Nina Teicholz - Red Meat and Health

so yes I'm gonna talk about red meat and health red meat what I often call the third rail of nutrition don't touch that subject but we are gonna touch it today and we're gonna start I just want to start with since it's breakfast time you know this is what used to be the breakfast of champions I don't know how many of you had a bowl of cereal this morning for breakfast this is what when Charles Dickens visited the United States he said was a typical breakfast in the United States during his trip this was an 1861 I mean times have really changed it seems almost unimaginable that this could be true so so now we live in a time when red meat is really like there's just there's sort of this idea that red meat is the worst thing you can eat and you might as well just not eat red meat like what is the point of eating red meat because it has no benefits and it's probably going to kill you and so where does that idea come from that's what we're going to talk about today and I want to say this idea has really spread to the highest levels that's Quinn Williams who's the was the immediate past president of the American College of Cardiology a vegan said the best diet that you can eat for your heart is a vegan diet no meat so in Harvard is very much behind a you know pretty much a vegetarian diet I found a vegan diet so I mean this idea has really reached the highest levels of nutrition and expertise my own background I did indeed grow up in Berkeley California it's why I'm wearing my bell-bottoms today and you know really I'm a I came to this as a journalist I am a journalist I got interested in the subject of dietary fats and I started researching this and I really had no preconceptions when I came into it I was in fact as Sean mentioned a vegetarian for more than 25 years and from Evita he was not a strict vegetarian I had fish and I had chicken but the one thing I definitely did not eat was red meat like I would never eat red meat or better and then I took this deep dive into this subject on dietary fat and after almost a decade of research I put a piece of meat on the cover of my book I never thought that I would do that but I was really just driven by the data you know I'm a again like I'm a journalist where does I go where the data goes and this is where it led me which is an extraordinary journey so yes so that's my book uh I also want to say they typically do this in scientific meetings that to disclose I have no ties to the meat industry I've not funded by the meat industry I don't have ties to any industry okay so let's just talk about some of some kind of facts upfront that are kind of startling because we're told that red meat is the cause of obesity diabetes heart disease right everything all those conditions have risen in the last 20 30 years dramatically right and heart disease even though it's gone down is still the number one killer in the nation during that time our consumption of red meat dropped precipitously if you look at beef is not on here beef has dropped by 34 percent since 1970 oh yes it is on there um and it's poultry and chicken that have that have dramatically increased in the last since 1970 this is since 1910 and again you see red meat has just has not increased very much since since the beginning of the century and what has increased is poultry and then this is a chart this is a chart from my book it goes back to 1800 and the way it does that is there's a really fascinating book called putting meat on the american table which by a scholar not nutrition he's a historian and he went back and looked at all the records the marketing the records of sales and how much meat was allotted to slaves and he looked at he looked at all kinds of data and he came up with this number that shows us that it seems as if we ate fifty to a hundred percent more meat than we do today in fact the slaves were given more meat than we are told to eat today so but this is what you know this is this is the are the main outcomes that are tied to meet the main diseases that are we're told meat causes so let's look at each of these in turn and first before we do that I have to kind of take a little tangent and introduce a this big word epidemiology how many of you know what epidemiology is Oh excellent oh you must have had your breakfast of champions so I just want to explain it epidemiology is a kind of science it's also known as observational studies or prospective cohort studies it's a kind of science that can show associations between two things and but it's meant to generate hypotheses right it's not meant to be proof it's meant to generate a hypothesis if coffee drinking is associate associated with heart disease let's go do an experiment on that and to do an experiment you have to do a test of that hypothesis which would be a clinical trial a clinical trial can provide proof epidemiology me ology see I can't even say it cannot probe cannot provide proof so what is epidemiology it's where they take a lot they take a large group of people usually and they follow them over time again they show the association but not causation okay so this is the problem with epidemiology there is something called false positives that turns up so here's a chart that shows if you don't want to get divorced in Maine you need to reduce your consumption of margarine cuz Association here's another one if you do not want to get breast cancer you better stop using the Internet so these are associations they look very convincing but there are only associations they are not causation so and an epidemiology so that's one problem with deputy I'm epidemiology another problem is they rely in nutrition on food frequency questionnaire here's an example of one and they ask people to - usually it's on the better ones they use about 200 questions and they ask you what you've eaten over the last six months some of them they ask you what you've eaten over the last year and then they assume your diet doesn't change for the next ten years but you know this is very unreliable I mean if anybody asks you how much how many glasses of wine did you actually drink last night do you think you would give an honest answer that so the first thing is people just lie they just lie even if or even if they even if they want to be truthful they don't remember I barely remember what I ate yesterday much less six months ago you know the easiest example of epidemiology is like cook you know how many people drink milk that's an easy thing raise your hand not raise your hand what kind of milk do you drink easy thing to narrow down you know I drink skim you drink whole milk but it gets much more complicated much very quickly like how many of you remember how many times you had ribs over the past six months and now I want you to tell me in cups which is what's on the food frequency questionnaire anybody need to grind it into a blender and measure it with cuts so and also those you know ribs some of those are made with highly sugary syrupy rubs and others aren't that sugar makes a big difference but you don't capture that in a food frequency questionnaire and then there were all these other things how many peaches how many pears how many grapes how many cups of grapes did you eat over the last six months I mean you can begin to see how unreliable this data is and one other thing did you have lasagna yeah yes or no that's your only question Howard how many times a week how do you make lasagna you know I make mine you know I don't I don't put a lot of pasta on mine but other people loaded up and well how'd you do fry what kind of meat to use and did you fry it in oil or you fry it in butter I mean there's so many variables that are not captured so that creates this very very unreliable data set there are also in epidemiology confounding factors so here's the thing about finding that red meat eaters are less healthy there are all these other factors about people who don't who eat red meat lots of red meat other than like the paleo people out there who are trying to be healthy most people who eat red meat are people who 100% ignore their doctors over the last 50 years your doctor every doctor you go to will say eat less red meat so if you're the kind of guy is like yeah yeah doc and then he goes out and then you drink a bunch you know you drink a bunch beer and whatever you're doing you are not paying attention to order so red meat eaters are less likely they're just less likely to do any number of of things that make them too healthy or they tend to be fatter they tend to have lower education smoke more drink more so any any one of those factors could explain why red meat eaters seem to seem to be less healthy we don't know and epidemiology we can never know because epidemiology cannot measure all these things they don't actually they can't or if they measure them they can't adjust for them properly so if you want to see the full critique of Epidemiology and it's this is just such an important issue because it really underlies so much of our misunderstanding about science and it's really I would take a picture of this and I would go and watch this hour-long talk by Stanford professor John Ewing Eady's who is he is the leading he's the leading person who his work on nutritional epidemiology and the critiques that he does is really I think the best he's really the leader in this field and he gives a wonderful talk here and he has many many papers that you can so that's epidemiology why it's so hard to trust epidemiology versus clinical trials clinical trials do show cause and effect you take to group this part of the room I give you a pill or I tell you to eat a hamburger every night that's your the intervention group this group I say don't do that just have your normal diet and therefore I'm consuming that everything else about you are the same I don't have to worry about confounding factors that's an experiment so and and at the end of that this is the only kind of science that can show cause and effect if you hamburger eaters you know all get diabetes or get twice as much diabetes as this group I know that meat was the probably the factor that did it because that's the only thing we changed we only changed that one thing so and this is so you would not prescribe a pill to your patients you know the FDA requires that your the pills that you prescribe to a patient or they have to go through a clinical trial right and you wouldn't prescribe a pill to a patient if they hadn't why would you do the same with diet which is really much what we do when we tell people not to eat meat I think I'll skip through that this is just one more fact about epidemiology when it's actually tested in clinical trials when nutrition epidemiology is tested in clinical trial that's shown to be right zero to twenty percent of the time which means that eighty to a hundred percent of the time epidemiology is wrong okay now let's get to the point that all the data that shows red meat is bad for health comes from epidemiology like 100% of it all comes from this really really weak science so and it's important to say there is one exception for epidemiology which is that it has it did find that heavy smokers had a 15 to 35 times more likelihood of contracting lung cancer than never smokers that was a success in epidemiology where an association was used to impute causation and that was okay because look at the size of that association 15 to 35 times all right remember that number anything sorry let me skip ahead so oops I'm missing a slide here but in nutrition epidemiology those numbers are tiny and anything less than two or really three in terms of so that 15 to 35 is what's known as the relative risk anything under two is just considered not reliable because there's because of these other factors because of the confounding because the weakness of the data so you really can't be you can't use any kind of relative risk under two okay so now let's get to the heart of it back to meat and health here's the numbers from meat and diabetes this is why the head of the school that the TUF school of nutrition says meat causes diabetes and he does it on the basis of this paper his relative risks are one point one five and one point one nine one means no effect remember 15 to 35 was what we what we thought we could rely upon to say that cigarettes cause lung cancer smoking causes lung cancer these are tiny effects for red meat and diabetes and I have conversed with the author of his paper and I showed him this chart I was like how can red meat cause diabetes I feel like all you need to do is look at this chart and say that is just completely implausible you know not only does mention the fact like how does red meat cause diabetes what causes diabetes is excessive glucose in your you know excessive exposure to glucose and red meat doesn't have any glucose so what is the mechanism by which red meat causes diabetes so that's red meat and diabetes I think that chart is just like that hypothesis goodbye alright so what about red meat and colorectal cancer I think this is probably the most prominent claim that is made against meat because it was made by IARC which is part of the World Health Organization this is a decision that came out I think in 2016 and they decided that this is there this is their scheme of how carcinogenic something is they decided that fresh me there was limited evidence or probable cause that fresh red meat caused cancer colorectal cancer which is cancer and then processed me like bacon what had convincing cause of causing cancer that's number one that's in the red zone there that's equivalent that's where cigarettes are so red meat is as cancer-causing as cigarettes according to IARC so what was the evidence that they used for this well this is the paper that came out when they announced this decision so and look at those relative risks 17 percent increase well they don't have the relative risk on this paper but it's like 1.18 for processed meats 1.18 and for a red fresh meat it was 1.17 those are the numbers associating the meat with cancer tiny tiny tiny and not greater than to remember to is a threshold above which you can even consider something to be maybe a decent hypothesis and again this is supposed to just this is data to generate hypotheses not to be used as proof for them oh those are the numbers good that I remembered them correctly okay is this a strong association no it is not and again so this is a this is sort of a pyramid that shows you the you know how you're supposed to prioritize evidence you put these epidemiology towards the bottom you can see randomized controlled trials are up at the top right that's a higher quality of evidence were there any randomized controlled trials on red meat and cancer in fact there were so that's those are the studies reviewed by IARC were those low ones down there there were clinical trials on red meat there were two of them and so now I have to tell you that I actually have know quite well one of the panel members who was one of the IARC panel members there were 23 or so and his name is David Clair Feld and I can talk about what he said because he published it in a paper subsequently and he sort of gave me the inside scoop and what happened in that meeting and he said one of the things that happen is he tried to present these clinical trials on red meat and cancer that's specifically on colorectal cancer and he said they they would not accept it as evidence for whatever reason I mean I think you know I are almost always deals with carcinogens that can't be tested because they're too dangerous they can't test them in a clinical trial like you can so you can't do a clinical trial cigarettes right because it would be considered unethical so they just maybe they just aren't used to clinical trials but these are incredibly important because they are a form of proof anyway this is one of those trials the polyp prevention trial funded by the National Institutes of Health specifically looking at colorectal cancer and they had they found absolutely no effect of red meat at all relative risk of one which means zero effect Women's Health Initiative was the other trial on nearly forty nine thousand women so this trial changed a lot of things the women's diet it reduced fat reduce saturated fats it increased whole grains but one of the things that said is please reduce red meat so and the women did they significantly reduce the amount of red meat that they ate and they did this well by 20% and they were on this diet for eight years at the end of which this shows that there was no quote there was no difference between the people who ate red meat or didn't eat red meat when it came to cancer rates so if red meat were driving cancer colorectal cancer you would see it you should see it if you reduce 20% of the thing that's causing cancer you should see some reduction in cancer rates and yet none was seen so and this is the rigorous evidence so what are the limitations of this process and this is again from David kerfeld who's a USDA scientist a longtime scientist and he one is that the panel really only looked at well I should've let me back up and explain the IARC decision came out in 2016 and they did not release the actual they released that one page statement from The Lancet but they didn't actually release the whole monograph the whole report and for two years afterwards so they put out all these headlines but and nobody could fact-check them nobody could go back and look at their work to see what they were actually what was the evidence they were actually looking at so this came out two years later and it turned out they only looked at 14 of these epidemiological studies they not 800 as they had originally claimed 14 epidemiological studies only one of those actually found a link between red meat and colon cancer not colorectal cancer and this was a seventh-day Adventist study that was really quite you have to say confounded by the fact that seventh-day Adventist this is a study not only on seventh-day Adventists but by seventh-day Adventists and they believe it's a sin to eat meat so so they're just kind of proving their own religion so that's that's a problem paper to say the least so the majority of the IARC panel had spent the last 20 years publishing papers against red meat that's biased and and and dr. kerfeld said that he would sit down next to people during dinners or lunches and ask them you know and he would notice that they're not eating any meat any any any any dairy and he would say well are you a vegetarian and they would say yes and he said well don't you think that's a conflict of interest when you're sitting on this panel and they looked at him and said why don't why why I mean being a vegetarian any kind of diet is a conflict of interest but being a vegetarian when you're on a panel about meat is a big conflict of interest and he said that was true of quite a few of the panelists and all the staff so and what did the IARC decide was the per that proposed mechanisms by which meat would cause cancer how does meat cause cancer well the main one that they use is heme iron they say it provides too much heme iron okay let's just put aside the fact that there's an iron we are in it America is an iron deficient population so but we apparently were getting too much of it from red meat and the way they determine this the studies that they relied upon in the IARC decision was they looked at Studies on rats that ate blood sausages blood sausages are 80% blood they're not meat some of them don't contain any meat at all and the only way they were able to observe problems with those rats getting having them get cancer is when they had calcium deficient diets when they tested them when there was enough calcium in the diet the proud the problem went away so two other papers by the same research researcher found that rats fed bacon had significantly fewer damaging compounds but he did not submit those papers despite being asked to and he would not talk about them who knows okay so there was such concern about this Lancet paper or about this decision that red meat causes cancer that The Lancet actually sort of walked to themselves back a little bit and they felt they wrote an editorial and they sort of said well we are we just have we were going to be more careful about how we go about making these determinations about cancer because there was some cause of embarrassment about it and this is a this is a study also by John Ioannidis whose lecture I recommended that you fought that you follow I mean this is where he went into a cookbook and he randomly chose recipes and and and out of the cookbook and then he looked up whether or not they caused cancer and he found that pretty much everything causes cancer so that's the problem with these cancer determinations I mean you know coffee causes cancers tomatoes cuts cancer everything causes cancer so as you know here in California don't you have given a just declare coffee cancer-causing now it has to be unhappy to be on Starbucks cups yeah that's not going to keep me away all right so this is David Clair Feld this is some of the work that he's done if you want to take a picture and and read it later I mean he's done some really interesting information on red meat and he'll he's one of the only people who writes about red meat Bob Lustig doesn't like them and he can ask a question after the talk oh we can't agree on everything we hold hands where we can so the disturbing thing is that even though the science is weak even though IARC itself suggests maybe we're saying too many things caused cancer there there this decision about red meat caused causing cancer has groups have just taken it and run with it so and it has real real impact right lawsuits to ban hotdogs processed meats in LA schools we have a similar coming up in New York City banned processed meats you should provide plant-based meats in hospitals that's kind of the flip side of that suggesting that a meatless diet is really something that ought to be offered to people I mean I think that's fair just on diversity but there's a lawsuit going on in Texas against the Texas Beef Council saying that they are should not be allowed to advertise their product as healthy because it causes cancer that's not fair I mean it's not fair based it's not supported by the science so it's not supported by rigorous science and all of us are being told not to eat red meat based on this data that is not supported by rigorous science so what about heart disease that's a good heart disease well there's a correlation between heart disease and red meat is it true that because we eat less meat now that we we get kind of had less heart disease in the nation I mean there are a lot of reasons for why heart disease going down treatment is better statins all kinds of you know there's a lot of reasons but maybe it's also red meat I mean we have to be open to that idea so let's look at red meat and heart disease well first of all you know the reason that we came to believe that red meat is the original reason we came to believe that red meat is bad for health is that it contains saturated fats and this is just to show you something that you should just know that all foods are actually a combination of different kinds of fat so you know you think red meat it's all saturated fat in fact a third of it is saturated fat in this particular kind of cut of meat so just you understand that all foods are a combination of fats so saturated fat was really the original reason we were told not to eat meat and it all began in 1961 with the American Heart Association is the first time anywhere in the world that that a group says to the American public don't eat saturated fat and cholesterol and therefore reduce your consumption of meat and also low-fat milk and that's where all that comes from in starting in 1961 before that we had never heard that meat was bad for health so so this hypothesis about saturated fat causing heart disease is really at the heart of my book I really go through the whole story of how that came about and the characters involved and the politics and the and it's a really fascinating story and I won't go into it now but I will just say that it has that hypothesis has been rigorously tested I mean they since the American Heart Association came out with that recommendation governments around the world undertook really rigorous clinical trials so that hypothesis that saturated fat and cholesterol cause heart disease is called the diet heart hypothesis it's been tested on more than 75,000 people all around the world in different clinical trials run by governments and in experiments that last really long experiments really look at feeding they would say and and I'm saying actual clinical trials you group over here ate regular amounts of meat and butter and dairy and this group ate soy filled cheese soy filled milk fake me whatever they dramatically reduce the saturated fat content of this group and at the end of those all those experiments oh so let me explain a little more those these all these were inpatient controlled settings like in hospitals that means they would control all the food would what you eat so it's a highly controlled experiment you can get a good result most were government funded and the results were no effect of saturated fats and on mortality or cardiovascular mortality or total mortality and this has been covered in numerous review papers and I can tell you where to go and look those up at the end but there this has really been a rigorously tested hypothesis and saturated fats cannot be shown to cause heart disease so so just going back to this so I think it's really fair to say that you know not eating red meat because because of the saturated fat content is not an idea that is supported by data okay let's look at red meat itself does red meat itself somehow cause heart disease for in some other way maybe it's not the fat maybe it's something else this is the biggest meta-analysis that has been done of randomized controlled clinical trials again rigorous kind of science and they they could not find any difference in heart disease rates between people who ate meat or people who ate different kinds of proteins this is the this is the the only study that I know that it that really did that recent study this is another one that looked at half of less than half a serving or less a day of meat another meta-analysis and they found that it does not again of clinical trials and they found that it had no negative infant impact on any of the cardiovascular factors okay so there's just really if you look at the most rigorous evidence it does not show that meat causes heart disease what about death maybe it's possible that somehow meat through some other mechanism just kills you because if vegan comes along and stabs you in the chest no I'm kidding so and most of this argument is based on these mechanisms one of them being nitrates nitrates is another mechanism that people suspect is very bad for your health and meat has it specially processed meat has it in it and this author here this paper she was one of the people on the IARC panel just to show you she's done 67 papers since 1995 trying to show all showing that red meat has some deleterious effect on health that seems to be her whole career and they're all negative on about red meat but sorry this is so but what but nitrates if you're worried about nitrates you really should be worried about your consent of vegetables and to a lesser extent water because that's what your main exposure to nitrates comes from it does not come from me so what are the here's a really I think an important issue of so what so what everything I've told you I think at least establishes that meat is not going to be harmful to your health but why bother with me like why not just do what what most I think magazine articles the first sentence is why bother with me and I'm gonna tell you now with a very manipulative picture of healthy babies I'm going to give you some reasons for why it might be a good reason to include meat in your diet and I'm so here we go this is a hard chart to read but meat especially red meat is extremely nutrient dense you get especially in terms of zinc and iron and vitamin b12 compared to other proteins the bottom of that list there in terms of being nutrient poor is chicken chicken has many many fewer nutrients than red meat red meat is extremely nutrient dense and if you really want to get into it liver is the most nutrient dense food on the planet if you can dig up some old liver recipe from your grandmother so it has a lot of nutrients needed nutrients nutrients that we are deficient in and you get those nutrients in a bioavailable form meaning your body is able to absorb them it also it also when it one of those nutrients was vitamin b12 lack of vitamin b12 especially in the womb can really harm a baby yeah and there's very worrisome data about this there are five times date expectant mothers with b12 deficiency or up to five times more likely to have a child with a potentially disabling or fatal birth defect women given b12 supplements during pregnancy immediately have or immediately after have higher birth scores on expressive languages children also need b12 for their brains to develop and their nervous systems to grow this is just facts such deficiencies have been linked to neurological and behavioral disorders I'll tell you one incredibly scary thing that I learned about b12 which is the symptoms for b12 deficiency in children is the same list of symptoms as autism it doesn't mean they're the same but it's a remarkable coincidence so these all these facts come out of this op-ed by dr. Ralph green from University of Sacramento and it's one of the world leading experts on this topic so another reason that it's good to eat meat it's an a really calorie efficient way to get protein if you want to get you know if you want to get 25 grams of protein you can see you got you have to eat 564 calories of peanut butter or you can have 154 calories of beef so when people tell you you can get your protein from quinoa you can but you have to eat a lot of more calories to get it so so those are just a few reasons that you know that they're that it's a good idea to eat meat I want to just touch briefly because I'm running out of time here the one you know now we're told not to eat meat because we're told that it's bad for the planet and so I mean this is a whole can of worms that I can't possibly get into but you know I think that and that the general argument is that a pound of plants is much cost much less to produce and is much easier on the earth than a pound of meat but if a pound of plants when we're talking grains really soy and corn how do plants comes with diabetes obesity you know 75 percent of our healthcare costs come from these nutrition related diseases all of a sudden that pound of plants looks a lot more costly than a pound of meat which you know if we can figure out how to make raise it sustainably and well that would lighten a tree load off of the planet which is our illness or sickness so but what we're fighting out there and the reason you see so many anti meat messages is there are very very well organized interests really pushing those messages mainly the animal welfare groups the environmental groups are now pushing these messages there are vegetarian vegan diet doctors and experts really pushing these messages very hard they're very well-funded some of them are doctors but are really animal rights activists they're just masquerading as doctors and so and we have there's very you know Netflix films with huge followings there's just a lot of information and campaigns out there telling us a vegetarian vegan diet is the way to go and and there is that there is you know the food industry is also involved I don't know if you know we always hear about there's big meat but you know there's big carb now that that's also a thing there's this Barilla pasta who who funds these meetings all over the world and they're all and they have all thought leaders there and their ideas you know the the diet that's healthy is a high grain diet and that diet will also also save the planet that little their little logo is a double pyramid which is to save the planet pyramid and eat more grains that's that's their double pyramid of health so here's the good and bad news good news for meat there really is no evidence that meat is bad for health it's really bad news for science we have week signs that's being repeated and promoted it's driven not by good science but all these activists ideological agendas and bias amongst our top scientists but as I like to say consensus and repete and repetition do not make weak evidence strong it is just the PR machine going over and over and over and over again I also like to remind people that meat eating is ancient this is from some of these are from the frieze of the Parthenon cattle being taken to to sacrifice for Athena so meat-eating is ancient it's part of our evolution our biological evolution to say that we're not meat eaters is like being a creationist like it's just denying our evolution we are not you know intelligent people tend to look down on creationist and they should look down at anybody you should not deny we cannot deny our evolution this is the way we think about meat now and I don't know if you can see that actual danger tiny thing right there in the middle and and if you want to read more on this you can read my article my book really has the whole story of really how we came to believe that meat and saturated fat and all that was bad for health part of my book was excerpted in the Atlantic Monthly especially the part on meat and that's where you can find me I'm totally confused by the clock so I don't know how much time I have or if that's I'm running into the question and answer period probably and this is the group that I started in Washington DC because what we're trying to change the Dietary Guidelines because those of you who doctors know that you know what you learn about nutrition in medical school comes from the dietary guidelines the dietary guidelines is telling all Americans to eat a high grain diet low in meat and that's where everybody's education comes from and an all nutritionists and all the dietitians and so it needs we need to be getting the right information it's like it's not our fault we're just given the wrong information and we want that information which is really a top-down model we want that information to be right so so that people have know what the actual science says okay so if I haven't completely messed up the Q&A period I think that we have some time for questions okay okay great as a reminder or for anyone yes thank you [Applause] for anyone who wasn't here yesterday I'm Betsy McMichael I'm a family nurse practitioner and director of operations with jumpstart MD it looks like we already have folks lining up we'll go for about eight minutes with questions right now just one question you think it's safe for me to go back to eating spam and eggs because I really miss it that's good spam spam spam spam yeah I think that's Monty Python yes you're good hello hi I'm gonna ask questions someone else asked yesterday then about the study that said that a ketogenic diet causes you to live four years shorter right do you know anything about that study and why that might not have been a study oh my goodness I wrote two pieces one in The Wall Street Journal and one for Medscape on that study okay so you can look up Medscape titles and you can also look up in The Wall Street Journal I wrote an op-ed okay that was called arek study a ric it's an NIH funded study they had a 66 question food questionnaire 60s only 66 questions to ask capture all your diet and they asked it they sampled people only twice and they did this like in the they stopped doing that in 1995 and just assumed afterwards that everybody continued eating the same thing okay a lot changed between 1995 and tell you one thing on that short questionnaire it said like it's a mini questionnaire Pizza is not on there oops we didn't count any pizza any of any of you know so much has changed in our food supply so it was a terrible food frequency questionnaire to start with and and they the leaders of that study I happen to know are vegan or terian the main leader of that study so it's had some bias going into it they don't want the ketogenic diet to be successful because it is the opposite of the diet that they have been promoting for all their careers which is a high carb diet so that's the bias part of it but the study itself was very the data was very very poor and then the group that they put in the so called ketogenic group were people who ate up to 40% carbs that's not a ketogenic diet so or maybe it was 35% whatever what it was not ketogenic they were not looking at a ketogenic population what they found is for that low-carb group they saw increased mortality but but the data was so unreliable it's not you can't begin to call that ketogenic and so it was they were and there was like 10 other problems with that study that are really quite serious I'll just tell you one more they decided to so they they sampled diet twice and if between the first diet sample and the second sample if anybody contracted heart disease or any of the disease they dropped them from the study and you know if you're looking at people if you're looking at a relationship between diet and disease why would you drop the very thing you're looking at I mean it's just it's inexplicable to me that's why I bring up the question of bias in that study I think that study is not worth anything and it's an epidemiological study any other questions thank you thank you so much for all of the amazing work you've been doing I'm a big fan of your work and recovering carb addict that's my bias and and I'm a functional nutrition and health coach and and one of the things I tell some clients sort of a little bit more food philosophy based is that most studies do isolate one variable and the problem with our diets is you know it's it's comfort to many of us we can hardly ever isolate one thing so after watching what the health forks over knives and stuff and reading some of the work by s Olsen and you know some of the vegan authors I do sometimes tell clients that you can pick your poison and studies show that you will lose weight and have certain variables if you go completely high carb and you limit saturated fat or you can get great results from the opposite and limiting carbs so the problem I tell folks is that high saturated fat in the presence of too many carbs for your phenotype or your DNA is the problem and I just wonder if you know of anyone working on these multi variable types of studies that would show ie carb tolerance varies you know this is more medical I guess but carb tolerance is what's individual especially in the light of the work of dill bredesen and a Poe apoE 3 & 4 thank you well I think that so as I do you think there is some suggestion that high carb in the presence of high saturated fat might is is is possibly where you see greater inflammation and may be problematic right so my knowledge of the literature suggests that if you're going to get rid of one of those getting there's there's a tremendous volume of scientific literature saying that you will have a greater chance of success if you lower your carbs right there's a lot of scientific literature I'm saying like practically a hundred randomized controlled clinical trials showing the benefits of lowering carbs I agree that there's a real tremendous range of how people will respond to diets there there just is and that's reality but if the answer is if the other end of the extreme is to say go very high carb and low unsaturated fats of vegan vegetarian diet that may work for some people but there is almost zero randomized controlled clinical trials showing that those diets promote health so if you making a science-based choice and you're looking at saturated fat and carbs you have to this is the science-based choice carbs should go down and saturated fats you can increase you don't have to go wild with them but I'm just saying some people respond poorly to low carb high saturated fats so that's that's that's something else I mean there's a lot of individual variation but so I'm just driven by the science but I think I know that on level you're working with people people have their own ideas and their passions and things they care about and you have to be very flexible in how you talk to people and let them be on their their own journey I back to the question about meat kills I looked at that study more carefully the study rate 40% carbs were 65% men and 19% smokers the group they compared with were 60% women and 4% smokers so the expected the mortality difference based on just male and female and smokers and non-smokers it's a ridiculous study thank you I don't take any of Sarah Hall Berg's time cuz she is so awesome and I think she's coming in the question answer right now so we have time for one more ok yeah that clock just slept hi Nina and Mullins from diet doctor how are you hi in 2008 there was a study from the epic in Europe that found that vegetarians actually had a higher rate of colorectal cancer and I compared to meat eaters that just disappeared and then two disappeared well it nobody really ever brings that up that there was a higher rate among vegetarians and then at the beginning of October at the Union of European gastroenterology they released a study that colorectal cancer has increased 6% among people 19 to 40 which they said was unprecedented but they didn't link that that group may be the highest of non mediators I'm wondering if you've seen anything that actually shows we've been focusing on red meat but it actually may be vegetables and vegetarianism that has a higher rate of calling it colon cancer so the only day that I can think of off the top of my head is that in all that's when I mentioned those those clinical trials on more than 75,000 people when you're reading the regular meat cheese and and butter and all that and you're eating this soy filled meat and you're having margarine and you're having butter and you're having fake meat in those large randomized controlled clinical trials one of the findings was that this group eating low mean low low low fat dairy consistently died at higher rates from cancer it was a big finding and it was true in almost a dozen of these studies really big randomized controlled clinical trials so that's not just an association its cause and effect so and I don't know what the cancer was from was it from the vegetable oils causing cancer was it from the absence of meat was it from I mean you really don't know but you did see a very big effect on cancer and there was so much concern about it that the National Institutes of Health had a series of very high-level meetings in the early 1980s to discuss this side effect of cancer on the diet they were recommending to the American public and they could never figure it out

Channel: JumpstartMD

Views: 71,774

Rating: 4.6376724 out of 5

Keywords: weight of the nation, wotn, jumpstartmd

Id: L9ZLJI-1ifs

Length: 52min 12sec (3132 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 30 2019