The Real Skinny on Fat Documentary - Part 2
INTRODUCTION PART TWO LIFESENSE™ PRODUCTS: LEARN ABOUT DIFFERENCES BETWEEN MCT OILS, COCONUT OILS, AND KETOMCT™ OIL
In Part 1 of this series, LifeSense™ Products: The Purpose Behind the Mission, we learned about Dr. Berger’s personal stake in a ketogenic diet. We also learned one can embrace the healthy benefits of keto oils while still appreciating good food!
Having spent a lifetime in research and trials with oils of many kinds, Alvin Berger, PhD, has also traveled worldwide in his search for sources, including new ones for conifer oils, (and not for aromatherapy purposes either)! Why does this matter? All oils are NOT alike.
Coconut oil, for example, is only about 10 to 15% C8 and C10. Dr. Berger’s KetoMCT™ oil is 100% C8! In short, don’t confuse the healthy benefits of keto oil with those of coconut oil. Confused? You won’t be.
Need to read Part 1 The Purpose Behind the Mission? Click here.
PART 2 LIFESENSE™ PRODUCTS: LEARN ABOUT DIFFERENCES BETWEEN MCT OILS, COCONUT OILS, AND KETOMCT™ OIL
Interviewer: When you say the hedonistic aspects of eating. Can you elaborate and give us some more perspective on that?
Alvin Berger: I think, for me, it's just pleasure in eating. Because all those years as a gymnast, where I was watching every morsel that went into my body, so it's just kind of letting go a little bit and taking pleasure in your food. Because I'm a big believer that you can be very fit and youthful for your age, without living these lifestyles that I see some people, where they have to ask a million questions about everything that they put in their mouth. It's all this kind of moderation, or when you hear people say these generalized statements like, "Meat is bad."
Interviewer: Right.
Alvin Berger: It's overly simplistic. It's all about the amounts and types, so you can enjoy that steak. Like I'll give you another example, like, I happen to like swordfish, it happens to have high mercury. Before my wife can remind me about the mercury, I often say I'm going to be getting my mercury tonight.
Interviewer: I really appreciate that point of view. For you, with coconut oil and MCT oil, and your son with his Type 1 Diabetes. Did you, when you first started to get him onto the ketogenic diet, I imagine you probably gave him quite a bit of MCT oil?
Alvin Berger: Yeah, MCT oils, more fish oils. Efforts to add oil to whatever he would eat, to pile on the oil. Whether it was olive oil or canola oils. If I was making my son pasta, and it would be the low carb types, then we would always add extra oil and then, a lot of these oils you can fry with. Lower temperatures so you don't reach the point where they start to smoke, the smoke point. I would always add extra. If he was having tofu, there would always be extra tablespoons of oil added.
Interviewer: And which kind of oils? The MCT oil?
Alvin Berger: We'd used MCT oils, olive oils, and high quality canola oils.
Interviewer: Got it.
Alvin Berger: When they don't want that olive oil kind of taste.
Interviewer: Right. If you take MCT oil, and you look at coconut oil, can you describe the difference between the two?
Alvin Berger: I mean the coconut oil is about 10 to 15% C8 and C10, whereas the products that we, and others sell, are 100% C8.
Interviewer: So an MCT oil is 100%?
Alvin Berger: I call them true MCT's.
Interviewer: Okay.
Alvin Berger: Because the people confuse all these things. The C12, the lauric acid, is where all the confusion happens because that's the major component of coconut oil.
"...when people start telling me about anti-microbial properties of coconut oil, it's not the correct form of lauric acid in coconut oil that's anti-microbial."
Dr. Berger, on a common misconception about coconut oil.
Interviewer: So the lauric acid.
Alvin Berger: The C12.
Interviewer: It's considered C12, and lauric acid for a lot of people, monolauric acid, lauric acid, like I take monolauric acid as something to sort of protect my immune system at different times. But the lauric acid that's in the coconut oil is at what percentage in coconut oil?
Alvin Berger: Let me just step into chemistry a little bit. You have the three fatty acids, which are lauric acid, then you have the monoglyceride form, the monolaurin, and then you have the triglyceride forms.
Interviewer: Okay.
Alvin Berger: Coconut oil is all going to be in triglyceride form. So it's going to have lauric acid ... remember on the glycerol backbone you have the three fatty acid positions, so you're going to have the lauric in one of those positions, matched up with other fatty acids, like palmitic, stearic, myristic, and so on. Part of the first source of confusion is when people talk about so called anti-microbial properties of coconut oil.
Interviewer: Right.
Alvin Berger: That was work that was attributed to the monoglyceride form, or the free forms, not the triglyceride form.
Interviewer: I see.
Alvin Berger: So when people start telling me about anti-microbial properties of coconut oil, it's not really the form in coconut oil that's anti-microbial. The second challenge with the so called anti-microbial statement, is that in today's era we've moved to the point of understanding that microbes are good. So I would say, to challenge someone when they throw those kind of statements around, well what microbes are you killing? And where in the gut? I've done that many a time and no one can answer it because ... you know people just get accustomed to kind of throwing things around.
Interviewer: Yeah.
Alvin Berger: But if it's a free acid and the the monoglyceride form that have been shown, in test tubes at least, to have anti-microbial types of properties, and that's good, and they're used as food preservatives as well.
Interviewer: And that's from the coconut oil?
Alvin Berger: It’s from chemically derived breakdown products from coconut oil.
Interviewer: Got it.
Alvin Berger: Not coconut oil in the intact form.
Interviewer: Okay.
"…when people talk about coconut oil being ketogenic, it's far less ketogenic than the true MCT's, C8 and C10…"
Co-founder, LifeSense™ Products, Dr. Berger, on coconut oil
Alvin Berger: And so when people talk about coconut oil being ketogenic, it's far less ketogenic than the true MCT's, C8 and C10, and within those, C8 being the most potent, with respect to the raising of ketone bodies in the blood stream.
Interviewer: So C8 and C10, can you talk about each of those so that we're really clear?
Alvin Berger: Yeah, yeah. They're naturally present in breast milks, bovine milks, and particularly goat milks, the Caprines, and that's where they get their name, like caproic (C6), caprylic (C8), and capric (C10). But they're naturally present in relatively small amounts, so to get a more ketogenic products those fatty acids get enriched. They're sourced from coconut oil and palm kernel oil and then through a series of distillation steps, not involving solvents, you end up with the C8 fatty acid. It gets combined with heat and pressure to form the triglyceride molecule, which in the case of C8 would just be C8. Then you can have the C8 and C10 varieties of MCT oils, and those come in typically 60/40 or 70/30 ratios.
Interviewer: C8 to C10?
Alvin Berger: C8 to C10.
Interviewer: Okay, and what are the best ratios?
Alvin Berger: Well the pure C8 is the one that we sell and also the one that's being developed as a drug in the Axona/Accera[1] product for Alzheimer's. That's the most potent, that's the one that gives the largest increase in ketone bodies[2] in the blood stream. It's also amongst the C8, C10 and C12, the fatty acid that does not get into adipose tissue at all.
Interviewer: So the C8 is what we really want to be ingesting?
Alvin Berger: That's right. There's nothing wrong with a C8/C10 mixture, but since from a price point of view, C8 is not that much more, it preferred. People like me would just as soon get the pure C8 form.
Interviewer: Right, right. Through all the research that you've done for your entire career, you see that the C8 in the pure form makes sense and that's a form of MCT oil that you take regularly I'm sure.
Alvin Berger: I do take it.
Interviewer: Yeah.
Alvin Berger: Unlike others, I don't add it to coffee and things like that which is very trendy these days. I find it's much more digestible in a solid form, with solid foods.
Interviewer: What do you mean?
Alvin Berger: For me, it would mean adding it to a sauce, for example. With your quinoa as an example, or I personally have a yogurt slurry every morning where I take a goat yogurt-
Interviewer: Yum.
Alvin Berger: -and then I take the MCT oil and then, this one's a little gross, but I add fish oil right to that, mix it up and that's my breakfast.
Interviewer: That MCT, that's C8?
Alvin Berger: That's a C8.
Interviewer: That is the pure distilled form of it.
Alvin Berger: Correct.
Interviewer: Without any solvents or anything like that right?
Alvin Berger: That's correct.
Interviewer: How is it actually processed?
Alvin Berger: Basically, these are typically coming from countries where coconuts or palm kernel oil are grown, Malaysia, Philippines, and then in these large factories they use techniques, distillation, to get the free fatty acids.
Interviewer: Right.
Alvin Berger: Then they have the C8, they call them buckets sometimes. So you have the C8 bucket and the C10 bucket and then you have glycerin or glycerol, they're the same, and that's where under heat and pressure, either in the US or in other countries, they're re-esterified. It's sort of analogous, like in the fish oil space when you hear people talk about RTG's, re-esterified triglyceride. It's the same technology.
Interviewer: Interesting.
Alvin Berger: You're putting things back together.
Interviewer: Why do you think that most of the MCT oils are combinations of C8 and C10? Or C12? Versus just this pure C8.
Alvin Berger: It's more expensive to have the pure C8 form, is one reason.
Interviewer: Yeah.
[1] Trial result from Phase 1 and Phase 2, around energy theory, differed from those of Phase 3. Accera VP of R&D Samuel Henderson, issued a statement last year, “The formulation of the drug was changed between the phase 2 and phase 3 studies. Unfortunately, this change in formulation had the unintended consequence of lowering drug levels in patients. We are confident that our newly developed formulation will provide increased exposure and allow a more conclusive test of drug efficacy.”
[2] [because it is a source of] caprylic triglycerides.