Chronic inflammation is a huge issue your body needs to deal with. The worst part is you may not even feel the inflammation until it has already been present for many years. There is a strong concern that too many omega-6-rich oils are causing a very high level of inflammation. And that oil is in nearly all the food we eat, and particularly in seed oils! Dr. Beth Bagley and Dr. Frederick Schurger cover the concerns & how best to address these inflammation issues in your life in today’s episode.
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Watch the episode here
Listen to the podcast here
Seed Oils And Chronic Inflammation
Dr. Bagley, how are you?
I’m doing well. It’s been a great day here in St. Louis. What about you, Dr. Schurger?
It’s good. I woke up, and the sun was shining. By the time I got to the office, it became overcast, and it hasn’t stopped for the rest of the day.
We had the sun come out for five minutes at lunchtime, and I did get to see it. You take what you can get in January.
At the very least down in St. Louis, you’ll see a little bit more sunlight up here. We are lucky to have sunlight at all between January through April.
That’s why I call it Hellinois, not Illinois.
That’s not inaccurate. In many cases, how are you doing as far as your new habits? I saw that you’d gotten into the CrossFit gym and had a successful session.
I did have a great workout. I hurt and cut my thumb not at the gym but at home. I had two stitches. I have not been to the gym because I can’t grasp things without popping a stitch.
That’s when you’re using your finger.
I am making an excuse, so I could probably go tomorrow and not use my thumb. I have been walking and stuff, but I’m not moving. I haven’t been back to the CrossFit gym since then. I’ve been drinking more water, which is feeling good. I highly recommend everybody to take a big swig of water because it’s good for you. Hydrate.
Mine is over here. It’s the beat-up water bottle that I’ve been using forever.
Hopefully, you’ll clean it. That’s green stuff floating in it. It is good for you. It’s algae or spirulina. You grow your own. It’s organic.
Was it algae? It’s not quite spirulina, but it’s in that same family. You can take these little capsules of it. It’s ridiculously expensive, but it’s high in protein, so there’s a bonus.
Speaking of protein, how are your protein goals?
It’s my 300 pounds of protein a day.
Pounds?
I know it’s supposed to be grams.
I would love to hear how you would consume 300 pounds of protein.
It’s one bite at a time, but even getting to four pounds of meat was like, “No. I was joking.”
At some point you get sick of it, don’t you?
No. It’s you’re so full that you’re like, “I have things to do.” I went to get my body composition test, and I was joking with the young man who runs that office. He was making the same comment. He’s like, “At what point in time do you think you have an eating disorder when you try to do all of these experiments?”
That’s like when people start talking about intermittent fasting, people can take it to an unhealthy place. We have to be aware of those things.
I looked at the numbers, not compared to where I was back in November 2022 right after Thanksgiving, but to where I felt I should be. I’m like, “Those numbers are low.” He says “No, your numbers are going in the right direction.” I’m like, “They are.” I had a steak and another steak at lunch. We’ll see.
It does sound good. I could eat a steak now.
It was good. I’ll have my eggs and my bacon for dinner and continue with that. Interestingly aside, one of the things that I noticed as I’ve gotten back into that higher protein level is I was able to do a lunge for the first time in about two months since I was adjusted incorrectly. I was slowly rebuilding my strength in getting things to work properly. I went down to do a lunge as I was setting up a table in my satellite office in the Amish community. Sure, enough, “That didn’t hurt for the first time. I didn’t have to brace myself to get down on that knee.”
That’s a big deal. I remember one time you were down here for a seminar, and it had been a while. I didn’t have any associates with me at the time, so I did not have any other chiropractors working near me. It had been a while since I had a Blair chiropractic adjustment and I realized that my knee pain, of course, I was getting off the toilet when I stood up afterward and realized I did not have to brace. My knee didn’t hurt after getting up. That was one of those moments of, “I forgot that chiropractic helps with my knee too.”
That sounds like such a small thing, but it’s a huge thing. How many times in a day, at least once for all men, we should be sitting on the toilet? That’s simple. It’s like, “Fine, I can’t go to the gym and do my CrossFit because my thumb’s messed up. I can’t go to the gym and do my squats because my knee is giving me grief.” Those things are first-world problems, but we all have a problem if we can’t go to the bathroom. That’s a major issue for most people if that’s not working properly.
It is pretty amazing as far as what the Blair Adjustment can do to get the body back to where it’s supposed to be. I’ve been doing some rehab that hopefully is taking care of my old dislocated shoulder injury from years ago. Time will tell on that one. I’m curious to see what happens. In any case, getting back to the diet, I had my good workouts, and my knee was working. I want to tell funny aside because we went out for dinner with some friends. My good friend, Jim, passed away a couple of years back. We went out for a celebration of his birthday. He would’ve been old.
That’s so kind.
His wife and I are the same age. He would’ve been 51. He was older than all of us, and we had fun with that. We went out to eat at one of these Japanese steakhouses.
I love those.
They are so good.
They make a little volcano.
Yes.
I love it. I’m such a dork, but it makes me happy.
It’s a great thing to go out with a group of friends. It’s got entertainment value. You get a halfway decent good meal.
Steak and scallops, that’s what I always get.
That’s what I got too. I forgot about that. I got that, and that was fantastic. I probably could have done scallops, but the steak was good. Before, they would have this butter-like substance that they would use to fry everything up. They’re not using butter. They’re using some seed oil. My suspicion is it is canola oil. It’s a very neutral flavor. It works perfectly for the high-heat conditions they’re using. It’s all-around.
The butter substance they were using probably wasn’t butter either.
It was probably a margarine. I can’t believe it’s not a butter-type thing. Whatever it was, this was full-on canola oil. When I saw it, I’m like, “I’m not going to complain. I’m not going to say, ‘Try not to put that on there,’” because he’s cooking all the meats all at one time.
He’s cooking altogether. That’s the point of the meal.
At the end of it, I’m like, “This was a good meal. I remember why I enjoy this.” The next day, I didn’t have a problem with my workouts or anything like that. The scale was higher than I liked.
I know you ate some of that rice. You ate some, didn’t you?
I did. The rice that I didn’t eat went to the dogs. Everyone’s like, “How are you not finished with your rice?” I was using my chopsticks.
That’s good that’s a good point. If you are using chopsticks, you’ll eat slower, and aside, real quick is if I’m to eat popcorn, I use a chopstick to eat it with because I eat it slower. It’s fun.
I make my popcorn in the beef tallow, and that makes it happy. Lard is better. I know they say to whip the oils only, but you’ll be fine for throwing your lard or your beef tallow into a whirly pop because that’s the only way in my mind to make popcorn.
I make it with coconut oil because that’s what I have.
That works too. I wake up the next morning, and I can smell the canola oil in my pores.
You don’t eat it, so you don’t ever have it. It’s a rancid feeling. It’s gross.
Unfortunately, most of those seed oils, as we’ve discussed other times, end up being deodorized in the plant because they are already in that rancid state. It’s disappointing on one level. It’s also eye-opening because I haven’t done that in several years.
Every so often, your body can handle some toxicity. The problem is people are eating this every single day. Multiple foods are Franken foods that they’re eating. Back in the day, McDonald’s used to fry their fries in beef tallow, I believe. I read somewhere why they stopped it. I don’t know if somebody was complaining or it was too expensive or whatever.
There was a man who had a heart attack that he blamed on McDonald’s French fries.
We would all be better off if McDonald’s would go back to beef tallow.
I think so too. Interestingly enough, they didn’t come up with medium and large fries or supersize fries until they changed up their formula and people could eat more fries because that beef tallow, for those people who’ve tried it, will fill up. It gives you that satiety that you’re no longer hungry. I got home after that meal.
You’re hungry again.
I know I had my normal quarter keto break for dessert. I could have eaten more, and that’s the problem. There are certain oils and fats that make us feel full. There was a ton of food. I had a pile of rice on a plate, this big around. There were noodles on top of that I could have had. I don’t do noodles. Shoot, I was up the scale up 4 or 5 pounds.
It wasn’t the actual food that you ate. It was probably the inflammation.
There was a volume of food, but I’m retaining water as a result of that inflammation. What we’re doing is people hear talking about retaining water.
Let’s go over what that means. Seed oil is something that’s highly processed. Canola oil is one of them. Sunflower seed oil is, too, as much as I don’t want it to be. There’s big soybean corn oil, which doesn’t even make sense. Soybean oil is another big one as cottonseed oil. Palm oil, is that one or not?
Seed oils, like canola, sunflower seed, soybean, and corn oils, are highly processed. Click To TweetPalm oil’s going to fall into the category of coconut oil, avocado oil, and olive oil. Palm oil is more saturated because it will solidify. The difference between what they call shelf-stable liquid oils, which they’re already not shelf stable because they’ve been deodorized, is it’s hard for them to go bad again versus most of the saturated fats at room temperature. Coconut oil is one of the weird ones because it’s right on the bubble.
In the summertime, it will be liquid. In the wintertime, it is solid.
Anything above 75 is when coconut oil starts going from a solid to a liquid. It’s interesting what solid has come out of coconut oil when it has gone back and forth a couple of times. There’s some stuff that will drop to the bottom, and you’re like, “How did that get into the mix?” but it did. Whereas most of the seed oils have been processed in such a way that they’re liquid all the time. Palm oil tends to be more on the solid side in the same family as coconuts. I’ve heard Dr. McCullough talk about the benefits of that in the past though I haven’t seen anything recently on that.
He’s more into beef tallow, coconut oil, and ghee. Those are his favorites.
Ghee is popular. We’ve taken all out of any of the milk solids that would’ve been part of the butter. That might be inflammatory to some people.
I still think so. If that’s not an issue for you, a lot of times, you get away with the butter and the ghee. The seed oils are processed. A lot of times, they use something like hexane I don’t remember that.
That’s the right word.
It’s the chemicals they use to process through it and some gross stuff. It’s mass-produced and what is in most processed foods when you go to the grocery store and go to the middle aisles. You’re going to find it in a lot of those foods. You’re going to find it in a lot of fried foods and pretty much any restaurant you go to. It is some seed oil in the fryer. It’s called an omega-6 oil.
Most of the seed oils are omega-6s. Let’s talk about that because everyone hears about fish oils being the omega-3s. Here is the best way to think about omega-6 and omega-3s. There’s an omega-7 and omega-9. The 6s tend to be an inflammatory oil. It helps you with inflammation, and you need that. It does because of the amounts that it’s supposed to be in the human diet, which would only be about maybe 5% to 10% as opposed to the 30% that it is now. If you have a cut or you had some problem, it would’ve helped with the inflammation process so that it could heal that area.
Seed oils should compose only 5-10% of our diet. Now, they make up 30%, making inflammation worse. Click To TweetWe need some omega-6s.
We do. Two components are important in omega-3. There’s the DHA, which makes up 40% of your brain matter. Mothers, if you’re not taking DHA while you’re pregnant with children or breastfeeding, that DHAs got to come from somewhere because our bodies do not make it very well. Where is it coming from?
There’s something called mommy brain. It’s mommy brain. There is a lot of stress and stuff, but they’re sucking the life from you if you don’t eat this. You must eat the DHA.
Make sure you’re getting the DHA. The anti-inflammatory part of the omega-3 is something called EPA. I’m not going to go into what DHA and EPA stand for because half the time, I can’t pronounce them properly.
The anti-inflammatory part of Omega-3, which you can get from fish oil, is something called EPA. Click To TweetNobody needs to know that other than there’s a ratio that we need to know.
Quite honestly, it’s supposed to be 2 to 1, if I’m not mistaken.
I’m going to look it up as we’re talking. I’m talking about omega-6s to omega-9s.
There’s some back and forth on that. In any case, the EPA is supposed to be the anti-inflammatory side of the chain, and the omega-6s tend to be inflammatory. They’re kept in check. That’s what they’re supposed to do. It goes back and forth.
What most websites are saying, whether they’re right or wrong, is omega-3 to 6, and 9 is 1 to 1. We need double, as you said.
That’s where we need to be now. Most people shouldn’t have an omega 6 to 3 ratio any more than 4 to 1.
That’s a lot of numbers. What should you eat more of?
Fishes would be nice, but you’re not going to get them. You need to get fish oil.
It’s going to give you the highest quality at the biggest boom for your buck. Fish oil versus krill oil, what are you thinking?
I’m still going to go with fish oil because krill oil sounds interesting. There’s that astaxanthin. I’m not opposed to it, but if you’re getting fish oils at all, that’s a huge step. You have to get enough.
You have to get quality ones.
I had a patient who got back from Jamaica. She was in town, visiting family. She’s heading back. I asked her, “You love the fish down there, but how quickly did you want to have a steak?” She said, “That’s the first thing I did when I got in town. I wanted a steak.” She hasn’t had a steak in a while. We don’t live in Jamaica. We don’t have access to all those freshwater fish. We have access to grass-finished beef, which is better. The omega-3 ratios are still not great, and beef is still going to have some omega-3s to it, even if it is grain finished. You need three grams a day. It is a lot. That’s three grams of EPA to start counteracting stuff.
If you’re looking at milligrams, that’s 3,000 milligrams
As I said, we want to have that 1-to-1 ratio, and we’re probably at 4 to 1 omega-6 over here. Most people, on the standard American diet, are anywhere from 12 to 30 times more omega-6s. This ends up creating a situation where you are always inflamed. Why is this important for chiropractors like ourselves?
When you’ve got someone who’s coming in who is dealing with some condition, I don’t care if it’s a migraine, a low back pain, or if it’s some neurological thing. There is a level of inflammation that is way higher than what they’re supposed to be able to cope with. We get them adjusted, and it becomes a slow process of healing. That doesn’t happen immediately or overnight the old timers used to tell, “We adjusted, and in a month, we sent them home and didn’t see them for another six months.” I’d love a little bit more of those.
I would love more of that, too, but it’s hard. People are sick. People are being poisoned by the food they eat.
It’s becoming more of a problem because we don’t appreciate what’s in our food. Getting back to why we should get high-quality fish oil, you can buy fish oil for cheap at the Big Box stores.
Walgreens, Costco, they got them.
They’ve got them. The problem is fish oils are tricky. They can go rancid as badly as the seed oils can go rancid, as all oils can go rancid. “I’m going to eat a bunch of fish.” Great. Now they’re saying, “I’ve had one friend mention that they’ve increased toxins in the water.”
There might be mercury, plastics, and even parasites and stuff too if you’re not cooking your fish. Some people aren’t cooking their fish.
This is why you got to be careful with sushi. I’m not saying don’t eat sushi. I’m just saying this is why you get a reputable brand of fish oil because not only are they making sure you get the right amount of fish oil in your capsule so that you can say, “How do I get to my three grams a day?” If you’re sick, ten grams a day, which is hard to do outside of a liquid.
We want that higher quality fish oil because not only are they making sure you have the right stuff in there, but they’re making sure you don’t have the wrong stuff in there. They’re taking out all the toxins and heavy metals and making sure that’s screened out. One of the nutrition companies where I like to work with is Protocol for Life, which is a subsidiary of NOW Foods. NOW Foods has one of the strictest protocols for making sure they have high-quality nutrition across the board. You need that in this day and age. Personally, I love bulk supplements for some stuff that I like experimenting with. I like to think I’m getting a good quality product half the time. I don’t know.
Higher quality fish oil not only has lots of Omega-3, but they’ve also screened out toxins and heavy metals. Click To TweetYou never know, but it’s better than eating Doritos and French fries all day.
Did the fries come from Five Guys?
They do. The peanut oil is what they fry their stuff in at Five Guys.
Still, it has some problems.
It’s not as bad as some of the others. If we have the spectrum, we got the canola oils, the seed oils, and then the peanut oils. We got the beef tallow, which we’re happy with, in general. If someone’s reading this, we want to increase your omega-3s, which means you’re going to need to supplement.
If you’re sick, you’ve got to figure out a way to stomach the liquid fish oil because that is going to give you a better bang for your buck dollar-wise than a pill.
If you’re going to take it by mouth, hold your nose before you get it close to anywhere where you can smell it, dump it, and then take it. Keep your mouth and nose closed and drink some water. Squish it, swallow, and unplug your nose, and then you’ll be able to take the fish oil without gagging.
I’m not convinced that works that well.
It works. You can be like my girls. When my twins were little, I have to tell a mom story. We would give them supplements, but when kids are little, they can’t swallow pills. We wanted them to have fish oil, so we would give them a fish oil pill and they would chew it up and swallow it. They’d smile real big and have orangey teeth. They didn’t care that it tasted disgusting. They thought it was great. I don’t know how they did it. Both my husband and I were like, “Good job, girls.” They were like, “Give us our fish pills.”
They had healthy gallbladders that could handle that whereas you and Jason didn’t.
To this day, they love the sardines, anchovies, and all that canned stuff. What were you going to talk about?
Here’s one more thing on the fish oils. I did a high-dose fish oil with testing pre and post. I was able to get from either 12 or 15 down into that 4-to-1 range several years ago. I had to take three tablespoons. I was taking a shot glass worth of liquid fish oil every day.
If somebody was sick.
They need that one.
We’re talking about cancer patients, fibromyalgia, and autoimmune disease, those things.
If you’ve got something where you’ve got neurodegenerative for Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s, you need more. Three grams a day is maintenance. This is something that you’ve got to do if you want to keep it at that level. I stopped doing it for that time period. I started bringing it, then the levels came back up. I took another test not too long ago, and sure enough, it was there again. There is a test kit.
Going over again, we are talking about an increase in your omega-3s. Those are the fish oils that are decreasing your omega-6s, which are the seed oils. That means your fried food and your processed food. There are lots of reasons those things are bad, but that’s one of the big ones. If you’re going to have healthy fats in your diet, we’re looking at things like coconut oil, butter, ghee, beef tallow, and lard. That’s what we want to cook.
If you can find duck fat, that’s the best thing for eggs.
I always forget duck fat.
I do too. I haven’t seen it in a store in a long time.
I’ll hunt down some ducks and pull their fat out.
That’s probably not a bad idea either.
I’ll get right on that. Is anything in your office that happened this week that you want to talk about?
I want to do the follow-up for the migraine patient who slipped off. She said she did great. I saw her on a follow-up, and she says “I was doing great up until Monday.” She was starting to feel something crawling behind her eye again. It is that stabbing pain back there. What’s curious is I’ve got had another patient who has since moved to California and is under care out there, but she also had this bad stabbing pain behind her eye. This case here was the same. It wasn’t her atlas that was involved. It was her number two, the axis that was causing the problem. I find that curious that I’ve had a few of those instances where that stabbing pain behind the eye is the axis. You’ve got one too.
I can’t wait to talk to you about this. It’s funny that you bring this up, which is why you are right about that. I have Dr. Shiloh who I invited to come. She’s going to come, and you guys will meet her soon. She has an MS diagnosis. She’s gone through some not-great things with that in the past. She’s finished chiropractic school, and August is when she first started Blair Care. She’s seen some big changes in her health, but she saw a dip.
I wouldn’t call it an MS relapse yet because it hasn’t gotten that bad. She has gone on vacation. She got engaged, and she had all these things, like all of this good stress, but stressful things happen that are different from her normal routine. Not so long ago, she hasn’t been feeling good. When we checked her, her atlas was way out of place. We got that back, and she noticed immediately she had her energy back and was feeling a lot better. She has an eye symptom. When she knows there’s something with MS and her eye isn’t functioning right, she gets the spot she can’t see.
She was having some weird arm thing to the point where she told me that she was going to go to the hospital and either get admitted or get a round of steroids. I was like, “Can you check me? It’s because I needed an adjustment.” She got me adjusted. She was like, “Can we check me again?” I was like, “Of course.” I checked her leg, and she did not have a C1 adjustment or need a C1 adjustment. I did another test, and C2 came up. She’s had a misalignment there before, but this wasn’t her typical presentation.
I did some pressure tests. I poked her, and she goes, “Oh,” when I hit one side, and I said, “There it is.” She got that adjustment done. By this afternoon, her eye symptom had gotten much better. Other than she had too much caffeine because she was jittery, she was feeling so much better too. That’s why I was like, “Come on in and talk.” She didn’t want to, so we didn’t get her on. I asked her permission that I could tell that story, and she said “Eye things and C2, who would’ve thought?”
As I’ve been thinking about this, it’s one of those things that I want to get into the neurology of what’s going on with the eyes. It would make sense on one level that it might be related to the trigeminal nucleus. We’ve talked about this in the past. If I have these three fingers here on my face, the one above my eyebrow is the top branch. The one in the middle is the middle branch, and the one along the bottom of the jaw is the bottom branch. There are more technical names, but for the general public, it’s the top, middle, and bottom.
The pain part of the nucleus for the trigeminal nerve drops down into the spinal column. It’s called the spinal trigeminal nucleus, which is largely responsible for pain sensations. It makes perfect sense if C2 is out of place. The ligaments that hold the spinal column at the level of C2 go straight across into the spinal column and the cord even. If this is twisted in one way or the other, it’s going to cause some stress on that trigeminal nucleus. Maybe that’s where the spot is where the eye is.
Your patient was feeling some.
It might feel like it’s behind the eye because that’s the way that people perceive it. It might be that’s where it’s at. In any case, that’s my speculation. It wouldn’t surprise me if that’s the case. As I said, this is one of those, “I need to go down into this rabbit hole to figure this out.”
A lot of times, as chiropractors, we can go, “I’m glad it helped.” We don’t always know exactly what nucleus, tract, and nerve affected what in your brain and all those things. There are some smart chiropractors, and you’re one of them, Dr. Schurger, that can figure a lot of that stuff out. In general, I want to get your head on straight. When your head is on straight, it is amazing how intelligent your body is that it can take care of itself.
This is what we perceive in the world. We can perceive things very differently, even with what is, “The same stimulation,” the same interaction with a certain spot, or the same interaction with the food, yet we can have different outcomes based on how those nerves are conditioned which may produce pain behind the eye and may have the eye not to work the way it’s supposed to. We might go out to dinner and have the same meal. Yours causes a migraine, and mine causes me to have sinusitis.
We’re different people. That’s the same thing with medications and why medications work differently with different people. Food is medicine. You’ve heard that before.
This was why I was drawn to chiropractic because the goal overall is how we get your body working the way it was designed to work at an optimal level so you can have the best possible health outcomes that you need. Sometimes we can start saying, “We’re not eating enough fish oils. Let’s get more fish oil in your diet.” We can say that much definitively, but if your atlas is out of place, I can definitively say, “It’s out of place that’s not going to allow your health to be as good as it is. Can I tell you what health is going to be worse?” No. Unless we already know your symptom profile, we won’t know.
In general, as an Upper Cervical Blair chiropractor, my number one is getting that atlas in place and making sure it stays there.
That’s going to be the best bang for the buck.
All this other stuff is gravy. That’s the icing on the cake. That top bone affects everything. Every aspect of how your body functions can be changed if that bone is not working. Does that mean every single person who has a stomach ache has an atlas subluxation? No, because some people eat crappy food, and that could be causing it. That does mean that everyone should get checked.
With that, it’s a good closing spot.
I hope everybody is working on their goals and stepping forward. If you need chiropractic care, which you probably do, or someone you care about, share this with them. Leave us a comment. Leave us a like, subscribe, and all of those things. You can find me at PrecisionChiroSTL.com.
I’m at KeystoneChiroSPI.com in Springfield, Illinois
I’m in St. Louis, Missouri. I’m on the West side of St. Louis. I hope you all have a great night.
We will be back. Have a good one.
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