And we thought sugar was bad.

According to Cate Shanahan’s Deep Nutrition: Why Your Genes Need Traditional Food (Flatiron Books, $27.99) vegetable oil is slowly, but surely, eroding away our. Yikes! When Americans cut back on saturated fat, they added oils like soy and canola–and lots of them. We now eat nearly 2,000 times more soy oil that we did in 1909, with roughly 45% of all calories coming from refined oils. Whether it be canola, soy, corn or other oils, over the past half century, these highly processed industrial products have gradually taken over our diets without anyone really noticing.

Yikes!

Refining and heating degrades the molecules in ways that create toxins, which Dr. Cate Shanahan, the Director of the Los Angeles Lakers PRO Nutrition Program,  pinpoints as the No. 1 contributor to poor health in America.

Once a world-class athlete plagued by debilitating injuries, physician and biochemist Cate Shanahan was determined to cure her own ailments. So she researched the diets from around the world proven to help people live longer, healthier lives—diets like the Mediterranean, Okinawan, and The Blue Zones—and identified four common nutritional habits that for generations have unfailingly produced strong, healthy, intelligent children, and active, vital elders.

These four nutritional strategies form the basis of what Dr. Cate calls “The Human Diet”:

• Fresh food
• Fermented and sprouted foods
• Meat cooked on the bone
• Organ meats

Not all food is created equal. Real food contains ordered information that can direct our cellular growth in a positive way. Our family history does not determine our destiny. What you eat interacts with your DNA in ways that affect your health and the health of your future children.

By adhering to this Human Diet, Dr. Cate cured her own ailments and has since helped countless patients and readers of the original self-published edition of Deep Nutrition achieve their own optimum health.

Cutting through conflicting nutritional ideologies, the book combines science with common sense to illustrate how the traditions of our ancestors can help us all lead longer, healthier, more vital lives.

Catherine Shanahan, M.D. is a board certified family physician. She trained in biochemistry and genetics at Cornell University before attending Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. She practiced medicine in Hawaii for a decade, where she studied enthnobotany, as well as the culinary habits of her healthiest patients. She currently runs a metabolic health clinic in Denver, Colorado and serves as