Georgia Ede: Brainwashed — The Mainstreaming of Nutritional Mythology

good morning everybody thank you very much to Greg Glassman for envisioning this this series on the mess at the fantastic lecture series I've been learning from myself recommend all the lectures to people and to the CrossFit team and Karen and Brad for all of your fantastic support it's an honor to be here and to be introduced by one of my intellectual heroes so it's a good day today any case yes I am a psychiatrist in a quick quick story about Harvard before I start the actual talk which is I did my residency at Harvard my psychiatry residency at Harvard and then I worked at the Harvard University Health Service as a psychiatrist seeing faculty staff and students for seven years and then there was a change in leadership so I was allowed to incorporate nutrition consultation into my work there during the time that I was there was the only one doing that the first person I think that it ever done that and it was really fun for me and for my patients and and then there was a change in leadership and I was told that I needed to stop because nutrition was beyond the scope of psychiatric practice so that's one of the biggest reasons why I left Harvard a number of years ago so in any case let me let me get started so I think that you know as a nutritional psychiatrist which I hope will be a growing field I'm passionate about the care the proper care and feeding of the human brain and I'm convinced by the science which I've been studying for more than ten years now that that the way to do that you know is to help people change what they eat and and I'm convinced by the science that the way that people should eat the brain prefers to eat is to eat a pre-agricultural Whole Foods diet that includes animal protein and animal fat and that if you have insulin resistance high insulin levels high blood sugar levels you may benefit from a low carbohydrate or ketogenic version of that same diet and there are many other modifications you can make but those are my standard principles and so in any case I I feel that my job is already difficult enough because human beings are naturally resistant to change of any kind but they're also they very very strong feelings about food we have very strong conferred attachments emotional attachments cultural attachments to food and addictions to food and these are very difficult to break and the food environment as dr. Mehrotra so beautifully said is working against us all the time so it's hard to have people it's hard to coach people about changing what they eat but that job is made infinitely more difficult by the nutrition myths that are implanted into our psyches day after day by all of our nutrition all of the people that are supposed to be you know having our good health in their minds and giving us good advice so in any case you know so I because of my what I've learned from the science I write articles like this that you know get lots and lots of attention you know 400,000 views and all kinds of comments and it sparks huge debates just really fiery debates online because this type of a topic is reviewed as very inflammatory if and no matter how objectively you try to write it it's really amazing that kinds of vitriol that you can you can experience but I understand people have strong feelings about food in there there's really entitled to those feelings so in any case all humans have biases and I feel I feel a lot of people make an assumption many assumptions about me because I write about in support of animal foods in the human diet especially for the brain and the developing brain in particular so I need to point these things out yes I think animal foods belong in the diet but I care about animal welfare I care about climate change I'm nutritionally pro-choice eat and let eat I will help you optimize any diet you want to eat and and so that's very important I respect people's choices and I have no tolerance for personal attacks on people who don't eat animals some of them are my good friends so and I'm not funded by the meat industry that's always the first thing that people think is true about me and so and just not funded by the meat industry on the after my sources of income such as they are and on the right there's a brand a newly formed advocacy group trying to get a low carbohydrate diets included in the United States Dietary Guidelines and I serve on the steering committee for that for that Network and that's an unpaid position so so yes public health and public mental health in particular is a mess and it's a mess because nutrition science is a mess and it's largely because of nutrition epidemiology which is not science at all and so you know of all the problems this is in my mind the biggest one the lion's share of studies that wind up in our guidelines and our headlines come from this type of a study and I think a lot of you know this topic already I just need to give us quick synopsis which is these are not scientific experiments epidemiologists do not change people's diet and see what happens instead they give them food questionnaires and they ask them you know how often over an entire year have you eaten this many blueberries or this many slices of bread or this many cups of milk and if you don't know you can't remember that's too bad because you're forced to quantify your answers this I think is the biggest problem with these questionnaires many problems but this is the big one you are forced to generate data out of thin air if you can't remember you must choose a number how many times per week or month so you know these wild guesses become the data that then form these they're used to make these hypothetical associations between specific foods and specific diseases and you know that's what ends up and you know most of the time so I'd argue that some people say these associations are too weak they're they're insignificant there's only a tiny little risk of cancer if you eat a hot dog it's not as big as they're making it sound I'd argue there's no data there to begin with and that these associations are not even real so and when when these are tested in clinical trials again these are hypotheses that must be tested first to see if they they have any meaning whatsoever at least 80% of the time they fail which is worse than a coin toss so that suggests that the hypotheses are biased in the wrong direction away from the truth you could you do better tossing a coin so other problems with the nutrition side I worked in labs for seven years before medical school including diabetes research labs with rodents I'm sad to say and you know where of course we're not rodents but that's just where the promise begin these animals are bred and highly unnatural stressful environments they're genetically our pharmaceutically often altered so that they develop diseases more easily and there are lousy controls so if you see a headline and this is a real headline that you know high-fat diets cause depression in mice then dollars to doughnuts the diet that the high fat group was eating was not just higher in fat and the wrong kind of fat but it was also loaded with sugar and other process ingredients compared to the control so the chow is read so that's the problem with animal studies if someone asked me to look at animal study the first thing I do is go to method section go to the method section and look and see what was in the chow so you know that that's you know with both epi and animal studies it's not just that they're unreliable or that they don't apply it's that they're so bad that they can generate information that flies in the face of human biology in the human studies are you know we have lots of human studies about lots of different kinds of diets but in even the randomized control trials which we think of as the gold standard of clinical trials you have to read them very carefully because we have you know just because someone says their diet is healthy their favorite diet their made a train or whatever it is doesn't mean it's healthiest for the human being and also you need to ask well healthy compared to what and so you need to know you know what the control diet is what did they compare it to how many different differences were there between those two diets with the Mediterranean diet for example it you know it's higher in olive oil nuts and red wine and things like that but you know it's also very very low in processed foods and that might be the only reason why it's healthier we don't know because there are too many variables and and what other lifestyle changes were made this is this happens with plant-based diets all the time every single study that I'm aware of that compares a plant-based diet to an animal-based diet did not simply remove the animal food from the diet they removed most of the fat they removed the the processed foods and most of the refined carbohydrates and they changed multiple lifestyle variables smoking drinking exercise stress management you just can't say that the reason why that diet looked a little bit better was because you remove the animal foods we don't have studies to answer that question we don't have any clinical nutrition studies that can answer the question we all need to know the answer to which is which diet is healthiest for human beings so in any case that doesn't matter because despite the fact that there is no good science on this question we are told all the time by lots of different people in positions of authority that the science is settled and basically it boils down to plants good animals bad and you know so we hear it so often that we believe it and we've been taught at some service since we were young and we think of it as though it's a fundamental law of nature like gravity but there's actually no science behind that position so there are three authoritative documents were gonna go through today that are responsible for implanting these anti-meat messages into our minds and you know you know if you know them you love them the unholy trinity the US Dietary Guidelines the w-h-o World Health Organization report on me and cancer in the eat Lancet report that just came out this year so all of these documents are biased against animal foods in general and red meat in particular and as you go through chronologically you'll see that it becomes more and more stringent with the most extreme position being The Lancet report which doesn't just vilify red meat but all animal foods are off the menu virtually off the menu with that plan so you know most people including most doctors and nutrition experts present company excluded don't even crack open these reports to read them and I really can't blame them because they're they're unreadable they're virtually unreadable they're really difficult they're dense they're convoluted and they're very very long they're really not designed to they're designed to obfuscate as far as I can tell so and they're created by credentialed experts who in whom a lot of people place their trust so but I have spent more hours than I care to count at my own financial expense and psychological expense reading these doctrines poring over these documents which in and of itself may qualify me for like a new type of personality disorder but but I you know I I do this partly because I enjoy the science I have a strong science background and and partly because I want people to understand what's in them and and people ask me about these documents every day my family my patients my colleagues my friends so I think it's important that we know what's inside so if you read all these they're all by different groups but they have a lot of things in common they're all long and unwelcoming and difficult to read they omit and misrepresent studies that challenge their recommendations their arguments are irrational incomplete internally inconsistent and if you try to read one of these your head may actually explode their intended they're written to in with the purpose of an influencing global human behavior and they use fear-mongering particularly Lancet but all of them do to some extent preying on our fears of disease death and planetary destruction and when people are afraid logic shuts down you just cannot argue logic with emotion emotion will win every time as a psychiatrist and a human being I can tell you that's true so if you want to motivate someone you need to really scare them and and they're doing an excellent job of this so when I was reading the Atlanta report which came out in 29 at January 2019 I read it served the nutrition section of the report several times and then I wrote a review of it a critique of it for Psychology Today and and then I was asking her presentation about it at low-carb Denver which I did so I read it again and I did that to myself too many times and but I found myself at low-carb Denver saying words like authoritarian and master plan and I thought to myself what is going on here excuse me I started to wonder then I started to wonder if these documents might have more in common with propaganda than with nutrition health education so I did something I've never done before which was I started to learn about propaganda I'd never I mean I've never thought much about this word I think it's in it's in the it's in the water now but you know and this is a classic text by Jacques Ellul who is a French philosopher and he said that propaganda is a set of methods employed by an organized group that wants to bring about the active or passive participation in its actions of a massive individuals psychologically unified through psychological manipulation so you know unlike and I read a lot about propaganda over the past month or so in preparation for this talk and I kind of boil it down to this that unlike the best forms of communication propaganda is not egalitarian it's not educational or enlightening it's not empowering it's dictatorial deceptive and disempowering and the language is not that have informed consent but it's the language of misinformed coercion so here are some of the hallmarks of propaganda gathered from various sources and all of these apply to the documents were about to talk to talk about to some extent and within in particularly the Atlantic I think every single one of them does so we're going to talk about these these keep these elements in mind as we're going through the documents particularly things like you know attaching your agenda to popular ideas or knits and hiding your motives and using one side of black and white arguments and and overwhelming people with so much information then and then boiling it down to a simplistic message lots of different different features here to think about so the US dietary guidelines is a hundred and forty four pages long imagine if a wild animal needed to generate needed to refer to a document like this before it woke up and ate something 144 pages and it's based on a 436 page scientific report and if you know you might not think these matter too much but they directly touch one in four Americans per month through school lunch programs and other federally funded programs so a lot of people need are forced to eat this way they influence our the influence our educational curriculum in for dietitians and other health professionals and they influence other countries Dietary Guidelines I was just in Indonesia giving a talk in June where I about the dietary guidelines in Indonesian they're almost identical to the u.s. dietary guidelines so what patterns did they recommend there are three and they're virtually identical with the exception of the vegetarian diet which excludes which excludes me there they're very very difficult to tell apart and these are and it's because they both follow these patterns higher and fruits vegetables grains legumes nuts low fat dairy and lower in red meat saturated fat sodium added sugar refined grains and notice how interesting this is that red meat is lumped in with a whole food my jus is lumped in with all of this junk and and that happens all the time it's almost as though it comes out in the same breath of thing a red meat and processed red meat and refined grains red bean and sugar people can't separate them in their minds so I wanted to understand how they came to these conclusions and as a psychiatrist I decided I was going to read the depression section of the report first was very short I think was two or three pages and I immediately a met criteria full criteria for depression after India so so the committee is summary was this this is what you see in the actual report patterns emphasizing red and processed meats and refined sugar because you know that are in there we're generally associated with increased risk of depression so I thought that's interesting because I'm not aware of any of that science I mean I've been reading missed up for 10 years looking specifically at mental health I don't where so there were 19 citations and again afflicted with my aforementioned personality disorder I decided to read every single one of them and so this is what you find it's just it's just outrageous so sixteen of them it's only sixteen of them even evaluated me so three didn't even mention me those three out so they're 14 epidemiological studies and two randomized control trials randomized controlled trials we don't know or just clinical experiments with human beings and you you choose a control and you compare your diet so there was one epidemiological study that said that red meat was positively associated with an increased risk of depression so red meat bad but it's an epi questionnaire based study but there you have it there were six epidemiological studies that lumped red meat in with refined carbohydrates and processed carbohydrates so you know I think that we can discard these you know I don't think it's fair to judge you know meet Ella mode is the same as meat so and then we have eight studies that found there was no association no increased risk with red meat and and depression seven were epidemiological studies and one was a randomized control trial and then there was one randomized control trial saying that meat actually protected reduced your risk of depression so if you're keeping score at home that's nine to one in favor of red meat and even if you throw in their their their meat a la mode study it's still nine to seven so you know I don't understand what planet can you then conclude that red B does associate with a higher as a depression the committee outright lied about the outcomes of the studies that they handpick to support their hypothesis so this just was infuriating to me so you know and what foods do they recommend instead of red meat so you may have heard this this this USDA slogan make half your grains whole so obviously if you flip that around its make half your grains refined so the you know the the USDA finds itself in a very uncomfortable position of mandating that people include three servings per day of refined carbohydrates in their diet and what do they have to say for themselves why do they do that I mean that's an area of pretty broad consensus I think most people would agree that that's not that's an unhealthy plan so what they say is that refined grains such as white flour and products made with white flour etc are part of the recommendation because they're commonly enriched with iron and several B vitamins and consumption of only whole grains with no replacement or substitution would result in nutrient shortfalls so G you know I wonder where else you might be able to get iron and B vitamins so you know it's just it's very suspect you mean how in the world did people get their iron and B vitamins before Wonder Bread and Special K with iron and so if the diet they recommend is so nutritionally inadequate that this is what the the lengths that they will go to but you know there isn't it's an uncontested fact that red meat and other animal foods are excellent sources of bioavailable iron and they agree themselves this is a chart from their report it's just been highlighted with different colors to help out so all of the ones highlighted in red are animal foods whole animal foods then the ones in blue are seafood shellfish primarily but other seafoods and the ones that aren't highlighted are plant foods and then the yellow up there that's fortified ready to eat cereals and instant cereals so and this is an order of you know iron intake from the top to bottom with the richest sources being organ meats followed quickly by the fortified cereals so you know of all the iron rich whole foods on this table to choose from they chose fortified cereals as their as their choice which makes one wonder what forces influence the recommendations process and you know I actually got to witness firsthand how this plant-based sausage substitute was made because I testified at the US Dietary Guidelines this summer and I was seated between lobbyists from the dairy industry analyst from the grain industry and it was fascinating so so it's a 14-member committee of md's and PhDs that submit the the large report to the US to be finalized and nine out of 14 of them had conducted research or written books in support of plant-based diets and there's nothing wrong with that it's just that they're mightily over-represented on the committee so you know seeing the professional biases of the committee listening to the roomful of lobbyists and and seeing that they had outright lied about the one portion of the port where I decided to dig in just random this I mean who knows what the rest of this report looks like and if you had to read all the references so it's clear to me that this document is anything but scientific and trustworthy so so now if your heads haven't exploded yet we're going on to the World Health Organization report on beating cancer which came out in 2015 well I should correct that statement the report itself didn't come out in 2015 this sort of glorified press release did which was a synopsis of their arguments that they said would be forthcoming in a future monograph but this was a less than two-page document if you don't include the references only 20 references are proclaiming to the world that you know that processed meat is cardiogenic carcinogenic and red meat is probably carcinogenic so they deemed this so urgent that they decided to release this short version and the the fully referenced version would come out later but you know never mind waiting for that we've got to get this we've got to warn the planet right away so and they reassure us about their process thusly the working group took into consideration all the relevant data including the substantial epidemiological data which I would argue is an oxymoron but showing a positive association between consumption of red meat and cancer of the colon rectum so let's see if we think that that's actually what happened but in any case this report you know made headlines around the world scary headlines around the world nobody criticizing the content of the report it just got echoed in in headlines you know eating bacon can kill you processed meats you know alongside smoking as cancer cause etc etc so this week anti-meat proclamation was dutifully accepted without scrutiny and echoed in these scary headlines but again my for mentioned personality disorder I decided to read all twenty references that they listed and and then I wrote a critique of it on my website we're just there and the reason I mention is because we only have time for a few examples from it and you may have more questions you can see there if you're curious to see everything that I found but in any case it was December you know and it was a lot of work to do this and you know I've had Christmas on my mind and so what I ended up doing to reward myself after I was done was I wrote a poem in the style of the Grinch who stole Christmas told Christmas about the w-h-o and meat and cancer report and so if there's time at the ending you want me to read it I have it with me because it's it's December again so in any case hold your noses we're going in so they said they took into consideration all the relevant data so here we have more than 800 studies of meat and all different types of cancer and over 800 and they these are epidemiological studies every single one of them on this slide and they threw out more than 744 of them because they were I guess not powerful enough and so and so what they ended up with was a handful a small number of epidemiological studies us and and of red meat and processed meat in cancer and you can see that they're mixed so Green Green says you know Noah says no association or protective and red is a negative associate meaning that maybe if there's something wrong there so here we've got epidemiological studies pointing in both directions and with red meat it's essentially split right down the middle 15 to 14 and it's actually 15 red meat good 14 red meat bad so you know the epidemiological studies are a wash so let's hope that they have more robust experimental evidence to go on because certainly they wouldn't warned us about meat based on this right six-six experimental studies were included in their report three rat studies three human studies I'm sorry three rat studies two human studies and one rat human study by which I mean rats and humans were included not rat human hybrids so these are very very small studies so and four of these were conducted by the same research group so let's look at the rodent studies first so red means so anyway here's how these studies work step one pre inject rat with a powerful carcinogen do I need to say that again because that's really important did you hear that then the next step is you feed the rat rat or processed meat and the third step is you examine its poor little colon to see if it has any funny-looking changes that might predict future cancer these rats didn't have never developed cancer but the red ones developed funny looking little changes that maybe would turn into cancer in the future so that's what red means and grey means neutral and the reason why those first two rats are bracketed is because it's the same two arms of the same experiment the first rats they removed all the calcium from their Chow before they gave them the meat in the second one they put the calcium back in and it protected the colon so I don't know what that means but the but so you know anywhere from two to three of these studies were you know a little scary-looking in terms of the colon so but here's what the w-h-o did not tell us on the very first page of the of the very first study cited the very first animal study I found this remarkable statement in puzzling contrast with epidemiological studies experimental studies do not support the hypothesis that red meat increases colorectal cancer risk among the twelve rodents studies reported in the literature none demonstrated a specific promotional effect of red meat wait a minute twelve studies why do we only see four up there and they aren't even the four that were listed in this document so we've got at least 16 studies and they've only given us four so this is an outrageous sin of omission these are the these the outcomes of those twelve studies if you read them and you can see that most of them are neutral in terms of meat and cancer and a couple of them it's kind of hard because the way that was designed you couldn't really tell what was happening and then you actually have two green animals green means good three means the actual red meat protected against precancerous changes in these animals so it is really it's it's really outrageous for me to think about now but ok so those are rats and we should move on to humans so what did the human studies tell us now that human studies are very complicated so you can read about them on the site if you want but here's a summary of them they're very small they're very poorly designed they basically they fed meat to volunteers but they didn't describe in their papers what else they were eating for the most part they didn't control properly they didn't in many cases people who are eating red meat were also eating a lot more processed carbohydrates in one study they were the the the volunteers were confined to a metabolic ward where everything is measured and everything is given up they didn't describe the diet at all except how much meat was in it so you really don't know what's happening in these studies and then they then they tested their stool samples or colon biopsies to look for biomarkers not actual cancer because that's you know would be very difficult to do they look for biomarkers thought to be associated with risk for future colon cancer and the the biomarker results were mixed so some of the biomarkers didn't change at all and some of them did go up which you're trying to avoid but the ones that went up when I looked into it more carefully didn't seem to be considered clearly reliable predictors of cancer risk and then there was the one higher marker that that people seemed to agree was the most reliable stayed neutral in these experiments but there was an experiment listed in one of the papers that I read again there were only 20 references and it referred to a study in human beings comparing a vegetarian diet to a meat diet where that most reliable marker went up on the vegetarian diet so but but this vegetarian diets may cause colon cancer that paper didn't show up in the WHL report so you know it's just a somehow they didn't they didn't have room I don't know so on the basis of these three in three inconclusive studies of a handful of people the WHL had the audacity to scare the entire world's population against eating a nutritious whole food including parts of the world where malnutrition remains a serious threat to public health excuse me okay so it wasn't until nearly two and a half years later that they released the full report there was no fanfare no press coverage I had to keep checking to find out if it had happened and it's 511 pages long and I did look at it I did not read all 511 pages but I did look at it to see if any new and information had been included that would change my opinion and I couldn't find any but it was too late you know that its original message had long since been absorbed as fact people ask me about this report every day in my clinical practice and it's had tremendous influence on people so now I'm not a cancer expert you should not take my word for this right but but luckily I have cancer experts from around the world to back me up on this because another paper that whu-oh did not include in their report which came out a full year before their two pager did was published by this new international group of cancer scientists who met in Norway at 23 of them and reviewed this topic of red meat and processed meat and cancer and what did they find epidemiological and mechanistic data on on associations between red and processed meat intake and colorectal cancer are inconsistent and the underlying mechanisms are unclear the interactions between meat and gut health such as colorectal cancer are very complex and not clearly pointing in one direction this is exactly what we just found together going over this information and you know how could the World Health Organization have looked at the same science and come to such different conclusions well let's take a look at who's on the w-h-o cancer report so 22 scientists from 10 countries and according to dr. David Claire Feld who is a USDA scientist who served on the the WH OHS cancer committee and helped write this report half of them were epidemiologists and a quarter to a third of them are vegetarians and and he he he had mentioned to them he'd been arguing that other studies should have been included that did not get included so for example he he advocated for the inclusion of these two enormous human clinical trials of diet and colon cancer risk the women's health initiative in 2006 tens of thousands of women in this study over eight years eating less red meat did not increase their risk of colon cancer one iota and the National Cancer Institute 2007 published a study of hundreds of patients finding that there was no recurrence of precancerous colon polyps adenoma x' and so he thought this data was relevant and they did not and i listened to an interview of him where he described the experience of serving on this committee as the most frustrating professional experience of his life so then in january of this year this happened The Lancet a very prestigious scientific journal published this 47 page report entitled food in the Anthropocene it's lead author is Harvard professor Walter Willett arguably the most influential nutrition researcher in the world and the father of nutrition epidemiology so it's vision was one of a great food transformation that can is intended to feed a growing global population in a sustainable way its core recommendation is to minimize or eliminate entirely all animal foods from everyone's diet on the planet and to make us healthier make the planet healthier and so to give it a sense of how much red meat they recommend on average in their in their diet it's a quarter ounce per day and this is because they say that red meat is essentially an apocalypse on a plate that it causes cancer it causes heart disease it causes obesity it causes diabetes and every single reference that they use in the red meat section of their report is an epidemiological study or the w-h-o report on meat and cancer so there isn't any clinical trial information included except for what I just showed you in the WH O so this is this is you know the epitome of fear-mongering so we understand him what Lancet is a prestigious journal but what does eat why is it called eat Lancet eat is a nonprofit this is their own description of themselves they're a nonprofit dedicated to transforming our global food system through sound science impatient disruption and novel partnerships so in this this report has made guideline headlines around the world and continues to every single day I signed up for Google Alerts on this every day three four five six seven articles around the world on this topic of magnifying this message that this is what we need to eat these these are the kinds of guidelines that you'll see new planetary health diet the way we eat could do my says the species here's a new diet designed to save us you know these these kinds of these kinds of messages so they're repeating the message rather than scrutinizing it I know had they opened the report and read it I think they would have been very surprised she was actually inside because inside the authors in their own words make an airtight case with the inclusion of meat and in a human diet it's it's fascinating to watch this this happened right before your very eyes so in any case here are a few examples so they say that you know eggs are nutritious and they they say that they're these are quotes from the report they're a widely available source of high quality protein and other essential nutrients needed to support rapid growth in large perspective epi studies high consumption of eggs up to one a day has not been associated with increased risk of heart disease except in people with diabetes however in low-income countries replacing calories from a staple starchy food with an egg can substantially improve the nutritional quality of a child's diet and reduce stunting so eggs are amazing right so how many do they recommend we eat per day we've used an intake of eggs about one and a half per week for the reference diet but higher intake might be beneficial for low-income populations with poor dietary quality so basically they're nutritious so eat sparingly yeah now I can understand if they might say well you know maybe people with diabetes should eat them asperity because we said that that's that's where the risk lies well except that this summary article of six randomized control trials specifically in people with diabetes found that eggs did not cause any problems so and of course this paper which was published in 2017 two years before the Atlanta report was not included in the Atlanta report so you know they're they don't like meat they're conflicted about eggs how do they feel about protein in general this is again the non should be an uncontested area of science everybody agrees we need protein we need all of the essential amino acids so protein quality they say this is the quote defined by effect on growth rate reflects the amino acid composition of the food source and animal sources of protein are of higher quality than most plant sources I completely agree with that high-quality protein is particularly important for growth of infants and young children and possibly in older people losing muscle mass in later life so protein good complete proteins excellent complete proteins come primarily from animal foods so that's fantastic this is an argument for animal foods well we can't have that so however a mix of amino acids that maximally stimulate cell replication and growth might not be optimal through about most of adult life because it could cause cancer I mean this is unbelievable and so I you know I really thought that I'd heard every meat causes cancer argument that there was but I never heard complete proteins cause cancer and so I looked to see what the what the citation was there was a single source cited for this outrageous statement it was this paper which is on the which is about the gene mutation theory of cancer and in this paper the words protein amino acid and meat occur grand total of 0 times this paper is not about protein of any kind meteor otherwise causing cancer I mean this is Amin they I don't know why they chose the pit they don't have a leg to stand on there is no paper out there as far as I know saying that complete protein and if you're worried about complete proteins and you're warning people about them shouldn't you also warn them about the sources of complete proteins that come from plants like tofu and quinoa and maybe people should be afraid to mix beans with rice I mean this is really scary so you know it's just us it's absurd it's absurd so the methods that you hear throughout the report is that you know that that a vegan diet is safe and appropriate for everyone over the age of two and it's it's but but when you read the actual report you'll find numerous caveats and exceptions and oh but not for these people and these people I mean they basically acknowledge in their report that you know that this diet the diet that they're recommending their reference type which includes a little bit of animal foods that their reference diet is inadequate nutritionally insufficient for pregnant women for babies and growing children for teenage girls for aging adults the malnourished and the impoverished that's a lot of people and and that that everybody else has to supplement so what they're saying is that their diet is nutritionally insufficient for human beings full stop and but you know the less you think you know you don't have to pay any attention to the risk to this report you can just eat as much meat as you want well it's important for you to know that this isn't just you know another scientific paper this is a master plan this is seriously it's a master plan for the human race so remember we said sound science which you can decide for yourself if you think it's sound impatient disruption and novel partnerships so what does they what do they mean by impatient disruption quote these are chilling comments data are sufficient and strong enough to warrant action and delay will increase the likelihood of serious even disastrous consequences the scale of change to the food system is unlikely to be successful if left to the individual or the whim of consumer choice by contrast hard policy interventions laws fiscal measures subsidies penalties trade reconfiguration and other economic structural measures you know need to be considered I mean this is this is not just another new study these these people have a lot of money they have a lot of power and they're getting a lot of media attention so but you know if if our planet is in peril maybe this is what we need to do you know if you know if eating a vegan diet is the way to save a planet but is it I don't know because I am not qualified to comment on sustainability and however I did read through the sustainability portion of the of the document and then I consulted with people who might be able to give me more information about it so that I could share something with audiences about it so in any case there's there's a table in the report where they I didn't put it up because it's so complicated but they basically they're doing mathematical projections and seeing okay if you if you do if you eat your current diet business-as-usual what will happen to nine different parameters of environmental quality including greenhouse gases and things like that so they looked at least nine different measures and they they did the business-as-usual diet the the reference diet which is a small amount of animal food that was sort of quarter ounce of meat per day and then the vegan diet and then they you know looked ahead to see you know could could this diet be helpful for the planet and in the chart you can see that it doesn't really have any effect on any of these measures except for greenhouse gases it looks to see it looks as though it may improve greenhouse gas emissions and that's important so I contacted I contacted dr. Frank MIT Lerner who's one of the people I consulted with and he had wondered how they had come up with those projections so he contacted them he wrote to them and said how did you come to those to those calculations because his information I guess would lead us to a different conclusion and this is the extraordinary reply that he got from the science director of Atlanta the meat consumption limits proposed by the Commission were not set due to environmental considerations but we're solely in light of health recommendations this is not the diet to reduce climate change but the diet to reduce the risk of premature mortality due to dietary related health causes so you know this is this makes me wonder you know if the Atlantic diet is not about health and in my opinion based on what I read it's not about health and it's not about the planet what might it be about and so remember that third leg of the stool was novel partnerships so what do they mean by novel partnerships well in 2017 eat launched an organization called fresh a global partnership of 33 corporations so what kinds of corporate corporate interests might be interested in supporting a plant-based diet you know people often assume that a that a pro meat agenda is tainted by profit motive but what about Pro plant agendas so two-thirds of the companies are companies that produce things like fertilizers pesticides processed foods primarily processed grain products and flavorings and additives so make it that you what you will but this is clearly not a Whole Foods agenda so a number of us so I'd written that that article for psychology today heat Lance its plant-based plan at ten things you need to know and then a number of other people in in the sort of alternative nutrition community also wrote some some powerful public replies as well and and they got some real traction on social media you know that these with these criticisms that we're posting and apparently this ruffled some feathers because just a couple of weeks ago The Lancet published an article criticizing the criticism without criticizing its content just basically upset about it and basically wanting to to silence us listen essentially so science scientists and journals face serious challenges in a rapidly changing media landscape that is susceptible to the intentional disseminate of misleading content health communication campaigns are clearly susceptible to polarization so-called content pollution and disinformation a scientists and scientific outlets such as The Lancet need to be continuously aware of and act proactively to avoid manipulation and misinformation about issues of fundamental importance for human health and the planet so again they did not take issue with any of the substantive criticisms that any of us made they were just upset that when you looked at the social media trends there were a couple of a couple of eight Lancet articles and then there was my Psychology Today article and then further down you see several articles by Nina titles and then you see one by you know dr. Zoe Hart comment I mean they were just upset that their media message had been diluted so this this is a really it's just amazing that they would call it misinformation without calling us out on the content of the information we were we are publishing so what would our our dear friend and philosopher Jacques Ellul have to say about this kind of a response the propagandist must insist on the purity of his own intentions and at the same time hurl accusations at his enemy the propagandist will not accuse the enemy of just any misdeed he will accuse him of the very intention that he himself has and of trying to commit the very crime that he himself is about to commit so unscrupulous a tactics aside it matters if authorities get this science wrong I consult with people all the time about all different kinds of diets and one things that's been happening more often lately is parents consulting with me about their children teenagers primarily but some as young as six years old refusing to eat animal foods of any kind and they're getting these messages at school and they're developing nutrient deficiencies I have real clinical real clinical stories about this developing nutrient deficiencies because no one is saying to them vegan diets have important nutritional holes they're just saying it's good animals bad this is really dangerous especially for developing children so it matters on a lot of levels so you know these unscientific documents become the standard of care most clinicians don't have the time or the interest to review them if patients don't improve or get sicker with your bad advice a lot of clinicians will assume that the patients are being non-compliant and not all the time I hear stories like this very frequently and it robs providers of the joy of practicing medicine and seeing actually helping people and seeing people get healthier and that increases burnout if all you're doing you know is is is watching people get sicker that that's not fun that it's really if it gives you a sense of powerlessness and hopelessness and I used to feel that way in psychiatry a lot of the times because no matter what medicine I tried people weren't really getting very much better so you know it impacts the clinician patient relationship so a lot of patients nowadays go off and do their own research online and they'll try something different to try to get better they'll go against their doctors recommendations in an effort to try to be healthier and sometimes that can backfire because the clinician can sometimes criticize or oppose the patient for being non-compliant and they don't have the time to figure out what this new diet is that this person is doing whatever it is even if it's working they may feel really frustrated with a patient for not following their advice and sometimes the relationship will be terminated on one side or the other and in some parts of the country and the consult with people in different eras the country if they're if there's a physician shortage which there is many many places in this country sometimes people are kind of left to their own devices if the doctor that they're seeing will not support their diet and they end up trying to taper their own medications and it's just really dangerous in some cases so so in any case Jacques Ellul what are we to do so he says and this is right along the lines of what dr. Milo Cho said propaganda ceases where simple dialogue begins you know bring it into the light ask questions don't just accept it blindly learn to recognize the signs of propaganda and when you're reading something you know ask yourself are you starting to feel very strong emotions like fear because that can shut down your intellectual processes consider the motives and interests of the person who's writing the article on it stay open-minded and curious even if you think you know a lot about nutrition there's always more to learn and it's really important to be able to say you know what I was wrong about that or I haven't thought about it that way ask questions play devil's advocate examine all sides of the argument not just one even if that one argument seems rock-solid and don't rely on any one source seek areas of uncontested facts where everybody seems to agree and of course don't deny the truth of your own experience if you are getting healthier on a diet that's not officially recommended by someone that's powerful information that needs to be taken into consideration so the so I have I I was listening online to to dr. Terence Keeley's talk and he gave a talk for CrossFit not long ago called the myth of scientific object objectivity and it was pleased to see that he's here today because I got to meet him in person and so this is how he approaches scientific articles he says you know you need to you need to view sorry about that I don't know what that was automatic um you need to view scientific papers not as facts to be you know swallowed whole as a consumer you need to realize that scientific papers it's a person's argument and they're there and it's an argument based on their very real very human biases and their their interest in furthering their own careers that's all very understandable but it's an argument and you need to evaluate it for yourself and so he said as you can see I was gonna say it out loud but I'm a bit of a prude so I didn't say you know how and why is this lying so-and-so lying to me and and I think that's a great you should start from the position of extreme skepticism because most nutrition science is really not worth the paper it's printed on and it's it really is damaging to to our public health

Channel: CrossFit®

Views: 82,109

Rating: 4.874763 out of 5

Keywords: crossfit, nutrition, home, at home, movement, functional, exercise, scale, modify, constantly, varied, messpert, georgia ede, the mess

Id: WbNDrcoRi8g

Length: 54min 40sec (3280 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 20 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/greyuniwave]

Georgia Ede, MD, is a nutritional psychiatrist who is “passionate about the care — the proper care and feeding of the human brain,” she tells the audience at a CrossFit Health event on Dec. 15, 2019. During her presentation, Ede delineates the various ways authoritative bodies such as the USDA and World Health Organization, through their spread of unscientific dietary guidelines that are rife with misinformation, have complicated her efforts to help patients eat healthfully.

[u/Meta_Tetra]

Brilliant woman

[u/greyuniwave]

also posted this lecture to r/lectures it was removed and i was permanently banned....

[u/dem0n0cracy]

https://www.crossfit.com/health/georgia-ede-ddc

[u/whalingsam]

Wow . Eye opening video

[u/intolerantofstupid]

Brilliant lecture - highly recommend watching the whole thing, but here's a TL;DR: 2015 WHO report on meat and cancer and 2019 EAT-Lancet report are not scientific reports designed to inform the populace, but are instead fearmongering propaganda that has nothing to do with the very science on which it claims to be based.