An Interview with Dr. Paul Mason - Dr. Mason answers questions about vegan and carnivore diets

[Music] thank you for talking with us dr mason can you tell me about your title and what you do so i'm a sports and exercise medicine physician so basically that means in addition to my medical degree i've got fellowship training in dealing with athletes and other issues like that and i guess a part of my practice is while i deal with elite athletes i deal with uh general members of the public i mean as you understand when it comes to elite athletes even just a one percent improvement in performance can be the difference between getting a medal and not finishing on the podium at all so athletes are very very concerned about human performance so i guess this specialty that i'm in lends itself very well to optimizing our our health because at the end of the day our physical functioning is a reflection of our underlying health you cannot function optimally if you're not otherwise metabolically healthy so i guess that's led me to having two interesting parts to my career so in one aspect i'll deal with elite athletes and the other aspect i'm dealing with members of the public and we're just looking at trying to optimize every facet of their health metabolically autoimmune inflammation wise you know focusing on sleep and mood and we really look at the whole package the three main sources of energy in the diet are carbohydrates protein and fat how important do you think each of these are so yes it's absolutely correct we get energy from three main sources in our diet from carbohydrates from protein and from fat but only two of those the protein and fat are what considered essential nutrients so the lowest level of carbohydrate intake that is consistent with good health is exactly zero that quite literally means you can be in excellent health and not eat a carbohydrate at all so and the reasons are simple because if your body does need sugar in the form of glucose for whatever reason it can actually make it through a process called gluconeogenesis and when we have a look at some of the old guidelines that actually recommend you need 130 grams of carbohydrates a day for your brain function well the origin of that myth actually stems from an institute of medicine report that actually calculated that the brain if it wasn't given any other nutrients at all if it was only given carbohydrates that it could burn up to 100 grams of carbohydrates a day and they just added on the extra 30 grams as a bit of a buffer but the simple fact is that if you're getting enough protein and enough fat in your diet your brain can survive perfectly happy for the most part on ketones which are produced when fat is metabolized in actual fact we know that 70 of more of the energy requirements for the brain can be provided by ketones and the rest of it can simply be provided when your body actually makes glucose through this process called gluconeogenesis there is absolutely no need to ingest carbohydrates to be in good health if we do not need to eat carbohydrates to be healthy how much protein and fat should we aim to consume well most dietary guidelines recommend an intake of about 0.8 grams per kilogram of body weight per day and in actual fact when we look at the literature we find that probably about double that or even more is actually required for optimal health and the reason that the guidelines actually underestimate the needs for optimal protein is that protein has two jobs in the body it's used to build stuff so things like muscles and bones require protein as a structural substrate but it's also involved in things like enzymatic activities so enzymes a little proteins that help chemical reactions along and do things in our body and they're very important for our function but in the original analysis when they're trying to calculate exactly how much protein we need they didn't actually consider the role of proteins as enzymes and all their myriad of important functions they only looked at it as a building block for the tissues and as a consequence they severely underestimated their level of protein which is consistent with good health and as we know that plant proteins are also clearly inferior to animal proteins in the basis of their digestibility and bioavailability they basically they don't contain the same amounts of essential amino acids and they don't contain the right concentrations of the other amino acids to be fully incorporated into body tissues effectively or as effectively as the animal protein so if we consider that protein intakes on certain say a vegetarian diet might actually necessarily be lower then that can actually and the protein is not as good quality then we end up with less lean tissues less bone density less muscle mass these kind of tissues which are associated with good health and then when it comes to fat well historically and this relates back to the diet heart hypothesis we've become fearful of fat as a nutrient especially saturated fat but the actual fact is that animal foods which contain saturated fats are healthy and the saturated fats in and of themselves actually seem to be good for us in actual fact it's a polyunsaturated fats which are found in the things we call vegetable oils which come from seeds which are quite deleterious and bad for our health i've always been taught to avoid eating saturated fats can you explain why you believe saturated fats are healthy and polyunsaturated fats are not so it's probably difficult for your viewers to get their head around the fact that i'm saying animal foods with all their saturated fats are healthy but the thing to understand is that that's exactly what the science shows that saturated fats are good for us and the polyunsaturated fats which are found in vegetable and seed oils are actually quite dangerous they can actually damage your health and the reason i can say this is because i'm backed up by the science now the big problem is that while we've got science that very clearly shows this it hasn't been communicated accurately to either the medical profession itself or to the public so if i give you an example so if we have a look at some some papers here so this study here was published in 1966 and it was a study of over 1 million indian railway workers over 5 years and they compared railway workers from different parts of the country and the thing to understand about india is that geographically there's significant variations in dietary consumption in the north of india they tended to consume about 19 times more fat most of it which was saturated animal fats and in the south of india they mainly get their fats from vegetable and seed oils and the difference in deaths from heart disease between these saturated fat consuming northerners and the southerners was seven times the southerners with their vegetable oils and less saturated fats were dying at a rate of seven times from heart disease that of the people in the north now this is what we call an epidemiological study so it doesn't in and of itself prove causation but we do have a bunch of other studies called randomized controlled trials which do if we for instance have a look at this paper which was published in 1965 this was a randomized control trial which actually had three arms two of them were comparing a corn oil a vegetable oil to no oils basically a control diet just continue having your usual saturated fat in the group that was placed on the vegetable oil diet the cornwall diet over the course of the study they had five deaths in the group that did nothing they had no oils that's just a standard saturated fat the diet they were usually doing they only had one death now again this is quite old research and not great numbers but the authors of this paper concluded that corn oil as that form of vegetable oil should not be consumed and then we have a lot of more modern studies as well we have large-scale randomized control trials this one here was done in sydney so this is called the sydney diet heart study this was run between 1966 and 1973 and they basically took males who had had a heart attack and they randomized them to either replacing some saturated fats with vegetable oils or not and this study you'll recall was finished in 1973 but the results are that the full results were never published until and this paper here so they weren't published until this was published in 2013 so an independent investigator uncovered the original study data in a basement and went through a rigorous process of analyzing the data and when they analyzed it they actually found that the mortality rate for the group that was given the vegetable and seed oil actually increased by 62 this is a large-scale randomised controlled trial over a number of years and yet the data wasn't originally published it was you know decades later when it was actually published and if you have a look here now if you come and have look here we can see that this is the intervention group this is the group that was given the oil this is a control group that still had their regular intake of saturated fat and this is the death trait along the side so the higher this line then the worse the outcome and you can clearly see that there's more people dying in the vegetable oil group than they were in the saturated fat consuming group now this kind of data has basically been buried and it's not the only one we have the minnesota coronary experiment which ran between 1968 and 1973. over 9 000 subjects males and females and it was very similar they you know gave some people vegetable oils and other ones that didn't and the results weren't published after the study completed for 16 years and even then they didn't publish the data on mortality and when they actually asked one of the original investigators before he died why they didn't publish the data he said and i quote it was because they found the results disappointing so this is hard evidence that was basically hidden from the public for decades and it's finally been published in 2016 in the british medical journal a very reputable journal but don't think for one second that this kind of i guess misrepresentation or hiding of results is confined only to previous eras we still have it in the modern era you may have heard of the woman's health initiative study this here cost over 700 million us dollars they followed 48 000 females for about 8 years this was a big massive study and yet when we look at the results when it was published if we have a look at the conclusions no statistically significant findings if we flip through to the results tables we don't find any statistically significant findings at all but it's only when we go to page 661 of this study in one sentence of obscure text which i've highlighted here do we get the truth this is the only statistically significant finding in this study what that means is that when we do a study we can sometimes get findings that are likely to be due to chance so we have to do mathematical calculations to work out what that probability is so if we get a finding that's called statistically significant then we say this finding is not jude by chance it's what we call a real finding and this study only had one of those findings and that was that females with a history of heart disease if they went on a low-fat diet their chance of complications of things like heart attacks was increased by 26 that was the only significant finding of this study and it was basically buried on page 661 of this journal it was never discussed in public by the study investigators wasn't mentioned in the conclusion at all and didn't even get into the results tables which is where most of us when we're reviewing articles will go to the results tables they just left it out so don't think for one second that science has never looked at whether saturated fats are safe or whether seed and vegetable oils are potentially harmful we have a clear abundance of evidence that they're not good for us fortunately though science is now catching up so the american college of cardiology earlier this year published this state-of-the-art review on saturated fat consumption and after a complete analysis of all the literature they've actually concluded that we should freely consume meat eggs and dairy and not worry about the satradaka now this is an organisation that used to be heavily in favour of controlling fats in the diet and going on low-fat diets so this is actually something of a watershed movement and i'm actually significantly heartened by this because one of the major reasons that we've actually seen vegetarian and vegan diets pushed so strongly through scientific and medical circles is through this fallacious belief that saturated fats are dangerous but now that some of the the true evidence is trickling down and filtering through we can actually see the truth of that that people who consume a lot of saturated fats do not impact their health negatively at all in actual fact it's the vegetable oils and the seed oils which seem to be doing the damage several studies have been published that link longevity with diets that limit meat consumption can you explain why people living in these blue zones seem to live longer so a lot of the research that we have on whether meat-free diets or low-meat diets are actually beneficial to the health of what we call epidemiological studies and epidemiological studies are fundamentally flawed in that they can't prove causation that is they can't prove that something happens all they can show is that two things occur at the same time so for instance people in the blue zones if they believe that not eating meat so if we take the loma linda group who believe that not eating meat is a healthier diet well they also engage in other health behaviors they have a big focus on community and family their very low rates of smoking not abusing alcohol all these things that also contribute to good health so how confident can we be that any health benefit we actually observe in this population is due to the lack of meat when you've got so many other confounding factors we also see okinawa where we take areas like this with the blue zones and there's now very reliable research that shows that a lot of the information about how old these people are is actually very unreliable and it's very very likely that the ages and the lifespans of people within these areas has been significantly overestimated and we also see that in okinawa that as meat consumption is reducing it's not actually conferring any benefit to all-cause mortality and then there's the obvious elephant in the room we have countries like hong kong which is the highest need consumers in the world they also have the longest life expectancy in the world so if we're comparing we look at data like this and say well it just doesn't make sense if we take a group like loan or linda which is about population of about 24 000 people very very small population um compare it to a whole country like hong kong i know which data is more reliable and we're also ignoring well what about the mormons who do we need that they actually engage in other behaviors you know in terms of non-smoking and these other things well their lifespans are very very similar to what we see in loma linda so we really can't put a lot of trust in this epidemiological research and even when we can well if we could we can't put a lot of trust in this epidemiological research and even then some of the epidemiological research doesn't always show in favor of reducing meat consumption so it's almost accepted now that meat consumption causes bowel cancer that's just something that people believe but in actual fact the evidence for this is incredibly tenuous and the evidence actually goes in the other direction as well so we have this study here um epic trial from oxford university and this actually found that the rate of bowel cancer in vegetarians compared to meat eaters was increased by 39 percent now again this is only epidemiological evidence so it doesn't prove causation but it certainly should give us food for thought when it comes to whether or not we should actually trust a lot of this research that claims that meat is bad for us some carnivores claim that after changing their eating habits they lost weight and healed the disease do you believe that only eating meat can be healthy yeah i mean this is a very interesting question and i guess um people who are on the carnival diet who i see as patients they get two benefits from it so the first benefit is that inherent within some diets there are certain chemicals and proteins that people react adversely to and it's simply a matter of removing those chemicals from the diet so that could be something called lectins which is a certain kind of protein they could be phytates or tannins or oxalates and there's a whole laundry list of things that some people can react to but i guess the question that most your listeners will be interested in is what about the nutrients haven't we been told that we need to eat vegetables for the nutrients well the fact is vegetables on average are less nutrient dense than animal foods they just don't contain as much nutrients so for example if you were on a purely vegan diet eating only vegetables without supplementing you would end up getting very very sick due to deficiencies like b12 deficiency so i would ask is a diet that you have to supplement on to stay healthy to stay alive is that really nutritionally optimal and do we see this with people on carnivore diets we don't actually see people most patients i see who are on the carnivore diet actually don't supplement at all and when i look at their results we don't see evidence of nutrient deficiency now the most common one that people will cite is vitamin c and they'll say oh but you must have some freaks and pictures because you'll like vitamin c well vitamin c is very interesting so first of all molecularly it's very very similar to glucose so when you ingest vitamin c it's actually competing with glucose to get into the cells of your body so people on carnivore diets who aren't consuming the glucose in the first place they actually absorb more of the vitamin c and what a lot of people don't realize is that animal foods including meat contain vitamin c and this has been known historically for a long long time so one of uh in the napoleonic era one of napoleon's armies in egypt they used to use horse meat from horses that were killed in battle to cure scurvy it's been well known antarctic explorers they well knew that if they consumed penguins then that would prevent scurvy so this has being known this is not new science it's just not well known we've got to we we know that if we actually do an analysis of meat we actually do see it contains vitamin c in necessary amounts and this is another area where science has been poorly done and poorly communicated if you go and look at a table of the nutritional quality of meat you might often see that it says vitamin c 0 but it will often have an asterisk and when you look at that asterisk you'll go down and in fine print you'll see assumed value not actually tested so it's this mistaken belief that meat mustn't have vitamin c that led to a lot of scientists not even actually bothering to test for it so the simple fact is that we can get all the nutrients we require from animal foods if we take eggs for instance they are nature's multivitamin contained within each yolk is all the nutrients required to support life to support a living organism you can't say that about a single vegetable and if we actually have a look at some of the science there was a study that was done in ecuador it was published in 2017 and they actually found that as a randomised controlled intervention by giving infants just one egg a day they were able to reduce the incidence of underweight children by 74 so animal foods are incredibly nutritious especially when it comes to plant foods we know that plant foods for all intents and purposes are deficient in nutrients vegetables have micronutrients antioxidants and vitamins can we get the perfect nutrients for our body by eating animal products only i think the key thing to understand is that the nutrients in plant foods first of all they're less nutrient dense and the nutrients within them by and large are much poorer qualities they're less absorbable and they're less bioavailable so this includes things like even omega-3 so if we have a look at the ala which is a precursor to the active forms of omega-3 in the body less than 5 is actually converted into the biologically active forms the plant source of vitamin a for instance is probably about 12 times less biologically active than the animal form so we see the forms of iron so heming versus non-heme iron it makes a massive difference and even then even if we are consuming nutrients there's other factors in plant foods called anti-nutrients which can actually block their absorption i'd like to show you this paper so this paper was done quite some time ago and it was published in 1979 and if you have a look at this graph here this shows how much zinc is actually being absorbed into the body after consuming 120 grams of oysters you can see that we get quite a good amount of zinc that actually gets absorbed and ends up in the circulation now what happens if you combine that same amount of oysters with 120 grams of corn or tortillas we can see here the bottom line the absorption of zinc is basically stopped so this is called an anterior nutrition effect you have this much zinc which is we're going to call the area under the curve which will give you how much is actually entered into the circulation versus basically zero and this is a these anti-nutrient effects are real so if you're looking at a label and let's say you had a packet of corn tortillas and they had added zinc to it do you really think that added zinc is going to be beneficial if your body can't absorb it and we know that plant foods say tea for instance can impact your body's ability to absorb iron the the nutrient quality of plant foods is far far less so if we look at it in its entirety number one that animal foods complain can contain all the nutrients that you need that phytochemicals plant chemicals actually don't serve a part of human physiology and they're very poorly absorbed anyway and the anti-nutrients in plant fruits can then block absorption of healthy nutrients anyway you can see you've really got a triple whammy so when it comes to nutrition status it's absolutely true that animal food's the best and don't think that this doesn't have very real consequences on people so if we take the most common nutrient that everybody always talks about in terms of vegetarian diets it's b12 because we know that animal foods really don't contain any b12 but every vegetarian almost i'm sure knows this so they must be supplementing with it so if there was a nutrient of concern that shouldn't be initial in vegetarians it should be b12 because they should all know to supplement with it and then also from the epic oxford study we have this kind of paper which shows that we have a massive rate of b12 deficiency so this study found that 52 percent of vegans were deficient in b12 despite i'm sure almost all of them knowing that it was something that they needed to supplement with and don't for a second think that this doesn't have real issues this is a systematic review that when we look at the more modern assays of b12 we find that if you're low in b12 that affects your intelligence it affects your cognition how your brain functions increases the risk of dementia this is very very real we know that iron deficiency is very common because the the 9 we have in vegetarian foods is really not very well absorbed so this study actually looked at females who had iron deficiency and then looked at what happened to their basically their intelligence if they were able to correct that iron deficiency so if we have a look here you can see here that in terms of their learning their memory and their attention these gray bars here were in those females who they improved their iron levels on in their blood you can see they literally increased their intelligence by replacing iron we take another supplement called creatine in meat this is naturally present in flesh this is naturally present but it's not naturally present in plant foods and we've got randomized controlled trial level of evidence that supplementing vegetarians and vegans with creatine improves intelligence this is the best level of medical evidence we have we can't pretend that the nutrient deficiencies within vegan and vegetarian diets aren't having a real impact on people we know that in young children vegetarian children they are deficient in these nutrients and this affects them for their whole lifespan it affects their intelligence it affects their growth we've already talked about how we can reduce underweight children by 74 simply by supplementing with one egg a day that's a massive improvement if we're trying to have healthy robust children that are growing their brains are developing they absolutely need animal nutrition it's just madness to think that any other diet is going to be optimal if we eat carnivore with lots of protein and saturated fat won't this be detrimental to our health the reason a lot of people are concerned about animal foods is because they're rich in saturated fat but they don't just contain saturated fat and as i've already explained saturated fat is not deleterious in any way it's actually very very healthy but the interesting thing is when we come to the polyunsaturated fats the amiga 3s and the omega-6s because their chemical structure means they're very prone to something called oxidation stress it means they contain double bonds which are reactive and if these fats oxidize before we consume them they actually generate oxidative stress in the liver and can contribute to problems like insulin resistance so and we've actually measured this when we do studies and we give people vegetable oils which we know are heavily oxidized we can actually measure these oxidized components in their blood very shortly after consumption the beautiful thing about animal foods is though that we wouldn't eat them if they were off if they were answered so the definition of rancidity is basically when the fats oxidize so if we're these monounsaturated and polyunsaturated oils so called oleic acid and omega-36 they are essential to good health but if we get them from meat sources we're getting them so they're not oxidized assuming that they're fresh and they actually are essential they're actually healthy for us whereas if we get those same oils and same fats from say a vegetable oil the chances are because these things oxidize within a matter of days chances are that they are heavily oxidized and they'll be doing this damage and that likely explains while the sydney diet heart study the minnesota coronary experiment the corn oil study all these studies actually demonstrated harms of vegetable oil consumption so yes meat is very rich in fat but that's a good thing it it provides us with all the fats we need saturated monounsaturated and polyunsaturated and the best thing is in fresh meat those fats are not oxidized they're not doing us any harm at all most carnivores report having high ldl cholesterol levels isn't that a problem so i see a lot of patients who are concerned about their ldl levels because they've gone on a ketogenic or a carnival style diet and their ldl levels have increased and invariably they've been told by their other doctors that it's going to be causing them harm that it's going to increase their chance of an early death but when we actually look at the evidence this isn't actually born out this was published in 2016 it's a systematic review of 19 studies prospective studies that looked at mortality and ldl levels and of those 19 studies 16 of them representing 92 of total participants found an inverse relationship basically this found that the higher your ldl level was the more likely it was for you to live longer and this absolutely flies in the face but this is a very good paper this is a systematic review of prospective studies published in a top journal so in terms of am i concerned about my patient's ldl levels if they go high not in and of itself we always have a look at the other metabolic risk factors we have a look at other parameters that will actually give us far more indication of their real cardiovascular risk ldl for all intents and purposes does not serve that purpose what about fibre isn't eating fiber necessary for intestinal health so the thing about fiber is it only comes from plant foods so there is no fibre in any animal source food so this is really i guess making the argument well you know is it possible to be carnivore or not or will you get constipated one only ever has to change the nappy of a breastfed infant to know that you don't need to consume fibre to open your bowels um fibre is absolutely not essential for regular bowel habits and in actual fact there's evidence that shows that fiber might even cause constipation so if we have a look at this paper here this was published in 2012 and this looked at symptoms of constipation so they had 63 subjects who all had constipation and they trialled them on various types of diet ranging from zero fiber diet all the way up to very very high fiber diets and so in the arm of the study where they had zero fiber diets the subjects were advised to eliminate all vegetables all fruit all cereals whole grain bread and brown rice from their diets and all 41 subjects who went on that zero fiber diet had complete resolution of all of their symptoms of constipation this was pain bleeding bloating strain opening their bowels they just they did better so and this was highly statistically significant this finding was not due to chance so the best evidence we actually have is that fibre actually exacerbates symptoms of constipation and i see patients in my clinic every week who tell me this that they've had stomach problems they've been told to increase the amount of fiber they ingest and it's just made their symptoms worse and this is such a simple intervention and it really goes against common thinking but if we think about it constipation is really trouble passing something through a small hole through the anal sphincter and we know about fibre's ability to bulk or increase the mass of the stool so does it really make sense that increasing the size of something is going to make it easier to pass through a small hole i mean that's really like adding extra cars to a traffic jam and thinking that somehow those extra cars are going to clear the traffic jam it's just going to make the jam worse now the other thing when we talk about gut health is something we call the microbiome and there's a lot of unscientific claims being made about the microbiome in advance of the science but what we do know is that some microbiomes are associated with improved metabolic health but the key here is that they're associated with it they're not causing it so about 90 percent of the bacteria in our colons are made from one of two phylum bacterias or firm acuities and we know that a larger amount of bacteria deities and a reduced amount of thermocuties is actually associated with improved metabolic health now when we actually put people on ketogenic diets we actually see that very pattern increased bacteria deities reduce term acuities good metabolic health now is it more likely that the good metabolic health comes from the fact is that you're now on a healthy diet or is it somehow magically due to the microbiome changing it's absolutely not microbiome we can change the microbiome within 24 hours we can get wholesale changes within 24 hours it's just coming along for the ride so yes it is reflective of the type of diet you're eating but it's not causative the real bang for the butt the real benefits come from the diet and then obviously the food that you eat also feeds the bacteria and different bacteria in the gut will proliferate depending differently depending on what food you're eating so this is really where a lot of people have mistaken correlation for causation just because two things occur at the same time doesn't mean that one causes the [Music] other

Channel: Low Carb Down Under

Views: 107,684

Keywords: Low Carb Down Under, LCDU, www.lowcarbdownunder.com.au, Low Carb Doctors, Carnivore, LCHF, Low Carb Healthy Fat, Ketogenic Diet, Carbohydrate Restriction, Paul Mason, Vegan, Plant Based Diet

Id: eEfAmhJxu34

Length: 39min 28sec (2368 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 30 2021