Transcription
What if a $200 billion food ingredient is shrinking our brains and making us dumber? From Ranch to Italian, the dumbing down of America is making our kids dumber. The brain is permanently stunted by the food that we consume. In the 1930s, a Polish farmer came to Canada with a plant that has seeds that produce an oil that was great for lubricating machinery. Canada produced tons of this stuff to lubricate ship engines during World War II, but after World War II, they didn't need all that lubricant anymore, and we were left with all these seed-producing plants. They also had tons of machinery left over because to produce just a tablespoon of oil, you need 70,000 seeds to get this tiny amount of oil. They ran the seeds through a long industrial process with high pressure, forcing out the oil, followed by a second extraction—a 70-minute wash with a solvent. They washed the oil with sodium hydroxide, bleached it, and then used a steam injection heating process to remove the canola odor. They then sold it as cooking oil for humans—healthy cooking with new Misola R blend MAA canola. Canola oil is now the most commonly used cooking oil today; you probably have it in your pantry.
Seed oils are the most unhealthy ingredients that we have. Seed oils are of the devil, and when you want to stop using them, you can't—they're in every food. In 1865, we ate 0 grams of vegetable oil, but now the average American consumes 720 calories in their diet from these highly processed oils every day. Vegetable oils, also called seed oils, contain a very specific type of fat that for 99% of human history we didn't eat that much of. The human brain is mostly made of fat—it's about 60% fat. So the question is, could eating a ton of all this processed seed oil fat be affecting our brain and our intelligence?
We eliminated Alzheimer's disease by eliminating vegetable oil, corn oil, and soy from the animal diet and putting in large doses of vitamin E and selenium. By the way, if you're interested in reducing the negative health effects of these seed oils, make sure to watch the video to the end because I've got a free gift for you.
Now, let's rewind a little bit. Damage to children, like brain damage and learning disabilities, was noted back in 1979 when researchers were shocked to see a notable decrease in the average IQ of children in Massachusetts. Not only were these kids slower at learning, but something was affecting their brains, making them more distractible, hyperactive, impulsive, and easily frustrated. In the 1920s, Thomas Midgley had just made a new product for the automotive industry that he predicted would make billions of dollars. Modern gasoline gives greater performance; that product was tetraethyl lead, which was used to make leaded gasoline. Leaded gasoline was far more profitable. From the 1920s, cars all over the country were pumping the poisonous lead into the air every day, mounting medical evidence that lead is damaging children's brains. This dramatic change in the air led to a decline in the IQ of children. Luckily, our brains are now safe from this because leaded gasoline was phased out starting in 1973, cutting lead by 91%.
So then what happened after 1973? IQ scores seemed to be drifting up, but there's also evidence that the effect is slowing down and possibly reversing. Oh boy! In 2018, Norwegian researchers revealed data that IQ scores started to slightly decrease for men born after 1975. The lead author, Rosenberg, says that similar studies in Denmark, Britain, France, the Netherlands, Finland, and Estonia all found the same thing: a trend of decreasing IQ scores. Now, Raborg points out that someone might criticize his finding, saying that because IQ has a lot to do with genetics, maybe it's just that more "dumb" people are having more kids. But he says no; it has to be environmental factors because they found the same downward trend in IQ within families.
Dr. Michael Crawford, director of The Institute of Brain Chemistry and Human Nutrition, says that based on current trends, we are heading for an idiocracy. There are tons of factors to IQ, but evidence is piling up that a different cheap and profitable invention is now polluting our brains. This completely new and unnatural product has created a $212 billion industry, and it's not in the air but in our food supply. Dr. Michael Crawford's data suggests that a new specific type of fat added to the global food supply may be de-evolving our brains.
Now, that's a huge claim, so let's take a look at what makes our brains so big and smart in the first place. "Lucy," the worst-rated movie of Scarlett Johansson's career, has a scene where her brain becomes so powerful that she can travel back in time, allowing her to meet a human ancestor also named Lucy. You see, Lucy is a member of a species of primate that really existed 3.2 million years ago. Primate brains leading up to Lucy's kind had been growing very slowly and steadily. However, something happened around 2 million years ago: brain size started mysteriously increasing way faster, ending up with humans having massive brains way ahead of schedule. In fact, the human brain is so abnormally large that if height increased at the same rate that brain volume did, female humans' height today would be around 8.5 feet or 260 cm.
So why did this happen, and why are cetaceans like dolphins, orcas, and whales so smart, while rhinos, cows, and horses are so dumb? One theory is that early humans essentially figured out how to cook wild potatoes and tubers, which gave them plenty of calories to fuel their big, energy-hungry brains. The human brain takes up a whole 20 to 25% of our calories, so an efficient source of calories was very important. Except this doesn't make that much sense because wild potatoes don't have any of the important nutrients the brain needs to grow; they're just calories. Hunting would be a much better reason for why our brains grew. Animal meat and organs would provide all sorts of critical nutrients for the brain, and animal fat would provide tons of calories.
Primates figuring out how to get meat was the most obvious explanation for evolving the human brain. However, zoologist Dr. Michael Crawford thought that there was another piece to the puzzle. In the 1980s, he decided to investigate what types of fat there were in the bodies and brains of various types of animals. He noted that high levels of two fats helped make the brain grow, and there was a third fat that seemed to be bad for brain growth. The two fats that made the brain grow and were therefore very important for the evolution of the brain are arachidonic acid (AA) and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA). Humans could get plenty of AA by hunting various land animals, but land animals aren't that great of a source of DHA. You can get a good amount of DHA from the brains and eyes of animals, but early humans would have had to crack open a ton of animal skulls to get a steady supply of DHA.
Dr. Crawford argues that the real reason human brains evolved was that early humans found a simpler way to get the special DHA. Now, primates like humans and monkeys have enzymes that allow them to make a very small amount of DHA from a fat in plant foods. So to get a lot of DHA, you can't make it; you have to eat it. Now, the average monkey diet does not naturally contain much DHA, so what happens if you give monkeys DHA? A 2014 paper outlines the work of some dedicated researchers at the University of California, Davis, who took some rhesus monkeys and fed them a diet high in DHA for their entire lifespan—about 17 to 19 years. After all this time, they put the monkeys in a brain scanner to see if anything was different. They found that compared to the other monkeys, the brains of the monkeys on the naturally high DHA diet had highly connected and well-organized neural networks, which in some ways resembled the healthy human brain.
This information in the wrong hands could be dangerous; monkeys are already smart enough to steal tourist stuff and hold it ransom for food. Yes, the best source of DHA is seafood: fish, shellfish, crustaceans, and algae. These also have all kinds of important brain nutrients like protein, vitamin A, zinc, choline, iodine, selenium, vitamin B12, and so on. But they would be the best source of DHA. Michael Crawford says it would be so easy and safe to just walk along the coastline and gather tons of nutrient-dense food versus having to hunt land animals. Professor Stephen Kain of Toronto University agrees, saying a shore-based diet was essential for the evolution of human brains.
One study from 2010 found that breastfeeding mothers who ate more omega-3 fats like DHA tended to have babies with bigger brains; specifically, the frontal cortex got bigger. The frontal cortex controls uniquely human things like long-term goal planning, decision-making, and problem-solving. Other studies suggest shrinkage of the prefrontal cortex from a DHA-deficient diet. Several studies have found that DHA improves attention, learning, memory, and reduces ADHD symptoms in children. Of course, those geniuses of the sea, dolphins and other cetaceans, are getting tons of the brain-evolving DHA from a diet that is mostly raw fish.
You might say, "Okay, well, dolphins eat tons of fish; why don't they just keep getting smarter and smarter? Why aren't they even smarter than humans?" Researchers say that might just be simply because smarter brains packed with more neurons use tons of energy and oxygen. If the dolphin's brain guzzles up more oxygen, then they can't dive as long. Speaking of diving, our quest for DHA-rich seafood might explain why our noses are so weird. There's this old controversial theory called the Aquatic Ape Theory that says that humans evolved from an ancestor that adapted to life near bodies of water. Several aspects of our body seem more adapted for the water. For example, we don't have hair on our bodies, which would make it easier to swim, and we have a layer of fat under our skin, unlike other primates, which would help us float in water.
Further, this may have something to do with why we started walking upright. Monkeys can walk on two feet, but they prefer not to unless they are wading through the water. Now, most anthropologists completely reject this Aquatic Ape Theory, but whether we had a semi-aquatic ancestor or not, humans are very good at diving. The human spleen, for example, is larger than in other primates, and it acts as a reservoir of oxygen-carrying red blood cells, which allows us to hold our breath for longer. The Bajau people near the Philippines live a sea-nomad type of lifestyle where they spend hours a day diving for all kinds of DHA-rich seafood like shellfish, shrimp, crab, fish, octopus, sea urchin, and squid. Their genetics gift them with an abnormally large spleen, which is thought to be why some Bajau can hold their breath for over 10 minutes.
Now, another interesting aspect of humans is our protruding noses. Unlike monkeys' flat noses, human noses are better at preventing water from getting into the nasal cavity when we swim or dive. Most monkeys are not good swimmers, but the proboscis monkeys are, and they happen to have these big protruding noses. As of 2019, Japan is number one in the world for IQ, with an IQ of 106—that's a full nine points higher than the United States' IQ of 97. Of course, there are all kinds of different factors to IQ, but Japan does have a DHA-rich food culture that includes plenty of seaweed and fresh seafood. They eat about twice as much fish as Americans. A traditional Japanese breakfast is white rice, fermented soybeans, miso soup with seaweed, roasted fish, and more dry seaweed.
Of course, you can find all kinds of fish at Japanese supermarkets and restaurants, but you can even get fish rice balls or roasted fish at a convenience store. What's tricky about getting an idea of which country eats the most DHA is that DHA degrades when you heat it. Lucky for Japan, they eat plenty of raw seafood. A 2022 survey found that the second most common way people ate their fish at home in Japan was raw, as sashimi. Japan also has more than twice as many sushi restaurants than fast food and pizza shops combined.
Now, there's that third fat that Michael Crawford said was important to brain size, which explains why animals like rhinos are so dumb. In their one-ton body, they have a mere 350-gram brain. That would be like a human having a brain the size of a walnut. I wish I could think of brilliant plants like that. Land animals like rhinos barely get any DHA, but their plant-based diet gives them plenty of linoleic acid. Linoleic acid is that third fat; it can compete with DHA for incorporation into the cells. Too much linoleic acid will hog up space in the cells so that DHA can't get in.
Did you make this with vegetable oil? Oh yeah, thanks, but I got to watch what I eat. These totally new and unnatural vegetable oils that we didn't eat for 99% of human history have tons of this linoleic acid that reduces levels of DHA. But DHA is critical for brain function and even the evolution of the brain. You might have a big bottle of linoleic acid at home, like sunflower oil, soybean oil, corn oil, grapeseed oil, canola oil, and so on. Most restaurants use these seed-based oils to cook with because they're so cheap. The guide to cooking a perfect steak? Touch of oil. Most processed food and prepackaged food has plenty of vegetable oil. Fried foods are, of course, fried in vegetable oil; mayonnaise and salad dressing are primarily just vegetable oil. The average person eats these oils every single day.
Now, IQ is a little controversial and does depend on many different factors, but lucky for Japan, which allegedly has the highest IQ in the world, they consume about half the vegetable oil of Americans. At a high school in Woodbridge, New Jersey, students say that the food is inedible. Some high school students are so sick of their school food that they've started a protest movement against it. In 1970, the law changed; schools could now turn to private for-profit companies to feed their students. In American schools, it's common to have plenty of processed food on the menu. You cut back on everything: salaries, supplies. The food in Japan's school lunches is planned out by a nutritionist, and it's standard to make them fresh from scratch every day.
What's alarming is that Michael Crawford found that those animals with high linoleic acid and low DHA had smaller brains. The animals with high DHA and low linoleic acid had bigger brains. He says that this state of high DHA and low linoleic acid is what allows the brains to grow and evolve. Now, as Nina Teicholz laid out in her book "The Big Fat Surprise," in 1911, the soap maker Procter and Gamble figured out that they could take seeds from cotton—something that no one eats—run those seeds through an industrial process, and make something that looked sort of like lard, a very common cooking fat at the time. They launched a massive marketing campaign positioning their product as a cleaner, more modern alternative to lard, and by 1916, sales of their crystallized cottonseed product, Crisco, reached 60 million pounds. Various other vegetable oils like corn oil, canola oil, and soybean oil came on the scene, and this is how we went from eating 0 grams of vegetable oil a day in 1865 to 80 grams a day today. That's over a pound of vegetable oils a week—around 720 calories from oil a day. Vegetable oils are now a $212 billion industry as of 2022.
Further, the dietary guidelines for Americans were introduced in 1980 and recommended we swap animal fats like butter and lard for vegetable oils. It makes you wonder if this could be a factor in why the IQ increase in Americans slowed down right around 1980. The vegetable oil story just gets worse from here. In 2010, researchers out of Canada were trying to figure out why some women did not have high enough levels of DHA. Multiple studies find that babies' brains and intelligence benefit from the mother's DHA supplementation, which would mean that women aren't getting enough DHA in the first place. But the researchers were suspicious that maybe it wasn't just that they weren't eating enough DHA, but something was interfering with the DHA in the women. By analyzing the blood of pregnant women, they found that indeed those women eating too much linoleic acid had not just lower DHA but lower levels of the brain-boosting fats AA and EPA.
This also suggests that linoleic acid shoves out DHA and other fats essential for brain function and development. Then, five years later, a 2015 study found that, as expected, children with mothers who got too much linoleic acid experienced negative effects on brain development. Just one year after that, in 2016, a study on over 4,000 children and their mothers found that higher linoleic acid in the mothers when they were pregnant was associated with more symptoms of autism spectrum disorder when the children were six years old. Four years later, a review article called for more investigation into how we can protect our brains by reducing how much linoleic acid we eat. Unfortunately for children under nine months of age, there is no infant formula on the market that does not contain vegetable oils.
All this doesn't mean that you don't need to worry about linoleic acid and DHA after you finish growing your brain. DHA is critical for healthy brain functioning in adults too, no matter your age. Studies have found a link between DHA and everything from irritability, stress, and depression to memory, reaction time, and even aggressiveness. DHA has even a protective effect on the brain in the case of head trauma, and papers have associated higher consumption of linoleic acid with higher rates of depression.
Now, don't get me wrong; linoleic acid is not a synthetic poison like lead. A very small amount of linoleic acid in the diet is totally normal, but the problem is we are eating a clearly very unnaturally high amount of it nowadays. Okay, so for that free gift I was talking about, I'm making a full guide on how to avoid and prevent those negative health effects of seed oils and linoleic acid. So check the description for a link to where you can put in your email so I can include you when I send over the guide.
But getting back to just how unnatural seed oils are: olives produce oil, and seeds generally do not produce oil. So I don't know what seed oil is. Let's say you wanted to get oil from corn; you would need 20 ears of corn just to get a single tablespoon of corn oil. For one tablespoon of sunflower oil, you need 560 sunflower seeds. Also, what even is canola? Have you ever eaten a canola seed? Canola oil is the most common cooking oil in the world, but to naturally get a single tablespoon of canola oil, you'd need to eat almost 70,000 canola seeds. In comparison, what about natural fats? For example, if you wanted a tablespoon of oil from sardines, you'd only need about two gutted sardines or two slices of fatty tuna sashimi.
Here's where this gets confusing: we have known for decades that DHA is good for the development of baby brains, which is why it's been added to infant formula. Evidence suggests that breastfeeding women who have higher levels of DHA have smarter babies. Eat the fish! Okay, so if linoleic acid is so bad and shoves out the brain-healthy DHA, why does the FDA require infant formula manufacturers to put a large amount of linoleic acid in the formula? Well, for one thing, this whole story arguably starts with the American Heart Association. The American Heart Association today recommends that for heart health, we get 5 to 10% of our calories from linoleic acid per day. They don't say 5 to 10% of our calories from vegetable oil; that's 5 to 10% of our calories specifically from linoleic acid.
So to break that down, canola oil, for example, is only 20% linoleic acid. So if your main source of linoleic acid was canola oil, then you would need to eat 1,000 calories of canola oil to hit the target set by the AHA. Of course, no one gets all their linoleic acid from vegetable oil because there are many food sources of it, but this means that the AHA suggests that we eat 5 to 10 times the amount of linoleic acid that we ate in 1865. 1865 was before seeds were crushed into oil and widely sold for human consumption. Now, the first heart attack was recorded in 1912. This means the AHA says that in order to protect our hearts, we need to eat 5 to 10 times the amount of linoleic acid that we ate when there was so little heart disease that most people didn't know it existed.
There's a story that I tell in my book that because heart disease was rare until the late 1920s, cardiology was a relatively small specialty. Nina Teicholz lays out in her book "The Big Fat Surprise" that initially nobody knew about the American Heart Association because it was so small and poorly funded. Then they got their big break when they met the makers of the hugely popular linoleic acid-rich cottonseed oil product, Crisco. In 1948, the makers of Crisco gave the AHA $1.7 million. As the American Heart Association's own history book reads, it says, "And overnight, millions poured into our coffers as the Procter and Gamble man, they had a dinner, celebrated, and handed us the check." The AHA then recommended that we swap animal fats like butter for vegetable oils in 1961.
Okay, so going back to why infant formulas have so much linoleic acid: the thing is, they're trying to mimic breast milk, and women's breast milk does have linoleic acid. However, the composition of the breast milk depends on the mother's diet. The more linoleic acid a woman eats, the more ends up in her breast milk. That's important because modern women, because they eat a ton of vegetable oil, get a ton of linoleic acid, and that means that their breast milk does not look like it would 100 years ago. When you eat vegetable oil, the linoleic acid accumulates and stays in the body. The percentage of this linoleic acid in people's fat cells has nearly doubled, from a bit under 10% in 1960 to around 20% in 2005. So the fat profile of an average American is looking more like a rhino and less like a dolphin. But 10% is even too high because by 1955, people were already eating plenty of vegetable oil.
So what's a normal linoleic acid concentration? The next thing I'm going to show you, I searched for three years. Do you know what I wanted to know? What was the omega-6 fat in anybody's adipose tissue who was on an ancestral diet? As Dr. Chris Kenobi discovered, these specific Islanders who were eating a diet unadulterated by vegetable oils had an amount of polyunsaturated linoleic acid that was only 3.8%. That is one-fifth the amount people have in their fat tissue today.
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