
Photo: Jon Tyson
A Little Bit Of The Right Dietary Chemistry Goes A Long Way:
The increase in UPF consumption is a worrying stat.
It seems to indicate that for many people, food is still seen as some vague substance that’s only there to fill you up.
But what that increase also suggests is that many people don’t care what their food is made of.
Now contrast that with what a lot of research and specific plans like Intermittent-Fasting will tell you.
Food isn’t just fullness. It’s a biochemistry equation that you eat.
And Harvard researchers are finding out another healthy-eating staple seems to make a much bigger difference than just fancy flavor and a full stomach…
The Short Answer:
- UPF consumption is on the rise.
- They’re full of stuff that’s not great for you.
- Food as medicine is an ancient & clever idea.
- Harvard researchers did an observational study on how olive oil might be like that.
- It involved 90,000+ subjects, aged 56 over 28 years.
- Those subjects who got more than 1/2 Tbsp of olive oil/day had a 28% lower chance of dying from dementia.
- One example the team gave is substituting 1 tsp. of it instead of butter or margarine could lower that risk from 8-14%.
- The effects of olive oil on dementia were so strong, they occurred independently of diet and cardio health.
- These effects may be down to anti-inflammatory or anti-oxidant compounds.
- It also turns out olive oil consumption is associated with a lower risk of many diseases.
- A U.Minn team found that it may also work by releasing stored compounds when you’re hungry or fasting.
- This also triggers signaling pathways associated with better health and brain function.
- The benefits of those go right down to the cellular level.
- By contrast, getting too much soybean, canola, or Omega 6 oils is associated with problems like IBS, Alzheimer’s, and inflammation.
- The current Western Diet already includes around 10x too many of these oils in relation to Omega 3s.
- Guess what foods are full of Omega 6 oils? Ultra-Processed Foods!
Read on to find out the details…
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Great Ideas Never Go Out Of Style:
More than 2,000 years ago, the father of all health & wellness said something like, “Your food should be medicine”.
Now they did have all kinds of herbal supplements back then, like wormwood for clearing intestinal parasites, etc.
But it does seem like an amazing accident that devoid of all the meds & refined supplements we have today, he would make such a prophetic statement.
Because, as we’ve said before, ancient man was not stupid and !SCIENCE! is just catching up to the smarts those wise men had.
Harvard’s Observations On 90,000 Medical Pros:
One of the ways it’s catching up is found in a recent analysis on olive oil consumption.
Researchers from Harvard reviewed data from two studies that cover more than 90,000 subjects who also happened to be medical pros.
Who knows what their lifestyle choices actually were, but perhaps this data is especially significant because of their job titles?
The work began in 1990 and continued on for another 28 years, with the average age starting at 56.
Olive Oil Fans Use Tiny Spoons, Get Huge Brain Benefits!:
Curing the study time-frame, the odds of early mortality from dementia turned out to be 28% lower for subjects who had more than 1/2 Tbsp of olive oil each day.
As another way of expressing the idea, the analysis authors suggest that replacing just one teaspoon of margarine or mayonnaise with olive oil could lower the risk of dying from dementia anywhere from 8-14%.
They also remind us that plant-based foods tend to have a higher-correlation with good health and that reducing animal-based foods might be a good idea..
Another Miracle. Somehow The Benefits Occur Despite Other Factors!:
One very interesting note the lead author made is that the reduction in mortality seemed to be completely independent of diet quality and cardiovascular health.
So this suggests that either there’s some correlation we don’t yet understand with factors that are doing the causation.
Or by contrast, that there is something fairly powerful that the olive oil may be doing.
Anne went on to mention that some of the anti-inflammation/antioxidant compounds in the oil can cross the blood-brain barrier, so that could be part of it.
Also possible is the idea that the brain benefits from improved cardiovascular health in an indirect way similar to the recent motto of, “What’s good for the heart is good for the brain”.
To draw any more direct conclusions would require a completely different & difficult type of trial.
The Benefits Of A Little Dietary Change Don’t End There:
Now that that’s out of the way, let’s have a look at some more HT-style reasons the results could be true.
Strangely enough, the sample group was about the same size as the current work we started out this post with.
As you might have guessed, the data was related to early-mortality, and from a variety of causes.
The bulk of the results were as follows:
1) 19% Lower risk of early-mortality from cardiovascular diseases.
2) 17% Lower risk of dying from cancers.
3) 29% Lower risk of dying from diseases of the brain.
4) 18% Lower risk of early-mortality from breathing related diseases.
5) 19% Lower risk of early-mortality from all causes.
(to be fair, some of the ranges for these were large; like between 8-34%)
So no matter how you slice it, those are some pretty impressive numbers, especially for subjects who only had about 1/2 Tbsp/day!
The Mechanism Behind The Benefits Could Be Sincerely Weird:
Still stranger, as you might expect on this site, a U.Minn team led by Doug Mashek found that olive oil also works in a secret pathway.
Not only does it have all kinds of interesting compounds like polyphenols, something strange happens after you consume it.
And Doug’s team found this out when investigating The Mediterranean Diet and expecting all the good results to come instead from red wine!
The long and short of their results were as follows:
SURPRISE! Mediterranean Diet Benefits Likely Come From Olive Oil:
The body stores up all the interesting phytochemicals from the oil when you have it in food.
Then some time later, under an intermittent-fasted or calorie-restricted state, it releases them back out into your body.
What’s even weirder is that there are two eating-plans that express very specific protein pathways that are helpful for both brain health and longevity.
(SIRT-1 and CREB-1 for the biochem nerds out there.)
As a bonus, you will get even more of these benefits if you exercise, probably because you will be a little bit fasted at some point during the program.
U.Minn’s Team Discovers The Very Fine Details:
Oh, and the short list of benefits the Mashek team found from the secret watchworks of olive oil + fasting?
Here you go:
1) Reduction of Inflammation
2) Improves Metabolism
3) Increases Usage of Blood-Sugar in Metabolism
4) Accelerates Zombie-Cell Cleanup
5) Protects Against Cyclical DNA Damage
5a) Extends Life By Up-To 30% Because of That
6) Increases Available Life-Extension Compound NAD+
BONUS ROUND! Watch Out For Other Oils. They Could Be Toxic!:
As a final capstone on this episode of HT, here are a few other things to watch out in the world of dietary oils.
Not only does canola have an association with increased rates of Alzheimer’s.
But recent work shows another set of data-points in the current Western Diet’s imbalance of Omega 6 : Omega 3 oils.
That’s normally supposed to be 1:1 or 2:1 based on historical evidence, but recently it’s more like 18:1 or 20:1.
Some recent work on Soybean oil illustrates just how bad that is.
The Modern Imbalance Of Oils Comes From Soybean’s Dominance:
Because it’s the most widely-used oil, we currently get 4x-10x the amount of fatty-acids in that category we’re supposed to.
So what you say? It’s just an oil you say? Hah!
This imbalance results in killing-off and crowding out all kinds of good gut microbes, and encouraging overgrowth of some really unhelpful ones.
It can all add up to Inflammatory Bowel Disease and all the other problems that come along with it like leaky gut, endotoxin release, and more systemic infammation as the body tries to clean up the problem.
And guess what food is just chockablock with that soybean oil?
Ultra-Processed Foods baby; and now we’ve come full-circle!
So as much as olive oil may work in mysterious ways to benefit your health, other oils can actually hurt it.
So if you’re going to spend your life eating a set of biochemical reaction elements, make sure they’re good ones!
References & Links:
• Source: Nutrition 2023
• More Coverage: UCR Soybean Oil
• Source Study: Pending Release
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