Eating as Nature Intended | sistr | Dr. Zoë Harcombe

oh hi it's emma's still in the screen get out the other emma get out we don't want you here um we are joined by amazing adam doctor zoe harcom um who is one of the uk's leading gurus in public health nutrition phd in it specializing in evidence-based dietary advice and that's probably that's probably a good place to kind of start into it because this evidence base i don't think i know a little bit having sports science degree in nutrition diet for the last 20 years and some of the stuff i learned at uni 22 years ago has really frustrated me over the last 20 years watching all like low-fat diets and all this stuff when you go well the evidence isn't there to support any of that so why are we why is it still um going on so from on that base to subscribe what what's the evidence-based interest that you work on where you know compared to sort of the diets that get flung at us the difference okay yeah good place to start actually so the most interesting thing about evidence base is that the key is in the word base so for something to be based in evidence the evidence has to come first and this is a point that i've been rowing over with public health england for quite a few years because they tried to they basically made up a number of dietary guidelines and then they tried to retrospectively provide evidence for them but that's not evidence-based so my phd was particularly about the introduction of the dietary fat guidelines so the two guidelines that say number one thou shall have no more than 30 of those calories per day in the form of fat and number two you shall have no more than 10 of your calories per day in the form of saturated fat because of course everyone knows fat is bad saturated fat is even worse lols um so those are the main dietary guidelines that were introduced and i see those as the root of all evil because when they came in in 1977 in the u.s and 1983 in the uk that's when we started to fear fat and that's when the low-fat diet came in and we can get into why low-fat is automatically high carb the consequences of all of that in a second but when those were introduced my phd basically went back to say okay what was the evidence for those two guidelines at the time they were introduced and to cut a three and a half year phd into one sentence there was absolutely no evidence base whatsoever so those guidelines should not have been introduced so i then wound forward to 2016 which was when i actually was awarded my phd so i was then saying okay let's look at the evidence around 2015 if we were re-looking at those guidelines today would they be introduced today i they weren't evidence-based but that was 40 years ago we've come a long way since then is the evidence there now and the second part of the phd said no the evidence is not there now we do not have evidence to say that we should have no more than than 30 of our diet in the form of total fat and that we should limit fat saturated fat to 10 the evidence is not there so we do not have the evidence base for that when you realize that and you start looking at other government dietary messages you realize there's no evidence base for any of them in fact i'd love somebody on the chat to come up with one and say hey i think this is evidence-based um there's no evidence base for drinking eight glasses of water there's no evidence space for five a day five a day was actually coined by the fruit and veg industry it's a marketing slogan it's something to try to get people in the fruit and veg industry to get us eating more fruit and veg i'm not saying it's a good thing or a bad thing i'm just saying it's got no evidence space and you just go into all of these the three and a half thousand calorie theory if you cut back by 500 calories a day you will lose one pound of fat over the coming week oh no you won't um i say at conferences if that were true okay i'm about 110 pounds if that were true and i cut back by a thousand calories a day i should lose two pounds a week so i would then lose 104 pounds over the next year and i would weigh six pounds in a year's time and of course people start laughing and i say why are you laughing because that's what you're believing to be true every time you start a calorie controlled diet on a monday morning so i've not found a single piece of nonsense that comes out of public health england or the american dietary guidelines or any other guidelines australia new zealand that is actually based in evidence i don't know but on so i'm not on that because you know we sort of not grow up but everything you know you look at everything and someone wanting to if they don't know a lot about food go on and look at the the you know the triangle of you know what to eat with the the fat at the top and then the meat and all the fruit and beds at the bottom what on the evidence base that you have that you're fighting and you're fighting against what what would your guidelines be okay yeah no good question so i i go to it the other way around and i i asked the question why do we need to eat and yes it's a nice thing to do it's sociable and all the rest of it but i mean forget that at the primary level we need to eat because there are certain nutrients that we need to consume the body doesn't make them the body makes cholesterol but it doesn't make um retinol or you know other nutrients that we need so they're basically 13 vitamins the fat soluble vitamins four of those and then um the eight b vitamins water-soluble and then vitamin c so there are vitamins that we need and there are minerals that we need things that people know as calcium zinc iron potassium sodium copper manganese etc etc so there are those things that we need and then there are essential fats which we call omega-3 and omega-6 and we need those nutrients in a particular form so just to use the example of vitamin a the body needs the vitamin a in the form of retinol retina i think eye health vitamin a and retinol is found in animal foods and carotene is found in plant foods so you quickly realize when you actually study nutrition and children are not taught this at school you have to study it for yourself when you're an adult you soon realize that whenever there's a plant nutrient and an animal nutrient the body always wants the animal nutrient so you go go to omega 3 for example the body wants omega-3 in the form of dha and epa it doesn't want it in the form of ala which is what you might get from flax seeds so when vegans and vegetarians say no i can get my my omega-3s from flax seeds no you can't not in the form that the body wants um and then you're into will the body convert will it optimally convert is it as good as the real thing no almost certainly not so go to what do we actually need and then look at food very very objectively and say i now know what i need where do i find those things that i need and i've spent hours on a website called nutritiondata.com which feeds off the united states department of agriculture all foods database so you put in an example red meat just take a steak you put in an egg you'll put in whole milk skimmed milk broccoli brown rice legumes lentils whatever just put in a selection of foods and i've got a fabulous spreadsheet where i've done exactly this and then i'll look at the nutrients that we need and i'll compare all the foods per 100 grams you can then compare them by 100 calories it makes no difference whatsoever what the data tell you are that the foods that we should be eating are meat especially red and awful fish especially oily dairy especially full fat eggs the yolk being the most important bit and green things and essentially that's all you need to eat to get your nutrients now if you then choose to eat um some sort of healthy carbohydrates whether it's brown rice or porridge oats or legumes or whatever because you enjoy them and your stomach can tolerate them then that's fine but make sure you major on the things that you actually need for nutrition so my dietary advice basically boils down to three things number one eat real food so stop eating processed junk and things that come out of a packet in a factory number two choose that real food for the nutrients it provides and that's the bit that we've just done and then number three unless you are a cow or want to be the size of one stop grazing because we can't eat all day long and then expect we're gonna look like amanda holden um you know she she will eat once or twice a day and probably then not very much but you know people like oh i'm gonna have breakfast and then i'm gonna have a snack and then i'm gonna have lunch and then i'm gonna have a snack and then i'm gonna have dinner and then i'm gonna have something before bed you're grazing you you're gonna be in in bad trouble if you do that so those three things that's my dietary advice because there's a lot on the grazing stuff there's a lot there's a lot of diets and diet plans that want you to eat about seven times a day i mean it's meal and a snack and there's a meal and a snack in it and it's a diet bar and then it's a shake and then it and i'm just like what so so when would you ever burn your own body fat okay so the other thing on weight loss because weight loss isn't about eating less and doing more weight loss isn't about a calorie deficit weight loss is about a physiological circumstance in which the body will say okay i now need to raid body fat stores and you'll know this as an exercise um physiologist or whatever you'll know that there are certain circumstances in which the body can do that let alone forget that it will so first of all if you've got easy energy available which is basically carbohydrate that you've recently eaten or stored carbohydrate which is any carbohydrate that you've eaten in the last 24 hours and the body stores it as glycogen have you got any of that available and the body needs some energy it's just going to go and raid the storm it's just going to go to the pantry and say great got some glycogen on i go now it did not need to break into body fat to do that so the first thing you have to do to start losing weight is to get your carbohydrate stores your glycogen stores low enough that the body is then forced to start looking around to say oh do you know what i got no glycogen yes i'm gonna have to go and get some fuel from somewhere else now if you've then been eating dietary fat recently the body will say okay i'll use the dietary fat but let's say you don't graze the whole time so you had breakfast at 6 30 this morning and it's 12 30 or whatever and you haven't had anything for six hours depending on what you had for breakfast you might be getting and what you've been doing in the morning maybe you went for a walk maybe you've been using lots of brain power in your job brain uses loads of fuel don't think you have to run around the brain brain will do great stuff for you so let's say you've started using up what you've had at breakfast and the body says okay i'm now going to go look for some fuel this person me is is someone who eats relatively little carbohydrates so i haven't got much in the pantry and i've used up the fat from what she had at breakfast so right now i need to go start looking for some fuel so i'm going to break down a bit of body fat now the reason i'm a constant weight and i'm not not losing weight is that my body will break down a bit of body fat when it needs it but then it will get body fat and other stuff going in later on in the day so i'm staying in this sort of equilibrium but it doesn't mean that my body isn't breaking down body fat and then storing body fat again on a cyclical process probably all the way throughout the day now if you're trying to lose weight what you want to be doing is breaking down body fat but then not replenishing it at the level that i am you don't want to be a constant weight you you want to start chipping away but to start losing weight the first thing you've got to do is to stop having a pantry full of glycogen that the body can just go to whenever it wants so when we tell people to graze we also tend to tell them to graze on carbohydrates so dietitians will say oh have cereal and a piece of fruit for breakfast and have a piece of fruit mid morning and that cereal bath thing that you mentioned and all lunch have a pasta salad and a you know ready meal deal with a low fat bag of crisps and then another snack in the afternoon and it's just carb carb carb carb coffee and the body just does not need that level of carbohydrate in fact that the entire physiological need that we have for consumed carbohydrate eating carbohydrate is zero both you and i could eat not one single ounce of carbohydrate between now and the day we die and and nothing would happen in fact arguably we might even be healthier for it um i'm not saying we should do that i'm just trying to make the point that we tell people to eat the macronutrient that we least need and that's just not helpful well that's the thing is it and i've been watching you know and have had friends who you know played for local harlequins and like big sports teams and they were this is 20 years ago i remember them going fully on like paleo and eating steaks and eggs for breakfast and that's what they're the team and you look at it and you go these top teams are you know are talking about a caveman diet and so why then isn't that why then do we have all these nutritionists and dietitians and public health england and the government give telling us something else in that you know the complete opposite of actually like what you're saying um and what people will read in magazines yeah it goes back to what i did my phd in which is why to me that's the most important nutritional question to answer there are only three things that we eat um so and we call them the three macronutrients so we know them as carbohydrate fat and protein so if you imagine a little pie diagram protein tends to be pretty constant in any natural diet and i can give you evidence for that theoretically i can give you evidence for that empirically um but it just does tend to be about 15 percent of a natural diet you can look at the pure study you can look at the bible of nutrition gordon and wardle it just is so then you've got about 85 percent left in the pie chart so the second you set a dietary requirement of no more than 30 of your diet in the form of fat you can immediately see what you've done to the pie chart you've said we've got 15 in protein we've got 13 maximum in fat there's 55 left that has to be carbohydrate now that's also why a low carbohydrate diet ends up being high fat so a low carbohydrate diet for the people who say right i'm i'm diabetic or i'm pre-diabetic um and they decide that they want to cut their carbohydrate quite substantially they might say i only want five to ten percent of my diet in the form of carbohydrate now their protein intake will probably go up a little bit it'll probably go up to about 20 percent but then let's say that they're at 10 percent carbohydrate 20 fat they're still as 20 protein they're still 70 left which then needs to be fat so you can see the minute you go low fat you automatically go high carb the minute you go low carb you automatically go high fat as a proportion of the rest of the diet so the reason the dietitians are saying eat whole grains eat fruit eat potatoes eat carbohydrates starchy starchy starchy stuff is because they fear fat which is why i had to go back to say were we right to fear fat now what i i went into my phd with no preconceptions whatsoever i guess if somebody had i don't plan ahead i just don't i don't know what i'm having for tea tonight so if someone had held a gun to my head and said what do you think you're gonna find i'm i would probably have said i'm gonna find evidence for the 30 percent fat but it's going to have consequences so we might have said oh you shouldn't have any more than 30 of fat and that was in the name of heart disease you know i might find some evidence for that but then i'm going to find that it was worse for i don't know obesity or diabetes or something like that but the real shocker was that there was just no evidence for the thing that it was done in the name of which was heart disease and overall mortality there's just no evidence you just don't die more if you've got more fat in your diet or more saturated fat in your diet and when you think about it that just makes complete sense because what have we evolved to eat over you know we didn't have the supermarkets that we've got now even 100 years ago even 50 years ago um you know post-war you did not walk into a a supermarket and have 80 of the grocery store food that you wouldn't even recognize you have to actually read the label to understand what the hell it even is um this is so new that the way that we eat what we evolved to eat was anything we could catch and kill and anything we could gather so we evolved to eat animals and any of their byproducts that we can consume and anything that we would find in the natural environment and then when fire came along which i think was about 350 000 years ago happy to be corrected on that then we started being able to eat things that were not edible prior to that we couldn't eat things like tubers but when when we could heat them up then they became more digestible um and that's what we've evolved to eat we haven't involved to eat muesli and cereal bars and low fat high sugar yogurts and um you know fruit gums and whatever the hell else has got no fat and high sugar and no nutrients whatsoever well no that's the fact that it gives me because also it sort of when you look at what people did you look at them you know the huge obesity issue we've got in this in this country and think well a hundred years ago they were eating full fat bath butter and full milk and animals and you know we didn't have it then so why we know what's causing it so why then are we kind of why is it all those foods causing it being advocated like i remember living with some of them there's a great friend of mine she moved in city girl and she'd never used never cooked before in her life and it was microwave meals every single night and she was like well they're low fat and i'm like completely within a few months actually completely re-educated her and got on the meat and the cheese and the high fat high protein and she was lit she'd lost weight so fast but that was it she didn't she was like well it's fat diet milk just that assumption that that was gonna you know make it make her lose weight and it's sort of everywhere isn't it on that and then yeah yeah i love my body okay so that was the second million dollar question there which the second million dollar question there was why um and that's also something that i can claim credit to so i've been a long-term opponent of what i call the eat badly plates they call it the eat well plate um i mean it has had various iterations so it's the balance of good health haha plate back in 1994 and then it became the eat well plate or something in 2007 i think it was and then it was updated in 2016 to call it the eat well guide um it's still the eat badly guy to me so my my claim to fame on that one is that i uncovered the conflicts of interest be behind the update that was done in march 2016 so public health england appointed a panel who put together that role model guide to healthy eating and i forget i mean it's on my website if you put in eat well i did actually call it eat well not eat badly if you put it in on my website um you can see that the panel that was put together mainly comprised representatives from the fake food industry so you had representatives from the institute of grocery distribution the food and drink federation the association for convenience stores which is your corner shops i mean they only ever sell junk um the british nutrition foundation don't be fooled by the name that's basically also the who's who of the fake food industry um it was just a confederation of fake food representatives so what do they want us eating the exact opposite of what i've just said which is stuff that comes from farmers um and fields which basically has no margin there's not a lot of margin on a steak or an oily fish or a piece of broccoli i'm just checking the cat can get out of the um oh bless him he's trying to open that i'll love him can you um while she's gone if anyone um if anyone has any questions then um sorry about that i said that telling everyone to fly through any questions prove this is live i have to go and let the cat the cat out of the office i'd locked him in so that i didn't get disturbed by noise going on downstairs um so where do we get to yes it's basically reps of the fake food industry so what do they want us eating they want to eat in their sugary cereals and their sugary low-fat yogurts and their sugary cereal bars and their pasta salad and their ready meals and those low-fat meals that your friend was eating on a daily basis that that's what they want us eating and the crying to me i don't blame them that's their job their job is to maximize returns to shareholders basically and to be a good employer that's about it i don't blame them at all i blame public health england but for putting those guys together and saying hey off you go you're allowed to design the role model healthy eating guide for the uk that then gets mandated in schools and prisons and hospitals it becomes the ingrained uk diet and then you get poor mums who try to put cheese and whole hard-boiled eggs and carrot batons and whatever into their child's lunchbox and then the school comes back and this happened to friends of mine the school writes back a little note saying oh where where were the carbs where were the grains where were your healthy whole grains um because it's it's a nationally mandated disaster and and why because it's it's about big money it's it's not about our health it is that they you know they're educated because most people think you can have a bowl of brown flakes and a banana that's a healthy breakfast chocolate and it you don't realize the sugar content in a banana which is off the chart you might as well eat a tube of fruit gum to be honest um and if you look at brown flakes they put they pack in all the extra sugar is that so on um like my my thing has always been sugar i just think it's the devil and just should be out um on on that front on this on the sugar front what yeah what what are your views on that and the work you're doing i completely agree i mean sugar if you give up one thing give up sugar if you want to give up two things then give up sugar and flour um because they are the root of all evil to me and they actually comprise the major part of the uk diet so when i wrote a book on obesity before i did my phd this is back in 2009 i actually looked at the data for how much if you broke down the uk diet actually how much of it came down to sugar and flour and it was about 1100 out of 2000 calories per day it was 55 of our diet and then i actually just worked out if you could replace just those 1100 calories with 1100 nutritious calories with things like awful and red meat and oily fish and broccoli and and other things um what a difference it could make to the to the nation's health so absolutely i mean my sugar intake um comes only from one source as a general rule and that's dark chocolate um so i eat dark chocolate every single day it will be a minimum of 85 percent cocoa um which means there's barely 10 per 100 grams left to put sugar in i used to have a hundred gram bar a day when i was doing my um study and i don't eat that much now i don't need it to fuel my brain um but that would be the most that i would ever eat on a on a daily basis i'm probably down a couple of grams of sugar a day and the average person is at something like 130 to 100 it's obscene no nutrients i know i gave up i pretty much gave up sugar two years ago i was trying to get either stubborn like after three kids in six years you've stubborn six kilos that just clinging to my ass and i was like right enough um and went full protein and fat which i love and veg green beds and um mine yeah my little vicey grenades grenade bars the protein bars because they're really sweet but they've got they're probably full of crap that you really shouldn't eat but they haven't got any any sugar in um or carbs so yeah they're my little voice and a glass of wine every night um [Music] should you get rid of all flowers or just gluten flowers because obviously you've got this massive kind of gluten-free um thing going on which are tired and you know now it has entire aisles in supermarket so gluten-free products which is another thing that people go if i just buy all of that and there's everything now from cookies chocolate bars cereals everything that's gluten-free that that's healthy and that's going to make you lose weight so what's yeah what's sort of the evidence on anything on the gluten free um again going back to the approach that i've got which is the starting point of why do you eat the gluten-free products have no place in the answer to that question so if i'm eating to get the vitamins and minerals and choline and essential fats and all the other things that i need they're not found in gluten-free products they're just not um so you keep going back to the red meat and awful oily fish eggs dairy green things if you're then not trying to lose weight and if you want to enjoy some other products and that works for you then then that's fine but make sure you get the staples first make sure you get what you need and then if you've got the luxury of being able to have some other things on top then go for it but i i am i got some sourdough um gluten-free or something somebody asked me to try something recently as a as a question in the club and a taste test so i did it um and got some gluten-free sourdough or something and i used to like a loaf of bread i mean i actually haven't eaten bread for i mean this century i don't know when i last get it um but i thought oh try this thing just because someone's asked it was disgusting i mean it didn't taste of anything it just didn't it was like eating cardboard um so i thought okay i've done the taste test the rest is this now going in the bin um it was just disgusting is that it that eating something because you think you have you're you're being healthy eating it like diet bars and stuff and actually it all tastes like crap it's like so many of these cereal bars or dark bars or you know gluten-free bars or gluten-free biscuits you it's more psychological isn't it that this is good for me um so i'm going to eat it instead but then if you really wonder it's helped me out eating issues all through teens and stuff with actually tasting food of actually making a conscious effort to taste the food slow down taste it and actually go do i actually like the taste of this yeah so i love the taste of carbs the carbs that i would eat um if if things didn't have an impact on weight and health i would just eat carbs all day long but the sad fact is that the nutrients are found in fat and protein and not found in cups but carb meals that i love are decent porridge oats with full fat milk um baked potato with cheese and or butter brown rice with a curry or something like that um you know brown rice bread good old prawn curry or something i would love those kind of things but i'm not gonna go and have a plastic sourdough or something or something that's got more ingredients than i need so i do eat carbs um and i do enjoy them and as i say if they made no difference to weight or health i would just eat them all day long i would never choose oily fish over haagen-dazs ice cream never honest brownie sauna i just wouldn't i would eat crap all day long i would eat quality street i would eat crisps i would eat viennetta trying to think of what my binge foods used to be medulla dates i'd eat all of that all day long if i didn't get fat and sick but i would get fat and sick so i have to say hang on a sec you're a grown-up stop being a and stop eating all the rubbish but do you find because i've i've found in it it's really hard it's probably like giving up anything it's sugar is a drug sorry it is a drug it's as addictive as smoking or any other drug out there and you have to go cold turkey and actually now i found like the first three weeks the headaches and kind of oh my god i can't i need to all i could think about was eating more sugar but i did it and i stuck it out but after three weeks so i don't want it anymore and actually the odd bit of birthday cake or something is so sugary that i can only have a couple of mouthfuls so i think i would say to people you've got to push through you've really got to stay on your ground um on it yeah and get through those first couple of weeks because you're getting a you're getting a drug out your system yeah it was a long much longer ago for me i mean i must have given up sugar crikey at least 20 years ago um as i said i've got i have a few grams now and i will have a crescent now or if i'm at a posh dinner and there's a nice dessert or whatever i'll eat it um you know i don't think it's it's like smoking if you have one you want to go back to being a smoker um you know i think when you've you've had as long as i have without really eating it in any quantity on a daily basis um you can have a little bit and it's not a problem but i do remember at the time a couple of things so i remember physically exactly what you've said i got the headaches i got the withdrawal symptoms i felt miserable i felt deprived i felt poor me why can't i have sugar how come other people can eat sugar and i just don't seem to be able to eat it in moderation but then the other aspect that people don't realize is when you've got an addiction like that you need to understand the role that the addiction is playing in your life and the addiction is a prop um and it's that it's the most common prop a food addiction because right from the year dot anything bad happened and we were given food um and you fall over you get a sweet you have a nice event you get an ice cream halloween you get treats christmas you get tweet treats birthday easter that the fake food industry make it absolutely guaranteed that you get to the age of five let alone 18 knowing that treats make you happy make you feel good cheer you up anything's going wrong just have some junk food and everything will be okay and that's my single biggest bug bear because when i've been trying to work with adults trying to help them to lose weight and you've got a 50 year old female who her bosses mean to her and the first thing she thinks about is cake or biscuits and her children are playing up or having teenage drops or whatever and she thinks of cakes and biscuits and it's just that absolutely ingrained pavlovian response if i feel low junk is going to cheer me up um and i i want to kind of escape the world so it to a it's really alcohol-like um to a carbaholic so you would get to the point having a binge that you could actually shut the world out because you were so in such a sugar high and in such a sort of frenzy of getting all these carbohydrates into you and goodness knows what on earth is happening to your blood sugar you are not actually functioning as a human being right at that moment i don't actually think you should be allowed to drive or things like that but what happens when you come off all of that is you take away the prop as well and then you have to try to work with people who are trying to do that to say you are going to go through raw emotions and you are going to have to deal with them in a way that you should have learned to deal with them when you were three years old but you didn't your parents just blotted them out for you for 15 years and didn't give you those coping mechanisms you're actually going to now need to learn those coping mechanisms at the age of 50 um or 30 whatever age you are when you give up sugar and you are going to have something that makes you feel bad like your boss being mean or your kids playing up and you're going to have to deal with it without turning to sugar and what a lot of people do is to try to turn to a different addiction so they might switch from sugar to alcohol a lot of people actually switch from sugar to exercise so instead of stuffing their face with carbs they'll go out for a run or they'll over exercise but to me anything in excess and anything when you're using it for a reason other than to advance your health you need to look at what you're doing and ask yourself have you just replaced one coping mechanism with another and have you actually got to the bottom of good coping mechanisms so that you and something nasty happens you get abuse online or whatever you don't reach for a glass of wine you have the coping mechanisms to deal with it to say okay there's abuse happening i don't know those people i don't care what they think because i don't i don't value those people only care about the people whose opinions you care about i don't care about them so i don't care about their opinions of me there you go dealt with it moved on didn't need a bucket of sugar but that takes a long time to get to for a lot of people because we should have learned it much younger than we do we just blot it out from such a young age because do you think and so someone's mentioned it now like that and we were talking about it um before it went live that this talk is very apt timing with um with the news out this morning um of the massive part obesity has played in the hospitalization when it comes to covered and the deaths involved um uh i mean huge percentage when and um sort of there we've now got asia saying that's why uk and usa the deaths are so high um because of our lifestyles and and diet and what what's out today um about gp's prescribing diets um now which you know which on paper sounds great but what you know what do you think they should be doing because that's very easy to kind of band-aid and prescribe diet but if they're gonna do get out and exercise and um low fat diet then that's not gonna solve the absolutely issue yeah sorry my chuckle was just i saw someone loves being eater as much as i do in the comments section so i didn't mean to inappropriately chuckle at that point um yeah this this is a really serious issue and about this time last year we became aware of the association between um certain characteristics and bad outcomes with covid so we had evidence that had come out of china limited and we had some evidence that come out of it italy and we were discovering some surprising things so smoking for example didn't appear to be a risk factor and that started people thinking do you know what this actually seems to be a bit less for respiratory disease and a bit more of a metabolic disease because what we are seeing is a strong association of obesity levels particularly very high bmis bmis higher than 40 and having a bad outcome with covid so i remember looking at particularly the new york data about spring of last year and they'd done some fabulous research across a number of different medical centers where they basically said right everyone who's presenting at a medical center who then had a lab test confirmed covid i know they can be a bit unreliable but whatever go with it they had a lab test for covid what they then looked at was their bmi on entry on presentation to the clinic and what then happened as an outcome and there were associations there were risk ratios of up to six times the difference that if you had a bmi over 40 your chance of the bad outcomes and the bad outcomes is basically hospitalization so from just walking into the clinic you get hospitalized ventilation which is you're in hospital and then you put on a ventilator and then death so those are your three bad outcomes in order and it was up to six times difference of the highest obesity levels bmi north of 40 and the bad outcomes from those three it was striking i mean normally they'll say oh red meat causes cancer and it's about seven percent difference you know this is that's 1.07 this is six-fold difference that we were seeing it was astonishing and it basically said from this time last year um the message could not have been louder or clearer now is really not a good time to have a high bmi now i know as well as anyone and you know as well as anyone it is not easy to lose weight and keep it off we are making no judgments here we are not saying you've had a year you should be 100 pounds down because we know that the calorie theory doesn't work eating less doing more doesn't work if you've not been given the right advice it doesn't work we know that fake food is addictive we know how powerful sugar is we have all the sympathies between us here on this call to to be making no judgments whatsoever but we have known for a year that right now you really do not want to have a high bmi um so i like to think if i'd have had a high bmi a year ago i would have been doing my own research and i would have been saying i don't know how many times i went on an eat less do more diet and i lost some weight and then i regained it and a bit more and then i lost some weight and i regained it and a bit more and i ended up heavier than i when i first started the less do more diet which is why i got to my point in my 20s where i said look this this isn't working what is going to work instead um and most people are actually working this out for themselves or they hear a podcast like this or they go to a conference or they see a video online or they follow someone on twitter who looks how they want to look and they realize that that person all the time is talking about the fact that they don't eat unlimited carbohydrates so you know there are ways of working out what needs to be done and i i would just be trying to encourage people right now to say um you just really don't want to have a high bmi right now the current advice is not evidence-based it's not good it's not going to help you work out what you can do what you can stick to what's going to work for you and then just do it just just don't look back just do it just find the motivation somehow pain is a much better motivator than gain this is not about looking good for your son's wedding or your graduation this is about life and death thanks to whatever it takes right now just find a way to do it and as you said it's been a year do you think does it frustrate you that it's now it's now hitting the the front pages on the obesity thing when it's been there for a year already the evidence has been there yeah i i think we failed people i think it's i really think we fail people it's like the vitamin d thing um you know the the question they seem to be asking is all um why should you be taking vitamin d the question that i ask is why would you not take vitamin d why would you not you know especially when they locked us up in our homes all over the last summer um and you know anyone who went down to the beach to get some vitamin d was called a covidia i mean you couldn't make it up um it's like telling you that there's some deadly virus out and then and they're not telling people so it's like discovering covered and then not telling anyone discovering that you're going to have a bad outcome if you've got low vitamin d levels insufficient vitamin d levels or a bmi over 30 and definitely a bmi over 40 not telling people that in my view is negligent because you could have given them incredibly important powerful information that they could easily have taken into their own hands and done something about and yet for some reason we didn't bother we just said there's a virus we didn't say you can do some really important some simple take vitamin d some not so simple lose weight and keep it off but you could have done some things that would make a really big difference to you yeah that's why i think they've had they've had you know they've had a nice goal for a year basically when i go oh an open goal to we had an obesity issue before covered hit to actually educate and but they kind of did the you know by shutting everyone in it kind of encourages everyone to the amount of people i know that are drinking more and drinking more alcohol they've put on people you know people who are healthy and gym body the gyms are shut everything's shut they've all piled on you know i know i've got friends who put on my two three stone over the last year from it it just seemed to have the the complete opposite of what could have been done um you know lock everyone in but give everyone the tools that whilst locked in to educate themselves i mean what a great time it would be because you're not walking past the coffee shop you haven't got the sandwich trolley arriving at work you don't go out shopping as much because one you're told not to and two it just became a really unpleasant experience going out shopping um we've got a lovely little story i saw my dentist back in november and she wasn't um particularly large at all i don't know what her bmi might have been but i think it would probably have been somewhere between about 25 and 30. i don't think it was in the dangerous category but i saw in in november and i sort of walked in through and went wow don't you look great um she said oh thank you i'm feeling great you know i've i've really taken the time while i've been um you know because the dentists were pretty much shut away from from being available to us she said i've really taken the time to get fit and get out there and and eat healthily and get the whole family eating healthily and her skin was fabulous and she just looked amazing and she just like right i just took it upon myself and she actually used the phrase i just realized it was really not a good time to not be in tip-top health um and therefore i wanted to be in tip-top health and i thought good on you but you know brilliant what a great what a great way to use lockdown kind of thing but as you've said that hasn't been the typical response the typical response has been this is traumatic it's distressing it's unparalleled it's unprecedented it's um stuff that we just cannot process as humans to be denied all our freedoms everything change everything taken away in such a short period of time and most people that i know have gone the other way which is do you know what what i need right now is uh it is something that makes me feel something makes me feel good and that's red wine and sugar um and and and that's what they've done yeah and ever but someone someone said and this is the organ isn't it they're you know this is eating is nature intended and there will be people that argue well if we're eating as nature intended then animals shouldn't be in included in that mix so what what's your view yeah what's your views on that argument because there is a sort of why is it is nature intended in eating animals which you and me are very pro um eating that but how does that sort of then fit the whole world we're not meant to eat them well we are and i probably should have a declaration here that i was vegetarian for 20 years um so i i didn't want to eat animals i still don't want to eat animals you know the cat that wandered out is is um you know he's right out there don't eat the cat no he's he's up there with husband as in you know loves of my life and my dear dear dog who passed away a couple of years ago you know i adore animals i do not want to eat animals i would much rather live in a world where we don't eat animals but the sad facts of nutrition are that the nutrients that we need are found in the form that we need them in animals and you actually cannot get everything you need in a plant-based diet you cannot get retinol you rely on the fact that you'll convert carotene to retinol and not everybody can do that you don't get b12 period you just don't get it um choline is very difficult to get in a plant-based diet you don't get heme iron which is the form of iron that the body needs you don't get d3 which is the form that the body needs yes you can get it from the sunshine um but you can't get it from the sunshine in the uk for at least eight months of the year in the quantity that we need what else can i get we mentioned the epa and dha earlier on there are so many nutrients that you can't get if you don't eat animals so essentially we would not have been able to even try to be vegan had the supplement industry not been invented and of course eating as nature intended the supplement industry was not here a hundred years ago um so when children didn't get the right food in the victorian era and they were climbing chimneys and they didn't get exposed to sunlight they got rickets which is vitamin d deficiency now i remember seeing articles in the newspaper just a few years ago saying ricketts is returning because children are being told to stay away from the sun if you go out in the sun then put on slip slap slop or whatever put on a hat put on a t-shirt cover the any naked parts with cream don't eat eggs because you fear fat don't eat at the end yeah the egg argument came back again didn't it in the last month or so about not eating eggs i'm like oh please not again yeah i've got three studies i mean people i i dissect to study every monday that that's basically my my business model it's what i do um people pay not even a pound a week or whatever for a monday newsletter and i take the latest diet and health study eggs cause diabetes or whatever and i just tear it apart um and i've been doing it for 10 years i've got three on my work top at the moment of all which one am i going to do next monday and there's one saying eggs are going to kill you there's another one saying um i don't know eggs are going to give you diabetes or something um eggs are going to give you heart disease oh where did you come up with this complete and utter nonsense from you know is it more like a cardiovascular disease is a modern illness okay we didn't even really register it until about in the 1940s which is more likely that it's caused by the foods that we've been eating since man first walked upright which is animals and things that we could scavenge or the crap that you can get in the aisles in the supermarket you know which is more likely let me think um it's just nuts that the ancient foods are responsible for a modern illness that's what um captain general surgeon peter cleave famously said you know the idea that a modern illness is caused by an ancient food is just quite the most absurd thing i've ever heard in my life caused by an egg you know [Laughter] all the nutrients exactly nature would have had to said okay right and nature would have a really funny sense of humor because nature would go right so humans need these nutrients to survive i'm gonna put them in the exact same foods that are gonna kill them there you go there's a bit of a there's a bit of a spoof take that humans which never killed the cavemen like thousands of years ago yeah when they went out with their spears those foods that oily fish that they speared now will kill you yeah i mean literally when you put it like that it just sounds like yeah it is it is it's sparkling um cool we're gonna um just the last one someone else earlier and actually touched on the about sugar and alcohol what's your you know i can't ever stop my wine i just haven't okay no good my hubby has wine every day i'm all for um you know get the basics but have a treat my treat is dark chocolate your treat is red wine my hubby's treat is red wine that's brilliant um this this is not about abstinence this is not about carnivore or fasting and all that kind of deprivation i i don't feel deprived alcohol is really interesting because i don't think the carbohydrate content or the sugar content or the alcohol content has got very much to do with anything yes i think if you're going to drink beer you want to start worrying about sugar and carbohydrate content because you're basically having liquid grains if you're drinking beer you're basically having flour and sugar in a big pint liquid form so put that aside we're talking about red wine um it's pretty low in carbohydrate i think a typical glass of red wine is probably somewhere around five grams of carbohydrate which is actually less than you're going to have in your green vegetables with your healthy meal that you have your glass of wine with so that doesn't bother me what is really interesting about alcohol for people who are trying to lose weight is that there's evidence that alcohol itself alcohol also doesn't make you fat because your body can't metabolize it so your body will just preferentially burn it you don't store alcohol calories so don't worry about those um a bit of biology there but alcohol inhibits the operation of glucagon now we've got these two hormones that are basically regulating your blood glucose levels if your blood and you've only ever got a teaspoon of glucose in your bloodstream at any one time your entire bloodstream you've got one teaspoon of glucose four grams so it goes above that the body calls upon insulin to say right turn that into glucose store it as glycogen get it out of the bloodstream if it starts going below that which it quite often does at about four a.m in the morning the body will say okay glucagon now you go and wake up go and look for some stored carbohydrate or if there isn't any breakdown a bit of body fat but get the get the glucose system back to the four grams because this person's going to be waking up in in a couple of hours so alcohol inhibits the operation of glucagon we we understand so you have alcohol in the evening and then at 4 00 a.m when your body is trying to get glucagon to do its thing and to start getting your blood glucose levels back up to normal it's impaired from doing that so you might wake up at four o'clock in the morning after you've been drinking you might find yourself a bit hungrier and crankier at breakfast the other thing that happens is if you go out for the evening and you have a few drinks early on in the evening and then you go out to the club or whatever and you're still clubbing at about three o'clock in the morning you'll find that the munchies kick in anywhere from sort of midnight 11 p.m onwards because actually your blood glucose has been getting lower and lower and lower and lower during the evening to a fraction of a gram and what you want is for your body to be saying right go and pop it back up again but because you carry on drinking you're impairing that process and what happens when you've got low blood glucose levels is that the body says go out and eat some glucose so that's why the kebab fan only ever looks and the chip van they only ever look attractive about one o'clock in the morning they actually don't look that attractive in in nice sunny broad daylight because your blood sugar levels are on the for floor so that's the harm that alcohol does is calories don't make you fat i don't think you have to worry about the sugar and the carbohydrate but you do have to worry about the fact that if you have what we say in our diet club is if you have a drink or a few in the evening you've basically shut off your chance of burning fat body fat overnight that night that's okay if you do that a couple of days a week and you're still losing weight and you're okay with that that's great but if you're doing it a couple of times a week or more and you're not losing weight that's probably responsible for your weight stall isn't it and it's again it's a sugary content isn't it because a lot of people go oh i'll have um you know i have a vulcan and diet coke and or yeah it's that diet word isn't it don't eat anything or drink anything that has the word diet or low fat it just perpetuates the taste for sweetness you know if i had a diet coke now it would taste so sweet i think it would just kind of wake up my brain and go oh vionetta fruit gums i haven't i haven't touched coats since then since school chemistry because i remember having doing that experiment where you've dropped dirty coins and stuff in coat and they clean it instantly and i remember i can see the visual now watching it going that is never going in my mouth yeah i think what it's doing to your insides your teeth or whatever else you uh you might want to pop in there exactly okay cool but do you know what we'll end there um but just as a as a quick takeaway what what's your what are your your advice sort of the goatees of how how to eat basically how to eat what do we just you know yeah it is those three is those three things number one eat real food number two choose that real food for the nutrients it provides and that's your meat fish eggs dairy and green things and number three eat a maximum of three times a day if you don't like breakfast don't force yourself if if you don't like lunch because you have a really good brunch and you make it through to dinner and then that's fine but just don't eat all the time it's it's not good for weight it's also not good for diabetes because i do think type 2 diabetes is the body just saying look enough is enough um there's only so many times i can get sugar out of the bloodstream i'm done you know i'm thrown in the towel what do you mean yeah just stop it you think what you do every time you eat is massive if you knew what happened every time you at you would respect that process and you would respect your body a lot more and and don't do it so often porn would you know thank you so much that was um that was great that was an hour of just talking food and just selling dispelling so many myths which how many people are just assume if you've got them to write down what they should be eating well they should be eating yeah it's a whole different it's a whole different boardroom isn't it different pleasure thank you for having me lovely seeing you

Channel: Sistr

Views: 14,254

Rating: 4.9404254 out of 5

Keywords: dr. zoe harcombe, zoe harcombe, emma sayle, sistr, sistrapp, public health, obesity, nutrition, eating well, eating as nature intended, well being, sugar, carbohydrates, why do we eat, Dr. Zoë Harcombe

Id: VQmFDHxpcqk

Length: 54min 30sec (3270 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 04 2021