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The Dr. Gabrielle Lyon Show

The Truth about Saturated Fat, Omega-3 Fatty Acids and Total Mortality | Dr. Tom Brenna

4/7/20261 hr 32 min

Only nine scientists were asked to advise on the 2025 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, and Dr. Tom Brenna was one of them. In this conversation, he pulls back the curtain on how dietary guidelines are actually made, why the process has never been the same twice, and what it was like to watch a decades-old saturated fat recommendation get carried forward despite a lack of evidence supporting it at the level of total mortality. This is the dietary guidelines conversation the internet has been missing: straight from someone who was actually in the room.

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Clips

Showing 10 of 11
The 10% Was Made Up
Whole Milk Off The Books
Trans Fats Misread As Saturated
Avoiding Fish In Pregnancy?
Saturated Fat’s Evidence Problem
Fish-Oil Trans Fats Are Worse
What The School Exemption Means
Saturated Fat: A Century Story
It’s Not All Saturated Fat
Pregnancy Oils, Offspring Brains

Transcript preview

First 90 seconds

  1. Tom Brenna· Guest0:00

    If you start substituting high omega-6 oils for your dairy fat, that's when things really go off the rails. When you feed those oils to pregnant animals, you can look in the brains of the offspring and they are screwed up.

  2. Gabrielle Lyon· Host0:15

    I mean, I've never heard that as a technical term. [laughs] So, um... Is it a mistake for pregnant women to avoid fish?

  3. Tom Brenna· Guest0:25

    Absolutely a mistake. No doubt, 100%. People that eat the most fish in the world do not have kids who are mentally challenged. They just don't. I always invoke iodine deficiency. You see nothing like that, the kids just get smarter.

  4. Gabrielle Lyon· Host0:41

    Is pregnancy that one time to build the brain versus post-pregnancy into childhood?

  5. Tom Brenna· Guest0:48

    Breastfeeding is so important. Kids are getting omega-3, they're getting DHA in breast milk. We are not just a heart. We have lots of other organs, the most important of which, in my opinion, is the brain.

  6. Gabrielle Lyon· Host1:02

    Omega-3 fatty acids, DHA, are necessary, amazing for brain development, important for pregnant women. Is there something else also on the horizon you're thinking, "This hasn't been developed enough, and it's gonna come out"?

  7. Tom Brenna· Guest1:17

    The story of precision nutrition is an undertold story. It is one that...

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