Dr Cate’s Frequently Asked Questions Answered

For help in understanding what to expect from your metabolic recovery and how to recover the fastest, please schedule a consultation.  

Alphabetical List Of All Food Categories

Dr. Cate: “I’m kind of excited that it’s happening because it’s women taking control. Whenever that happens, I’m already kind of on an uptick on the positive side because of that. They’re taking control, and there are so many things in society that disempowers women; that’s an important thing to do. So the natural question is like germs, right? but you know, life is gross. I mean, poop babies are all about gross. And also, that tool is evolutionary. We had wet nurses. This is not the first time social women have come to this as a solution. And wet people were hired as wet nurses. That was a job. So, but yeah, I mean, I think you wanna make sure that you do some basic things like make sure the person doesn’t have covid. You are taking a little bit of a risk at that point. But all those kinds of things can have a slim chance of being passed through breast milk and you wanna make sure it’s fresh too because contaminants grow in very nutritious things like breast milk very rapidly. But that’s my opinion. As long as you like and go into it knowing you want to be careful. You wanna make sure there are risks, but I think in terms of the nutrition, it’s gonna always be miles ahead of the formula.“

Dr. Cate: “Our bodies suffer from inflammation when we are injured or when we have an infection. So if you sprain your ankle and it swells up, that’s an example of inflammation. You get punched in the face, and you get a big swollen black eye. That’s because of inflammation, and your body’s actually doing it on purpose, even though it hurts. Your body’s doing it on purpose because there’s injury, there’s destruction, and your body senses this. It comes to the area that’s been injured and starts breaking it down because, just like any good home improvement project, if you got something that is not working, it’s broken, you gotta remove it, you gotta take it out. So you gotta make it actually worse almost before you can rebuild it back from scratch again. So that’s what inflammation is for. And it’s supposed to occur only when there’s an injury, infection, or some other good reason. But what happens when your body fat is loaded with these seed oils is that the inflammation is triggered for no good reason. A lot of people have psoriasis or eczema on their skin. That’s because the fat right underneath their skin, which is where most of our body fat is stored, is inflammatory, and it’s for no good reason. It’s just damaging the cells, and it turns red, or it makes certain skin cells divide and divide and divide, and that’s what psoriasis is, and it’s super thick. So that’s one example of an inflammatory condition that comes directly from the fat beneath your skin.“

Dr. Cate: “Our body fat runs our metabolism. Our metabolism is the ability of our cells to generate the energy that they need, and our body fat is in charge of that. So when we talk about my metabolism needs to speed up or slow down, that actually doesn’t really happen at all. When your metabolism is healthy, it’s not that it’s faster, and it doesn’t actually slow down. What really happens is that the systems in your body that convert body fat into cellular energy are healthy versus unhealthy. So if they’re healthy, they produce abundant energy extremely efficiently, and it changes the way you feel. It changes your life on a minute-to-minute basis. And when your body fat is unhealthy, your metabolism is unhealthy, and it’s inefficient, and it cannot convert your body fat itself into cellular energy to run every organ in your body.“

Dr. Cate: “Canola oil is a seed oil, and so it’s one of eight. I call them the Hateful 8. And it’s really no better, no worse than the other hateful eight. But the canola oil industry will tell you that it is better than soy in corn because it has omega-3 in there. And omega-3 is one of the two essential polyunsaturated fatty acids we need. We need it for brain health. We need to consume some, but I have a problem with canola oil due to the processing. And it all boils down to this: whether it’s omega-3 or omega six, it’s an unstable fat. And that’s why we can’t eat as many seed and plant oils as we are right now because they are high in these unstable fats. And the chemical term is polyunsaturated fats, and you can break the polys down into omega-3 and omega six, which have opposing effects on our body. They’re not meant to be used for fuel. Uh, they’re meant to really be signaling molecules in a present certain amount in our cell membrane so that when we get a cut, for example, in our skin, we can have clotting and healing start to occur. If we get like an infection, these signaling molecules help fight off infections. And it’s playing a big role in what’s happening with the coronavirus and people’s immune systems being unable to fight off the infection due to so much inflammation, but they promote inflammation.

So canola oil, just like soy and corn, promotes inflammation because it’s unstable. And the amount that we consume these seed oils these days is the problem. If we could dial back our consumption of omega-3 and omega-six and ensure that it only comes from food, whole food, not factory-processed oils, We’d be fine. We’d be back where we were a hundred years ago when our consumption was about a 10th or 20th, or 30th, depending on who you are or what it’s now. But we have 10, 20, 30 times more than our bodies can handle. And it builds up in our body fat, acts like a toxin, and makes it so that our body fat is inflammatory. And it has huge implications for every aspect of ours.“

Dr. Cate: “The other thing that happens in the dirtier versions of keto is we wanna give people what they want. Well, people want snacks and something sweet tasting, both snacking and just the sweetness. The taste of the sensation of sweetness itself blocks your fat burn and blocks your body’s ability to use your body fat for fuel. And so you’d need to understand that and use that in moderation. I say that there really is no such thing as a healthy snack. If anything has calories, then you have the potential to block what you were doing, which is healthy, which is burning your body fat. And just getting yourself further down that unhealthy road to diabetes. Beyond that, even just the idea of a healthy snack. Even if you’re bored and say “Ah it’s just a few calories. It’s just a handful of nuts.” You’re okay, for sure, but you need to know that the fact is that’s blocking. You might have been burning some body fats now, which is what you wanna do. If you wanna lose weight. You cannot lose a pound without burning your body fat. So I don’t care if you’re burning the fat from those nuts; technically, that’s a keto thing. You are not producing, you’re not burning your body fat, and therefore you are not producing ketones.“

Dr. Cate: “If you’ve eaten but don’t feel that satiety after your meal, give it five minutes, get up, walk around, and do something that involves bending over because you’re gonna get that pressure on your belly. And that’s gonna start triggering the correct chemicals to go when your belly is full like that, and it actually sends signals to your chemical, chemical signals to your brain to stop. So that’s just one little trick that can help those people. And that’s both that you just mentioned, where they’re gaining weight on a high-fat diet because they don’t have the fullness, and they’re used to those fullness cues. So there are a lot of little tricks that can be helpful for folks. I actually mentioned a lot of them in the fat burn fix. So there’s a lot in there, but there’s a lot of science in there too. And so it’s really for that person who can learn on their own, for an expert like yourself to be able to help people walk through a process with some structure. That’s what I was hoping it would do for everybody.“

Dr. Cate: “Highly. It is the most unstable. Because the stability comes from the number of double bonds that are located close to each other, and they’re called conjugated double bonds. When you have two double bonds very close to each other, it attracts oxygen, and oxygen is an aggressive molecule. It attacks the bond and destroys the molecule. And so if you have two double bonds next to each other compared to just one all by itself, the oxygen is like something like 9 billion times more likely to attack. And so if you have three double bonds in a row, then you’re just magnifying it beyond, like normal numbers for which we even have words. And the fish oils have the longest. One of the fish oils, I think, has five double bonds. All very close to each other. So there’s basically that thing is so unstable that it rarely makes it off the shelf before just being gone. And it doesn’t just politely disappear and evaporate. It actually very often will turn into somewhat toxic compounds. So this is a serious issue. We have people who are consuming fish oils, and they’re actually getting some toxic compounds if it’s low quality, especially if it’s a low-quality fish or cod liver oil. And they’ve done surveys on that as well, and I cite some of the nutrition.“

Dr. Cate: “Meat is essential. That’s what we need a lot of protein, and it’s very difficult to get enough protein without meat. And there are also animal nutrients that just don’t exist in plants, like actual real vitamin a, vitamin b12, and long-chain omega-3 fatty acids. But it’s just it’s the intensity of nutrition that is easily digested by our digestive system. It’s just our digestive system was designed to be minimal. That’s why carnivores have slim waists. Gorillas have bellies like potbelly waists. They sit around eating vegetables all the time. You need a massive digestive tract to extract nutrition from plants. You have to be eating all the time, and you need a very sophisticated digestive process. Cows have six stomachs with different types of organisms, and every single one, each one doing a different job. You know, I like to say that all of us, even herbivores are carnivores because your digestive system is taking plants as the raw material and ferments it, fermenting plants into more nutritious byproducts of tiny animals, bacteria, when the cow absorbs, eats grass, all the nutrition that it’s getting is coming from basically dead bacterial bodies because the grass and the cud that the cows chewed is the slurry that bacteria live on. And the bacteria is what’s really nourishing the cow. The bacteria have the capacity to create a lot more different types of nutrients and vitamins and everything they need. And so biology’s smart. We don’t have the capacity to make a lot of vitamins because we eat bacteria, or we eat foods that we eat, foods that did right, or cows. If you’re an herbivore, you just eat the bacteria that know how to make all these important vitamins. So there really is no such thing as an herbivore.”

Dr. Cate: “How does cellulite happen? I actually have a conversation about that in my first book, Deep Nutrition. And I have a little diagram of what is the difference between fat that has cellulite in it and fat that is not cellulite. And the difference is connective tissue. So the connective tissue is the stuff our ligaments are made out of that. What supports our skin is a layer of collagen that’s flexible, and the more of that flexible collagen we have in our skin. It’s like if you built a house and you spaced out the two-by-fours in your walls a little too far, the house is gonna be less sturdy. The walls are gonna be kind of wibbly. Well, that is almost literally what happens with cellulite. We have less supporting infrastructure, collagen infrastructure.

And why does that happen? I don’t know that it’s genetic. I think it’s really more epigenetic, which is another concept I talk about, that how your parents’ nutrition affected you. If that goes on long enough, then yes, it becomes genetic. But in the short term, you have a lot more control over it, your child’s connective tissue, than you’ve ever heard. And it’s so important to make sure that you eat right and pre-pregnancy during pregnancy and feed your children right so that they don’t end up with a connective tissue deficit just because you, your mother, didn’t get enough. Or maybe your mother and your grandmother. If you don’t have enough connective tissue in your body fat to support healthy skin, what will happen to your children? We don’t know, but I know it’s gonna get worse if we don’t eat properly. And it could get worse to the point where now you have 10% body fat, which is an unhealthy low amount, but you still look like you have cellulite. And I’m starting to see, this is what’s terrifying me, is that I’m starting to see babies who they’re walking around naked and you see their little butts and normal amount of baby fat, but there’s, they’re dimpled like cellulite. That is not normal, that is abnormal, and that is epigenetic because some of these are actually in my own family, I’ve seen this, and I didn’t see it on my little sister when she was walking around naked. But I do see it in her child. And it’s not her fault because I think it was epigenetic. And it’s not my mother’s fault. I’m not looking to blame people. I’m looking to understand how this happens and how very, to see and say how very important it is that we don’t do the pregnancy thing mindlessly on a prayer crossing our fingers, and going to our OB-Gyne and counting on the medical system to help us have a healthy baby. Forget about it. The medical system loves it when your babies are unhealthy because one unhealthy baby can cost half a million dollars. That means half a million dollars of pure profit.”

Dr. Cate: “Our fat is stored in our body fat, and our body fat is located directly under our skin. So you go down maybe like an eighth of an inch, and you start getting to body fat that’s actually body fat, and under there is called subcutaneous. That’s where all the extra PUFA goes. When you have been eating a normal standard American diet, and you’ve got all that PUFA in there, if you’re super pale and you go out in the sun for 20 minutes, you’re gonna burn. Sunburn that’s one of the great things that us pale faces; we wanna get our tans on in the summer. And it’s a challenge because you burn when you’re on PUFAs. So one of the great things that people notice that I didn’t mention is they tan instead of burning. So that right there is huge and you still gotta use Sun tan lotion and all that stuff, but you won’t burn as easily“

Dr. Cate: “Oh, hugely. I have a chapter in the new edition of Deep Nutrition. It’s called Brain Killer, how Vegetable oil is your brain’s worst enemy, and it truly is. And there are many ways that the mechanisms of how seed oil promotes inflammation and disrupts our growth that is right in line with what happens with autistic children’s neurological development. Some people call Alzheimer’s Autism of the elderly because there are similar findings there that have to do with inflammation, and seed oils promote inflammation. So it’s related, and you can do something like every day that you don’t eat seed oils before you have a child before you conceive is a good thing.“

Dr. Cate: “I would. What’s better for you, it tastes better because the flavor is nutrition. Chefs are the original nutritionist. That’s why Deep Nutrition is all about respecting chefs and respecting culinary old-fashioned recipes. There is a lot of a recipe that could be really short, a traditional recipe, but there’s a lot of wisdom, knowledge, and skill buried in that. And that is the body of nutritional science that doctors used to respect. But if we come full circle and come back and say, “oh yeah, if you wanna really be in to help, don’t go to dietician school. Don’t be a dietician or nutritionist. Go to culinary school and just focus on using real whole-food ingredients” because that’s what everybody is used to.“

Dr. Cate: “There are 11 symptoms of hypoglycemia, and they include things like brain fog and dizziness, and headaches. Do you get HANGRY? Hangry wasn’t a word until like 2010 because kids didn’t get hangry when I was growing up. We just went outside and played longer. Because we could burn our body fat, but this hanger is really the first sign of a severe metabolic problem that your body fat is not serving as a fun, effective fuel, and now your cells are using more sugar than your bloodstream can provide. That is a huge problem. So your body is needing more sugar than your bloodstream can provide. So what happens? Your brain is one of the most sugar or energy-dependent organs. When you start having difficulty supplying your brain energy, that’s when you feel almost all of these 11 hypoglycemia symptoms are related to low brain energy. So your brain starts saying, “I know biology, and when I was born, a normal fasting blood sugar level was somewhere between 65 and 85, but that’s not doing it for me anymore. So I’m going to take charge of this situation. I’m gonna fix my own problem, gonna increase my fasting blood sugar level.” What does that mean? My brain is giving you diabetes.“

Dr. Cate: “The way I work with it with my patients is cause I don’t have time to go over a whole meal program. I just say, “let’s figure out a healthy breakfast for you because breakfast is the most important meal of the day not to screw up.” And we do screw it up when we start out with processed foods and high carbs because we start out immediately blocking our fat burn for the morning. And then, if you block your fat burn, you can be hungry. You’re not gonna make healthy choices at lunch. So what I do is I have; I’ve tried to help people get a breakfast that’s gonna be relatively high in saturated fat. And frankly, you don’t need anything else. If you are trying to put on muscle, you wanna have protein meal-rich meals at least twice a day. I don’t know if three times a day is really necessary, but at least twice a day. But it doesn’t have to be breakfast. Whether it’s a smoothie with a lot of vegetables and coconut as the fat base, avocado as the fat base, or macadamia nuts ground up as a fat base or yogurt kind of thing. That’s a full-fat yogurt. If you put creme fresh in whole yogurt and then add a few coconut shavings and chocolate or cacao nibs and a couple of nuts, that is a really delicious breakfast for some people in Hawaii. They would just slice an avocado in half and put a little salt on it. Cause’ avocados were fresh. What I have is kind of a variant of the whole. I started doing this before Bulletproof Coffee, but I just have like coffee with a lot of creams in it and some milk or eggs. If you have eggs and you cook them, you just add plenty of fat to them. Like not more than maybe one or two eggs and no carbs, maybe a few non-starchy vegetables. Those are some really great ways to start your day. So breakfast sausages, that’s good. Start your day that way. And I can guarantee you that you will feel different than if you started your day with a very high-carb, low-fat kind of, just right, You will not be as hungry by lunch. You will not be as distracted by thoughts of food. You do that day after day, and now you can maybe start to make a healthier lunch. Or maybe you’re like, “I’m not even hungry, and I’m so busy. Maybe I don’t have time for lunch.” And this is, again, not gonna be a great idea if you’re in the process of trying to build a lot of muscle, But if you’re just a regular person trying and you can still tone up and have plenty of muscle doing this, you just skip your lunch and then just make sure that your dinner has a lot of protein in it. You can stimulate muscle protein synthesis with multiple meals, but you can also stimulate it with just one really big meal if you are fat-adapted and you’ve exercised, and you sleep well. I’m not clear that you really need to do the multiple small meals yet. I don’t think we really do have research saying that you definitively do. We may be able just to be fat-adaptive and have one big high-protein meal.“

Dr. Cate: “So folks are often confused about recommendations on peanut oil, cause’ I say that peanut oil is okay if it’s unrefined. It’s actually good because it’s a traditional fat, really, honestly, because it’s been bred for hundreds, maybe thousands of years to be extremely generous with the oil in the seed. So it’s easy to release, and even though there’s a decent amount of PUFA in there, depending on the peanut and the strain and everything, that can be as high as 35% PUFA or as low as like 17%, which is like olive oil now. Some peanuts have oil profiles that are more like olives. It depends on the strain, depends on where it’s grown. A lot of variables with plants, so it’s hard to be absolute about anything. When it comes to a number, you always have to try it for the best quality. Actually, the best quality peanuts are the larger ones, and they do have a better fatty acid profile. So I’m an advocate of using peanut oil if you like it because not only does it have relatively high saturated fat, which protects the PUFAs, but it also has lots of antioxidants in there. And as long as you’re not doing extended like deep frying, you’re hard-pressed to make that healthy because 400 degrees for hours and hours and hours, that’s not a traditional way of cooking.“

Dr. Cate: “Here’s how seed oils make sugar more toxic. Cause’ you said it’s like the perfect one-two punch, right? Seed oils make your body want more sugar in the bloodstream all the time because it has to do with how your brain can get energy. When your body fat is failed because you have too much PUFA, then all of your cells will start wanting sugar kind of all at the same time after the food from your last meal is left the bloodstream, and there’s nothing in there anymore. All that’s left is your normal amount of blood sugar. But it’s a tiny bit. And so after a while, your brain is really smart, and it gets smart and says, “Hey, I know I’m just gonna make that liver put more sugar in the bloodstream all the time.” And this is what I talk about in the fat burn fix. This is how I think we all get type two diabetes. So other people have their other theories that it’s all about sugar and carbs and wearing out the system. I don’t think that makes any sense. I think seed oils actually cause type 2 diabetes too, and they make you less tolerant of sugar.”

Dr. Cate: “Ironically, like some of the greatest sources of vitamin E are the seeds that they make oil, seed oil, but it’s totally destroyed in the processing, right? So you don’t have it anymore, but so you can eat the seeds, you can totally eat the seeds, but you don’t wanna have them cooked to death because that will oxidize the oil. They’re better for you when they’re like raw or lightly cooked, or this thing called sprout.”

Dr. Cate: “So these are high polyunsaturated fatty acid oils, and I can explain what polyunsaturated fatty acid is, but mostly what you need to know is the names of the oils. So there are three seeds that you have to look for when you’re grocery shopping. That’s corn, canola, cotton seeds, soy, sunflower, and safflower. And then when you’re in the restaurant, and even fine dining, like either five-star hotels that the Lakers would stay at, there’s rice bread and Grapeseed oil. That’s the eight of them. And why are there bad for us? It is because they are too high in these unstable fatty acids. That’s the category called polyunsaturated fatty acids. And that’s the kind that Ansel Keys is telling people that we need to eat more of and carrying on his horror legacy of horror, in places like Tufts and Harvard, we have the figureheads at these Ivy League institutions sending the same message out that we need to eat more of these polyunsaturated fatty acids. And they’re just horrible for us for so many reasons. It would take an entire series of podcasts just to cover it properly, but the short story is they damage your mitochondria, they promote inflammation, and they are incompatible with health, yet we are getting 30. The average person who doesn’t know to avoid these things, even if they’re kind of a health nut, is probably getting somewhere between 30 and 50% of their total calories from these things. And like 80% of their fat calories from these things.”