Understanding Linoleic Acid and Health

As you know, seed oil consumption is quite controversial. In today's show, we're going to review a study, a series of studies that have found that lowering linoleic acid concentration, which I will define shortly, that is highly concentrated in industrialized seed oils, can reduce the concentration of oxidized linoleic acid metabolites that are associated with reduced symptoms of headaches. And I think this is important because this is a series of studies by our friend Christopher Ramsden over at University of North Carolina. And that name may sound familiar to you because he reanalyzed, him and his colleagues reanalyzed the Minnesota Coronary Experiment data from the 1960s, which as you may remember, that clinical trial randomized people to reduce the amount of saturated fat in their diet and replace that with corn oil, finding there was a 32% increase in mortality from all causes and I believe cardiovascular disease as well. I can't remember the exact... statistics on the death figures. We did review that several months ago. But needless to say, that clinical trial did find that swapping out saturated fat and replacing that with corn oil that is enriched in linoleic acid was linked with increased risk of mortality. And so his group has done a lot of investigation into the neuroinflammatory aspects of linoleic acid consumption because as we will soon find out, it turns out that linoleic acid is highly susceptible to oxidation. And in the study that we're going to talk about today titled, Lowering Dietary Linoleic Acid Reduces Bioactive Oxidized Linoleic Acid Metabolites in Humans. This was published in the journal Prostaglandins, Leukocytes, Essential Fatty Acids during the year 2012. So this is an older study. And why are we talking about an older study? Because here we are in 2024, and we have a lot of controversy when it comes to C2L consumption. There are numerous short-term studies, epidemiological studies, that find that diets higher in polyunsaturated fatty acids, such as corn, canola, soybean, safflower, rapeseed oil, sunflower oil, and beyond, are linked with a reduction in LDL, or your so-called bad cholesterol, and that is, of course, as the medical establishment likes to say, is associated with reduced odds of having a major adverse cardiovascular event. However, we do know that some longer-term studies actually find, for example, the LA Veterans Study, that higher intakes of polyunsaturated fats, and this was an eight-year study, were associated with greater odds of dying of all causes. So we do have short-term studies, and we have epidemiological studies that find that PUFA, polyunsaturated fat consumption from industrialized seed oils, is protective, right? But then these longer-term studies and the Minnesota Coronary Experiment... conflict with that. So I'm trying to provide you more mechanistic evidence to possibly insinuate that there is a physiologic difference when you are consuming diets high in linoleic acid from seed oils, namely canola and corn and soybean oil. So this study I think is important and Christopher Ramsden has done a lot of investigation and clinical trials manipulating the concentration of linoleic acid in study subjects that have headaches finding an improvement in symptoms when it comes to headaches because it turns out that the oxidized metabolites from linoleic acid are associated with headache severity and symptoms associated with chronic headaches. So they go on to say linoleic acid is the most abundant polyunsaturated fatty acid in human diets, a major component of human tissues and the direct precursor to the bioactive oxidized linoleic acid metabolites known as ox LAMs for oxidative linoleic acid metabolites. I don't want to get into the weeds of all these metabolites, but since we're talking about the nuances of the study, I think maybe it's important to understand. And so these acronyms are associated with the metabolites known as 9 and 13-hydroxy-octadecadianoic acid and 9 and 13-oxo-octadecadianoic acid, respectively. And so we're going to learn more about how these four oxidative linoleic acid metabolites have been mechanistically linked to various pathological conditions. from cardiovascular disease to chronic pain, and are even implicated or elevated in the context of Alzheimer's disease, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, and have been proposed as biomarkers useful for indicating the presence and severity of both of these different conditions, which I think is important. And so in short, this 12-week intervention was designed to look at the changes in linoleic acid, reducing the concentrations in the diet to just 2% from I think about between 4% and 6%. down to 2% over the course of 12 weeks, and then look at serum levels of these oxidative linoleic acid metabolites. And then they had several follow-up studies, which we're not going to dive into extensive detail herein, but I will share with you some of those titles of those studies because we actually have reviewed them before. But I think this is a really interesting point to talk about with people because many people will say, well, PUFA consumption is linked with lower levels of LDL cholesterol and epidemiological studies find low LDL cholesterol is unequivocally linked with lower prevalence of major adverse cardiovascular events. And so I think it's important to discuss the mechanisms by which there could be potential downsides to diets high in polyunsaturated fat consumption, particularly in people who have high LDL cholesterol or who have high. background inflammation, such as a high C-reactive protein, other clinical conditions, such as insulin resistance, obesity, or type 2 diabetes. But first, friends, I just want to thank you all for being here. Hopefully you're enjoying this video. If you are, please hit that like button. And before we get into those details, today's show is brought to you by our friends over at bondcharge.com, the makers of a range of health-prone tools that I've been using for the better part of seven years now. Their blue light filtering glasses are phenomenal. Their sleep mask is amazing. I just bought. two more of them. I've had like seven or eight of these things because they're good. I travel. Sometimes I leave them in a hotel, but I want to let you know about their amazing infrared sauna blanket. As you know, there are numerous health benefits linked to sauna therapy, but the challenge is you probably don't have space for a big old sauna in your house. So this is why I'm a huge fan of the infrared sauna blanket at Bond Charge because it gets up to 170 degrees, but it's one of the lowest EMF units on the market. It has a very small form factor. You can travel with it. And after you spend just five or six minutes in this, you are sweating, you are detoxing, and you feel very calm and relaxed. I'm a huge fan of this infrared sauna blanket, even after going and doing like a cold plunge or a polar bear plunge, which you should be doing on January 1st and pretty much on most days. So you can see what other amazing products they have over at bondcharge.com forward slash H-I-H. So getting back to this study, and this was part of an ongoing study that was already in progress. And so the investigators wanted to specifically analyze ascertain whether or not lowering dietary linoleic acid in the diet reduces the oxidative linoleic acid metabolites. And so in other analyses, they talk about the improvements in clinical related outcomes such as reduction in headache severity. But this study specifically was looking at how manipulating the linoleic acid concentrations in the diet from 6.7% to just 2.7% would affect the oxidative metabolites known as the oxlams, which unfortunately, the I looked at Quest and LabCorp and we can't directly measure these. That would be a really cool, for any of you entrepreneurs out there, a cool assay to look at because as we just learned, the way that linoleic acid gets into your body is from solely exogenous sources. Your body's not making this. You must get linoleic acid from your diet. And that's the thing I think that is controversial for some people because we need some baseline level of linoleic acid, but the I think many of us would agree we are probably consuming too much of that, coupled with the fact that many of Americans and people out West that are eating industrialized diets and so forth have a high degree of inflammation and oxidative stress, rendering that linoleic acid to have a higher propensity to become oxidized, which can then lead to clinical symptoms such as Alzheimer's dementia, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, and in this case, possibly headaches and maybe increased risk of cardiovascular disease because the LDL oxidation. can initiate, that's a key pathophysiologic step in the process of atherosclerosis or arterial plaquing that can lead to, over time, major adverse cardiovascular events, such as a stroke or heart attack or worse. And so there were 56 individuals that had met the criteria for having chronic headaches that were part of this study, and they were randomized to one of two different diets, one of which was consuming the standard American diet, which is Contains roughly, as I mentioned, 6.7% of linoleic acid. And then they had a reduction, a group two in this intervention only had 2.4% of their calories from linoleic acid for 12 weeks. And so these individuals had chronic headaches and so forth. And what they found is there was a significant reduction at the end of the study of the four oxidative linoleic acid metabolites, the oxlams that we've been talking about. So they go on to say in the discussion that to our knowledge, this is the first demonstration that changes in dietary linoleic acid can alter the abundance of plasma oxidative linoleic acid metabolites in humans, or that lowering dietary linoleic acid reduces the abundance of these oxidative linoleic acid metabolites in any tissue in a human or animal model. Our findings are consistent with a report that that a fourfold increase in dietary linoleic acid from corn oil produced a fivefold increase in two of the four oxidative linoleic acid metabolites that we've been talking about, the 9 and 13 HODE and the 9 and 13 oxo HODE in memory tissue of, and this was in an animal model study. So a fourfold increase in dietary linoleic acid causes a fivefold increase in these two of the four oxidative linoleic acid metabolites. And they say, collectively, these observations indicate that dietary linoleic acid may hold a proximal control over the production and or accumulation of oxidative linoleic acid metabolites in certain tissues. They go on to say, we also found that lowering dietary linoleic acid reduced the abundance of linoleic acid in several circulating lipid fractions that may serve as precursor pools for exogenous oxidative linoleic acid metabolite synthesis. Importantly, the concentration of total fatty acids did not change. The plasma lipid, triglycerides, or cholesterol ester, or free fatty acid pools, indicating that observed reductions in linoleic acid from the diet and oxidative linoleic acid metabolites were unlikely to be secondary to the general reduction in plasma lipoproteins. Because this is kind of curious. Mechanistically, I don't know how this works. I really need to spend like several days diving into this. Why is it that polyunsaturated fats and particularly oils that are enriched in linoleic acid, why does that reliably lower LDL cholesterol? I would love to, if you know that, let me know in the comment section below. I think this is particularly interesting. How does this mechanistically lower LDL cholesterol? Does it affect the HMG-CoA synthase pathway? As many of you know, the way that statins lower LDL cholesterol is by affecting this major upstream pathway in the isoprenoid. category of synthesis. You can Google this. There's geranol, geranol. There's all these different metabolites that are created downstream of HMG-CoA reductase, which ultimately affects the synthesis of LDL cholesterol. And downstream from that is the important coenzyme Q10, this fat-soluble antioxidant-like molecule that is intimately involved in energy production inside the mitochondria and possibly reducing LDL oxidation and beyond. So it gets... really complex quite quickly, but it's very interesting to discover that linoleic acid somehow reliably reduces LDL. Now, whether or not that is a good or bad thing, I think is debatable. So this is what I really wanted to dive into because this gets really complex quickly and I don't want to lose you in the weeds of complexity of these oxidative linoleic acid metabolites that you can't even measure commercially or at home. And that is the conflicting advice that we hear from mainstream medical doctors and many people who follow. the public health institutions, CDC and FDA and so forth, and the American Medical Association, American Heart Association that recommend, and even the FDA recently updated their guidelines. We did a live video about this. We talked about how they're now recommending roughly 20 grams of polyunsaturated fats per day as part of a healthy diet. Well, that is going to... reliably increase your linoleic acid content in your blood. And if you already have insulin resistance, which you know the data from the NHANES, about 93.4% of US adults have some degree of insulin resistance, whether that's increased visceral adiposity, high blood pressure and beyond, that high dietary linoleic acid could lend itself to creating higher levels of these oxidative metabolites that could over time lead to symptoms such as hyperperception to pain, chronic headaches. possibly dementia, fatty liver disease, and heart disease. And so I think it is interesting that, you know, most of the mainstream medical community likes to say, well, you should be consuming more polyunsaturated fats in your diet from even omega-6 sources because it lowers your LDL. But again, does that lead to improvements in your health? And I think that's very debatable. And so, you know, my perspective on this is that for most of human history, we have not been consuming, you know... copious amounts of soybean oil corn oil canola oil cottonseed oil or sunflower oil right people would consume fruit oils maybe a little olive oil oil from avocados things like that but not so much from these from these seeds because you need a lot of industrial manufacturing to reduce the anti-nutrients for example we've talked about this a million times but just for your memory you know in the case of canola there is a cardiotoxic metabolite known as uricic acid And so you can't just go out and squeeze a rapeseed and get edible oil. It's cardiotoxic. So really no humans or animals would ever consume that. The same goes for cottonseed oil. You have this compound known as Gysopal that, as irony turns out, that also is cardiotoxic as well. And so animals that would consume the cottonseeds prior to Procter & Gamble figuring out how to industrialize, prior to Procter & Gamble figuring out how to get Gysopal. and isolate that out of the cotton seed, it was inedible. It would kill wild hogs, feral hogs out in Louisiana and Georgia and things like that where the cotton manufacturing facilities would just dump these seeds. Horses would die as well. Now we have people eating copious amounts of this that I think is contributing to the background inflammation that many people are experiencing. And I think the important point here is that we have decent evidence from Ramson's group looking at these numerous clinical trials during the mid-2000s. The most recent one, to my knowledge, was published in the British Medical Journal in 2021, finding that manipulating the dietary linoleic acid content in the diet, how that can lead to a reduction in the severity of headaches. But what's curious is many of these studies, they would also increase the amount of omega-3s in the diet. as well. And so there seems to be some sort of protective effect of having omega-3s in terms of reducing the propensity of the linoleic acid content to causing severity of headaches and so forth. So I think that could be part of the equation here is many people in the West are consuming Very, very small amounts of omega-3 fats in their diet. And the relative proportion of omega-3s to linoleic acid is skewed. And that could be increasing to their symptomology, headaches or the increased formation of these oxidative linoleic acid metabolites. But there's been four clinical trials here that Ramston et al have conducted, manipulating the omega-3 to omega-6 fat content in the diet, finding improvements in... pain and severity of headaches. And so I wanted to share that with you. We've reviewed several of these studies over the years, so I'm not going to dive into the details of all of those here now, but just so you know, his group is providing a lot of good, I think, evidence. And this to me suggests that if you have symptoms, if you have headaches, if you have chronic pain, if you have a first-degree relative that has dementia, if you're an ApoE4 genotype, if your liver enzymes, your AST, ALT, GGT are elevated, perhaps you should consider reducing the amount of linoleic acid from your diet. So maybe instead of using canola or sunflower oil or soy oil or corn oil, use olive oil or maybe coconut oil or butter or ghee or tallow or lard or things like that. That's basically the gist of it. And I think the seed oils are particularly problematic when they're in the refrying, the repeatedly refried oils. So when you go to restaurants and you get the fried fish, for example, or onion rings or French fries or things like that, or even the sweet potato fries, those oils are most likely oxidized, which could be problematic in the long term. And in conclusion, they say there are robust correlations observed between circulating oxidative linoleic acid metabolites. linoleic acid models in several pools in this 12-week intervention that are consistent with the hypothesis that having high linoleic acid pools contribute to the formation of oxidative linoleic acid metabolites. And this 12-week linoleic acid lowering intervention may have not been sufficient to establish a new steady state linoleic acid in circulation, but consistent with this, there was a robust correlation between the levels of linoleic acid metabolites and the linoleic acid at baseline. So I think that's interesting. And they're going to do longer studies. This was just a 12-week study. I think what's interesting is we have heard from several other researchers that the half-life of linoleic acid in the adipose tissue is something like 700 days. And so I think that's quite interesting. So if you've been consuming a ultra-processed food diet for a very long time, eating a lot of fried food and not being mindful of your fat sources, it could take longer than just 12 weeks to notice really significant shifts in the concentration of these metabolites or linoleic acid in the body. But as they conclude here, potential implications from these oxidative linoleic acid metabolites in the body, they say a major component of oxidized LDL is a formation of foam cells and the migration of the vascular smooth muscle cells found in atherosclerotic plaque lesions. oxidative linoleic acid metabolites have been implicated in cardiovascular disease pathogenesis and pathophysiology. Therefore, the diet-induced reductions in circulating oxidative linoleic acid metabolites demonstrated here may have clinical relevance for cardiovascular risk reduction, independent of LDL cholesterol. So I think that's something to consider. And for my clients, how do I talk about this just practically? It's like, if you have LDL cholesterol over 130 milligrams per deciliter. I advise people to minimize consumption of fried food and foods containing linoleic acid. I don't think that if you have a salad once a week with soybean oil dressing or corn oil that you're going to die. I don't think it's really a problem. If you maybe your kid has a pack of Oreos at school and they, you know, have corn oil or soybean oil, you know, periodically. But when we are overdoing this, I mean, you could easily see how. If you go to Starbucks and you get a muffin for breakfast and it has corn oil as the main fat source. And then for lunch, you have a salad dressing with canola oil or soybean oil. And then you might have some fried chicken on that salad. And then for dinner, you have another salad, for example, or you're having an Impossible Burger that's made with canola. You can see how you can easily get into 30, 40, 50 grams of industrialized seed oil. And you don't exercise and maybe you smoke or you vape. And over time, this can contribute to. the pathophysiology that we now know to be cardiovascular disease or dementia or Alzheimer's. And so I just think it's important for people to be aware of this, to try to minimize their consumption of this and just be more mindful. I don't think it's the number one reason why people are sick. I think most people are pretty unhealthy because they simply just don't exercise enough and they're very sedentary. But could it be that linoleic acid in high amounts contributes to the rampant ill health that we see? possibly. And the mechanism therein could be because linoleic acid contributes to these oxidative metabolites known as oxalams, and that's problematic. So let me know what you think in the comment section below. Hopefully you enjoyed this research review. If you did, hit that like button. Be sure to subscribe to this channel, and we'll catch you on a future one down

statistics on the death figures. We did review that several months ago. But needless to say, that clinical trial did find that swapping out saturated fat and replacing that with corn oil that is enriched in linoleic acid was linked with increased risk of mortality. And so his group has done a lot of investigation into the neuroinflammatory aspects of linoleic acid consumption because as we will soon find out, it turns out that linoleic acid is highly susceptible to oxidation. And in the study that we're going to talk about today titled, Lowering Dietary Linoleic Acid Reduces Bioactive Oxidized Linoleic Acid Metabolites in Humans.

This was published in the journal Prostaglandins, Leukocytes, Essential Fatty Acids during the year 2012. So this is an older study. And why are we talking about an older study? Because here we are in 2024, and we have a lot of controversy when it comes to C2L consumption.

There are numerous short-term studies, epidemiological studies, that find that diets higher in polyunsaturated fatty acids, such as corn, canola, soybean, safflower, rapeseed oil, sunflower oil, and beyond, are linked with a reduction in LDL, or your so-called bad cholesterol, and that is, of course, as the medical establishment likes to say, is associated with reduced odds of having a major adverse cardiovascular event. However, we do know that some longer-term studies actually find, for example, the LA Veterans Study, that higher intakes of polyunsaturated fats, and this was an eight-year study, were associated with greater odds of dying of all causes. So we do have short-term studies, and we have epidemiological studies that find that PUFA, polyunsaturated fat consumption from industrialized seed oils, is protective, right? But then these longer-term studies and the Minnesota Coronary Experiment... conflict with that.

So I'm trying to provide you more mechanistic evidence to possibly insinuate that there is a physiologic difference when you are consuming diets high in linoleic acid from seed oils, namely canola and corn and soybean oil. So this study I think is important and Christopher Ramsden has done a lot of investigation and clinical trials manipulating the concentration of linoleic acid in study subjects that have headaches finding an improvement in symptoms when it comes to headaches because it turns out that the oxidized metabolites from linoleic acid are associated with headache severity and symptoms associated with chronic headaches. So they go on to say linoleic acid is the most abundant polyunsaturated fatty acid in human diets, a major component of human tissues and the direct precursor to the bioactive oxidized linoleic acid metabolites known as ox LAMs for oxidative linoleic acid metabolites. I don't want to get into the weeds of all these metabolites, but since we're talking about the nuances of the study, I think maybe it's important to understand.

And so these acronyms are associated with the metabolites known as 9 and 13-hydroxy-octadecadianoic acid and 9 and 13-oxo-octadecadianoic acid, respectively. And so we're going to learn more about how these four oxidative linoleic acid metabolites have been mechanistically linked to various pathological conditions. from cardiovascular disease to chronic pain, and are even implicated or elevated in the context of Alzheimer's disease, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, and have been proposed as biomarkers useful for indicating the presence and severity of both of these different conditions, which I think is important. And so in short, this 12-week intervention was designed to look at the changes in linoleic acid, reducing the concentrations in the diet to just 2% from I think about between 4% and 6%. down to 2% over the course of 12 weeks, and then look at serum levels of these oxidative linoleic acid metabolites.

And then they had several follow-up studies, which we're not going to dive into extensive detail herein, but I will share with you some of those titles of those studies because we actually have reviewed them before. But I think this is a really interesting point to talk about with people because many people will say, well, PUFA consumption is linked with lower levels of LDL cholesterol and epidemiological studies find low LDL cholesterol is unequivocally linked with lower prevalence of major adverse cardiovascular events. And so I think it's important to discuss the mechanisms by which there could be potential downsides to diets high in polyunsaturated fat consumption, particularly in people who have high LDL cholesterol or who have high.

background inflammation, such as a high C-reactive protein, other clinical conditions, such as insulin resistance, obesity, or type 2 diabetes. But first, friends, I just want to thank you all for being here. Hopefully you're enjoying this video.

If you are, please hit that like button. And before we get into those details, today's show is brought to you by our friends over at bondcharge.com, the makers of a range of health-prone tools that I've been using for the better part of seven years now. Their blue light filtering glasses are phenomenal. Their sleep mask is amazing.

I just bought. two more of them. I've had like seven or eight of these things because they're good. I travel. Sometimes I leave them in a hotel, but I want to let you know about their amazing infrared sauna blanket.

As you know, there are numerous health benefits linked to sauna therapy, but the challenge is you probably don't have space for a big old sauna in your house. So this is why I'm a huge fan of the infrared sauna blanket at Bond Charge because it gets up to 170 degrees, but it's one of the lowest EMF units on the market. It has a very small form factor. You can travel with it.

And after you spend just five or six minutes in this, you are sweating, you are detoxing, and you feel very calm and relaxed. I'm a huge fan of this infrared sauna blanket, even after going and doing like a cold plunge or a polar bear plunge, which you should be doing on January 1st and pretty much on most days. So you can see what other amazing products they have over at bondcharge.com forward slash H-I-H.

So getting back to this study, and this was part of an ongoing study that was already in progress. And so the investigators wanted to specifically analyze ascertain whether or not lowering dietary linoleic acid in the diet reduces the oxidative linoleic acid metabolites. And so in other analyses, they talk about the improvements in clinical related outcomes such as reduction in headache severity.

But this study specifically was looking at how manipulating the linoleic acid concentrations in the diet from 6.7% to just 2.7% would affect the oxidative metabolites known as the oxlams, which unfortunately, the I looked at Quest and LabCorp and we can't directly measure these. That would be a really cool, for any of you entrepreneurs out there, a cool assay to look at because as we just learned, the way that linoleic acid gets into your body is from solely exogenous sources. Your body's not making this. You must get linoleic acid from your diet.

And that's the thing I think that is controversial for some people because we need some baseline level of linoleic acid, but the I think many of us would agree we are probably consuming too much of that, coupled with the fact that many of Americans and people out West that are eating industrialized diets and so forth have a high degree of inflammation and oxidative stress, rendering that linoleic acid to have a higher propensity to become oxidized, which can then lead to clinical symptoms such as Alzheimer's dementia, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, and in this case, possibly headaches and maybe increased risk of cardiovascular disease because the LDL oxidation. can initiate, that's a key pathophysiologic step in the process of atherosclerosis or arterial plaquing that can lead to, over time, major adverse cardiovascular events, such as a stroke or heart attack or worse. And so there were 56 individuals that had met the criteria for having chronic headaches that were part of this study, and they were randomized to one of two different diets, one of which was consuming the standard American diet, which is Contains roughly, as I mentioned, 6.7% of linoleic acid. And then they had a reduction, a group two in this intervention only had 2.4% of their calories from linoleic acid for 12 weeks.

And so these individuals had chronic headaches and so forth. And what they found is there was a significant reduction at the end of the study of the four oxidative linoleic acid metabolites, the oxlams that we've been talking about. So they go on to say in the discussion that to our knowledge, this is the first demonstration that changes in dietary linoleic acid can alter the abundance of plasma oxidative linoleic acid metabolites in humans, or that lowering dietary linoleic acid reduces the abundance of these oxidative linoleic acid metabolites in any tissue in a human or animal model.

Our findings are consistent with a report that that a fourfold increase in dietary linoleic acid from corn oil produced a fivefold increase in two of the four oxidative linoleic acid metabolites that we've been talking about, the 9 and 13 HODE and the 9 and 13 oxo HODE in memory tissue of, and this was in an animal model study. So a fourfold increase in dietary linoleic acid causes a fivefold increase in these two of the four oxidative linoleic acid metabolites. And they say, collectively, these observations indicate that dietary linoleic acid may hold a proximal control over the production and or accumulation of oxidative linoleic acid metabolites in certain tissues.

They go on to say, we also found that lowering dietary linoleic acid reduced the abundance of linoleic acid in several circulating lipid fractions that may serve as precursor pools for exogenous oxidative linoleic acid metabolite synthesis. Importantly, the concentration of total fatty acids did not change. The plasma lipid, triglycerides, or cholesterol ester, or free fatty acid pools, indicating that observed reductions in linoleic acid from the diet and oxidative linoleic acid metabolites were unlikely to be secondary to the general reduction in plasma lipoproteins. Because this is kind of curious.

Mechanistically, I don't know how this works. I really need to spend like several days diving into this. Why is it that polyunsaturated fats and particularly oils that are enriched in linoleic acid, why does that reliably lower LDL cholesterol?

I would love to, if you know that, let me know in the comment section below. I think this is particularly interesting. How does this mechanistically lower LDL cholesterol? Does it affect the HMG-CoA synthase pathway? As many of you know, the way that statins lower LDL cholesterol is by affecting this major upstream pathway in the isoprenoid.

category of synthesis. You can Google this. There's geranol, geranol.

There's all these different metabolites that are created downstream of HMG-CoA reductase, which ultimately affects the synthesis of LDL cholesterol. And downstream from that is the important coenzyme Q10, this fat-soluble antioxidant-like molecule that is intimately involved in energy production inside the mitochondria and possibly reducing LDL oxidation and beyond. So it gets...

really complex quite quickly, but it's very interesting to discover that linoleic acid somehow reliably reduces LDL. Now, whether or not that is a good or bad thing, I think is debatable. So this is what I really wanted to dive into because this gets really complex quickly and I don't want to lose you in the weeds of complexity of these oxidative linoleic acid metabolites that you can't even measure commercially or at home. And that is the conflicting advice that we hear from mainstream medical doctors and many people who follow. the public health institutions, CDC and FDA and so forth, and the American Medical Association, American Heart Association that recommend, and even the FDA recently updated their guidelines.

We did a live video about this. We talked about how they're now recommending roughly 20 grams of polyunsaturated fats per day as part of a healthy diet. Well, that is going to... reliably increase your linoleic acid content in your blood.

And if you already have insulin resistance, which you know the data from the NHANES, about 93.4% of US adults have some degree of insulin resistance, whether that's increased visceral adiposity, high blood pressure and beyond, that high dietary linoleic acid could lend itself to creating higher levels of these oxidative metabolites that could over time lead to symptoms such as hyperperception to pain, chronic headaches. possibly dementia, fatty liver disease, and heart disease. And so I think it is interesting that, you know, most of the mainstream medical community likes to say, well, you should be consuming more polyunsaturated fats in your diet from even omega-6 sources because it lowers your LDL. But again, does that lead to improvements in your health? And I think that's very debatable.

And so, you know, my perspective on this is that for most of human history, we have not been consuming, you know... copious amounts of soybean oil corn oil canola oil cottonseed oil or sunflower oil right people would consume fruit oils maybe a little olive oil oil from avocados things like that but not so much from these from these seeds because you need a lot of industrial manufacturing to reduce the anti-nutrients for example we've talked about this a million times but just for your memory you know in the case of canola there is a cardiotoxic metabolite known as uricic acid And so you can't just go out and squeeze a rapeseed and get edible oil. It's cardiotoxic. So really no humans or animals would ever consume that. The same goes for cottonseed oil.

You have this compound known as Gysopal that, as irony turns out, that also is cardiotoxic as well. And so animals that would consume the cottonseeds prior to Procter & Gamble figuring out how to industrialize, prior to Procter & Gamble figuring out how to get Gysopal. and isolate that out of the cotton seed, it was inedible.

It would kill wild hogs, feral hogs out in Louisiana and Georgia and things like that where the cotton manufacturing facilities would just dump these seeds. Horses would die as well. Now we have people eating copious amounts of this that I think is contributing to the background inflammation that many people are experiencing.

And I think the important point here is that we have decent evidence from Ramson's group looking at these numerous clinical trials during the mid-2000s. The most recent one, to my knowledge, was published in the British Medical Journal in 2021, finding that manipulating the dietary linoleic acid content in the diet, how that can lead to a reduction in the severity of headaches. But what's curious is many of these studies, they would also increase the amount of omega-3s in the diet. as well. And so there seems to be some sort of protective effect of having omega-3s in terms of reducing the propensity of the linoleic acid content to causing severity of headaches and so forth.

So I think that could be part of the equation here is many people in the West are consuming Very, very small amounts of omega-3 fats in their diet. And the relative proportion of omega-3s to linoleic acid is skewed. And that could be increasing to their symptomology, headaches or the increased formation of these oxidative linoleic acid metabolites. But there's been four clinical trials here that Ramston et al have conducted, manipulating the omega-3 to omega-6 fat content in the diet, finding improvements in... pain and severity of headaches.

And so I wanted to share that with you. We've reviewed several of these studies over the years, so I'm not going to dive into the details of all of those here now, but just so you know, his group is providing a lot of good, I think, evidence. And this to me suggests that if you have symptoms, if you have headaches, if you have chronic pain, if you have a first-degree relative that has dementia, if you're an ApoE4 genotype, if your liver enzymes, your AST, ALT, GGT are elevated, perhaps you should consider reducing the amount of linoleic acid from your diet. So maybe instead of using canola or sunflower oil or soy oil or corn oil, use olive oil or maybe coconut oil or butter or ghee or tallow or lard or things like that. That's basically the gist of it.

And I think the seed oils are particularly problematic when they're in the refrying, the repeatedly refried oils. So when you go to restaurants and you get the fried fish, for example, or onion rings or French fries or things like that, or even the sweet potato fries, those oils are most likely oxidized, which could be problematic in the long term. And in conclusion, they say there are robust correlations observed between circulating oxidative linoleic acid metabolites.

linoleic acid models in several pools in this 12-week intervention that are consistent with the hypothesis that having high linoleic acid pools contribute to the formation of oxidative linoleic acid metabolites. And this 12-week linoleic acid lowering intervention may have not been sufficient to establish a new steady state linoleic acid in circulation, but consistent with this, there was a robust correlation between the levels of linoleic acid metabolites and the linoleic acid at baseline. So I think that's interesting.

And they're going to do longer studies. This was just a 12-week study. I think what's interesting is we have heard from several other researchers that the half-life of linoleic acid in the adipose tissue is something like 700 days.

And so I think that's quite interesting. So if you've been consuming a ultra-processed food diet for a very long time, eating a lot of fried food and not being mindful of your fat sources, it could take longer than just 12 weeks to notice really significant shifts in the concentration of these metabolites or linoleic acid in the body. But as they conclude here, potential implications from these oxidative linoleic acid metabolites in the body, they say a major component of oxidized LDL is a formation of foam cells and the migration of the vascular smooth muscle cells found in atherosclerotic plaque lesions. oxidative linoleic acid metabolites have been implicated in cardiovascular disease pathogenesis and pathophysiology.

Therefore, the diet-induced reductions in circulating oxidative linoleic acid metabolites demonstrated here may have clinical relevance for cardiovascular risk reduction, independent of LDL cholesterol. So I think that's something to consider. And for my clients, how do I talk about this just practically? It's like, if you have LDL cholesterol over 130 milligrams per deciliter.

I advise people to minimize consumption of fried food and foods containing linoleic acid. I don't think that if you have a salad once a week with soybean oil dressing or corn oil that you're going to die. I don't think it's really a problem. If you maybe your kid has a pack of Oreos at school and they, you know, have corn oil or soybean oil, you know, periodically. But when we are overdoing this, I mean, you could easily see how.

If you go to Starbucks and you get a muffin for breakfast and it has corn oil as the main fat source. And then for lunch, you have a salad dressing with canola oil or soybean oil. And then you might have some fried chicken on that salad.

And then for dinner, you have another salad, for example, or you're having an Impossible Burger that's made with canola. You can see how you can easily get into 30, 40, 50 grams of industrialized seed oil. And you don't exercise and maybe you smoke or you vape. And over time, this can contribute to.

the pathophysiology that we now know to be cardiovascular disease or dementia or Alzheimer's. And so I just think it's important for people to be aware of this, to try to minimize their consumption of this and just be more mindful. I don't think it's the number one reason why people are sick. I think most people are pretty unhealthy because they simply just don't exercise enough and they're very sedentary.

But could it be that linoleic acid in high amounts contributes to the rampant ill health that we see? possibly. And the mechanism therein could be because linoleic acid contributes to these oxidative metabolites known as oxalams, and that's problematic. So let me know what you think in the comment section below.

Hopefully you enjoyed this research review. If you did, hit that like button. Be sure to subscribe to this channel, and we'll catch you on a future one down

Transcript for:Understanding Linoleic Acid and Health

Transcript for:
Understanding Linoleic Acid and Health