, getting us back healthy and creating more longevity. Look, we're living to be older now, but, you know, our lifespan has increased, but has our health span, because it's not a secret. The American Standard Diet has, at the American standard waistline and a lot of diabetes and a lot of really bad chronic health problems. But I think we can reverse that, actually. We know we can. [00:02:10] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. So let's start section one and look at just a quick journey back into history. So say the 1900s and really anything before that. [00:02:22] Speaker A: Okay. [00:02:23] Speaker B: From whenever history begins. [00:02:25] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:02:26] Speaker B: Through people were eating food through the 1900s, at least. [00:02:29] Speaker A: Okay. [00:02:31] Speaker B: We ate butter, lard, ghee, tallow, duck fat, like olive oil. You know, the kinds of fats that exist in nature, they're not. They're not made fats. [00:02:49] Speaker A: Okay. [00:02:49] Speaker B: There was no chemistry experiment involved other than adding heat. Right. You add heat to pig fat, and now it's lard. There's no extrusion and pressing and oxidizing and deodorizing and. Right. So like for all of history, we. [00:03:08] Speaker A: Have eaten natural fats, but people didn't live as long. But it wasn't because of their food, was it? No, no, but people will say that. Well, people died younger, but it was, we all know that it was due to other things, whether it be the like, we didn't have antibiotics, for gosh sakes. That was like one of the main things. Right. [00:03:27] Speaker B: Doctors didn't know to wash their hands. [00:03:28] Speaker A: Yeah. There were so many other reasons died in childbirth. Right. But look back at people prior to that. And there were just healthy specimens of, of their bodies were just the size they were supposed to be. Really. [00:03:41] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. [00:03:42] Speaker A: And so we've eaten fats for millennia prior to the 1950s. [00:03:52] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:03:52] Speaker A: And what in 1950s, Ancel Keys came, comes along. [00:03:56] Speaker B: Yeah. And there's a lot of history there. And you can look into it. Heart disease was increasing and Ancel Keys came along with a hypothesis that cholesterol caused the heart disease and along with that fat caused the cholesterol buildup. And so the, the, the tie was thus fat causes heart disease. [00:04:25] Speaker A: Which. It was junk science, right? Yes, it was absolutely junk science. He, he, his, his study, and we've talked about on this podcast many times, his study was he took a bunch of information, he cherry picked out what he wanted. It was on a bunch of countries, but he actually just cherry picked those countries that, that basically proved his hypothesis. And then that's what the, our entire nation for the last 40, 75 years. Oh, sorry, 75 years. [00:05:01] Speaker B: The 50s. Yeah. [00:05:02] Speaker A: Has been following. But you went, you were talking about the 1900s. Prior to the 1900s, we all ate animal fat. But in the early 1900s, like in the 1910s time frame, along comes a product that was introduced to the American diet, known as, quote, vegetable oil or a canola oil. [00:05:31] Speaker B: Crisco was a huge. It was introduced as, you know, a replacement for butter, a replacement for lard. It was shelf stable. It sat there and they advertised it as, you know, the, the modern woman uses Crisco in her, in her kitchen. [00:05:50] Speaker A: I mean, let's be honest. You and I grew up on Crisco, right? [00:05:53] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:05:54] Speaker A: Everybody used Crisco. That was the oil of choice. But the thing is that Crisco, where did that originate? Like all of a sudden there's a new oil on earth that we can now consume. And that oil was a waste byproduct of. [00:06:17] Speaker B: Industrial lubricant. [00:06:17] Speaker A: Industrial lubricant yeah. [00:06:20] Speaker B: So we start introducing these types of things like crisco and vegetable oils. And then the heart disease risk or heart disease does increase. So then by the 1970s, we've the American dietary guidelines. So, you know, and then from that builds the food pyramid. And so from, you know, late 70s on, you've got a, you know, the base of the diet should be starches and grains. And then you work your way up to, you know, healthy vegetable oils at the very top. And minimal, minimal years, minimal amount of, of that, but, you know, completely remove all of your animal fats. [00:07:10] Speaker A: And we were told that saturated fat was very bad for us. [00:07:13] Speaker B: Right? [00:07:14] Speaker A: Yeah. Okay, so we, so now we're in the 1970s. We've got this dietary guidelines and we've been, we had that food pyramid and those dietary guidelines for years and years. And the result of that has led to chronic obesity, overweight and inflammation, type 2 diabetes. The rise has just been really off the charts and spreading worldwide because our dietary guidelines kind of lead the world. If other countries, they see what we're doing and they go, okay, us too. And so it has led to chronic disease the world over. Yeah, it's not working. [00:08:01] Speaker B: This 50 year experiment, like if you consider it that from, you know, 77 was when the guidelines came out. So it's been almost 50 years. If you consider it a 50 year experiment in health and nutrition, I would say that the hypothesis that low fat, high carb as a, as a diet has been disproven like that over the last 50 years, health has progressively gotten worse to the point where we now have make America healthy again. Right. Like we now have a government, the government has decided that it's time to step in because as a nation we are so sick. Well, this 50 year experiment, like call it that, call it a hypothesis that we should go low fat and you know that that is the basis of a, of a diet. Well, the hypothesis has been disproven at this point. [00:09:01] Speaker A: Okay, so let's get into the fats a little bit. We have several different types of fats. One is saturated fat, which we've been told it's been demonized. [00:09:11] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:09:11] Speaker A: And we have all been told that it's very bad for you. It's going to clog your arteries and it's going to kill you. And saturated fats come from primarily animals. Coconut oil is also high in saturated fat. So you've got your pork fat, beef fat, any kind of animal fats. We have been told don't eat those. Right. The monounsaturated fats, olive oil, I mean, olive oil has kind of become the darling of, of the oil family. Avocado oil, avocado oil also. And then you have your polyunsaturated fats or sometimes called PUFAs, and those come from your seed oils. Those polyunsaturated fats come from your canola oil, which would be rape seed. I think you've got your, your, your corn oil, any, anything that's extruded from seeds or plants. Right? [00:10:18] Speaker B: Yeah, it's mainly the seed oils. [00:10:20] Speaker A: And it has been found that the polyunsaturated fats are quite inflammatory within our systems. [00:10:28] Speaker B: Yeah. Which is against what the, you know, the dietary guidelines tell you. They say that these are the most healthy and you know, science research studies are showing now that they're actually highly inflammatory. And so in the, in the switch to those oils, the, the inflammatory based diseases have increased also. [00:10:52] Speaker A: Right, okay. So the saturated fats, they're, they're making the comeback. And we believe in that wholeheartedly because we found whenever, from our experience, when we switched to eating real animal fat, butter and tallow and lard, our energy level, our brain function, our entire systems, it was almost like they were starving of it. And when we started eating that, everything started working better, even at, to the cellular level because our cells need it for energy. [00:11:30] Speaker B: Satiety is different. [00:11:32] Speaker A: Oh my God. [00:11:33] Speaker B: You, you feel satisfied with a meal and not I need to eat. Two hours later, we stopped going from waking up with what am I going to eat? To finishing breakfast, thinking, what is my snack? To finishing a snack to what am I having for lunch? Like that used to just drive. I know you and I both, you talked all the time about being hangry all the time. Know hunger causes anger for you, agitation. For me, it was just always, what is next? What is next? What is next? You know, I had my Snickers bar and my pack of crackers that I carry around with always. And, and like, you know, being in the military, being in a fighter squadron, I didn't have time to like go cook lunch. So for me it was, here's a Hot Pocket, here's a Snickers bar. But it was always what's next? And I think that was one of the first things, you know, even before really realizing that I have less brain fog. One of the first things when we switched over to eating a ketogenic style of eating was I don't think about food always. Like, I'm not, it's not controlling me, it's not what Is next. What is next? What is next? It was, I ate, it was high in fat, it was high in saturated fat. And I am now satisfied. And, and I'm, you know, I'll eat again sometime. [00:13:00] Speaker A: Yeah, I feel exactly the same way. If we eat a big meal and it's loaded, I, I know that I'm not going to be hungry for 8, 18, 24 hours sometimes. [00:13:11] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:13:12] Speaker A: But back to the PUFAs and the, the seed oils you mentioned when we started, how they are, they're created like they have to be engineered. They are chemically altered, they are oxygenated. Like explain to, to us the process a little bit about how they even come up with these seed oils. [00:13:36] Speaker B: They gotta mash it, they gotta heat it, they gotta oxidize it, they have to deodorize it. Like before deodorizing it comes out, it's nasty, it stinks. Like there's the clarify it. Like it is a huge industrial process to turn these seeds into oils. [00:13:56] Speaker A: So that type of oil to it, margarine as well, which we were told to replace butter with some years ago, that process in my opinion would be considered an ultra processed food. [00:14:10] Speaker B: Oh yeah. [00:14:11] Speaker A: And in the, in you mentioned Maha, in with all the new awareness, ultra processed foods are on the like proverbial chopping block. We need to get them out of our diet. And these seed oils are ultra processed foods because we can't, you can't make a seed oil in your kitchen. You're not going to take some rapeseed and turn that into oil in your kitchen. But if I, which we sell a couple of pounds of pork fat, you can put that in your crock pot on low heat. [00:14:48] Speaker B: Right. And now you have lard. [00:14:50] Speaker A: And now you have lard. It's just going to render down, just add a little heat like you mentioned. And so the, the concept of a seed oil, it, it's so engineered and it's so ultra processed. That's the last thing that we need to be putting our, in our bodies. [00:15:05] Speaker B: Yeah, we push, we push very hard for eating like natural foods, real foods. Yeah. We, we shouldn't have to have a chemistry lab to make food. [00:15:18] Speaker A: So some of the people that it hurt the most whenever they started attacking animal fats, butter, lard, tallow, all of that was farmers, it was small farmers that took the hit because not only are we going to demonize eggs, right. We're going to say don't eat fat, don't eat any, don't eat meats that are high in fat. [00:15:42] Speaker B: Right. [00:15:43] Speaker A: And so we we reconfigure the entire pork industry. [00:15:47] Speaker B: Replace your butter with, with margarine. [00:15:50] Speaker A: Dairy farmers re. [00:15:52] Speaker B: Replace your cream with something else. [00:15:55] Speaker A: Again, hit the dairy farmers and all of the small farmers who might have used to had cows and pigs and, and whatnot on their farms, a lot of them said, well, if they're gonna demonize my product, I need to change what I'm doing. A lot of them now grow monocrops. They grow corn, soy, canola up north, rapeseed. And now instead of grazing those cows on, on grass and regenerating our land, we're degrading the land by growing all of these monocrops so that we can have all of the seed oil. [00:16:41] Speaker B: And you were talking about pork and I think I cut you off. But like by the 80s it had transitioned to where the, the advertisement, the commercialism on pork was pork, the other white meat. Like they literally bred the fat out of pork. [00:17:00] Speaker A: Right. [00:17:00] Speaker B: And that led itself to these huge hogs with no intramuscular fat, you know, grown in an industrial system. Like the, like pigs themselves actually changed to meet this low fat push. And because chicken, white meat, chicken was the lowest fat meat typically that people. [00:17:23] Speaker A: Wanted to eat, homeless skinless chicken breasts. [00:17:26] Speaker B: Pork had to compete with that. So they bred the fat out of the pork and you end up with pork, the other white meat. Unlike we grow heritage hogs, we grow Berkshires that have marbling all through their muscles like beef does. [00:17:41] Speaker A: And. Well, yeah, and the meat is red. It isn't white. Right. It's, it's, it looks closer to grocery store beef than it does to grocery store grocery store pork. [00:17:52] Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. [00:17:53] Speaker A: It really does. And it's nice and marbled with fat. It's got a nice fat cap on it. And wheat. We like that because you can sit down with a pork chop. It's tender, it's juicy, it's not dry, it's delicious. [00:18:04] Speaker B: It's so flavorful because that's where the flavor is in the fat and the nutrition. [00:18:09] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. And anyway, so the satiety. Well, that's true. [00:18:13] Speaker B: The fat helps you stay satisfied. [00:18:16] Speaker A: Yeah. And so we're, we're bringing back, I mean, we're just, we're us small farmers out here doing it regeneratively and multi species. We are very focused on, well, what kind of, what kind of fat is that animal going to have on it? Even our chickens, whenever, when our, when we, when we were processing our own chickens and especially the whole ones, when they have that nice yellow fat in it, you know, that They've been eating grass. You know that that is going to be some of the most nutritious meat that you can eat. [00:18:50] Speaker B: And flavorful. [00:18:51] Speaker A: And so much flavor. No more bland chicken here. [00:18:54] Speaker B: Right. [00:18:55] Speaker A: And because grocery store chicken is just. It is bl. Yeah. Anyway, so if you can get your hands on some chicken that's been out on pasture air to ground meats. Hint, hint. Shameless plugs. Anyway, it is. It's more. It's delicious and it's, you know, satiating and is good for you. [00:19:15] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:19:15] Speaker A: Really. So how can we consumers, humans, get this fat back into our diets? Because it. We have basically demonized it, axed it, whatever, and now we feel like if I eat it, it might harm my health. Well, look, our health's being harmed anyways. If we're eating the Standard American diet and we're eating the food pyramid, you are on a path for destruction for your body. [00:19:51] Speaker B: So the last 50 years have proven. [00:19:54] Speaker A: So you have been a subject of an experiment. Why don't you run your own and get off of the Standard American Diet? Flip the script. Flip the, the. The pyramid upside down. And let's add fat as our base for our diet. Yeah, real fat. Real fat that comes from real animals that were grown in the way they were supposed to be raised. And we can turn our health. Like he was just saying we've turned our health around. We know that we're healthier because of the way that we feel, the energy that we have, the mental clarity that we have. [00:20:33] Speaker B: Well, all the way down to blood work. Right. Like, yep, our blood work is totally. [00:20:38] Speaker A: Clean and our cholesterol is right where we want it. Where you're going to have. What if you have high cholesterol? Well, it turns out that our brains need cholesterol to live. We need cholesterol and all of our cells make cholesterol because our body requires that Cholesterol is not the enemy. It's the ultra processed foods we've been eating causing inflammation. That's another podcast. But just suffice it to say that your body genuinely needs the cholesterol. And the further. The lower your cholesterol goes, the worse your body is functioning at the cellular. [00:21:14] Speaker B: Level, especially at the brain level. [00:21:17] Speaker A: Yeah, low cholesterol really does do your brain bad. [00:21:22] Speaker B: Yeah. So some steps to. To transition over. [00:21:26] Speaker A: Toss the seed oils, get them out of your kitchen. [00:21:30] Speaker B: Number one. Well, what am I going to cook with? [00:21:33] Speaker A: Coconut oil? [00:21:35] Speaker B: Avocado oil. [00:21:36] Speaker A: Avocado oil. Dare I say bacon grease. [00:21:42] Speaker B: We. We always have mason jars of bacon. [00:21:44] Speaker A: Grease sitting on our, we, we cook like our grandmas. Our great grandma's probably cooked. Yeah. [00:21:50] Speaker B: We use a cast iron skillet and bacon grease. [00:21:53] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:21:55] Speaker B: Unless we're using butter from our own raw milk. [00:22:00] Speaker A: And butter is Kerrygold. Butter is really flavorful, it's grass fed and it's delicious. [00:22:10] Speaker B: Yeah. So get rid of the vegetable oils, return to historical fats. [00:22:17] Speaker A: Yeah. Take your bot, take your body back to prior to 1900 and it, you're, you're, you would be eating more of an ancestral diet at that point. [00:22:29] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:22:29] Speaker A: And I guess that's really what we promote, huh? Yeah, it's basically an ancestral diet. If we can get, go back before the, the engineering was involved and find. [00:22:39] Speaker B: A, find a butcher. If you don't have a local farmer that sells, you know, pork fat or lard or tallow or find, find a butcher and see if, if you can find some there and render it yourself. Our, our processor will render the fats for us. If, if customers want it that way, we can have it done right there at the processor. But otherwise, I mean, it's fairly cheap compared to other things. And then render it down yourself. And it, it is like a great way to get ancestral fats and to. [00:23:17] Speaker A: Increase your fats in your diet. Things that we do would be cook your eggs in your butter. All right. You, you just upped your fats. Yeah. Roast your vegetables in with tallow on them. Like pour, pour some beef fat on there and roast your vegetables. Delicious. [00:23:36] Speaker B: Oh, yeah. [00:23:38] Speaker A: Another, you can. We don't bake a lot, but if you did, you would, you would, instead of using your vegetable oil, you would go back to using lard like in your biscuits or something. We don't advocate for that, but that is some a place that you could do that. But like I said, we don't really, we don't really bake a whole lot because we don't eat those types of carbs. What is it, what are some other ways that you can think of that we have added fat back into our diets? [00:24:05] Speaker B: Olive oil. We use a lot on salads. We, we pour olive oil on top of vegetables. And because, because we use cast iron. Every, everything that we cook on the stovetop starts with a base of some type of animal fat. Unless we use coconut oil. Sometimes we'll use coconut oil, but most of the time it starts with butter or ghee or lard or tallow. Like that's the start of whatever it is we're cooking. And then now the dish itself, the meal has the fat already in it. [00:24:48] Speaker A: That's true. Yep. And then sometimes we add a little pat of butter to the top of it. Your steak. If you're grilling a steak, put a pat of butter on top of that steak. [00:24:58] Speaker B: Oh yeah. [00:24:58] Speaker A: Instead of pork chop steak. [00:25:01] Speaker B: Like anything like that will add. [00:25:02] Speaker A: You can increase it. [00:25:03] Speaker B: Butter on top of it. [00:25:04] Speaker A: Especially if you're eating ketogenic diet and you really want to get your fats up, put, put butter on top of your meat and it will, it will, it will taste really good. Yeah. Pretty much start adding animal fats and real fats back to your diet and for one thing, your taste buds are really going to thank you. [00:25:23] Speaker B: Oh yeah. [00:25:24] Speaker A: And. And your, your body through satiety and just working better. [00:25:30] Speaker B: Yep. [00:25:30] Speaker A: All in all. [00:25:32] Speaker B: Yeah. There's a lot of research out there on the ketogenic diet and how it can be used to treat reverse. Some people even say cure type 2 diabetes, overweight, obesity, chronic inflammation. Like there, there is a lot of research out there. Check it out. We've done quite a few podcasts on it. You can check those out. Go to Virta Health. There's a lot on Virta Health's website, especially in relationship to diabetes and using a low carbohydrate ketogenic diet. [00:26:04] Speaker A: If you're new to this and you need to be convinced about dietary fat, Nina Teicholtz wrote a book. It is a fantastic book that really breaks down what we've just been talking about here. It was one of the first books that we read about fats and were wholly convinced at that point. She's an investigative journalist who dug into the fat that we eat in this. [00:26:26] Speaker B: Country and is not owned by Big Food or Big Pharma. [00:26:30] Speaker A: Right, right. [00:26:31] Speaker B: Like she's just independent. She's not, she's not paid for by one of the other, you know, food or pharma groups that are paying for a lot of the research that you find that is anti saturated fat or pro seed oils. If you start digging, you find either Big Food or Big Pharma behind that research. It's. It's sick. Literally. [00:26:56] Speaker A: It is. It really is. At hey, are you on ketogenic diet? How have you added fats back in? Let us know in the comments. We love to hear what you guys are doing, especially as far as your health is concern because we can all turn our health around and we don't. And we don't have to do what the government's telling us to do. [00:27:15] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. [00:27:16] Speaker A: Because we're all about freedom. [00:27:17] Speaker B: If you care to check it out, air2ground meats.com is our website, and we do sell beef fat. We do sell pork fat. Give it a. [00:27:27] Speaker A: You bet. [00:27:28] Speaker B: Give it a look. If you can't find it in your area, we'd be happy to ship it to you. [00:27:31] Speaker A: Absolutely. Thank you for hanging out with us again today at the Dusty Mud Podcast. And until next time, bye, y'. All. [00:27:37] Speaker B: Bye.