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STORY AT-A-GLANCE
- Omega-6 linoleic acid (LA) is the most common fat in the American diet. Most people get 25 times more LA than they need. At most, you need about 2 grams a day, but the average American gets about 50 grams a day, thanks to the fact that most processed foods and condiments are loaded with omega-6 seed oils
- LA gets incorporated into your cell membranes where it causes inflammation. Its half-life is nearly two years, so ridding your body of stored LA completely can take up to seven years
- Eliminating LA is a marathon, not a sprint. Ineffective and potentially harmful ways of eliminating LA include extended fasting and overtaxing your body with strenuous endurance exercise
- To stop the accumulation of LA in your cells, eliminate seed oils from your diet. Cook with beef tallow, butter, ghee or coconut oil, and avoid all processed foods, restaurant foods, condiments, and animals raised on grains, such as chicken and pork
- Vitamin E, in a dose of about 2 IU - 3 IU for every gram of PUFA (not just linoleate) consumed daily may also be able to provide some protection against the inflammatory and endocrine (estrogenic, pro-cortisol) effects of linoleate and PUFA in general
- To safely encourage the elimination of LA from your body, focus on building muscle and maximizing lean muscle mass with concentric exercise, and eat a balanced diet with a ratio of 2-to-1 healthy carbs to protein
Both Georgi and I are convinced excessive LA intake is one of the most important variables that can make or break your health, especially in the long term. It’s a far greater contributor to chronic and degenerative disease and mortality than sugar, and it’s the primary culprit that makes processed foods so harmful.
How Georgi Became a Biohacker
Despite having a degree in computer science, Georgi has made a name for himself as an expert biohacker. After graduating from college in 2002, he got a job as a programmer at the National Biomedical Research Foundation (NBRF).“Between 2002 and 2005, I was part of this group as a programmer, but I basically started attending all of their lectures and classes,” he says. “Some of them were teaching at nearby universities, so I kept going.
Low-Carb Considerations
In the interview, we clear up some of the pervasive confusion surrounding low-carb diets, and why long-term chronic low-carb is not ideal. It’s a great short-term intervention for most people, especially those with insulin resistance.- The elevated lipolysis in a low carb-state, which results in chronically elevated circulating levels of PUFA, with the resulting inflammatory and endocrine effects (e.g. PUFA is pro-cortisol, estrogenic and also synergizes with endogenous/exogenous estrogens, and promotes their effects even in low doses).
- The downregulation of the resting metabolic rate (RMR) by lowered synthesis of T3 when eating a low-carb diet and/or fasting and/or strenuous exercise.
If you listen to the interview, you will learn that once your sugar stores are expended, you start tapping into your fat stores through a process called lipolysis. This liberated fat is then circulated around your body and supplied to the cells as fuel to compensate for the low glucose availability.
However, certain types of fat block the effects of insulin in your body, so a long-distance endurance athlete can actually end up with a blood profile similar to that of a person with Type 2 diabetes. In Georgi’s case, as an endurance athlete, his blood sugar climbed higher the less sugar he ate. This competition/antagonism between glucose and fats (mostly PUFA) as fuel for the cells was first discovered in the 1970s and named the Randle Cycle.
Why does it occur? The process in your liver that controls blood sugar is gluconeogenesis. If you stop supplying carbs to your body, the organs that need them will activate glucose creation in your body by elevating the stress hormone cortisol, which ends up being very destructive to your tissues, including skeletal muscle, liver, brain and kidneys.
In Type 2 diabetes, a state with hyperglycemia, only about 10% of the circulating glucose is of dietary origin. The rest is due to chronically elevated gluconeogenesis — which suggests that cortisol is the driver of hyperglycemia in Type 2 diabetes — and elevating cortisol chronically by doing low-carb or exhaustive exercise is likely detrimental to insulin sensitivity.
People with elevated cortisol (Cushing phenotype) have the same central obesity and loss of muscle mass (sarcopenia) as the ones seen in diabetes 2. Conversely, blocking cortisol’s effects with the drug RU486 has been demonstrated to lead to sustained fat loss WITHOUT dieting, and improved insulin sensitivity.[3][4][5]
Dietary Fats and Fatty Liver Disease
In his search for answers to the symptoms he experienced on a low-carb diet, he came across Dr. Peat’s website,[6] aka, Dr. T.A. Peterson, an American biologist who’s been studying the role of energy in the cell, and the effects of LA. Georgi started reading Peat’s work in 2009, and eventually started doing his own experiments.As noted by Georgi, published research has long demonstrated that LA is far from a benign macronutrient. It’s actually a highly proinflammatory mediator and has endocrine effects that mimic estrogen. Contrary to popular belief, LA is also a major culprit in nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), more so than fructose and other sugars.[7][8]
“The livers of people who are eating predominantly omega-6 fatty acids very quickly get fattened up. Also, there’s cell damage of the Kupffer cells due to the many oxidation byproducts (OxLAMs) of these omega-6 fatty acids ... [Meanwhile], the livers of the animals that were still alcoholic but were given the saturated fatty acids had very little oxidative damage to the cells, and they weren’t fat.
PUFAs Are Stored, Not Digested
An important take-home here is that PUFAs such as LA are not digested. Instead they’re stored.[13] Most of the body fat in obese individuals is composed of PUFAs, not saturated fat. Saturated dietary fat is mostly burned (oxidized) and used up.So, obese individuals are typically not eating very much saturated fat; rather, they’re exponentially overdosing on LA. Animal studies in the early 20th century demonstrated conclusively that pigs fed saturated fats (mostly coconut oil) could not get fat but became lean and muscular, while the ones fed PUFA gained mostly fat.
This led to the adoption/promotion of PUFA as animal feed since the goal there is to maximize “caloric efficiency” — i.e., get the animals as heavy as possible with a little food as possible. In other words, the pro-obesity effects of PUFA and anti-obesity effects of saturated fats are well-known in the livestock industry and are not disputed.
Considering the similarity of our metabolism/structure/tissues/organs with those of pigs, it should not be at all surprising that we keep getting fatter while consuming ever-larger amounts of PUFA.
The half-life of PUFAs such as LA, which get embedded and integrated into your cell membranes, is about 680 days. This means that to rid your body of LA will take approximately seven years, provided you don’t load more in. And you really do want to get rid of this fat, as it’s highly inflammatory and prevents your mitochondria and cellular machinery from operating properly.
PUFAs Coming Out of Storage Can Cause Trouble
A key way to eventually lower your body burden of LA is to keep your total LA intake below 2%, maybe even close to 1%. You need to stop putting more in. Exercise and fasting will help drive the LA out, but you need to be really careful if you have a lot of LA storage.“A recent study [16] found that even lean people who are running marathons, a good portion (82%!) of them are actually in acute kidney failure by the time they reach the finish line,” Georgi says. “The question is, how is this possible? It looks like these circulating fatty acids, which are mostly PUFAs coming out of storage, circulate and cause energetic problems.
My Recommendations for TRE Have Changed
Georgi pointed out the dangers of an excessive time-restricted eating (TRE) window.[18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25] An extreme example of TRE is the one meal a day (OMAD) protocol, where you’re fasting 20 hours or more each day. Georgi believes this is too extreme for most people, as most have large stores of LA that need to be purged safely.I have been personally practicing and advocating a six– to eight-hour time restricted eating window. What I learned from our conversation is that this, or even longer eating restrictions and fasts, are perfectly appropriate for 95% of the population as they are insulin resistant and metabolically inflexible.
The major problem comes once you lose your insulin resistance and become metabolically flexible. At that point, this strategy becomes counterproductive as you will increase your cortisol levels, which causes chronic inflammation that can lead to tissue damage. Usually, it takes about three to six months for you to recover your metabolic flexibility.
Prior to my interview with Georgi I would have a six- to eight-hour eating window and I did this for a few years. Now I am going to shift to one day a week of 12 hours, three days of 10 hours and three days of eight hours. If you are metabolically healthy, I would encourage you to avoid very short eating windows under eight hours.
“So, you don’t want to be doing this to your normal tissues, and you’re doing it to your tissues every single time you over-exert yourself to the point of either glycogen running low or you’re so stressed that your adrenaline has gotten to the point where it’s increasing lipolysis and you’re starting to shed fat.”This is a massive piece of the puzzle that I never fully appreciated. Molecular biology and pH physiology are based on a pre-1860s scenario where you didn’t have these high levels of LA, which totally distorts the strategies. If they weren’t there, you could fast to activate autophagy and get all these benefits.
How to Safely Purge LA
How can you safely reduce these stores of LA without self-sabotaging? As explained by Georgi, extensive fasting will, in this instance, backfire, as will overtaxing yourself with heavy exercise. You’ll need to accept that this is a marathon, not a sprint, and that it’s going to take years to purge your LA stores. The best strategy, Georgi says, is to build muscle and maximize lean muscle mass.“What does that mean? Concentric exercise, stimulating the muscles to grow. We already mentioned that cortisol is a very catabolic steroid for the muscles, so [you don’t want that] chronically. Acute spikes of cortisol are unavoidable. But things such as chronic fasting or eating inflammatory foods should be avoided as much as possible, which means cutting out vegetable oils.
“Protein is thermogenic. It’s going to raise your metabolic rate. It’s important to consume it with enough carbs because one of the quickest ways to damage your kidneys is consuming a very high protein diet without sufficient amount of carbs.
So, the key is not to be afraid of healthy carbs: They are your friend. If you are eating enough protein to build muscle, please make sure you also have enough carbs because, if you fail to do this, you can hurt your kidneys, liver and brain.
How PUFAs Cause Heart Disease
Saturated fats improve the structure of cells, specifically the lipid bilayer, while PUFAs like LA impair it. The reason your cholesterol and LDL levels may go up when switching to saturated fats is because you’re giving the cells the structural material needed, from which the cells can synthesize their own cholesterol as needed. Hence, extra cholesterol gets dumped into the bloodstream because it isn’t needed.Cholesterol is carried around by LDL. So, when you’re eating saturated fat, your LDL rises, but it’s rising because the cholesterol already in the cell is not as needed anymore. It’s actually a good sign.
Conversely, when you’re eating PUFAs, your cells need more cholesterol to strengthen their structure, so your body dumps cholesterol into the cells to protect them from the onslaught of the PUFAs. Hence, it appears your cholesterol level is going down, but it’s actually having a strongly negative effect.
“The plaque is basically a reaction to an inflammation caused by these toxic PUFA byproducts, and PUFA itself is inflammatory. When it gets lodged into the blood vessel walls, it causes a localized inflammatory reaction. The first response of the body is to send white blood cells to protect the blood vessel wall from damage and rupture. That’s really the purpose of the plaque.
Concluding Thoughts
Like me, Georgi is convinced LA is a primary culprit in chronic diseases. And, since LA is found in most whole foods, there’s really never any need to take an omega-6 supplement. It’s virtually impossible to get too little from your diet.I believe omega-6 supplements really ought to be removed from the market altogether, as people are getting 25 times more omega-6 than they could possibly need from their diet. At most, you need about 2 grams a day, but the average American gets about 50 grams a day, thanks to the fact that most processed foods and condiments are loaded with omega-6 seed oils.
If our diet were to be shifted away from seed oils to saturated fats, the way it was 150 years ago, we’d likely see a massive decline in chronic diseases, including cancer and heart disease.
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