Nina Teicholz - 'Red Meat and Health'

thank you very much yes I'm gonna talk about red meat and health and I'm hopefully gonna have enough time at the end a little bit to talk about what we're doing at the nutrition coalition to let you all know about more about that so first thing to know is I have never presented this material and I finished it at 2 o'clock in the morning so just be nice to me and smile please ok so red meat you know it's clearly like the third rail of nutrition there's just so much bad news out there about red meat and you know this is just a selection of things you can find on the internet but there's also you know mainstream publications the New York Times the Atlantic magazine just a constant drumbeat of articles about how red meat is bad for health and you see this the immediate past president of the American College of Cardiology said everybody should be a vegan for for heart health Harvard I would say publishes a paper once every half a year or so about you know against me the British Medical Journal recently editorialized about meat saying it was like smoking cigarettes so it's really serious the claims against red meat and I'm gonna go over just 3 of them all of these have been proposed by various top experts in the field and the first so the first one is red meat and diabetes and that is all I'm gonna say on red meat and diabetes okay next up okay red meat and colorectal cancer that's cancer of your colon and rectum so red meat has been accused of being connected to many kinds of cancers but this is really the one that has risen to the top and that's because in 2015 I ark which is the International something are there but it's part of wh the World Health Organization and they they decide what causes cancer and so they decided to look at red meat and this is what they found they found that fresh meat like steak was a probable cause of cancer and that processed meats like bacon and sausage were a convincing cause of cancer that's in the same category as cigarettes so and this was this that the coverage of this was really resounded all over the world what was the evidence this was they published a two-page paper in Lancet Oncology about their findings and they found they said a seventeen percent increased risk between red meat and cancer colorectal cancer and 18 percent between processed meat and colorectal cancer doesn't seem like a big difference to me and those are both small numbers to begin with but anyway that's what those were their findings and they were supposed to publish a full dossier about all of the papers that they reviewed and what those papers said and they reviewed apparently 800 papers and they were supposed to publish that you know normally in science what happens is that the papers are sent out before they're published right to journalists and you have like a week to look at it ask other scientists what do you think and then you write an article that is when the embargo is lifted that is suppose that can be a balanced coverage of that science that did not happen here they published this and two years later two and a half years later they still have not published the scientific rationale for their decision I mean that the foundation of it so given what we know which is very little what are the foundations of the data here well that 17 and 18 percent is all based on epidemiology which is a kind of science that is very weak it shows association not causation what could go wrong with epidemiology well I mean these are just challah you can find so many hilarious examples of Epidemiology of things that are really well correlated so don't consume margarine if you're from Maine and you want to stay married or it seems like maybe that's a really good way to get rid of your husband if you here's another you just find all these false positives you know okay here internet user using the internet causes breast cancer you can find a million things like this and scientists have actually done kind of joke experiments where they looked at people's horoscope and correlate it with all kinds of diseases it with the same strength of association and dose-response relationship that you find in the published literature so that's one limitation of the data why don't you know in epidemiology it's not you could not like you can never use epidemiology to show cause and effect but it really depends on a number of criteria the most important one is the strength of the Association so what was the strength of the association between red meat and cancer well so first of all the great success story of Epidemiology is heavy smokers people who are heavy smokers compared to never smokers and they heavy smokers had a 15 to 30 fold increased risk of getting lung cancer compared to never smokers that's considered the great success of Epidemiology compare that to the numbers they found in it for me I mean one point one compared to 15 to 30 and in general you know what people who care about the standards of evidence that you should never look at a relative risk lower than two and because there's just too much possibility that there will be confounding and and bias that come into it so what is confounding well confounding on studies with red meat looks like this people who eat red meat are just less healthier in a whole bunch of other ways all of those things listed there because you have to think about it like other than the low carb high fat paleo community who is eating red meat those are the people who aren't listening to anything their doctors are telling them or maybe not going to their doctors I mean not the advice not to you red meat is one of the you know the top of the list anything your doctor will tell you so those are people who are doing a lot of things you know that they're not what we call adherers people who adhere to advice are just healthy in a whole lot of ways that we can really never measure and red meat people people eat red meat are non adheres on the whole except for you guys you guys are doing great [Music] okay other thing about epidemiology in nutrition is especially poor many people know this it all relies on these self-reported food frequency questionnaire that have 200 plus questions like how many peaches did you have in the last six months how many apricots did you have in the last six months and then you have to figure out well I have the zhonya last night what what is that you know I don't even know how my husband made that um or what was in it and so these are just notoriously unreliable as a source of data they've actually been tested when they actually go in and see what people are eating and then they test it against their food frequency questionnaire and and they find out that the quality of this data is very poor and that's in the published literature but they still reply depend on these just to show you like why epidemiology can be so dangerous when it comes to making policy these are some of the spectacular failures of Epidemiology these were all basically public health recommendations adopted on the basis of the epidemiology that when they were finally tested properly in randomized control clinical trials which is how you show cause and effect they showed that these interventions didn't work or were even harmful hormone replacement therapy was killing women antioxidant vitamins also had I think it's a vitamin E where they found they had rates of heart disease so so it tells you let's not rely on epidemiology so what did IARC do for the w-h-o decision they relied entirely on epidemiology this is the pyramid of evidence you can see you know epidemiology is properly at the lower end of the pyramid and trials are up at towards the top well what about clinical trials on red meat and cancer are there any oh it in fact there are and but they were not considered by IARC here's a big one the polyp prevention trial funded by the National Institutes of Health it was designed specifically to look at colorectal cancer it was a clinical trial and it was a big one and long one and they could find no effect of decreasing meat on prevention of the reoccurrence of these polyps which is a measure of your cancer and there's this trial NIH funded also forty nine thousand women designed again as a cancer trial right that was the primary outcome they were looking at and they reduced red meat significantly in the intervention group compared to the controls and that's the chart showing the effective that's the control group versus the intervention group and their rates of cancer and they look exactly the same no effect well so this is the so I was actually lucky enough just this week to see a presentation by one of the panelists so there were maybe twenty five panelists on this IARC committee who was deciding about red meat and cancer and one of them gave a talk earlier this week his name is David Clair Feld I've cleared it with him to talk about these points and he said that he presented this clinical trial research and said why are we not considering this more rigorous body of evidence they said we're not set up to look at clinical trials because because you know most of the things they look at our toxins you don't do experiments on toxins right but and they just ignore so they ignored that data and they also said it was and this is a fair point it's that it was multifactorial so in both those trials people not only reduce men red meat but they reduce fat they ate more fruits and vegetables they did a lot of things so it's not specifically a trial on red meat and that is true but if red meat were driving cancer and you reduce cancer I sorry you reduce red meat and you see no effect on cancer that is a pretty strong indication that red meat does not cause cancer so what were some of the other limitations of the process that I heard from David kerfeld who is a scientist at USDA the panel only looked at 23 papers for its conclusions not the 800 is claimed the majority of the IURC panel had spent the past 20 plus years publishing papers against red meat that is bias remember when you're talking about what messes with results in epidemiology one of them is bias and the IARC staff leaders and many of the panelists were vegetarians and when and when he asked them don't you think you should disclose that as a conflict of interest they said why so that's a terrible story for science okay so and what were the proposed mechanisms for red meat causing cancer you know you have to have an explanation about how red meat causes cancer I'm just going to go over the two top ones that are that were most convincing to the panel itself okay the first one is heme iron this is one you'll hear heme iron causes can't is the factor in red meat that causes cancer so this is what I learned from David kerfeld the all the studies that that heme iron mechanism rely upon were on rats who were blood sausage okay do you know what's in blood sausage it's 80% blood and it does not necessarily include any meat at all they only observed the damaging effects on calcium deficient diets and that those effects went away when they gave them enough calcium and that two other papers by the same researcher had found the rats said they'd do it another experiment if enroute said bacon had lower damaging compounds but he did not submit those papers I mean bacon compared to other proteins and he wouldn't talk about them so the other the other mechanism that's convincing to people are the N nitroso compounds it's that's what they're called and he said that at a toxicologist one of the main toxicologist at the meeting stood up and said these n nitro compounds that you're feeding these lab animals you're feeding them at at levels that are a multitude of what humans actually eat and therefore it's really an exaggeration of the data and the chair of the panel said shut up and sit down so okay there's actually been I'm so much concern about this IARC decision that Lancet Oncology this is now about eight months after the decision came out with an editorial saying we really need to question the IURC process it's just that there's a problem with reliable findings I mean the IARC really like pretty much I don't know how somebody did a study on this I think it's Johnny Unitas worry this looked at the 300 things that IARC had examined to see if they cause cancer and every single one of them they decided to cause cancer so there's concern about the process here however this IARC decision has proven to be extremely powerful so on the basis of that decision the American Medical Association decided there should be no more processed meat in hospitals anymore so no you know that's no more salami or sausages or anything and there's now a lawsuit that's been started by an animal welfare group trying to ban processed meat in La Schools so that's four things tan on red meat and cancer red meat and heart disease okay they're correlated heart disease has dropped in coincidence with red meat I wish we had this data to go back to like 1900 because we used to eat way more meat in 1900 when a heart disease it was non-existent but anyways let's we'll just stick with us to be fair this is the data that we have so let's remember why did we ever think that red meat caused heart disease was the diet heart hypothesis it was all based on the idea that red meat had saturated fat and cholesterol in it and we now know from if you were at the talk yesterday that though that that hypothesis the diet high hat diet heart hypothesis has been really rigorously tested in tens of thousands of people in government-funded trials in well controlled settings and the conclusion is that there is no effect on saturated fats or cardiovascular mortality or total mortality and that's Austin and that's you know there are there are lists of all those reviews on the nutrition Coalition website if you want to look them out but Cochrane is one of them so so what about red meat just by itself causing heart disease let's not look at the saturated fats and cholesterol let's just look at red meat and so there have been a number of meta analyses that have been done on the clinical trial literature that's the more rigorous kind of literature and they they have cannot find any negative effect of red meat on your cholesterol markers or inflammatory markers so that's one review and this is another review that came out they could not find any negative effect and this is a poor guy this is a bad picture but but I just didn't I I met this researcher and I know a little about his studies but I didn't have the right ones to cite but I want to tell you his findings are very interesting he finds that he's done Studies on lean meat versus regular full-fat meat and he finds that peoples lipid markers look better what do you think how many people think lean meat not the lean need good people look better and their HDL rises more on regular meat okay so we find that red meat doesn't really seem to cause cancer it doesn't seem to really cause heart disease it doesn't cause diabetes yet it still causes death so by what mechanism we don't know okay and this is a study out of NIH this woman here is dr. Sinha I just just put she's one of these people who spent her entire career trying to prove that red meat causes cancer 67 papers on red meat since 1995 and they're all show that red meat seemed to be bad for health and she was also on the IARC panel so you'll notice that what she thinks causes you know she's her new mechanism is nitrates and that's apparently what causes death and here's a study showing that the most nitrates that humans are exposed to are from vegetables and moreover there's quite a bit of literature to show that they're not bad for health still I mean again the you know the expert community is is chugging along with anti meat publications and now even if the data doesn't show it's bad for health there's kind of a drive to show that it's just bad for the planet so now I have to switch tissues show you like well where does that come from I mean why is there so much anti red meat energy it's partly these bias researchers but it's also partly this which is that there is now a tremendous push from very well funded very well organized activist groups you know these they really do not want people eating any kind of animals at all and they have kind of made Brooklyn bread with the environmental groups who are convinced that cows cause global warming and are and are not sustainable that consumed too many of the the planet's resources you know it's the idea of like a pound of plants versus a pound of meat meat costs more to produce but I always say but if a plant a plant comes with diabetes obesity heart disease okay what do those really look like now okay there's also the vegetarian diet doctors these guys are they are very active they're they're very well funded some of them are not really mainly about diet they these guys have spent their entire life in animal welfare and this guy David Katz is my favorite not just because he said I'm an animal unlike anything he's ever seen to her Guardian reporter but you know he does have amazing conflicts of interest he is just paid you know he's really paid by the carbohydrate companies this is a these come from an article on the Russell's blog which you can look up and he is really one of the ringleaders of this idea the plant-based diet I mean he organizes all these people together and their idea is a plant-based diet for all they don't want to tolerate any other diets and this is what he said just like yesterday at a vegetarian conference so you guys you can be on your keto diet diet or you can go binge on cocaine same thing [Music] but all these sucks we can do both I don't know how you catch a cholera but these folks are incredibly powerful and they have a lot of money and they've persuaded a lot of people and as we just heard you know how powerful films are they've done these two movies there's a great well I wouldn't say great I mean I did it so there's an analysis on the diet doctor calm of what the heck how would I say it was a rigorous effort to to analyze all the health claims in what the health that movie so in some I would say there's good news and bad news about this the good news is for meat there is no rigorous evidence no clinical trial evidence to show that meat is bad for health in any way and I won't even get into all the things that are beneficial about meat its very nutrient dense it's an low-calorie source of protein I would recommend for that going to the blog of Georgia heed who you de who has done a fantastic job I think of going through some of those issues the bad news of course is for science it's just terrible it's just terrible science and it really is sad to see how that that's happening this is just to remind us you know we evolved eating meat we had a positive view of domesticated animals those are you know domesticated animals were taken to Athena it's on the Parthenon on the freezers of the Parthenon and humans had respect for their animals and and they were a valued part of human existence and and this is us now so that's it on red meat and health so I think I'm okay for time to talk about the nutrition coalition okay so the nutrition coalition is a group that I founded in 2015 really looking at the expert report for the Dietary Guidelines that had come out you know the Dietary Guidelines come out every five years my book had just come out and I look at this extra report and I read the whole horrible 481 pages and I thought where's the science like where's all the science in the low carb diet not there where is the science unsaturated fats you know it's like all the reconsideration of saturated fats that's gone on in the last five years where is it it's not there and and having spent like nearly a decade researching science for my book and seeing how much bad science there is out there terrible science I mean authors just like denying their data or lying about their data I have to say that report is possibly some of the worst science I have ever seen so trying to think about like as we all do how do we create change we can try to convince our family members our friends we can take you know stacks of material to our doctors but I realized that really what we have to do is change the dietary guidelines this slide is just a draft so it's not really so I it's not done yet but you have to understand dietary guidelines there should be arrows pointing down here how influential they are really all across America they determine the military rations they determine the US food supply because you know once the dietary guidelines started all cattle started being bred leaner low food start if they actually told food manufacturers please start creating we need thousands more low-fat foods it determines what's how the food fact panel looks and everybody flips over their packaged foods to see what's on their food and so food manufacturers will design foods in order to have a certain look on the food fact panel that's an incredible thing they'll basically decide the number of grams the number of saturated it's the number of saturated fat grams the number of total fat and then they will reverse engineer to what the product might be like a low-fat chocolate dairy product I think most importantly the Dietary Guidelines are really just downloaded to all these medical professional groups and they go out to the doctor's office and the nutritionist office and the dieticians off and every and all of those practitioners just give you the guidelines give people the guidelines everybody on the frontline of health care is delivered the guidelines and as I mentioned yesterday it's quite true that in large medical practices doctors are forbidden for giving any advice that is contrary to the guidelines because they're a group that they're in is fears medical malpractice should they go against the gold standard guidelines there's one medical doctor who wrote about to me about how she takes my plate which is the the guy whose graphic and she just puts a big X through half of it and that's the way she delivers the guidelines without breaking the rules and also all the USDA feeding programs that number should be one in four Americans consume one of these meals every month and they affect our children our elderly there it is it is one of the biggest budget items outside the military in the u.s. budget so there's really nothing weird there's a tremendous for Duty here and this is the important thing to understand none of this can change until the guidelines change so it's like it seems impossible to change the guidelines but that is truly what has to be done and this is just a chart to show how great the guidelines have been for for America again because they're so powerful I understand this is a correlation not causation but it's very suggestive so how are the guidelines wrong the guidelines are the three dietary patterns which is what they currently have they are all high carb they say they have a range of diets but they all look exactly the same and you can see in 1965 all of America was basically on what we would now call a low carb diet we were although carvers we just didn't know it other ways the guidelines are wrong if you follow them to a tee there nutritionally insufficient you will not get all the nutrients you need and the only reason that this doesn't look way worse is that they still recommend five servings a day of refined grains refined grains and because they are enriched and fortified in folate and B vitamins and iron and otherwise the guy if you're not eating your refined grains you're not getting those nutrients either let's just not even talk about how that the fact that your body does not absorb those enriched supplements as well as it does when you get them from real food and actually and through some information this Freedom of Information Act FOIA information I got I found that the LA 2015 committee had actually tried to reduce refined grains because you know their top-line messages eat whole grains and they wanted to reduce refined grains but they found they couldn't because they would be even more nutritionally insufficient so the Dietary Guidelines currently recommend equal amounts of refined grains and whole grains and remember that's what's being served the school that's what's in the military that's when it's in elderly homes okay other things they recommend 27 grams of vegetable oils every day limits unsaturated fats and lean meat and low-fat dairy so what is the nutrition coalition done so far well in 2015 I basically went around and talked to members of Congress remember the guidelines are going on everybody's concerned about the guidelines all newspaper articles and everything Lise decided let's go in and take advantage of this attention on the guidelines and put in place something that will prevent this happening again and the next go-around of the guidelines which are in 2020 so we convinced Congress to appropriate or we were among the people who convinced Congress to appropriate a million dollars for really the first-ever outside peer review of the guidelines they'd never been peer reviewed by any outside source and this was done by the National Academy of Medicine and it came out the report came out last fall and it had a bunch of strong language in it which was great you know the sign to the guidelines lacks scientific rigor they don't state-of-the-art systematic review they say all this language is fantastic because it allows us now to move forward on the 2020 guidelines with this this authority at our backs right and USDA has already gone through a set of listening sessions to say like we need to respond to this report so everybody's taking this report very seriously which is wonderful another I would say of our successes is at the USDA just announced this week that is starting that 2020 guideline process by soliciting they want feedback for the first time in order to increase transparency which was one of the National Academy of Medicine recommendations they are asking the public to make public commit to send in comments about topics that they have decided are the most important topics to review so instead of reviewing all the science like they they try to do every five years they're just gonna focus on certain topics to review and in their list of topics are low carbohydrate diets okay so they just put this in the dietary patterns you know this is not a dietary pattern but if they just stuck it in there and also saturated fat yeah between friends I like I would like to I know I can't really take credit for this but when I was asked to submit testimony USDA this was exactly what I said I said you must focus on certain topics that are disputed and these are the topics so I'm sure lots of other people were saying that too but anyway it's in there now so what can you do all of us you know one of the things that we want is we want for the guidelines at least do no harm for the medical doctors out there you understand at least don't make us fat and sick so so we have this petition which ours basically what we have is a number of points that are all about that's just what are the existing dietary recommendations that are not supported by the evidence like this limits unsaturated fats like and so we have this petition please sign it for better Dietary Guidelines org also you can sign up for our newsletter which I said yesterday but something was wrong with our website now it's fixed you can wear at nutrition coalition dot US you can subscribe on that button the other red button is donate feel free to donate and also please submit a comment to USDA do you think what do you think they should review about saturated fats or low carbohydrate diets or a please submit a comment this post that will talk about what I just spoke about and give you the link to where you can make your public comment is on the home page of our website also we're going to start hosting screenings of this movie the magic pill I mean I think it was it's such a good point how powerful movies are they really do change minds this is the one that there's a screening of it tonight it's a really moving film and I think it's very powerful those cities are ones where we would especially like to have people to host it it's it's the hosting the whole process of hosting is organized by a company that makes it completely easy they give you all the information and you use their software to get people to sign up and so you just you just have to give it some energy and passion and and host a screening of that movie and we will help you do that you know our goal is to use a scientific method stop obesity diabetes and other chronic diseases in America and imagine a disease-free America if we can really pull this off which I think we can do all of us together so thank you as you say

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Views: 306,937

Rating: 4.7904267 out of 5

Keywords: Low Carb Down Under, LCDU, www.lowcarbdownunder.com.au, Low Carb Breckenridge 2018, #LowCarbBreck, The Big Fat Surprise, Red Meat, LCHF, Low Carb High Fat, Heart Disease, Diabetes, Cardiovascular Disease

Id: 1rz-8H_i1wA

Length: 34min 13sec (2053 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 25 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/dem0n0cracy]

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[u/arnott]

Good one. Nina mentioning food manufacturers create the nutrition label(based on food pyramid/plate) first and then make the food was eye opening to me.

[u/k-del]

Very good video. Thank you for posting this.

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[u/[deleted]]

Kinda odd how her first graph is on red meat vs diabetes then goes on a bit about false positives with similar double overlay graphs. I guess that irony was lost on her. Probably obvious I'm not a Nina fan.

[u/mcndjxlefnd]

Veganism is the ONLY healthy way to live. . . /s