If you've ever been addicted to
vegetable oils but now you know better
enough to eat butter, then this video is
for you.
Hi. I'm Dr. Chris Masterjohn of
chrismasterjohnphd.com and you're watching
Chris Masterjohn Lite, where the name
of the game is, "Details? Shmeetails.
Just tell me what works!"
Now, I don't know if you've been watching
the Masterclass With Masterjohn videos
on the antioxidant defense system. If you
have, awesome. If you haven't, who cares?
That is
details details. This is detailed shmeetails.
One of the key takeaways that you
may or may not have seen from that
series is that polyunsaturated fats, which
some of us like to call PUFAs, which are
found in modern vegetable oils like
soybean oil and canola oil, and back in
the day people even used to eat corn oil, and
nowadays people also eat safflower oil
and sunflower oil. If they're not called
"high oleic" all these oils are rich in
polyunsaturated fats. And these increase
our need for vitamin E and all the other
antioxidants. Now, although our bodies
need some polyunsaturated fat there's a
lot of good reasons to believe that we
should consume small amounts like were
found in traditional animal fats,
tropical oils, and oils like olive oil,
instead of the really large amounts that
we find in modern vegetable oils. But
here's the thing.
It can take four years for the amount of
polyunsaturated fat that's stored in your body
to fully accumulate when you're eating a
diet rich in vegetable oils, and when you
switch from something like soybean oil to
coconut oil, that polyunsaturated fat
takes about four years to go back down
to low levels. And what that means is
that if you've been eating
polyunsaturated fat for one, two, three,
four years, your need for vitamin E could
stay elevated for the next four years
after you quit. And so, although you may
get a lot of benefits in the long term
and maybe you'll even get some benefits
in the short term, it's still possible
that lingering in the background there's
this potential harm of the transition. So
what do we do about that?
Well let's say for simplicity that over
the past four years you've consumed a
diet that's thirty percent fat deriving
all of the fat from soybean oil.
Who knows, maybe you consumed forty percent
and it was a mix of different oils, but
for a simple calculation, if that's the
case, your vitamin E requirement could
stay at about 20 IU per day for the
next four years. Let's say you switch to
coconut oil and butter.
You're getting some vitamin E from
butter but only enough to protect the
polyunsaturated fats in the butter, which
isn't very much. Coconut oil has
practically no vitamin E at all.
So in that case the easiest way to get
20 IU of vitamin E from food would be to
consume 4 tablespoons of palm oil per
day. Now that can be great if you like
palm oil and if you're willing to eat
that much added fat but you may have
goals that require you to eat less added
fat or you may want some diversity
in the taste of your food because
palm oil has its own taste.
So, is there are more convenient way to
hack around this? There absolutely is.
What I would do is simply as an
insurance policy take a low-dose vitamin
E supplement for the next couple of
years.
The problem is almost all the vitamin E
supplements on the market have enormous
quantities of vitamin E in them that
could, although the science isn't totally
clear on it, could increase your need for
other fat-soluble vitamins, and you don't
really want to mess with that balance. The
vitamin E supplement that I would
recommend for this purpose is Jarrow
Formulas Toco-Sorb. Now the thing that I
like about this vitamin E supplement is
that its amount of alpha-tocopherol is
19 IU
and alpha-tocopherol is the
most important form of vitamin E and
it's the most powerful antioxidant. S you
want to meet your basic needs for
vitamin E largely as alpha-tocopherol
and that's just about the perfect amount.
But it also has these other
tocopherols and tocotrienols that reflect
the natural blend of vitamin E forms
found in palm oil. So I think it's great
that the blend you get is natural and yet
you still know that you're getting
about 20 IU of vitamin E as
alpha-tocopherol. Now, your vitamin E requirement
isn't going to stay elevated forever and
in fact even across the four years after
you switch from a diet that's mostly
vegetable oil to a diet of traditional
fats it's only going to be elevated that
much at first and it's going to slowly
decline down to the level that's found in
your diet over four years. So you don't
need to take the supplement forever. Your
vitamin E requirement is going to depend
on a lot of things like the other things
you're eating in your diet,
what your lifestyle is like, what
you're exposed to in the environment, your
genetics, and so on. So you may not need
the supplement at all. However,
if you're making that switch it's a good
insurance policy and if you have any
reason to feel like your body is
subjected to a little bit more wear and
tear than you'd like then it's a pretty
good idea to take it.
All right, I hope you found this useful.
Signing off, this is Chris Masterjohn of
chrismasterjohnphd.com.
You've been watching Chris Masterjohn Lite,
and I will see you in the next
video.