Nina Teicholz - 'Science and Politics of Red Meat in 2021'

[Music] my name is nina teichels i'm a science journalist and an author and i'm going to talk today about the science and politics of red meat in 2021 this is a subject that i spoke about a few years ago and at that time i called it the third rail of nutrition and now i think it's more like the atomic bomb of nutrition science it is sort of the subject that we cannot speak about it is almost forbidden really to speak about the potential health benefits of meat or how it may not be terrible for uh for human health so i want to explain the science on red meat what the most recent science says where the science is strong where it's not strong and i also want to explain um we're going to veer more into sort of topic of sociology or try to understand what it is about the changing climate that makes it so difficult to have a conversation about meat why is that space for open conversation closing first my disclosures i receive still some small royalties from a book i wrote some years ago called the big fat surprise and i otherwise receive no funds from any kind of commercial enterprise and importantly i receive no money from the food industry or any kind of industry at all i do not promote any products or have any connections to industry it's also important to disclose my biases which really were against me when i began doing my research some 20 years ago for the previous decades i had been a vegetarian in the sense that i had definitely not eaten red meat for quite a long time i thought meat was bad for health and i avoided it i come from berkeley california which is one of the birthplaces of the vegetarian movement so i really had a bias against meat and it was only until i researched it over many years did my views on it change so today we're going to discuss why do we believe that red meat is bad for health what does the most recent science say on red meat and is it possible that red meat is a health food and then as i said why can we not talk about red meat so the first reason that we americans started to avoid red meat goes back to 1961 when the american heart association was the first public organization anywhere in the world to say that we should avoid saturated fats as a measure of protection against heart disease and that was effectively telling people to eat less red meat because red meat and also dairy contain saturated fats as do other foods in fact all foods are made up of a combination of different kinds of fatty acids but this was the beginning of telling the public to avoid red meat and full fat dairy as a means of protection against heart disease so that's the original reason that we as a population started to avoid red meat uh for health reasons fast forward to today the u.s dietary guidelines for americans this is the nation's most important nutrition policy and since this policy was launched in 1980 it has always recommended that the public choose lean meats meaning not red meat but rather poultry and um that is continues to be a recommendation today the current dietary guidelines have added an additional recommendation which is that they specifically say that we should lower our diets in red and processed meat that is a new addition to the dietary guidelines i did a paper on the dietary guidelines analyzing the last edition in 2015 in which i found that when you go digging for the evidence for the recommendations specifically against red meat it turns out that a systematic review on red meat had not been done and still not has been done although there are several analyses that look at animal protein products these reviews include eggs fish and dairy and therefore do not isolate the health effects of red meat or meat of any kind so that is a an emission in the data the evidence based used to make the recommendations about red and processed meat my group the nutrition coalition uh it's a non-profit group that aims to ensure that we have evidence-based dietary guidelines we did an analysis looking specifically at the 2015 dietary guidelines advisory committee which had been the first to elevate a vegetarian diet as one of the officially recommended diets or dietary patterns as they call them and what we found was that 11 out of 14 of these members or nearly 80 percent of them had consistently published work in favor of plant-based low animal fat vegetarian diets and that many had built their careers promoting these types of diets i think this shows a level of bias on the committee against meat and the committee did try to recommend reducing red meat in its report but ultimately that recommendation was not taken up and has subsequently appeared in the 2020 guidelines just to remind everybody how important the dietary guidelines for americans really are they're not just sort of take it or leave it advice they have a tremendous influence over particular food programs that are delivered to one in four americans each month including school lunches school breakfast food baskets for women and infant children feeding programs for the elderly these are groups of underserved people on the whole and tend to have higher rates of diet related diseases so they really depend on this food it's also the dietary guidelines that informs all k through 12 education and medical education most doctors and dietitians teach the dietary guidelines most health care workers teach them it also affects our military we have an obesity crisis in our military that is almost this equal to what we see in the general population and the dietary guidelines really affects our whole food supply because manufacturers of processed foods want to have what's called a clean label so they can follow the guidelines and seem like they're healthy and also uh all cattle have been bred to be lean because of the guidelines it's just an overall enormous impact on what we believe to be a healthy diet and what is our food supply so why else do we believe that meat is bad well this is a monograph by an agency within the world health organization that issued a statement saying that red meat causes colorectal cancer that's cancer of a colon this is a report that came out in 2018 it was covered around the world very scary and began to commonly be referenced as for the statement that red meat causes cancer another source of information about meat is the harvard school of public health now called the harvard th chan school which publishes quite regularly from its databases that seem to show that red meat is associated with many chronic diseases here is an association between red meat and type 2 diabetes here's a paper where they're showing that red meat is associated with heart disease and of course the ultimate scary thing red meat is associated with death the head of the harvard school of public health walter willett uh is pictured here and he has uh i think it's fair to say he has truly believed in a vegetarian diet or even a vegan diet for a very long time these are statements going back to 1990 where he is stating that red meat is something that we should avoid if these opinions by walter willett are based on the saturated fat content of meat there's no reason to single out meat over any other food containing saturated fat so why meat it's a good question and we'll come back to walter willett who has been so much on the forefront of promoting vegetarian or vegan diets how could all these authorities possibly be wrong i think that's a completely legitimate question and i think that it's important to remember here that nutrition science has been wrong in many big ways and it has something fundamentally to do with the fact that nutrition science is a difficult science to do but that is understandable but i think it also helps us to explain why have there been these these enormous flip-flops in nutrition science and let's just cover a few of these dietary cholesterol we were told to avoid dietary cholesterol in eggs and shellfish we were told that from 1980 to 2015 and then that recommendation was dropped by the u.s dietary guidelines they were wrong they simply said we don't have any evidence for this um the low-fat diet also recommended from 1970 starting with the american heart association and then picked up by the dietary guidelines in 1980 so for a very long time we were told to eat a low-fat diet but if you go on either of those authorities websites now and search low-fat those words cannot be found that diet is no longer officially recommend recommended that's a big flip-flop and again because there's no evidence for it it's also true that nutrition science has long been influenced by the food industry the pharmaceutical industry and other influences um and it has long relied as i said on weak science so this should just open up the possibility in your mind that every single expert in the world really believed that we should eat a low-fat diet and we should we should not eat cholesterol and now those authorities have changed their minds so could they be wrong on something else i think it is possible i'm going to mention another topic on which we have seen a massive shift in thinking in nutrition science which is saturated fats the kind of fats remember in meat dairy also in coconut oil and other foods um there are now in this paper there is a review of 17 meta-analyses on all the data unsaturated fats there are now 20 of these papers actually and their conclusion was diets that replace saturated fat with polyunsaturated fat do not convincingly reduce cardiovascular events or mortality we must consider that the diet heart hypothesis is invalid or requires modification the diet heart hypothesis as many of you know held that saturated fat and dietary cholesterol caused heart disease but here we have many many papers by independent teams of analysts around the world researchers looking at the original data on saturated fats and saying we got it wrong on this most recently there was a state-of-the-art review published in the prestigious journal of the american college of cardiology what's notable here is that three of these authors were members of former dietary guidelines expert committees so the people who make the recommendations at the highest levels and they concluded there's no robust evidence that current population wide arbitrary upper limits on saturated fat consumption in the u.s will prevent cardiovascular disease or reduce mortality so these are people saying we got this wrong and this paper was one of 100 papers chosen by the editor-in-chief of the journal of the american college of cardiology one of the 100 top papers of 2020 so it's an important paper and yet we see in the dietary guidelines that there remains a 10 of calories limit on saturated fats so that evidence has not trickled up to our top authorities but it has definitely changed among experts at the very highest level in the scientific community the science unsaturated fats is important because this is remember the reason from the start that we were told to avoid meat if scientists were wrong to vilify saturated fats as i think the science really now shows then our avoidance of meat based on this pillar of evidence really falls away we can no longer justifiably say there is good data to avoid red meat based on its saturated fat content but what about the other data that seems to demonstrate unhealthy effects of red meat all of that data is really comes from epidemiological or what's called observational studies and those are the kinds of studies that come out of the harvard school of public health that show associations one thing is associated with another smoking is associated with cancer but they do not show that one thing causes another they do not show cause and effect in order to have that kind of data you have to do a randomized controlled clinical trial you cannot get a pill from your doctor that has not gone through a controlled clinical trial but you can get dietary advice from your doctor that has not had the same level of evidence behind it what is the problem with associational data well the problem there are many problems there's difficulty in recalling the what you eat all of these studies rely on people writing down what they've eaten over the last year or the last few months and that data has been shown to be very unreliable there's also the problem of false positives so you see here the divorce rate in maine this shows it's perfectly correlated with the consumption of margarine does this mean that eating less margarine causes you to get divorced or does divorce cause you to eat margarine both of those are likely to be untrue but this is an association but not necessarily a cause and effect relationship here's another one another false positive that seems to show that internet use causes breast cancer is that the case or is there something about people who use the internet that are more likely to get breast cancer or is this just a random association again we can't know without a clinical trial so this data of associ this associational kind of data that comes from epidemiology um can be used sometimes to infer cause and effect when there's a strength of the association is very strong and i think the best example that people know of this is the one great success story that showed that smoking was so strongly associated with lung cancer that um it could causation could be inferred in that case heavy smokers had a 15 to 30 times greater risk of contracting lung cancer than did never smokers that is an enormous association and indeed causation was inferred from that by contrast what do we see in the data that seems to show that cancer is caused by red meat that data shows a 1.17 relative risk for fresh meat or cancer or 1.18 relative risk for processed meat and cancer so i mean we that number 1.17 has to be compared to 15 to 30 times greater risk that we see with smoking and lung cancer these are tiny numbers and it is generally agreed in the field of epidemiology with the exception of nutritional epidemiology that these numbers when they are below 2 or 3 are are really unreliable um and there's a whole literature on on what's called confounding it's just not clear that you can make the assumption that it's the red meat that is having this impact on cancer or if it's something else that a red red meat eater does like red meat eaters are known to way more do less exercise they have a number of health behaviors that may be the cancer causing elements of their behavior and diet but it may not be the red meat and because that number is so small it makes that association unreliable so where are the rigorous data on red meat where is that clinical trial data that i was talking about that can show cause and effect you can see this is a pyramid of evidence and randomized controlled trials are near the top just below systematic reviews the first attempt to look at all of the data on red meat both the observational data and the clinical trial data occurred in 2019 with this group that did a gr what's called a grade review of red meat grade stands for um you can see this long um title here but grade is a way of evaluating evidence that i just want to explain what they do they look at all the evidence and they grade it hence great so they look at randomized controlled trials those trials start towards the top of the pyramid but they look at them very closely are they biased can we trust the outcomes they look at through a number of criteria if they're high quality they will be graded up a point if they're low quality they will be graded down a point and the same is done for observational studies so it allows them to look at the quality of the evidence so there was a grade review of all the data on red meat and this is what it found there were a number of papers that came out in the annals of internal medicine a very prestigious um academic journal in 2019 this first one looks at red and processed meat and cancer mortality it was a review of the epidemiological data and it found that um the certainty of the evidence was low to very low and the effects were the the effect was very small so just to say a tiny amount of evidence with not much certainty here is red meat intake and cardio metabolic and cancer outcomes again these are the clinical trials cardiometabolic stands for the indicators that are looking at both heart disease and also um metabolism having to do with diabetes outcomes um so again little or no effect um and low to very low certainty evidence so we really don't know another paper on all-cause mortality and cardiometabolic outcomes looking again at the observational evidence evidence is of low certainty and there's a very small amount of it so uh altogether at the end of all this analysis they came out with a guideline and they said that's part of the grade process and they came out and they said because the evidence is of such low quality and of low certainty and because there's so little of it we advise uh basically doing what you would like to do they care about what they call patient preference but it is what the you know what you as a individual public citizen would like to do and they don't what they're saying is there's not enough strong evidence to suggest anything to the contrary it is what we would call a weak recommendation because there's not strong evidence to say anything else and just to show you that this group of authors is not alone in its conclusion here are a couple of other studies systematic reviews of all the clinical trials on red meat and heart disease and they come to very similar conclusions um here's uh one that says we we searched all the controlled trials and it has they have the red meat has no influence on blood lipids and lipoproteins or blood pressure basically no effect so in conclusion i think we can say there is no strong evidence currently that red or processed meats cause ill health or um the flip side of that statement which is that avoiding these meats there's no evidence that this will improve health um i want to shift now and talk about why it is we might be able to say that red mean is good for health why should you eat red meat um and i think there are actually um quite strong arguments that have to do with its nutritional content which is something we rarely talk about but meat contains b vitamins including b12 iron zinc selenium and other vitamins and minerals and its form of iron importantly is called heme iron which is highly bioavailable means it is easily absorbed by humans when they eat it even the dietary guidelines advisory committee report um the one that is was led by vegetarians um said that the highest source of iron from natural foods are clearly organ meats um which we don't really eat very much nowadays but is traditional in almost every culture that has been studied because it contains so many vitamin minerals including heme iron and it's important to note that red meat beef particularly contains twice the amount of iron per serving as lean white meat so there is an argument there for eating red meat that has to do with its nutritional content remember that we need nutrients every day we need them not just one once a month we need them every day to maintain our health our immunity our strong everything about our health depends on getting all the vitamins and minerals that we need and we have a problem in america we have shortages of these nutrients this is not only a third world problem this is a problem right here at home iron is under consumed and this is all information from the 2020 dietary guidelines advisory committee iron is under consumed or a public health concern for for many women ages 12 through 49 including pregnant women which is a serious issue because iron deficiency can be a problem in uh if you don't have enough you can't have a healthy baby and that is also true of vitamin b12 which is also a nutrient of consumed or under consumed under consumed by women of almost all ages and protein is also under consumed by older adults and adolescent girls which we'll talk about that the importance of protein in a minute vitamin b12 a lack of it has been shown to be quite worrisome babies who don't receive enough b12 in the womb run the risk of developing dangerous defects um having a child with potentially disabling or fatal birth defect problems with their nervous systems problems with digestion and growth problems with neurological and behavioral disorders i mean this is all very scary and it's very important to know that not all people can absorb vitamin b12 in its supplemental form so many people uh can only absorb it from animal foods and so it's essential actually that they be eating red meat or organ meats or some other form of b12 it also is rich there are many sources from shellfish clams i think are the highest in vitamin b12 protein getting a a good source of protein is also very important uh as we saw protein is under consumed by important groups in america and clearly lean beef or beef this is um illustration that i didn't make but is a very efficient way to get a complete protein you have only 154 calories in three ounces of beef and compared to the amount of calories that you have to eat in peanut butter or black beans quinoa or edamame and it's also important to note that a legume or bean source of protein has to be paired with a starch like rice in order to get the full complement of amino acids that are essential in protein and you have to eat them at the same time so actually the calories needed here would be higher probably for black beans you have to have that with rice you have to add in the rice calories so that's not very a very calorically efficient way of getting the protein that you need there have been a few experiments looking at what happens when you supplement the diets of children with meat this is a reporting on a paper children on meat-free diets suffer impaired growth vegetarian diet harms children's growth these articles came out in the same day about one study and it showed that just two spoonfuls of meat a day given to children on a vegetarian diet could produce a dramatic and permanent improvement in their physical and mental development that is quite striking even when they were adolescents these children who were fed as vegans when they were still young still had delayed development or permanently impaired development that is from this study here that you can see by lindsay allen if you want to follow up and look at that there's also just no evidence for a meat-free diet this is a recent systematic review by the respected cochrane group which found there's there's currently no information about the effects of a vegan diet on cardiovascular disease outcome why do we not hear about this important information that article from the independent was from some years ago and i see fewer and fewer articles talking about the nutritional value of meat we seem to have almost a daily or weekly um pulse of articles that are very negative about meat and i want to talk about why that space is shrinking for this conversation first of all i think it is not too strong a word to say that there is a kind of silencing of studies that have results that are positive or even neutral for meat this would be inconvenient results for those who are promoting vegetarian diets so let's go back and look at what happened when the papers on red meat came out in the annals of internal medicine well before they even came out there was a letter from a group of that is a vegan or vegetarian advocacy group saying this these papers should not even be published they should be pulled from the journal before publication and it was signed by a fairly long list of people which we'll talk about later and they said what were their reasons um they said it was potentially damaging misinformation we do so on the basis of grave concerns about the potential for damage to public understanding and public health in other words it was too damaging even to hear about this science which is really antithetical to good science which is to say science is fueled by uh observations and dissent and discussion to remove it and say it's dangerous is to say we want we don't want any debate on this issue we we think that is dangerous even to talk about it this true health initiative group also claimed that these grade analyses had excluded two studies now that is a more serious concern and i looked into that um one of the studies was called pretty med which is the large study on the mediterranean diet conducted in spain and so if you look at that study you'll see here that red and processed meats which is highlighted that they were not there was not statistically different consumption between the control group and the intervention groups so they did not test any differences in red meat so this this study cannot be said to have tested red meat the other study was the diabetes prevention program i took a look at that this is the original paper that came out of that program and there was just simply no information on red meat at all i looked through all the supplementary information perhaps there was a subsequent article with more dietary information but i have not i have yet to find it so these papers were correctly omitted it seems from these analysis in the annals of internal medicine but that was not the end of the response to these papers it it became a sort of storm of controversy um at first there was a measured article in the new york times about the paper that seemed to be fairly even-handed by the journalist gina colada but then there were there was sort of a raft of stories that said actually the principal author of these papers that he had conflicts with the meat and food industry according to this article by the new york times which we see here strange meat and food industry not industries we'll see why that particular phrasing is used um this is a similar article that came out in the washington post there's another article by the washington post i include this just to show that it seems to me that when the um media wants to pile on against me they use the most offensive possible pictures that they can find but what was the accusation against bradley johnston the lead author it said that he had received money from ilse north america ilse is a well-known it's a non-profit but really it is a it's a group that is funded entirely by large multinational corporations in the food and pharmaceutical industry and they had indeed given bradley johnston money to write a different paper on sugar and he had accepted that money but that was for a different paper it really had nothing to do with the meat paper um this these are the members of illc you can see that they're mainly companies that would be very interested in a paper that shows that sugar is not bad for health but there's only a couple of companies in here that care anything about meat but in any case it's irrelevant because the money given to him was for the sugar paper so it was disappointing to see this coverage of him about a conflict of interest really that had nothing to do with the meat paper and i think that i don't know if this was conscious or unconscious but there is certainly a tradition in nutrition science of accusing an author or scientist of being motivated by corporate interests of some kind accusing somebody of having financial motives this goes back to ancel keys many of you know him a physiologist at the university of minnesota who was responsible for the original diet heart hypothesis on saturated fat and cholesterol and many other things but he would use this tactic against people who challenged him so john yudkin who famously suggested that maybe it wasn't fat but perhaps sugar that caused heart disease keys responded yudkin and his commercial backers unnamed but clearly impugning his motives um he continues to sing the same discredited tune of course it's important to point out that sometimes these accusations are true many if not most nutrition scientists are taking money from industry sometimes disclosing it and sometimes not and these conflicts are problematic in that they can undermine the integrity of research so pointing out these real conflicts of interest is legitimate to increase transparency in science but false accusations that are designed simply to defame a researcher's reputation are just something entirely different walter willett who is one of the letter signers extended the campaign against these annals papers by presenting at multiple conferences this image here he's showing his disinformation triangle which features gina collada because she wrote i guess a balance story in the new york times and big beef is on here because one of the other authors on these papers had a very distant tie to the beef industry at texas a m again trying to show that there were financial motives rather than pure scientific motives as a way of undermining these papers another tactic that is used is um i think unsavory but i i think we can all recognize it with the ad hominem attack which is just any kind of criticism that you can think of to try to undermine somebody's credibility and again let's go back to ansel keys who is one of the original um people to create the dynamics that we see in the nutrition science world today uh and here he is criticizing raymond reiser who is a very esteemed professor at texas a m in the uh this is i think in the 1970s riser dr riser had criticized the diet heart hypothesis that ansel keyes was promoting and ansel queues response in um more than 20 pages in the american journal clinical nutrition includes all kinds of just flat out insults a hall of jokes at the country fair typical distortion riser pompously states obviously riser has no comprehension those are extremes are not necessary for the scientific argument that keys is trying to make there they are ad hominem i have also been the victim of ad hominem attacks um particularly by david katz who is the head of the true health initiative that group that went after bradley johnston and his papers i have been called a parasite of science great peril to us all i am a part of a cabal a band of wingnuts living in their mother's basements um just like you know that i'm not in my mother's basement and then perhaps the worst she's an animal unlike anything i've ever seen before he told a guardian reporter a number of doctors objected to that at yale university and um he was actually written up in the yale daily news about this comment that he had made about me uh the guardian thankfully reported also that the reporter had followed up on whether i was in fact an animal unlike anything that anyone had seen before and could find no instances of my unprofessional behavior but um this is uh common in nutrition science i'm i'm reluctant and sad to say and again walter willett it is a tactic that he has used as well he when he did not like a study that came out by a respected scientist 30 years working as an epidemiologist at the u.s national center for health and statistics didn't like her study called it a pile of rubbish and no one should be wasting their time reading it for which the editors of the magazine nature rebuked him and said that this was not behavior fitting of a scientist so we've been talking about strategies that are used to try to diminish or discredit science that contradicts one's beliefs science that is inconvenient for those who are actively promoting vegan or vegetarian or quasi-vegetarian diets the idea that red meat is not harmful is one of those dangerous ideas and that's why we see a number of efforts or tactics really to diminish that science or discredit the people who are talking about the science or publishing it another tactic that is used to convince the public of one's ideas in this case the idea that a vegan or vegetarian diet is ideal for health is to repeat that idea over and over and over again as much as possible this is known as the big lie strategy and i had not really heard of this idea until recently but when i look around at the constant pulse of information about meat i think that perhaps this is one of the stratagems that is used to try to just make it seem commonplace we know we must all know that red meat is bad for health and here again is the true health initiative website which is saying we agree we all know we all agree repeated often enough it becomes the truth we also see a kind of effort to stigmatize anybody who questions or challenges the nutritional dogma as deniers a denier is a terrible thing to be you don't want to deny the science but here it is an entry in wikipedia saying those who do not believe that statins are the best drug for heart disease it is a form of statin denialism um here are cholesterol deniers group of scientists who've been challenging the conventional wisdom on cholesterol well in fact there are many scientists who have all kinds of debates about ldl and hdl and total cholesterol and what means what is the most effective for predicting heart disease but that debate is effectively shut down when there's this kind of um criticism of it or nobody wants to be a denier an anti-vaxxer a denier is to seem like you're irrational i do think there's also an effort to characterize meat eating as being part of the non-progressive right wing ideology you can see there's a lot of coverage i've noticed this i may be wrong but there's a lot of coverage again this is possibly the most unpleasant photograph you can imagine but to you know to associate red meat eating with right wing um non-progressives who just don't care anything about the climate and um and here we see another one in the atlantic jordan peterson well-known right-wing figure conservative there is has it become a disorder eating meat eating only beef as he does which he does for health reasons as his daughter has does his daughter here's the new yorker americans eat three hamburgers a week so serving beef at your cookout is as patriotic as buying a gun what could paint more perfectly the picture of a right-wing republican than a gun and this is maybe the second line into the piece um and you know climate change duh so again right wing climate denying denying the science this is all part of the red meat story as painted by the media which completely ignores the the issues of children the issue of growth healthy growth reproduction the fact that red meat is often a food that people need to eat in order to be healthy i know many people liberal democrats living right by harvard who who find that red meat has cured their autoimmune diseases or helped them to overcome mental health diseases it has nothing to do with the last thing they would do is be carrying guns but those are not the perceptions that are reflected in the media and i think that there is some intentionality to that on the environmental issues that meat is the major cause of global warming this is not an area where i'm an expert but i have followed the debate somewhat and i've seen again the media focusing on these really enormously high numbers that meat is responsible for 20 50 of all of greenhouse gases and this is a graph that reflects information that came out of the epa under the obama administration showing that livestock represents only two percent of global greenhouse gases um and is completely dwarfed by other sources of um of those gases i think a more recent report puts that at four percent but still is is is tiny compared to the numbers that are so generally um thrown about and talked about um in the public debate i want to shift gears a little bit and talk about what are the motivations that might be fueling these efforts against meat where do they come from what are the interests and let's start with the true health initiative because that group really has been out on the forefront at least with respect to these papers that came out on meat and that group is led by david katz the one who called me an animal you see him pictured here the harvard school of public health walter willett signed that letter and four other members of his um school and then the physicians committee for responsible medicine which is led by neil barnard signed the letter he was the second signer i believe and dean ornish whom many of you know he is um a diet book uh author and and does a number of other things so what are their interests well the true health initiative is promotes a generally plant predominant diet so a near vegan diet and we'll go into a little bit more about their sources of funding walter willett he is has continually been publishing findings against red meat as i said earlier we did an analysis of that and found um 78 findings that red media is associated with a negative health outcome between 1983 and 2019 these are 78 different papers and 130 papers saying that vegetarian or mostly vegetarian diets are associated with a positive health outcome i don't know what walter willett's motivations are but i think it is notable that there is a tremendous amount of uh money going into the harvard school of public health that has an interest in removing meat from the table these are would be the sources of protein such as nuts that might replace meat the peanut institute walnut commission frozen fruits and vegetables would benefit from it all of these groups have donated quite a bit of money to the harvard school of public health it's hard to know these numbers there is not much transparency about the exact amount that has been given here is something called uh the new val company that was started by david katz um and i'm just this was a business venture that was food labeling that was adopted by superman supermarkets it's now defunct but i just want to show you that these commercial ventures um this and another one that i'll show you have involved many of the people who signed the letters um dr david jenkins was part of that team and also dr willett was part of new val diet id is david katz's current company and again here we see many of the letter signers are also involved in this venture christopher gardner walter willett david jenkins in there again university of toronto if it were up to me i would have everyone embrace a vegan diet says david jenkins dean ornish is known for his many diet books but less well known is that he his diet program is the only one that is reimbursed for by medicare if you are someone with cardiovascular disease and want a lifestyle uh choice solution rather than surgery so he has franchise programs all over the country that um put people through the ornish program it's quite i'm sure a big and lucrative company um so that is also an interest that is involved here and again i'm not saying that these are the dominant motivating forces behind these people's lives but it is significant that there are major financial interests at stake the physicians committee for responsible medicine one of the other letter signers is i believe an animal rights group um primarily and so this is a a compilation by a blogger on the evidence for the fact that physicians committee for responsible medicine has a long history and is involved in animal rights issues so it's hard to know are they working towards animal rights or are they working towards human human health those things may not always be compatible so it's just hard to know what the motives are there and one other the seventh day adventist church i know this may be coming out of nowhere for many people but it is a church that believes and has as one of its primary missions for all of its members that people must give up animal foods to achieve salvation and that is all people must give give up animal food so they have an evangelism that is focused on converting people to vegetarianism or veganism it is the group that founded something called the christian association of lifestyle medicine 2002 2003 and then they changed the name to the american college of lifestyle medicine but still a church-backed group with nine board members one of whom was walter willett if you want to read more about the incredible power of the seventh-day adventist church and its influence on nutrition science and also the nutrition the food industry you should look up some of the videos by belinda fettke who has researched this in quite a lot of depth it's also important to know that the academy of nutrition and dietetics had its roots in the seventh-day adventist church here's the american college of lifestyle medicine which is the group that is um still backed by the seventh-day adventist church and here are um the letter signers that are prominent members of this group board of advisors the former president was david katz i don't know if they're seventh-day adventists um and maybe that their interests converge but it is another source of um it is another conflict of interest a religious conflict of interest how strange in the world of nutrition and there is such a thing as big carb which are many many companies that are promoting carbs and if you get rid of meat for dinner what do you have instead you have maybe pasta so the burrilla pasta company which is the biggest pasta company in the world not only are they involved in promoting pasta and their product they also came up with this double pyramid idea um that is quite compelling and it shows that to save the planet what you really need to do the most important thing you can do is to get rid of red meat this double pyramid campaign was extensive involving presentations all over america and it seems clear that characterizing red meat as a threat to both health and the planet makes way for all the products that might replace meat not only pasta but also rice cereals and other grains nuts legumes beans we can see all these food companies and their interests lined up pretty clearly with the meatless mondays project in the united states which promotes abstaining from meat one day a week for health and environmental reasons yet it's also backed by this long list of companies that stand to profit when meat is removed this page is no longer available these are screenshots but you can see the serious financial conflicts of interest that significantly muddy the waters about what meatless mondays is all about is it for people for the children for the planet or is it for these corporate interests getting back to the true health initiative we see that their partners include a plantrician project which is a promotes a plant-based diet no beef which aims to eliminate beef altogether and now this makes more sense to see their founders the american college of lifestyle medicine seventh-day adventist group the german college of lifestyle medicine the european college of lifestyle medicine all part of the seventh-day adventist church and barilla pasta um and corn now a fake meat company so there is this just incredible overlap and convergence of different kinds of interests that are all coming together to promote a vegetarian or vegan diet and eliminate beef if you want to learn more about this i highly suggest this article by the journal of the american medical association a journalist called rita rubin she did quite a good job of covering the story of what happened when the annals of internal medicine papers came out and i think this is a particularly interesting quote where she says the editor-in-chief of the annals paper said her inbox was flooded with roughly 2 000 emails most bore the same message apparently generated by a bot and she said the tone of the emails was particularly caustic she said we the response from the national rifle association was less vitriolic than the response from the true health initiative that is quite something it shows you the fervor the passion whether it be religious commercial individual genuine concern for human health we don't know but there's certainly passion behind this movement we now see this at a global level so the proposed global diet the reference diet for the entire world uh came out first published in the lancet magazine it was called eat lancet eat referred to the supporting group and it it was the head of the commission that produced this was walter willett again and this paper proposed um the eat lancet as the diet for all uh and what did it recommend red meat you could have 30 calories a day or about 1.2 percent of your calories i think that's like this much red meat size of a quarter and instead your diet would be dominated by grains 811 calories a day sugar 120 calories a day and 14 of your calories could come from seed oils the eat group is led by a norwegian billionaire gunhild stordalen and she and her group funded almost everything around this paper it was also funded by a group called fresh which i think was mainly involved in funding because of the rollout and the pr around the eat lancet paper and you can see the group here it is a formidable group of food companies pharmaceutical companies this is notably this group includes google it's there's various different motives that are at work here um we'll just talk about a few of them they maybe do want to save the planet or they want to i guess it's called green washing they want to appear that they're saving the planet they will have market share that opens up to them if meat and dairy are eliminated that opens up new markets for them and this is something that is spoken about within their internal corporate documents that i've read because processed foods are of course high profit foods and the in general the food industry doesn't grow very much but all of a sudden if there's a giant market for vegetarian vegan foods this is an enormous opportunity for them as we've already seen with all the ersatz burger companies that have come out with tremendous valuations this will also allow them if they succeed in replacing real meat with uh fake meat they will own the technology to create that food so we will be at uh at their behest in in being able to um to obtain the food that we need and by focusing on meat i think it's fair to say that it alleviates and diverts our attention away from other greenhouse gas producers which are actually contribute much more to the problem i mean oil gas airlines industrial pollution these are all potent contributors to greenhouse gases again i'm not saying that i know what motivates these companies but i'm saying these motivations exist and all of this is being fueled by the world economic forum which is uh it was founded with davos and they want to have what's called the great food transformation where we will all shift to this new way of eating these new kinds of foods these new food replacements and uh this is something that is part of the great reset um that we are supposed to undertake now um and if you want to read more about this i really suggest that you follow dr frederick leroy who is a professor at the university in brussels and he has done just a tremendous job of writing in a in a rigorous academic way about the various interests that work here and the various corporations involved and and the actors i highly suggest you read more about that this eat lancet diet has now been adopted by the united nations and has really sort of flung itself into this interpretation of the problem which is that meat is the worst thing that we could possibly have for the environment the most urgent problem and it has named these fake meat companies impossible foods and beyond me as the winners of the champions of the earth category and coming up in september is a food system summit this is just incredibly important to know about because this is now an effort to take this eat lancet paper and convert it into policy and this is action track two of the food system summit and we see here that it is chaired by um gunhild sterdalan of eat and its corporate partner is the good food institute which is a trade association for the lab meat companies as far as i know nobody from an alternative viewpoint has been invited to speak or participate at this conference and it is almost entirely populated by um groups that share the belief that we should be converting to a vegetarian or a vegan diet and and this is a very uh nobody elected these people it's not a democratic process it has the backing of this entire group of of companies that i showed you earlier so it's neither democratic nor is it really um being led by citizens and scientists it is a is a top-down approach and i think that we cannot underestimate what this might lead to so it's important to educate ourselves and know uh that this is happening um google as you'll remember was one of those companies that is supporting this effort and he uh the leader of google is involved um he bankrolled the world's first synthetic beef hamburger so he has a commercial finance and financial interest in this diet as do many of the other people involved here um jeff bezos bill gates richard branson i think maybe there's nothing more ironic than somebody who runs an airline being against meat um you can't eat meat but you can uh fly a plane um and these people have a tremendous influence on media and and and what is spoken about so again when we talk about why do we not see more or hear more about these issues and why we don't see them on on youtube owned by google why we don't see them uh in well let's just go to this next slide why do we not why do we not see them in the washington post because jeff maybe because jeff bezos who's invested in this technology owns the washington post here you see the washington post is a near-constant drum beat of articles that support uh impossible burgers or one of the other plant-based burgers most recently bill gates has come out saying he thinks we should start eating 100 synthetic beef that is a big part of his new book on the environment and he has quite a lot of money to throw at that it problem should he want to he made i think 20 billion dollars in the last year alone this is just a reality check if red meat causes global warming it is not reflected in our consumption data we eat 28 percent less red meat in terms of calories than we did in 1970 we 35 percent less beef 10 percent less pork veal mutton lamb decreased by nearly 80 percent this is us government data on it's the best data that we have on meat consumption meat availability follows the same decrease so we just have not been eating more red meat we eat a lot more of his poultry and chicken but in this same time period obesity diabetes have rocketed out of control and it is clearly not red meat that is causing these issues another reality check on the vegan diet which is that although we see constantly how very very popular it is the reality is that people who are vegan superstars cannot stay on this diet people whose entire careers depend on this diet they cannot stay on it this was a very interesting article that showed that among vegan leaders who had hundreds of thousands of followers on youtube channels and were making an extraordinary living off of this would never have given up their diet had it not been for serious health issues 32 of them had quit according to this analysis because it was not sustainable and there are deeply wrenching stories about people losing their health on the vegan diet this is a slide just to show you to remind you uh what you're told in grade school you must read your history lest we be doomed to repeat ourselves as we we almost inevitably are but this is our history human beings evolved eating red meat domesticating animals in order to have convenient sources of meat um we this is human history in every civilization and really going back to the evolution of humans to our earliest times i think the paleo anthropological literature is full of evidence that humans evolve to eat meat i think it's clear that as humans we can evolve in our thinking on sociology politics economics many different subjects but we cannot evolve beyond our biology and our biology requires us to eat animal foods according to all the evidence that we have before us so we abandon our biology at our peril and so i conclude my talk on red meat and politics i hope that you found it interesting please feel free to send me any questions i'm sure there will be much to question and ask and debate over these topics and i welcome any kind of discussion or dissent thank you [Music]

Channel: Low Carb Down Under

Views: 223,167

Keywords: Low Carb Down Under, LCDU, www.lowcarbdownunder.com.au, Nina Teicholz, Big Fat Surprise, Nutrition Coalition, Red Meat, Nutrition, Vegan, Plant Based, Impossible Burger, EAT-Lancet, Seventh Day Adventist, Walter Willet, David Katz, Carnivore, Low Carb Healthy Fat

Id: GNRo-IbQ1Jo

Length: 58min 5sec (3485 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 24 2021