Butter, Meat and The Science and Politics of Nutrition l Doctor's Farmacy with Dr. Mark Hyman EP2

[Music] welcome to the doctors pharmacy I'm dr. Mark Hyman I'm excited to have an extrordinary guest today Neena tyke Holtz who's written a book that inspired me to write my book called eat fat get then her book was called the big fat surprise which turned all of our conventional notions about what to eat on its head meat fat or bad and you write that they're good so Nina has really done quite a bit of work on this and she's no slouch her book was probably one of the best written books I've read both from the investigative journalist point of view and also just from the literary point of view it was a pleasure to read she published a number of articles in The Lancet and British Medical Journal about her work and about these ideas and The Lancet wrote that this is a disquieting book it's ruthless sciencing and dissent that has shaped our lives for decades researchers clinicians and health policy advisers should read this provocative book the big fat surprise was named the 2014 best book by The Economist The Wall Street Journal Forbes Mother Jones and Library Journal that's pretty impressive Mother Jones in the world Street Journal in the same sentence that's pretty good she's the executive director of the nutrition coalition which is a nonprofit group that promotes evidence-based nutrition policy and I'm on the board of directors full disclosure she graduated from Stanford and Oxford universities and she served as the associate director of the center for globalization and sustainable development at Columbia University and she now lives in New York with her husband and two sons welcome Nina Thank You mark it's great to be here thank you for that nice introduction of course you deserve it and your story is kind of fascinating because you used to be a restaurant critic right and reviewed restaurants and suddenly you were eating loads of fat and the whole story behind how you got into all this could you share that story yes so I meant to because I wasn't really a restaurant critic I've been a journalist for decades but I actually sort of inherited this little restaurant critic gig in a throwaway newspaper in my neighborhood on the Upper West Side of Manhattan where there was no budget to pay for meals which is the proper way to review restaurants we can go in and so we just had to eat whatever was sent out to me and you at that point I had been a vegetarian for like over 20 years and my instinct was to go into a restaurant and say I'll have the stir-fried vegetables please I mean what was I doing being a restaurant critic anyway but but instead they didn't want to send out that food you know what a chef wants to showcase is their red meat and cream sauces and and and things like foie gras or tripe or you know all these things I had never eaten or in many many years and and I dutifully ate them I found that they were kind of rich and delicious and textured and interesting and and they filled me up and I ended up like losing 10 pounds almost effortlessly I go to my doctor he says your cholesterol levels hmm they look better than ever so that was part of what got me on this journey which is like how is it I'm eating all these foods that are supposed to make me sick and fat and yet I'm thinner and feel healthier than I have in years I mean that's just a huge mystery so it took me like a decade to write my book to try to get to the bottom of that story that's impressive so what was the reason you were vegetarian - it's nothing high minded I wanted to be thin and so starting from when I was a teenager you know I was taught like so many people of us that fat is bad meat is bad makes you fat and so I stopped eating almost any bit of fat no butter no you know skim everything I used to put water on my cereal in the morning because I even eat why I even have this skim milk I don't know how I bear bared that and indiscipline and I didn't get fan of course I was you know pretty I was overweight most of my young adulthood but but I just thought this wouldn't make me fit and and if I had the less fat I ate the better chance I had of being Finn but of course it never happened for 20 years yeah didn't work but it just I don't know it's so engrained in you they I don't know why I never questioned maybe the basic advice is wrong that really never came to my mind I think I did what many people do is they just blame themselves like if only I try harder if only so what happens when you are in a very low-fat diet like I was depressed yeah well I was depressed and but you also you're hungry all the time because you're trying to stay full on carbs in carbs you know make your blood sugar go up and then a crash isn't enough and it crashes so and you don't it's not associating so then I'm so then you're binging so then you're like trying to get by and like bagels and then you have to go sneak the cookies because you're starving it I mean my story is just like so many people's which is that you're just on a low-fat diet your experience sort of contradicted all the dogma which is that fat makes you fat because it has more calories and carbs and protein and that fat causes heart disease and messes up your cholesterol and is not good for you right and that's the meme that we all believed for decades and decades and in your book it was fascinating because you really unearthed the origin story of why we came to believe that fat was bad and you kind of turned it upside down and revealed all the flaws and the science and the thinking behind why fat wasn't the culprit in particularly heart disease I'm particularly sad fat so can you talk about the origin story and what you discovered and the surprising things you found is you're researching your book that we're like oh my god what happened how do we get in this mess yes so I mean like any idea the idea that fat and cholesterol are bad for you they have their origin in a moment in time we've been living with it for so long we just kind of think it's always been true but it hasn't so it really started in the 1950s when the nation was in a panic over the rising tide of heart disease had been pretty much non-existent in the early 1900's and had risen to become the number one leading killer right even President Eisenhower 1955 has a heart attack in the out of the Oval Office for ten days everybody's attention is fixed on this public health emergency what causes heart disease and there were a number of explanations maybe it was you know Auto exhaust maybe it was vitamin deficiency maybe it was the type A personality remember that but there was one theory both of us probably have and we're still alive and there was one theory proposed by a physiologist by the name of Ansel Benjamin keys from the University of Minnesota and it was his idea that it was saturated fats the kind you find in animal foods but also coconut oil saturated fats and dietary cholesterol think egg yolks shellfish that cause heart disease and so that was called the diet heart hypothesis right so where some animal studies on rabbits who never eat that stuff and gave him high levels of cholesterol - II yeah and they got heart disease so it's cholesterol in the arteries so must be the cholesterol we're eating and the fat were eating yeah I mean when you talk about the the weak science behind you know when he came up with his idea it was just an idea and there was a tiny bit of evidence behind it including these animal studies where they looked at they gave a rabbit's a super high cholesterol diet and the rabbit's got cholesterol in their blood well rabbits are herbivores you know they're not omnivores like we are so and and so there was like there was just like a little bit of piecemeal evidence out there but it was this moment there was this this this vacuum of information and into that stepped Ancel keys with his diet heart hypothesis saturated fat dietary cholesterol he was this incredibly charismatic powerful man who was according to his peers able to argue anyone to the death he was called aggressive even by his friends and he was really able to get his idea implanted into the American Heart Association such that in 1961 the American Heart Association comes out with a recommendation saying don't eat saturated fat Dietary cholesterol cut back on meat full full fat dairy cheese and meat was vilified because it contains saturated fat because these they contain saturated fat and they contain cholesterol right by the way the saturated fat in meat is a specific kind that doesn't raise cholesterol called stearic acid right ironically and meat the kind of fat in an average like porterhouse steak only a third of that is saturated all foods contain a mixture of different kinds of fatty acids olive oil is 20 percent saturated right mackerel has more saturated fat 400 grams of fat than meat does but it was just like he was just this really simplistic kind of science that they were using and it was taking a stab at trying to prevent heart disease but it became policy so that an it that 1961 American Heart Association policy was the first time anywhere in the world that people were told cut back on meat cheese eggs in order to prevent a heart attack and that was the beginning of it all so it's really important to say that at that time it wasn't the total a low-fat diet they didn't say reduced fat overall it was just saturated fat no in fact there was a lot of evidence around that time that carbohydrates were driving obesity and carbohydrate restriction was a standard recommendation for weight loss yeah and also for controlling diabetes it was you know in the early 1900s and actually there was a large amount of science on in the early 1900's mainly in Austria in Germany and the story is that that science disappeared with World War two those scientists kind of like were dispersed but they had done the science on showing how weight gain is really not controlled by energy and energy out calories in cuz it was really controlled by hormones yes and they understood that yes they didn't at that point understand that it was the insulin hormone which turns out to be the most powerful hormone for fat deposition but they understood there was something going that was controlling fat deposition that was not about calories and then all that was lost yeah that science it was all written in German and then the whole field of nutrition moved over to the United States didn't read the German articles and then was just lost so instead center stage is Ancel keys and his colleagues and they become the most influential nutrition scientists of the 20th century they they're very closely tied in with the National Institutes of Health that they are the people of all the money for all the research grants they kind of take over the whole nutrition establishment really they they're the editors at all the major journals they are the top people at all the expert conferences and they suppress dissent right so Newt can was another scientist at a time that we showing that sugar was really the driver of all the cardiovascular risk factors yes so clearly silent him and he ended up sort of dying in disgrace at the end of his career basic kicked out of his lab in London and race the high-fat crew didn't do well on the low-fat crew ascended well there were these were you know so these were like Yadkin as you say he was a professor in in London in London University his theory was that it was sugar that caused heart disease and there was another man MD in the u.s. called Stephane sand and he had traveled all over with the the Inoue tin in the Arctic the Canadian Arctic and it was and he saw them being devastated by carbohydrates so it was his theory that was carbs and sugar so there were these other thinkers with other hypotheses and it is true that they were silenced I mean which is a shorthand way of saying like they were criticized they were they were told that you know really in the same way that we see today they're they're accused of being backed by industry they were their science was attacked they were attacked they were they couldn't get their papers published in journals I mean that's the way that science is is silenced yeah and the data that that dr. keyes used was based on looking at patterns of consumption of foods in a certain number of countries in Europe there were seven countries and it was just looking at correlation and most people don't understand that science is not all the same science it shows correlation doesn't prove anything it just shows a correlation I could wake up every morning the Sun comes up they have anything to do with each other but there's a hundred percent correlation I'd like to see believe that and I and I think that they they tried to follow up on that research because they believed the theory and they saw this association but when they did the follow-up research it was fascinating because they did a study that could never be done today there was unethical it was 9,000 patients in mental institutions who were captive they gave half of them high saturated fat diet the vegetable oil or corn oil and they were sure that the corn oil group would do better have less heart attacks less deaths and in fact their cholesterol dropped on the corn well but their heart attack rate and death rate was dramatically increased for every twenty thirty point drop in cholesterol there was a 22% increase in heart attack and death and they suppress that data for forty years because they didn't believe it and they didn't want to publish it and it was just published a couple of years ago so yeah that's the Minnesota coronary survey Ancel Keys was one of the primary investigators and you're right it was the biggest most ambitious test ever funded by the National Institutes of Health of his hypothesis right and they and and at the end of that study what happened was that did actually publish it in nineteen seventy seventy nine but the but that was sixteen years after they had finished the studies so they study results come out they don't publish them for sixteen years and they finally put it in this little out-of-the-way Journal that they know nobody will read and when the one of the investigators was asked why wait so long because it is of course a form of cheating in science not to publish your results and he said well there was nothing wrong with our data we were just so disappointed in the way it turned out but it wasn't there more data that came out so then yes so this is so then in 2015 these researchers at NIH went back to that study and they went back to the son of the investigator and they they found out that any of the basement there were these magnetic tapes from the study that had never been fully analyzed and they analyzed them and used special machines to try to get the data off of them and they discovered that they had never published the full results and and so in 2015 they published the result that actually the more the men lowered their cholesterol the higher their rate ya heart dying from heart disease so everything that so there's the exact opposite and the butter group did better basically and the butter group did better right yeah and so you know it's and actually so the story is the bigger story is that that study that the the idea that study results are ignored not published that is not the only example of that I mean and this was a randomized control trial which is the highest level of evidence it's not like a population study where you can see a pattern but you can't prove anything right this data is more convincing right so this is the kind of data randomized control clinical trial gold standard or evidence it's where you can demonstrate cause and effect right that's what they do for drug trials they show cut they have to do a trial to show cause and effect otherwise as you say it's just this kind of weak observational data that data relies it's it's data relies entirely on people recording what they ate you know these food frequency questionnaire it's like what did you how many peaches did you eat in the last six months - how many pears did you eat in the last six months and then like and repeat that for other 200 items on the list and then somebody asked me what I yesterday I can't remember this morning so that data has been shown to be just notoriously unreliable right and they can't and they've actually tried they've actually done tests on it you know see what do people actually eat and then what do they remember they ate people it's all confounded like the fatter you are the more likely they are to lie about the data I mean it's really fascinating but the patient depends on what the prevailing view is if you think meat is bad and you eat mean you're gonna minimize you can porting of meat you ate right and you minimize your should they show that they've shown that people under well under report how much sugar they eat and they overestimate the exercise and under report that just sounds like human nature to me but I think that the point is is that's really unreliable data and that was the data that Ancel Keys used at the foundation for that first American Heart Association policy but then you know and that was in 1961 so what I wants to say is that the what happens after that 1961 policy is the government the US government and governments around the world realize okay we have to test this more rigorously so they did these trials these government-funded trials including this Minnesota coronary survey they actually tested like more than 75,000 people all over the world in a number of randomized controlled clinical trials that's again gold standard of evidence and I and I describe these trials in my book I mean they were met as you see many than the kind of experiments you couldn't do anymore because they were in mental hospitals you're not allowed to do that anymore be like for its people their food but they were really that makes it very what we call well-controlled meaning you're controlling everything that everybody's eating it's not like giving somebody a diet book and saying you know it's right yeah and then you don't know what really happens so and none of those experiments could show that that replacing saturated fat with vegetable oils improve was able to prevent heart disease or cardiovascular more terror death right none of them one of them that was done in Australia showed the men on the corn oil diet died at much higher rates than people on the regular diet and none of those I think that kind of the blockbuster thing to me which I didn't even really know until after my book was published is that none of those studies the billions of dollars spent by governments around the world none of those studies have ever been reviewed by our dietary guideline committees which is our like our expert bodies making our national food policy ordinary they've just ignored all those the best possible evidence on fat and saturated fat was completely ignored paid for by taxpayers everywhere right and by and it's absent from our guidelines which we're going to talk about so back to dr. keyes because he is a fascinating story he at the end of his life changed his mind didn't he he did on cholesterol he decided that dietary cholesterol which is you know why you have egg white omelets instead of regular omelet he he in it the late 1980s he said you know I don't think cholesterol is such an issue um and he recanted on that part I don't and and I think I don't think he ever recanted on saturated fats that I know and the data from that study you went back and looked at it and what was fascinating to me was that the signal that came up even far stronger than fat was sugar yes so this is going back to the seven countries study where they looked at what people ate in seven countries and then they looked at to see who died and who had heart attack and what he decided was it was a saturated fat consumption that was most closely correlated with your likelihood of death right it turned out or cardiovascular death but um so I went and looked at that study in a lot of detail and and one of the things that I found was that that later on when they reanalyzed the data they found that sugar and sweets were actually much more highly correlated with cardiovascular death and I actually asked some of Ansel akiza's colleagues like well why did you not report on sugar and they said well we had discussions about it but Keyes was just so opposed to the idea that it was sugar that caused heart disease and he was very sure of his own idea that it was fat so I mean one of the things about Ancel Keys so much for the purity of science and independent researchers and honestly you know when I was in medical school I thought that science was this beautiful pristine you know honest field full of integrity and truth and as I've learned and as I read the data it's highly influenced by the food industry it's highly managed by bias it depends on the design of the study and was looking at it was paying for it it's fascinating I'm mayor Nestle is writing a new book about how the nutrition science that we have is corrupted by the food industry which basically obfuscates the truth and they try to promote basically false science like fake news like soda doesn't cause obesity and dairies great for your bones and all sorts of ideas that we have pretty much taken on in a society are often corrupt but by the food industry so science is not this pure field of truth it's essentially a often corrupt thing and you know you have to know how to read it and think about it that's what's impressive in your work is that you really go through the nitty-gritty and you don't just look at the headlines you go between the lines you look at the data you look at the appendices of the data you look at the appendices the appendices the data and you really kind of find out what's going on it's very impressive well thank you I mean but like you I started off thinking like science was this sober reasonable rational rational process and my father is a scientist and was a professor at Stanford and and you know hitting his journals like you open up his journals and and and there's like math problems on there it's like I I mean I just grew up in this world thinking this is the you know science is about responding to observations honestly and then if you're if your explanation doesn't explain the observation then you have to change your hypothesis but the thing about nutrition science is you know the food industry is huge and they have a stake in what nutrition science if there's a study coming out that says that you know five walnuts a day helps lower your risk of heart disease you can be sure the walnut industry is probably behind that study but it makes a big difference for them like what can they put on their packages and you know can they claim they lower heart disease so the food industry is really and they know how to corrupt science at it's very source right they know how to fund studies and get them get you know how to how to distort the even the study design so that they can get a favorable response but I think in this field there's another factor playing at play which is maybe even stronger which is that is that the scientists and experts themselves I don't believe that they were you know going back to the 50s 60s and 70s I really don't believe that they were corrupt I didn't really find evidence of that so much as I found there kind of that they fell in love with their own ideas they were really just unable to see data to the contrary and they couldn't accept it when when there was contrary data and and Ancel Keys kind of did the opposite of a scientist which he believed that he was right until proven wrong yeah science like you're supposed to prove yourself wrong you're supposed to prove yourself wrong and then like only after you gradually accumulate data do you think that well maybe maybe I'm right but let me see how I could prove myself wrong again you know that's the way science is supposed to work so and then I think the other factor is that these ideas became institutionalized right once they're adopted by public health institutions medical institutions the entire government and then you have this thing where the institutionalization of science it's it's its own like institutional science is almost like an oxymoron because science requires self doubt the ability to change according data they billing to be flexibility to be flexible institutions just need the exact opposite right I can't flip-flop on their publics they need constancy they need to it for their credibility that can't be changing so it's very hard once this was adopted by the US government the idea that you should not eat fat and cholesterol it just became so hard to reverse out of those the truth you know I work at Cleveland Clinic and Steve NIST is there it was one of the leading cardiologist in the world he's the head of Cardiology there and the vice-chairman of Cardiology the cardiac art of thoracic surgery also had these discussions with me that you know they think that the whole idea that fat is bad is wrong and he maybe even saturated fat and that's bad is wrong and yet at the Cleveland Clinic when you go into the hospital for heart surgery you are prescribed a heart-healthy diet which is high carb low fat even though they know that's a problem it's just so institutionalized and imbedded it's hard to change it's really hard to change true so when you you know wrote the book you know we had a certain set of beliefs that were pretty prevalent around fats actually I have you noticed anything change about our beliefs about fat and carbs in the last few years since you wrote the book yeah I mean what has the conversation changed you know when I so when I started my book of course I was a vegetarian eating a low-fat diet and then that was in the early 2000s I used to track what you know a do a word search on saturated fats see what the conversation was about saturated fat that debate has really changed in the in the scientific literature so there's now like eight major review papers from teams of scientists all over the world saying that saturated fats have no effect on cardiovascular mortality so in the in this scientific community there is debate over that I don't think it's really changed it so much you've seen many many more articles in the lay press about it but there is such a open question I would say it's sort of a wobbling open question now and that was not true before before 2014 that really was just it was like sealed settled science and now it's unsettled science yeah and there have been two changes that I think will probably really surprise your your audience's mind which is how many people know that there is no more caps on dietary cholesterol in other words eat as many eggs as you want don't worry about shellfish eat liver if you like it that is no longer there are no more caps on cholesterol we had them for 35 years and I love what I heard about that one of the people on the guidelines committee said you know what we never really looked at the science we just thought it was bad so we eliminated for 35 years and Toby lead egg white omelet and up sorry and they call it no longer a nutrient of concern which is pretty amazing to me and they did kind of so that was in 2015 the Dietary Guidelines dropped that limit and the American Heart Association did the same thing a couple years before and that was and that and that went went all the way back to Ancel keys right that was his idea nobody really ever looked at the science too hard and and but they did kind of tiptoe away from that advice I mean I there were no big headlines there wasn't a big there was a press release around it's not a nutrient concern and we were wrong and we're just not going to but the other amazing thing is is that they no longer recommend a low-fat diet yeah that's pretty shocking and again there was no headlines about it nobody named removed the limit it used to be 30% 35% now they were like it doesn't matter right now they're like we don't talk about it so what they did is actually they did a little it's a little bit of a rhetorical jujitsu I think which is that they just stopped talking about the low-fat diet if you go to the Dietary Guidelines an American Heart Association you search low-fat it's like it's gone like wow that was my life and then that what they've done is they've shifted over to talking about dietary patterns so now we have dietary patterns which are all you know fruits vegetables whole grains nuts seeds fish low-fat dairy and lean meat and they don't talk about how much fat you should eat yeah so I'm gonna talk about lean meat and they also talk about low-fat dairy and they also talk about low saturated fat yeah there's still a cap on saturated fats yeah so that that's that it that's why your hosts have lean meat and low fat dairy is because of the saturated fats but the low fat diet is gone but again no press release no announcement nobody knows that you know they should stop avoiding fat right I mean it's still news I say whoever I see egg white omelets and skim milk everywhere and I think people handing out the news I'm like I said this guy was getting coffee I'm like why are you having this skim Alexis well isn't fat bad and it's pretty amazing so one of the things in your book I loved was this sort of taking us back in history and looking at populations and what they ate and the truth is there's never been a voluntary vegan society in the history of humanity and in fact there's there's been varying amounts of animal food that we've eaten you know we often ate a lot of plant foods that average indigenous cultures ate a up to eight hundred different species of plants but they also ate a lot of animal food and some of the stories you tell for example about the Plains Indians who pretty much consumed only Buffalo or the Masai had incredible health and longevity could you talk about that a little bit yeah I mean I include a bunch of examples in my book of populations that ate a lot of fat like okay so one of them is the Masai warriors who were studied quite rigorously by a biochemist from the university of vanderbilt named george man who went and looked at them in the 1970s and discovered they were eating the warrior men ate nothing but meat like five pounds of meat a day and and milk and blood that was their diet total you know fruits no vegetables total failure by our standards and they had extremely low levels of cholesterol he measured he measured their cholesterol they had low levels of low blood pressure their cholesterol did not rise with age which was just assumed to be normal and their blood pressure didn't rise and then he did electrocardiograph so 600 of them could find maybe a slight indication of a heart attack in one person so they seemed to be they had to have excellent cardiovascular health even though they were eating a diet that was the very opposite of what we're told to eat and and then it wasn't just the average meat or milk or blood it was grass-fed it was organic it was heirloom it was like it was very different than where it is what they could hunt right right so it's not coming from a feedlot that's definitely true so but but you know high in saturated fat I mean their diet was like 70 60 70 percent fat a lot of it was saturated they didn't they didn't drink like lean milk or you know low fat milk so and then there is that the Plains Indian who lived you know they they're their main food source was Buffalo all they also had some you know root vegetables and they eight so they ate a lot of meat and they were known to be very long-lived there were more centenarians living in the Indian populations according to an anthropologist report that there were anywhere in the world so they seemed to be really long-lived and and I include these examples not to say you should eat a diet of milk and meat and blood or Buffalo although it seems likely that you could and be healthy and I'll tell you one more example of that in just a second but I include those examples just to show these are data points that are contrary to our thinking ready so you have if you have a theory or hypothesis you have to explain this how can these people even be alive according to our theory they should all be dead the same thing that South Pacific they were in having animal food but they're having coconut fat 60% of their diet was saturated coconut fat and it's the most saturated fat we have and they had no be city heart disease that cholesterol their blood sugar was all fine it was all fine and there's a what I wanted to tell you that there wasn't actually a year-long experiment by that MD doctor I mentioned named Steffensen who had gone to the Arctic to study that can do the into it and when he came back to New York he decided to along with a colleague to eat nothing but meat and fat for an entire year and they did this experiment a super part of it they actually stayed at Mount Sinai Hospital and they stay under a team of supervised by doctors and then they were allowed out for the rest of the year eating nothing but meat and fat at the end of that they were they were had every test they could think to give them there were six peer-reviewed papers published out of that study and they were found to have absolutely be in perfect health they could find no deficiency not even he knew you think they would have liked vitamin C deficiency because they weren't having thought but somehow if from the you know they ate every part of the animal ate the brain the whatever so they were getting it wasn't just the muscle meat so they got all the nutrients that they needed to live so let's go into this because you know there are a lot of people out there who strongly believe that you know meat is bad and that being a vegan is the weight a long life and health and that we should really be eating no animal foods because they promote heart disease cancer diabetes and you know this is a huge debate out there and I think you know I used to be a vegetarian for 10 years you're vegetarian for 20 years like how do you address this this debate in literature because there are studies that show that people eat more vegetables and eat less meat do better and live longer you know this is a seven country I mean there's seventh-day Adventists there's Dan Buettner 's work-around Blue Zones how do you sort of address that so I just want to acknowledge there you know people don't eat meat for ethical reasons and they're or they you know they don't want to eat animals and that that is a whole I mean I respect that and that's that's you know that's your own that's a different I want to just like let's just address the question of health health and we leave environment on the side side we have to address that but I don't think anybody agrees that we should be eating factory farmed animals of any type because a lot of reasons for the environment of affect so putting all that aside let's just address the health claims so so there's kind of two sides to this one is that you know is meat bad for health and you know originally it was convicted because it contains saturated fat and cholesterol so cholesterol is no longer nutrient of concern saturated fats wobbling we can't have there's no rigorous science to show saturated fats of any effect on cardiovascular mortality so meat has kind of been exonerated on those counts right and now it's true there's an effort to kind of convict it based you know that it causes cancer or maybe diabetes and all of that data is that weak observational data that we talked about right so relies on food frequency questionnaire is really really unreliable data and then here's the other thing there's a lot of contradictory data a lot of studies show it helps so I'm studying short hurts yeah and it's very confusing so and then when they actually like what are they actually fine they find people who eat processed meat have have a point one eight greater risk of I mean their numbers are tiny tiny tiny and they're so small that they are not really they're not considered reliable by you know standards of the field so and they're just a tiny other like sort of used to help people understand that for a minute because this is this is important in science yeah if you do a regular randomized control trial that can prove cause and effect and you may not need a lot of numbers if you look at studies that are observational studies which are looking at populations over time and tracking what happens and what doesn't happen you have to have a big effect to really consider there's any cause there for example smoking was a 20 or 30 fold increased risk of cancer with smokers okay whereas me you're talking about a point one eight or a point to increased risk which sounds like a lot when you say it's a 20% increased risk but in terms of these types of studies unless it's two or three or four it's not really relevant right I mean and the ones that meet are all all all below - yeah so again 0.18 versus 20 to 30 right yes smoking causes lung cancer does meat cause cancer data don't is a bacon a day for your whole life increase your risk from 5 to 6 percent of getting colon cancer yeah so which based on if you even believe the data which is and you know the other thing about that data that makes it unreliable especially with regards to meat is who has been eating meat over the last you know 30 years ok these are people who don't listen to their doctor's orders obviously they're they've been shown to be people who don't exercise as much tend to be fatter tend to drink more tend like tend to do everything wrong there then they're what we call in science the non adherers they do not adhere to anything they don't wear their seat belts you know so those people do lose fat and they still did it you didn't care about their health and all these bad habits so that's what you're measuring in meat-eating so if you see any greater risk of disease if you're seeing it it's it's it could be any one of these factors and they can't really control for them in these studies they can't go around and saying like you know talking about your risky behavior in it so so that's awesome makes that data unreliable so I don't see any rigorous by that I mean clinical trial data showing that meat is bad for health in fact there are a bunch of clinical trials that I've just been reading that show that looking at lean meat versus regular meat not so all of your cardiovascular risk factors look better on regular meat you know compared to lean meat yeah is that amazing I'm sure yeah and I were to study where they compared kangaroo meat to feedlot meat and they found that this sort of wild kangaroo meat reduced inflammation whereas feedlot meat increased inflammation same thing me same quantity but very different biological effects food is information not just calories and it has biological effects independent of the calories right not to mention all the nutrients it contains so all the B vitamins in there right proportions vitamin b12 you can't get in plant foods iron folate in the right form that is bioavailable for humans to absorb so you know when people have a conversation about meat and they're like well I just why not give up me that's sort of the approach like we you know why bother eating meat it has all these problems associated with it so let's just not eat it but you know the reason to bother especially if you're a woman who wants to have a child is that you need those vitamins you know vegetarian mothers such as I was for my first pregnancy tend to have children infants who have who are deficient in B vitamins especially b12 and and so and taking folic acid doesn't help with that I get deficient iron and omega-3 fats and vitamin D and and their babies are much more likely to then have a bunch of deficiencies which are exactly the same symptoms of as autism which is just a scary thing I mean it's just that you just have to be careful when you're make this is this is like the story of nutrition science which is you have to be so careful what you do because you what are the unintended consequences right you know we as humans evolved eating meat what are the unintended consequences of then deciding you're not gonna eat meat right I mean even if you like have to hold your nose and you know if you want to be healthy or your baby to be healthy like you may you may need to eats a little yeah one of things I recognized recently is it's pretty well known that our factory farming of animals and the way we grow with a corn and soy that actually is used to feed these animals by the way 70 percent of our agricultural lands are used to grow food for animals that we will then eat the animals at 70% of the world's water is also used for animals to grow food and to also feed the animals that leads to water shortages but what what most people don't realize is that is that the factory farming as we do it now has enormous impact on climate change and can have increasing greenhouse gases and methane and so forth the soil depletion the results in the way we grow the food but it turns out that in order to actually reverse climate change and this is work done by Paul Hawken and team of scientists he wrote about in his book called drawdown using regenerative agriculture in other words grazing animals you literally can restore soil and soil is a huge sink for carbon and it sucks out the carbon from the environment and prevents it from heating the climate and affecting the oceans in fact some say that we could by doing this at scale could reverse climate change completely and take it back to pre-industrial levels and people don't understand that the soil is so important we used to have 60 million Buffalo in America 80 I thought it was 80 million cows 6 million Buffalo somewhere around there yeah but it's a lot of a lot of them and they weren't causing climate change they were actually storing soils by treading on it digging up with a hose peeing and pooping on it and building soil that's why we have tens of feet of topsoil in the Midwest now the way we grow animals is not doing that and it's actually the opposite so right from a climate change perspective it might be better to eat meat reverse climate change if you eat the right meat and if you look at the science on climate you know on cows causing global warming I think you know that is it's you have to I wouldn't say that it's unsettled science at this point you know in terms of my reading out of it but you know I think the other really the argument that people make and has been made since Francis Moore lepay wrote her book diet for a small planet in the 1970s early 1970s is that how can we afford to produce a pound of meat versus a pound plans if the meat consumed so many of the earth's resources right that doesn't seem right and they're people starving around the world and we should eat plants instead because they don't consume it so much water and inputs but you know what we're finding is that a high carbohydrate diet a high grain diet for humans is is what is very likely to fuel obesity diabetes and heart disease so you're looking at the pound plants all of a sudden you have to add 300 billion dollars a year in diabetes does it in the obesity you know that doesn't look so cheap anymore right let's say you know not all calories are the same so a pound in a pound is just not equivalent you have to really look at what the externalities of health are yeah right we don't include all the true cost of food into the price other thing we buy at the grocery store okay you know there and there are a lot of other studies that are showing this the 42 countries study looked at not just 7 countries but food consumption patterns in 42 countries and found those who consumed those cereal grains potatoes had a higher risk of heart disease and those were the most animal protein and fat had the lowest which I that was fascinating you're talking about the pure study yeah no peer studies another study that 135,000 people 10 I think 10 Dec 10 years 19 countries 5 continents showed a very similar thing and so some of the data is just sort of looking at this quite differently and what's fascinating is that you know there's a lot of glands that we can't use in agriculture they're grasslands 40% of the planet it's grasslands and that's the kind of land we can use in a regenerative way with grazing animals that can actually increase production and actually decrease climate change right well you know I know they're doing this incredible experiment in Brazil where they took arid land that had obviously nothing growing on it and they were eight they put they planted trees and grass and they put cows on it to roam and the whole forest came back that's right yeah because you know they need they need what you know the nitrogen from the the feces is what you know fixes the soil and they need them walking around on the land and I mean I think that I think that's tremendously promising so let's talk a little bit down a different road because you know saturated fat is bad according to the experts but vegetable oils are good according to experts and then we should be consuming a lot of these polyunsaturated basically omega-6 refined oils like soybean oil which is 10% of our calories corn oil safflower oil sunflower oil canola oil and they're all saying these are great we should consume more of them what do you have to say to that well ok so going back to Ancel keys when they said avoid saturated fats you were supposed to replace them with vegetable oils right that was the idea going back to the 1960s well this is where the food industry does come in a little bit just to start off this story so the the the vegetable oil industry was kind of born in the early 1900s right the first vegetable oil product was Crisco oh yeah right so used to be that those oils were used for the Industrial Revolution they were lose to lubricate machinery and then they figured out how to harden them to make them and they learned how to bleach them and make them look white and then they thought and it was actually Procter & Gamble that figure out how to do that they were gonna make it into a soap you know soap is made from oil instead they like that looks an awful lot like lard let's try to sell it as a food yeah so they started to sell it as a food and yeah so it turns out that they contained you know that it's what they hardening vegetable oils is done through a process called hydrogenation and that produces trans fats but so these these trans fatty hardened oils were started to be sold to Americans in 1911 so coincidentally heart disease starts to take off right right around you maybe like ten years later we started seeing increases in death from heart disease so so then Procter & Gamble figures out how to just sell oil as oil so one of the things I understand about these oils is their price Procter & Gamble produce like shampoo they were a soap maker that's why they came up with this but they're like but Crisco was like a best-selling thing they convinced you know in America so all these immigrants so and they want to become American right and so Procter & Gamble had this brilliant advertising campaign basically saying you know give up Lara those are the throw the bygone days of your grandmother's like the spinning wheel of the olden days and you know have Crisco instead and this is the newfangled thing made in you know shiny scientist kitchens so so Procter and Gamble figured out how to then make vegetable oils that were fluid in bottles it kind of tinkered with the fatty acids to make them stable and then so here's the where they they started to influence nutrition science in 1948 the American Heart Association which is really just an association of cardiologists right remember heart disease is new tiny little Association that barely in office they were just like they barely had any funds Procter & Gamble comes in and says we're gonna make you the designee of this radio show for the week and oh it was this huge deal overnight literally according to the official history of the American Heart Association they said millions of dollars flowed into our coffers we became overnight the powerhouse opening offices all across the country that we are today they're still the number one largest non-for-profit in the in the country all thanks to Procter and Gamble and pretty soon thereafter they started to recommend that you start eating vegetable oils to prevent a heart attack which was the worst idea because turns out that trans fats everybody agrees in this had killed hundreds of thousand millions of people over the decades Trant with the sets yeah the trans fats in the heart and vegetable oils in Crisco are bad for health clearly bad for health but in the liquid form and now their world is not safe to eat by the FDA after 50 years of pressure to change that right I finally took a lawsuit from a 97 year old scientist who first discovered this 50 years ago to get them to change great great and that's also another story telling my book about how he tried to get to change another a woman a scientist who was trying to you know lobby for change and they and and how they were vilified and how they were raked over the coals by all the scientists who disagreed with him how people would literally they the vegetable industry literally had people assigned to stand up in conferences and yell at these people when they were giving their presentations I mean this is the state of nutrition science so which again continues today food hecklers but so vegetable oils so it turns out that it they when they're in the oil form they're also dangerous so they don't contain trans fats right but in the oil form the oils are highly unstable that means that they oxidize easily they go rancid oxidation is remember that's why we take antioxidants because oxidation causes inflammation in your body like yes that's actually to the inside and heart cause heart disease on the inside oxidized LDL is what's thought to provoke that unstable plaque that causes heart blockage yeah so this is what and in those clinic in that on all those studies remember we talked about the Minnesota coronary survey where they had people some people on on vegetable oil diets in all of those studies again and again and again the people in the vegetable ldiots died at much higher rates from cancer mmm this was considered a side effect of this heart-healthy diet and they actually had a series of very high-level meetings at the NIH in that early 1980s to figure out what was going on with this side effect of cancer and nobody could figure it out and they basically just said look we believe that vegetable oils will help people prevent heart disease so we're going to ignore the cancer effect so how do we explain them these top Harvard scientists who studied this data for decades saying that we should all be consuming more of these oils you know I have such a dirty back story on that you know I don't have the whole story I have to I I have to assume that a lot of it is cognitive dissonance right this is we're in the third generation now a scientist who believes saturated fats are bad and must be replaced by polyunsaturated vegetable oils and that is their that is just their their you know boiled in the wool belief that they cannot back out of right pave 100 papers written on that subject you're not going to change your mind it is also true that that the Harvard scientists and have a close relationship with Unilever one of the biggest vegetable oil manufacturers in the world and not the biggest food company another big vegetable oil manufacturer in fact recently Harvard published a paper in which three of the authors were employees of Unilever Wow what and it's and they have Unilever fellows who come and work with them and the one of the biggest promoters of vegetables is you know on the scientific advisory board of Unilever so I mean I just I think that the the veg and what I found out for my research because I actually started my book by writing about trans fat I thought I was writing a book on trans fats when I started I didn't realize I would get sort of dragged into this whole larger world so I spent like a year doing nothing but talking to vegetable oil executives want and I came to understand how much they have controlled nutrition science for like the last 5060 years they were involved in every single one of those trials they would give them their products for free they were intimately involved in trials at NIH I mean they they've just had they've really been brilliant and and executives from the vegetable industry have have almost always served as the top general counsel role at the Food and Drug Administration so they just think they're very they've been intricately a moral lobby yeah it's called the Institute for shortening and edible oils Wow they still call it that yeah the Institute for shortening your life yeah that stuff is not good and and what's fascinating is it when you leave increased our consumption of this is a new food you know I always worry about when we add new to nature foods so we had olive oil we had lard we had tala we had other fats but we didn't have vegetable oils and these seed they're not really Batchelor like seed and nut and bean oils yeah these were sort of invented a hundred and twenty plus years ago and we now have increased our consumption of soybean oil for example a thousandfold and it's ten percent of our calories and it's in everything it's stuff that you wouldn't imagine is in so any processed food that you buy it's made in a factory probably has this oil in it or some variety of it and I think you know when you look at the data it is confusing there's a lot of people who who are looking at large observational processes that show that there's a risk for you know saturated fat and a benefit for omega-3 or omega-6 oils and there's other data that show this some actually randomised trials that show the opposite when you just have people eat only the vegetable oil they do worse right and let's just remember that latter data from trials is is the rigorous cause-and-effect data right so yeah I mean so what do you recommend no vegetable oils well I was just gonna tell briefly about my visit to a vegetable oil factory to explain what a Bunge factory what a brutal it is to get oil out of a bean or a seed right they they have to go through this you know process of extracting the oil when the it's not even really oil when it comes out as gray rancid disgusting fluid it's chemically extracted with it's actually in another nasty camera right if you use hexane as a solvent to extract it and then they and then they have and then it's this bad smelling gray liquid it has to be deodorized winterized you know tweets and all this so it goes through like 17 steps in this giant industrial plant and you know and then it's Crisco so you know compared to and this is what we're told to eat instead of of churning butter right so like you just milk the cow and then you turn the butter so I think that you know it's it's sort of it speaks to our to me like speaks to its kind of the craziness about food that we live in which is so you know so divorced from our history like can you really believe that something that goes through this you know 17 step process in a in a factory is what you should be eating to restore your health how many steps did it take from the field your fork you know yeah more than one or two it's probably not a good idea yeah I was joking it's easy to throw at eat if man made it leave it if God made it eat it right yeah or you know you know man made it but they step on the owl's and smush room and then you get the olive oil it's not well you know the story of olive oil is a little bit funny because actually it was originally used in ancient times it was not eaten it was used as like a people put it on their bodies like anoint it to make their muscles shine and they use it to make their skin look good but they didn't eat it they didn't start eating olive oil until like the late 1800s interesting so it wasn't actually an ancient food stuff but what humans I remember being in Greece everybody is rubbing all over their bodies I was like wow this fasting anything but you smell like a salad yeah oh yeah Mykonos to no.17 and there were these beaches and everybody's rubbing olive oil for the funnies I'm like okay yeah the other thing you notice in the Mediterranean is like of course the Mediterranean diet high in meat right that's another thing that it was kind of not it's not been accurately transferred through history but so olive oil is relatively stable so the huge worry about vegetable oils to my mind is that when they are heated and even if they're left out and in a bottle whether it's exposed to light they will degrade what's right they oxidize they did gray that means they break down into these oxidation products when you put them under heat that in like any chemical reaction that speeds up and it creates literally hundreds of degraded oxidation products some of which are known toxins look up the word aldehyde and see what that is a known toxin that is created and so deep fryers they call acrylamide which is super toxic that for acrylamide is another one so and they occur so without going into too much detail but when all the big fast food chains like Burger King and all this you know McDonald's switched over to trans free oils oils without trans fats they went right back to using just regular old vegetable oils I mean much as we don't like trans fats the what they did is that they stabilized the oil that that process of hardening the oil made it stable now we have these totally unstable oils in these fryers they create hundreds of degraded toxic products those products are now known there's experiments have been done to show that they enter into the food and that food enters into your body and that those products go past the blood-brain barrier and if you eat a lot of those you know chicken McNuggets or french fries or whatever they are going to build up in your body and rise toxic inflammation anyway I used to work when I was at 17 I used to work in his mother sandwich shop and I my job was to you know deliver the sandwiches in little Volkswagen but at night at the end of the shift I would have to go in the kitchen and clean the oil so literally will run the oil through a filter so they could reuse it and we used those same oil for a month heated heated reheated reheated it was terrible and you know I think people don't realize that McDonald's and all those companies used to use beef tallow yeah fry an and now they switch to Crisco basically it trans fats and now they've gone to vegetable oils which in some ways may be just as bad if not worse so definitely worried I think it's definitely worse and you know actually ironically it's probably like places like McDonald's and Burger King are probably safer than your mom-and-pop shop right because they have all these regulations in the big stories about not reusing their oils too much and then they know about this oxidation product so they've developed things like nitrogen blankets and silicon beads they put in the oil to try to absorb all the toxic oxidation products so they're actually they're oils are probably better than your local Chinese stir-fry or whatever it were there I mean that's probably where the real danger is over Chinese takeout yeah that's the take-home message there stay at home and cook no but I but I wanted to tell you the amazing story that I discovered which is how they found out that these trans free oils were causing all these problems is that when they switched over to transferees oils they all of a sudden they were having this like polymer like buildup on their walls and in their fryers that they couldn't scrape off it's like paint stickiness and those toxic oxidation products were so unstable and volatile that they they would take the used uniforms from the workers to the to the dry cleaner and on route they would spontaneously combust in the back of the car because they were so fired because those products are so unstable they're so unstable they're mutating and changing minute by minute and then they would put the they'd wash the uniforms put them in the dryer and the dryers would combust so there was just like this it's just unbelievable that we're eating this stuff yeah you know that's a good take-home messages to stay away from their refined oils and deep fried stuff maybe a treat once in a while but definitely not a staple you can fry things in lard that is stable you can find it yeah I mean I know a big a big food company that switched over to beef tallow for their fries and everything now yeah so I always say you can eat french fries but you have to make them yourself and just make it home and you have to do it in lard or towel right right and you know or we should start a citizen's movement to get tallow back into McDonald's you know fryers that's what what actually tallow was what led to the development of America with the Lewis and Clark expedition and the settle they all ate pemmican which was basically bison tallow which was 70% fat about 20 something percent protein about 5% carbs horn berries and that's what led to the settling of America that's amazing yeah I know there's another quote in my book from Lewis and Clark that I remember reading where they were they were they were as they were traveling across country where they said that they had gone out to kill meat but but it was in the spring and all the meat was too lean and therefore inedible which just tell you it's just like tells you something about like we used to think a lot differently about fat that way okay all right now before we end I want to dive into a topic that I know you're passionate about and that matters so we've heard all this conflicting evidence about what to eat about the recommendations from the government and these recommendations which are called our Dietary Guidelines have really shaped a lot of our thinking about what's good and what's not good to eat and we followed it and we followed it in terms of Public Health recommendations in terms what doctors say nutritionists say what scientists say and more importantly what the government tells people to eat therefore mo nutrition programs from our school lunches to our military programs and so much more and you know I just want to give you some credit because people say oh what can one person do to change the world you know Margaret Mead said never doubt that a small group of people who are committed can change the world in fact it's the only thing that ever has and you understood the challenges with these guidelines that really were promoting ideas that were killing millions of people and and you said I'm not gonna stand for this and you went to Congress and you shared this perspective and you said we need to think about the guidelines in a different way and you basically got the Congress to Commission a million dollars for the National Academy of Sciences and medicine would review how we come up with these guidelines and whether there was integrity in them whether they looked at all the science whether there was corruption in them and this report that was really initiated by you has come out and it says some pretty shocking things so can you tell us about what's wrong with the dietary guidelines and how you said about to go fixing them and what's next so okay well so first of all no one person can take credit for what Congress does like Congress does what Congress does and I that's Ania and I and it was that report by National Academy of Sciences engineering and medicine was the first-ever peer review of the Dietary Guidelines since they were launched in 1980 amazing 35 years of policy and if you look at their I mean if you judge the guidelines by the outcome measures the dietary guidelines were meant to prevent disease we got a bad how is that progress gone you know like it's not working for you heart disease still number one killer cancer going up so like by any outcome measure they have been a total failure right and the conventional explanation is that people don't follow the guidelines anybody even knows about the guidelines I don't go to my dot gov website to find out about a diet and you don't but then you know what's a food pyramid you know about the food pyramid and the reality is that they are just downloaded into every doctor's office every nurse every dietician every nutritionist they when you go to their office they are giving you the guidelines right with rare exception so and they're in you know they determine school lunch programs feeding you know what your elderly parent gets that they're feeding you know their nursing home all of that so in hospital food so I came to understand like how powerful they are they have such a powerful control over how Americans eat probably the single most important lever and they clearly are not working the argument that Americans don't follow them I looked at that what maybe Americans don't follow them and it is our fault but I went looked at all the best available government data that I could find since 1970 I mean in every food category you looked at you can look at Americans follow the guidelines low-fat less meat less eggs listen everything like fat dairy down by red meats down by 28% and we've increased our chicken by 120 percent animal you know vegetables we've increased by almost 90% animal fats down by 17% I mean everything there's not one area where we have deviation eating more grains right forty percent more grains more fruits and vegetables and the vegetables is not ketchup it's like the greatest single increase in in vegetables has been leafy greens I mean iceberg lettuce eating kale it's the agent what do you so so it so that argument that it's just that Americans don't follow the guidelines is not supported by the data and then people also say well Americans eat more calories right and and and that's true we do eat 270 something more calories per day than we used to but if you look at every single one of those calories is carbohydrates right so what we did what the guidelines did is they put us on a high grain diet right 7 to 11 servings of bread rice serum pasta day every day and we did it and just the way you can fatten cattle on grains you turns out you can fatten humans were pretty well on grains so I did I mean I felt like that the there's in Washington DC there's just so much defense of this policy and the status quo and you know they're renewed every five years and the expert committee that is supposed to review the science instead just kind of rubber stamps the status quo nobody wants to change conflicts of interest many of them you know if conflicts offenders they're funded by food industry people in the food industry nobody wants to change the rock that boat I mean cuz you know to say that the guidelines are wrong is is really a kind of heresy right so that's what I've done I've committed an act of heresy I wrote that a paper that was a on a cover story the British Medical Journal saying that guidelines are not based on good evidence they've ignored all those clinical trials we talked about we're never ignored never in their you know the best available evidence about fat they completely ignored they ignored so you know those of us who study the science if you go and read the expert report you're like well where's all the science I studied yeah why do they say we have to drink three glasses of milk a day there's no evidence for that there's no evidence for that so there's also and I and I look to see like there's been this huge body of evidence that's growing up around the benefits of ramping back your carbohydrates a little bit and eating a little more fat there's more than 70 clinical trials now there were 64 when the the 2015 dietary guideline committee was reviewing the science none of those none of those were in there so actually they reviewed them but they decided to put it in the methodology section of the paper and one of the committee members I know this from from emails that I got through a Freedom of Information Act request one of the ladies I am emails right they get to you carefully to write in your email so one of the committee members said you know I don't think we should be burying that was the word he is burying this data in the methodology section where it doesn't belong and then I was like well that was the end of that email chain yeah so you know I I so I started this group to nutrition coalition and our goal it's really you know we get no industry money we are we don't want to be conflicted in any way we just our whole aim is just to say we want we want science in our guidelines and we want the best science and we want it not to be cherry-picked we want the whole body of science we want you to review those clinical trials that we paid for and put that in the evidence base and and we don't we don't recommend any one diet you know we're not an advocate for any one diet you know I'm confident if the clinical trial research is actually reviewed which is the best rigorous most rigorous science that we'll get good guidelines yeah so you know and the reason it's important for everyone is that like even if you fix your own diet you've still got you know unless you live in a very privileged fear you've still got your child in school lunch program your you know what food you get in the hospital your parent at a nursing home our military do you know that you know what the rate of obesity is in the military obesity yes not overweight it's 14 percent unbelievable and you cannot say those guys are not exercise those men and women are not exercising enough no exercise we have a bad diet so and actually 2/3 are overweight or up to two-thirds overweight or obese and they have due to illness and injury and and you know illness is something that happens is associated with being overweight right 10 percent of our armed forces at any one time are not deployable no it's frightening we are we are literally poisoning America and I hate to say this but I think it's true that our government recommendations and the original food pyramid which was 6 to 11 servings of bread rice and pasta a day and very little fat really led to millions of deaths not intentionally but I think the consequence of that advice has really led to this greatest health crisis and globally that we've ever seen in humanity and and you're you're really a pioneer and fighting for this and I think you know it's curious to see what's gonna happen next with the guidelines so you think they're going to shift you think there's going to be a shift in the recommendations well I'm somewhat hopeful in that I think that you know the USDA which is the the agency in charge of the guidelines they I believe that they are actually interested in real reform they put it out as one of their legislative priorities to have reform of the dietary guidelines so that they are science-based those are their words and they've taken a number of steps as they started off doing this next set of guidelines that suggest that they really are going for transparency yeah the first time they ever invited comments right right they had public comments on sort of the topics that they want to focus on for review and among those topics like hallelujah included low carbohydrate diets and saturated fats and you know so those are two big areas where if you could change the current guidelines like if you just simply allowed lower carbohydrate diets as one possible dietary pattern that would be huge here yeah and if you could recognize that the caps and saturated fats are really not support shouldn't be a strong recommendation if at all a recommendation if you could get rid of that that would also be big now it reflected good science it's true and you know there's a more and more emerging research one of our colleagues here Hallberg just published a paper on diabetes now this is a condition that in medical school I learned once you had it you got it there's no reversing type two diabetes type one for sure not but that's not that's an autoimmune disease type two is really a disease of carbohydrate intolerance and in this study which was remarkable showed by using a very high fat diet with lots of saturated fat you literally could reverse 60% of type 2 diabetes in a year you can get a hundred percent of people off the main diabetes medication in which potentially is harmful and has been linked to heart attacks and you can get people off insulin or dramatically lower insulin in 94 percent of the people that is unprecedent and the average weight loss was 12% which is unheard of in dietary studies are about 30 pounds this is radical and yet it's not mainstream it's not something that doctors use or recommend but there's an increasing awareness at different kinds of diets that actually restrict carbohydrates and increase fats may actually help with certain metabolic conditions and we're seeing this across the board in terms of diabetes obesity even things like cancer fatty liver disease liver disease Alzheimer's autism epilepsy brain tumors I mean it's pretty interesting this data is starting to come in and rapid rate and now I go on Amazon look at the best-selling books and a lot of them are ketogenic diets which I find really fascinating yeah well and you know I just just to emphasize one of the one of the numbers that you just said about that Sara Hallberg study that was on a at one year 60% reversal okay that means they no longer have a diagnosis of diabetes if you go to if you look at that same number if you go on this standard American Diabetes Association diet then there is 0.1 I'm sorry give them credit point one percent so and and but I mean just speaking to the politics of this field you know when I can talk about my work and over my book I you know yes it's about science but really the story here is really about politics right I mean this is really so much more about politics than it is about science because as we've seen the science is ignored so much of the time and that is politics and and and the story of set this Sara Hal Berg's diabetes study is like the current day version of that because can she get I've been working with her to try to help her get an op-ed placed or get any press coverage there was zero mainstream press coverage of that study which should be if you know my news headline news we can reverse sixty percent of our nation's diabetes in a year yeah she could everybody ignored it and we and she weaves actually she's gotten back like angry notes from editors saying how can you say this yeah well it's not something we actually believe this possible is doctor so we have to think something's wrong with the study that's the assumption yeah we're seeing I mean we we were in a clinic including clinic last weekend one of the patients who'd been on insulin for twenty years was off insulin in three weeks it's unbelievable it is but you think that doctors would at least be and this is the surprising thing that they're there they're so close-minded like you would think there are some doctors who are open I mean in the nutrition coalition we have hundreds of doctors are among our members or people who are now successfully helping people through by ignoring the guidelines musically right but there are so many oh yeah thank you like most famous among them but you know there are store so many stories of people who go to their doctor and they find out about a lower carb diet they go to their doctor like hey doctor you know guess what my blood pressure's down my weights down all my cholesterol looks better oh and I my skin problem went away and the floater in my eye is gone or whatever and then the doctor is like well just be careful that dangerous diet you're on right confuse me with the facts my mind's made up yeah all right final question yeah if you are queen for a day and you could change something in our food space what would it be and if you had a one piece of advice for people listening to change in their lives what would it be wow that's my family asking that every morning you know would you like to be queen for the day you know I I have to just be boring and say I would change our dietary guidelines they're so powerful so I would change them to be evidence-based theirs would be the single biggest lever on how Americans eat the truth is our guidelines influence global dietary guidelines so it's not just here it's the whole world what would you suggest to someone listening to change in their life in their diet well if you're still like you know frying anything and vegetable oils are using vegetables don't do that look up a good large supplier and and I think that you know I think you know don't fear fat right the fat you eat and bacon is not gonna be a fat in your hips you know yeah in fact it goes by your lips won't end up on your hips is that it yeah that's great that's great thanks Nina it's great having on the show it's been an amazing conversation and I'm so glad y'all listen out there and got to the end of this and if you like this podcast leave a review and share your perspective and your thoughts and you can also follow me on Facebook Twitter and Instagram and I hope to see you next time thank you so much for having me it's been great to talk to you and goodbye to all your listeners great thank you for listening thank Xena you

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Views: 269,424

Rating: 4.8275299 out of 5

Keywords: dr mark hyman, mark hyman, mark hyman md, nina teicholz, interview, nina teicholz interview, dr mark hyman interview, doctors farmacy, the doctors farmacy, doctors pharmacy, top podcast, health podcast, top rated health podcast, health advice, how to be healthier, eat fat get thin, advice for nutrition, nutrition advice, healthy eating, how to lose weight, weight loss tips, weight loss help

Id: Zc_e5ME_5Cg

Length: 75min 20sec (4520 seconds)

Published: Wed May 23 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/FrigoCoder]

Excellent interview, I enjoyed every moment of it.