Expert Profile #5 - Dr. Cate Shanahan

Portrait Artist: Natalya Kopylova
About, Food/Nutrition
3-minute Read

​Dr. Cate is a board-certified physician who worked as a family physician all over the United States for over 20 years. She also worked with the Los Angeles Lakers to create a nutrition plan that helped players be less susceptible to injuries and allowed them to recover faster. Currently, she works as a consultant for a company in Florida (ABC Fine Wines & Spirits), helping to improve the health of their 1500 employees through one-on-one consultations.
 
Dr. Cate has written multiple books but her most well-known is Deep Nutrition. She covers many different topics in this book but the most prominent are:

1. Why vegetable oils are “Public Enemy #1.”
2. What she calls the four Pillars of World Cuisine: meat on the bone, organ meats, fermented and sprouted foods, and fresh foods.

 
“Meat on the bone” means that when we consume meat, we should be including everything that comes along with it. Most of the meat you find in the grocery store is stripped of the skin, fat, cartilage, and bones even though all of those things give us nutrients that our bodies need. Dr. Cate warns that the more you cook meat, the less nutrients remain, especially when it comes to steak - she advises trying to work your way down to eating steak medium-rare or even rare.1 She also states that the bones can be used to create something she calls “a missing food group,” bone stock.2
 
The other groups are more self-explanatory. She suggests eating organ meats 1-3 times per week,3 eating probiotic-rich foods like kimchi and sauerkraut once a day,4 and having a salad with four cups of fresh vegetables of four different colors, four days a week.5
 
Dr. Cate’s other books include Food Rules and The Fatburn Fix and she also shares articles on her website, DrCate.com. Through her job, her books and website, and the work she does to spread the word through interviews and health documentaries, she is doing all she can to help as many people as possible with improving their overall health.

Impactful Tips & Quotes

• “Small steps, repeated often, can lead to massive health improvements over time.”6
• “Reorienting our financial priorities around healthy eating rebuilds our family’s genetic wealth and is the best investment we can make.”837
• “...vitamins manufactured in factories typically fail to approximate the real thing.”8
• “I let all my patients suffering from depression in on a little secret: studies show that exercise is at least as effective as the best antidepressant medications.”9
• Get three servings of dairy each day from different sources (milk, yogurt, cheese, etc.). If you don’t, supplement with 250-500mg of calcium citrate.10

Resources

1. Deep Nutrition, p. 244
2. Deep Nutrition, p. 303
3. Deep Nutrition, p. 405
4. Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast: "4 Ways To Eat Yourself Beautiful: Meat On The Bone, Fermented & Sprouted Foods, Organ Meats, Deep Nutrition & More With Dr. Cate Shanahan"
5. Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast: "4 Ways To Eat Yourself Beautiful: Meat On The Bone, Fermented & Sprouted Foods, Organ Meats, Deep Nutrition & More With Dr. Cate Shanahan"
6. The Fatburn Fix, p. 333
7. Deep Nutrition, p. 21
8. Deep Nutrition, p. 118
9. Deep Nutrition, p. 298
​10. The Fatburn Fix, p. 216