About Us

Aloha and thank you for reading our story.  I invite you to join us on our website’s journey by becoming a regular subscriber.  For the past six years I’ve been writing Deep Nutrition with my partner and husband Luke.  It’s a book that covers some of the fascinating things we’ve both learned about health.

We’re Kauai-based and write “Dr. Cate” for everyone interested in good health and “alternative” health solutions.  To my patients I’m a doctor who is critical of the drug companies and interested in nutrition. I look forward to the day when nutrition is no longer considered an “alternative” medical practice.

The life changing event that led me to better nutrition.

On a strenuous hike a few years ago I injured my knee and surgery failed to correct the problem.  It was impossible to walk and threatened my ability to work.  I began to believe that there was no hope for recovery.  When I took Luke’s advice and changed the way I eat, I started to see improvement.   Not only did my knee heal, but all aspects of my health took an upturn-from better mood, to more energy, to fewer colds.

These three people helped challenge my thinking:

1.  Andrew Weil, MD. Weil’s book Spontaneous Healing made me question my medical training on nutrition.  While I had learned that fats were bad, Weil’s research found that omega 3 fatty acids were needed in our diet. This opened my eyes to the fact that there was much more to nutrition science that what I’d learned in school.

2. Weston A Price, DDS. Price’s textbook Nutrition and Physical Degeneration was published just before WWII and the Better-living-through chemistry revolution. His message was clear: indigenous people were healthier than their civilized counterparts because they valued health and understood that the only way to achieve it was by eating right. Unfortunately, few physicians ever hear about his research because of the changes brought by antibiotics and other valuable technology have been over-emphasized to the point that nutrition is practically excluded from the medical student’s learning experience.

3. Anthony Bourdain, Celebrity chef and host of Bravo TV’s No Reservations. (Yes, the tube can be educational.) Bourdain’s show made it clear to me that our Americanized vision of the Mediterranean and Okinawan diets is limited and wrong. Likewise, longevity researchers who conclude that a diet of low fat fish and salads is the way to go are misinformed.

The nutrition science I learned in medical school was incomplete.

Two things I learned about nutrition in medical school were that saturated fat raises cholesterol levels, and cholesterol is a known killer.

So which was the right track, the American Medical Association’s, or the more anthropological approach?

Presenting a people’s stamina and strength as evidence of a healthy diet rang true with my own clinical experience in Hawaii. The healthiest family members are often the oldest, and raised on foods representative of a far healthier ecosystem that is more nutritionally potent according to studies.

The best dietary stance would be the one most supported by the scientific facts which, thankfully, I had the training to decipher. And that’s what I did.

After many months of research, I’d found that what I’d learned in med school was full of contradictions, and resting on assumptions proved false by researchers in other, related scientific fields. The available evidence failed to support the AMA’s position. The overwhelming evidence suggested that low-fat, low cholesterol diets are unlikely to supply adequate nutrition for optimal human health.

Medical research is funded by industries expecting a healthy return on that investment.

When research conclusions jeopardize a product line they make their way into textbooks only in the rare case they survive a near impossible journey, swimming against the roaring currents of one or another industry’s profit stream. Those that make it-sometimes decades later-are allowed in only in abbreviated form.

These omissions prevented me from learning, for instance, that Canola oil is actually full of trans fat, or that cholesterol-lowering pills increase your risk of dying from cancer.

Catherine Shanahan, MD trained in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Cornell University, Agronomy at Cornell University, completed medical training at Robert Wood Johnson medical school and specialty training at the University of Arizona, studied herbal medicine botany and ethnobotany at the National Tropical Botanical Garden in Hawaii. She now has a thriving private practice on Kauai.

Luke Shanahan, MFA studied creative writing at the University of Iowa workshop and earned his MFA from the University of Arizona where he won several awards. Since retiring from teaching college English, Luke has been a freelance writer for The Pacific Journal, the Garden Island Newspaper, and organizes creative writing and screenplay workshops. Following his love of cooking and nutrition, he is currently writing a cookbook based on The Four Pillars of World Cuisine.