Nina Teicholz - 'The Real Food Politics'

so we'll just get started what are the politics really this is really a talk to answer the question that I think so many people have which is wow this diet works so well why is everybody against it why does you know what is mine why does nobody support me and what I'm doing so it's a really amazing story so it really I wanted to say that the the idea of food politics really started with meri Nestle an NYU professor who wrote this fantastic book and it really introduced me to the world of food politics and her whole book was around this idea that oh the food industry influences what happens in dietary policy which like seems like a really obvious idea but this book really sort of gave a lot of very concrete examples and brought that to life unfortunately marion Nestle exclusively blames the meat dairy and egg industries for everything that's gone wrong and why does she do that well we all know I think most of us know that's because we've been told that those are the industries that produce the foods that that make us give us heart disease right this is the answer keys hypothesis going back to 1961 and and saturated fat and tireder cholesterol raise your blood cholesterol and clog your arteries give you a heart attack that was the idea and that was adopted by the American Heart Association in 1961 so that's been a long-standing hypothesis that everybody believes in and this is the hypothesis upon which our dietary guidelines in the United States are based right and I don't know how many of you have seen this chart this is a chart that you could pretty much replicate in any country in the world which is the Dietary Guidelines began and that was the beginning of our obesity epidemic that is not explained by those old food politics right it really is curious I mean it when the dietary guidelines came into being people started having low fat milk lean meat I mean they really started shifting their food consumption that all cattle was bred to be leaner I mean it really changed the whole food supply but even so the this is still the interpretation of kind of the old food politics and this is you know the American Heart Association and the Center for Science in the Public Interest which is a sort of advocacy group in the US and Mary nestled her food politics still blame everything on the meat and dairy and egg industries well is that supported by any evidence at all I mean this is consumption of red meat in America since the dietary guidelines weird red meat beef is down by 35% consumption red meats down by 28% overall all the red meats are down the whites the white meat the white supposedly healthier meat that's up and if you look at all food categories actually American I did this chart in for the Canadian food consumption a couple of European countries as well and and it really is extraordinary that people really have been following the guidelines to an amazing degree all those blue lines are things we've been told to eat more of more fresh vegetables more fresh fruits 35% more fruit 28% more grains we eat almost 90 percent more vegetable oils like we've been told and everything we were told to decrease we've decreased so you know one of the arguments you commonly hear is that the reason you're all fat and sick is that you fail to follow the guidelines but this is just completely contradicted by that evidence so you know the old the food politics that have kind of existed today really just are have no connection to the actual evidence so enter the new thinking on nutrition and disease you know many of you know these books Gary Taubes is of course the one who really started it all and then there's been a lot of work since him and there was actually a lot of work before Gary as well and this is just a sort of I just like to show you know the the number of people who have contributed to this new thinking it's really been a tremendous effort on the part of many people so there's some old people and some new people here but it's really to show that this is this this new thinking has been on the rise and this new thinking posits that really we have to turn the food pyramid upside down right and this is a direct threat to the existing food pyramid so you know I have to put this slide up just to show you know there is a tremendous amount of evidence for the fact that low-carb is something that works there are longer this was actually old there's almost a hundred randomized controlled clinical trials which is the gold standard of evidence showing that the diet is safe there are three trials lasting two years which is considered that's what the duration that you need to have a trial to show if there's any negative side effects and there aren't any and it really shows that those diets are safe and highly effective for really a number of chronic diseases so you would think AHA this is it we've discovered the holy grail we should be welcomed with open arms this is the most promising solution we have to curing these incredibly crushing diseases and we can't wait for everybody to welcome us with open arms instead this is what we find like just across the board so why is that this is our age that we are living in now which is a new food politics which is really aimed to defend the status quo and I want to explain why you know obviously there's a defense of the status quo but I just want to kind of break it out for you and show you what that status quo looks like and why it's so well defended one is that there is just an extraordinary institutional investment on the part of all of our major public health institutions so you know the NIH in our country is very closely allied with the American Heart Association since they were both really founded in Nice since 1948 they've had all the same leaders and all interlocking executive executive director it's all these groups have been supporting the dietary guidelines for you know 60 years right so they are very invested and I really believe there's something like you know there is something where institutions and science like institutional science is kind of an oxymoron right and in science you really need to be one of the tenets of scientists to be self-doubting and self questioning and never to be sure of your own ideas and to if there are new observations to sit you know shift your your hypothesis institutions how many of you have tried to change an institution like they're really open to change so they are you know and they they can't be they can't be flip-flopping on their publics they can't you know they can't lose the public trust they can't say oh we got it wrong on cholesterol and fat and saturated fat so it's very hard to change institutions there's also just a tremendous amount of cognitive dissonance among professors and in institutions to changing their ideas I mean this is now three generations of scientists who have staked their careers and really many of them especially earlier on I think really truly passionately wholeheartedly believed in their hypotheses really to fellow sort of fell in love with their hypotheses I think there is really now less plausible deniability given the evidence but but still these they're there's a tremendous risk in saying you know my entire career has been wrong there's also a lot of cognitive dissonance for doctors and this is this is a story that many of you doctors know where people go to doctors this is these are screenshots taken from a wales BBC documentary that was done last year where this journalist goes to this doctor and he says i want to go in a high high fat low carb diet which is fine and won't do your blood work and we'll measure your belly and after three weeks on the diet he goes back door he's measured again he's lost six kilograms and his cholesterol is down and he's like he says you don't know it's not just my weight I feel great and did it and she says to him great but beware of the dangers of this diet and let's not overlook at the fact that there's so often the case you know she herself would probably benefit from low carb high fat and yet there's just this incredible block about you know seeing what's right before you so so what else so there's you know an also big pharma against a nutritional solution big pharma you know had its most basic level they make money from people being sick and they give them pills and if you get them off pills they no longer have an income dream there's also all the statin drugs that are rely on the idea that lowering your LDL is is meaningful to prevent heart attack risk so so therefore according to them lowering your LDL through diet is which is achieved by having by cutting out saturated fat and possibly fat overall lowering your your saturated fat has a similar effect and so they're very invested in the the anti saturated fat hypothesis and this is just an interesting fact for you to know even though whatever you want to say about statins and whether or not you believe a statin data lowering LDL by diet in diet trials has never been shown to prevent cardiovascular mortality or risk maybe it works with drugs but it's never been shown to work with diet so it's the drug data that's being applied to our diet data which is which is just it's not legitimate in any way okay so we also know about the influence of big food often people think when they first come to me and they say well isn't it just the big food companies and well of course big food has a role to play I mean they make this junk food and and they are all sponsoring and supporting all of those the professional medical associations and the dietitians associations and heart association's they're all the major sponsors so they are they're very they're clearly trying to maintain guidelines that support their products and I mean there's just no question about that these are the ones that are sort of the standard whipping boys and the candy companies but you know it's not just them it's also you know big grain big soy big corn I mean the American Soybean Association is a huge powerhouse in the US and in other places and actually one of the things that you've seen in all of our guidelines recently is that it's they're recommending more and more not just soybean oil but now soy products have managed to sneak their way into the protein category so now they're recommending soy products as a legitimate way to get your protein so all these companies are involved and of course the vegetable oil companies some small little minor players in the world stage ADM Monsanto Unilever Unilever and bungee fund a lot of the science at Harvard Harvard is responsible for most of the papers coming out in the last couple of years insisting that polyunsaturated fats are better than than saturated fats Unilever and Bunge also fund tufts who are saying the same thing and this is just an example of Nestle which has some companies are perfectly vertically integrated Nestle makes you know they started off with sweetened milk for babies to replace replaced breast milk it's sweetened with sugar and so they have all the products to get you fat and now they have all the products once you're fat and obese that you can used to try to lose weight on there are these other products with soy flavor isolates so they have a kind of cradle to death model so um but you know I have to say that ultimately I blame the experts ultimately its these are the people who sit on the expert committees every country has a committee like this where experts from universities sit on a committee and sort through the science and say this is what the science says and these are the people who are responsible for deciding ok this thought this this study is not legitimate because it's funded by a vegetable oil company or this is or this I mean they're the ultimate gatekeepers and they should be the ones who are the guardians our republic health well who's a this is Alice Lichtenstein funded by Bunge who is from Tufts and she I have cheese I have a on her on the record saying you know that saturated fat limit that we have we just pulled it out of thin air there's no data for that number for the 7% or 8% or 9% limit on saturated fats but she is vehemently all her life anti saturated fats that's Frank who over there on the right of that other picture he's Harvard funded by Unilever and Bunge he's one of the people who publishes all the papers constantly saying that polyunsaturated fats are better than saturated fats he was in charge of this saturated fat review for the dietary guidelines and the last go around so I mean these are the people that are making these decisions and and they're not we're they're obviously not you know unbiased so now we're just want to talk a little bit about you know what are the time we are the barbarians at the gate sort of saying hey you know you're not this is not good science and what are the tactics that are used to prevent us from being part of this conversation from trying to change things you know they're they're really some many of the tactics that are taken straight out of the tobacco industry playbook so one of them is to really to put in efforts to portray the science is settled it is settled we all agree we have a these are these are people who have consensus conferences and they they come out with statements it's the true health initiative led by David Katz supposedly from Yale and you know they have hundreds of doctors and people saying you know we agree and we are right and stop listening to those people who are just confusing the public and and this is a very but these are all this is very powerful group many of these are vegetarians whom you'll see later in the lecture so and they will also attack people with different ideas so David Katz again there he is supposedly from Yale he's written a number of columns going after me and he was quoted in The Guardian telling reporters she is an animal unlike anything I've ever seen before you know it's actually a tactic they used in the Nazis use you know anybody uses to try to demonize people that you know just sort of create parallels with small rodent animals anyway and we all know Gary Taubes is a blowhard so um that was by some bloggers who also blogs against me so you can also blame your opponents of being motivated by Ansel keys oh well and I wanted to say like this is something that really goes but the tactics being used today any of them really go back to the very early days of nutrition science with Ancel keys and and his colleagues who there's a chapter in my book which I call the sharp elbows of nutrition science which was sort of a nice way of saying what they were incredible bullies these men were they really bullied people and so they this is keys talking about you'd Ken you can of course had the opposing theory that maybe it wasn't fat that caused her disease maybe it was sugar and so he's recognized that as a threat to his own hypothesis and went about very systematically criticizing and and kind of demonizing good Kenan and sort of battering him to the edges of the field and it's the same thing today you know any of us who come out not just me I mean I'm talking you know also academics if they come out if they were to say anything there that would be slightly controversial they might find an article popping up about their funding from this industry or from that industry anybody who writes a book are accused of you know seeking home doing what we do only for book sales because as we all know it's a really great financial model to spend ten years writing a book there's like with no vacations or anyway so and again so it's ansel key to pioneered this tactic and this is a really truly amazing example Theodore Reiser who's a Texas A&M professor he wrote a really thoughtful interesting critique of the saturated fat hypothesis in 1973 and answer keys wrote a 28-page reply that was published by the American journalist a Clinical Nutrition which just shows you how influential a scientist he was you know normally you get your letter to the editor is like 200 words his is 28 pages just filled with these unbelievable slender's things that should not be in the pages of any medical journal as far as I'm concerned so what is another tactic well silencing the voices of low carb I mean I think many of you know a lot of these cases I mean Jennifer Elliot from dietitian from New South Wales was ejected from your dieticians Society for when she started writing and talking about low carb gary fed key of course he's orthopedic surgeon Tasmania and he was once he started talking about low-carb the authorities came down on him and threatened to take away his medical license and said he was never allowed to talk about nutrition again ever and one of the points that the complaint made was that he had inappropriately reversed a case of diabetes shame on him and of course you know vet quite well-known professor Tim Noakes who you know truly highly respected sports medicine professor who waded into the field of nutrition although he had taken on many battles in his life including against all of you know Gatorade drinks he never experienced the the the politics of being in the food field which was so much worse and he due to a tweak a single tweet that he said where it was safe to put a wean a baby on two low-carb high-fat was taken on by the professional association threatened to have his medical license taken away has gone through an arduous three-year long trial which ultimately he was found not guilty of trying to kill babies and and Karen's in our own lovely Karen's in who just spoke here she's also had increased from the New Zealand I think dietitians Association oh sorry Australia dietitian Association you not eat country and and only because she's clearly so lovely and charming has she been able to escape that but you know silencing the science has again also has a long history silencing the science has been done not only by external people but also by the scientists themselves who simply cannot believe their own studies it's called selection bias as sort of the term for it I'm going to tell you this one story with that man Ivan France he was one of the leaders of the this is because it's the most incredible example of a selection bias that I've ever encountered he ran the biggest ever test of ants Lucas's hypothesis called the Minnesota a survey on over 9,000 men and women in institutionalized mental hospital settings so very highly controlled they're getting they're controlling all their meals you can't do that kind of experiment today because it's considered unethical but they did it and they did it for four and a half years she was like and you there's just hardly a trial I think in the world that has run that long and that big that well controlled and at the end of that study so half the people got but you know the kind of die were recommended now nine percent saturated fat they had low fat milk soy filled cheese soy filled burgers whatever horrible foods they had to deal with and then the other people got regular meat regular cheese regular whole fat and they had 18 percent saturated fat which is like considered outrageous today but that was considered normal in the day this is was conducted in the 1960s funded by the National Institute of Health at the end of that study they found there was no benefit from being on the vegetable oil diet from from from from lowering your saturated fat and replacing with polyunsaturated fat and they didn't publish those results for 16 years which he knew in science is a kind of fraud really it's you're not supposed to do that and when they did finally publish them they put him in a sort of out-of-the-way Journal that they knew nobody would read and they just sort of disappeared and much later when Gary Taubes actually asked I have in France why didn't you publish your results he said well there was just nothing wrong with the study we were just so disappointed in the way it came out so I mean this is like incredible selection bias they said scientists who just don't believe their own results and actually in 2015 some researchers went back and found Ivan Frances son and found that that Ivan French still had the original magnetic tapes from that cyant that study in his basement and went through all the tapes found the you know what reanalyzed all the data and discovered that actually the more the men lowered the of their cholesterol the more likely they were to die of a heart attack which had never been reported in the original paper anyway that study was just never part of the literature a conversation nobody talked about it also the Women's Health Initiative another what's called silent studies they just disappear nobody talks about them the Women's Health Initiative is the biggest ever nutrition trial ever undertaken in the history of nutrition studies on forty nine thousand women on the low-fat diet with the results that came out in 2006 and his fan of low-fat diet had no benefit for anything obesity diabetes heart disease nor any kind of cancer so so this is and that again that study also nobody talks about that study or they say or they find a litany of things that must have been wrong with it so it's they can just find ways of dismissing it you know the sort of the flipside of that is that people who are having who have low carb studies find there's there work very hard to get published very hard to get any anything into journals and that's because the Alice Lichtenstein's and Frank who's of the world sit on all those editorial boards and it's it's just very hard to get our science to rise so how else do you silence the science well you can try to get it retracted so and this is an article that I did for the BMJ that came out in 2015 it was a cover story and it really analyzed all the science behind our dietary guidelines I mean literally I went through for every key recommendation I created a spreadsheet and went through every single study that they cited and found that for instance you know their recommended Mediterranean diet there's only one study on 250 people for the vegetarian diet they recommend zero clinical trials for the four so I mean it just was theirs and what they rely almost exclusively on this really weak form of science called epidemiology which can only show Association and not causation and all those big clinical trials the Women's Health Initiative the Minnesota coronary survey I'm just telling you about never reviewed them never cite them not there ever not in the history of the Dietary Guidelines going back to 1980 so of course everybody really loved that article and I was welcomed with open arms [Laughter] so again Center for Science in the Public Interest the Abbasid group that's very close with the government they rounded up 180 people scientists mostly to ask for retraction including the entire all the US dietary guideline committee saying that it was to flow it's riddled with errors and there are so many flaws and I should say this is after the whole regular review process where they you know people write in letters and you respond to their queries and they say this is wrong and you're a you know I was able to refute really everything that all the critiques of the paper this went on for a year that the BMJ put it to an outside committee and and they stay you know a year I didn't sleep and but at the end of it the BMJ stood by it and they said you know we had minor Corrections that had no bearing on any of the allegations in the article and they stood by the article and did not retract it so yay for that thank you so um more of my own experience I mean I'm sure you've heard of the the dis invitation as a way of preventing ideas from be heard well that's happened to me too which is that but one of the most prestigious and most influential Food Policy conferences in the u.s. takes place in Washington DC and I it's been going on for 35 years has been run by one person and then there's a new person installed to run that in 2016 I guess and he he he was brand new to the whole field really didn't know what he was getting into I sent him my book I was like oh you know maybe maybe he'll invite me and and he called me back he's like oh I loved your book it's so provocative and interesting and you know we've had somebody drop out on this panel why don't you come and join I think it'd be great to have a fresh point of view so so I said sure great I'd love to do that Thanks and I said who are the other members on the committee and just three other members one is the the head of the US dietary guideline committee the other is they had the head of C s the CSPI the group that organized the retraction letter against me that head of that that group and then the head of the dietary guidelines at USDA so I think Oh that'll be great so so I hung up the phone and I turned to my husband and I said how long do you think it'll be until he calls me back and this invites me from that so sure enough nine o'clock the next morning there is a hi Tom calling me on the phone he says you know the other three members have said they will they will refuse to come if you're on the panel so I'm really sorry but we're going to disinvite you and I thought that was terrible but there was nothing I could do a friend in Ireland started a petition we got almost 4,500 signatures for it and the course of a week but I was not reinstated on that panel so so now I want to just say there's there's also this whole other area of advocacy defending the so-called plant-based diet you know and and this is the animal welfare people a lot of them now masquerading as doctors who are using vegan diets as a way to push forward the V animal welfare agenda there's a social justice component to it you know because meat consumes too many of the earth's resources so we all must eat grains because that's more fair and then the environmental groups who have really rallied behind this idea that cows drive global warming which you know I don't think there's any good science for that but you know there's a real the all these groups have really come together to be a very very powerful force especially in the United States and it's sort of United around this triumvirate of you know do good and feel good and and be good to the planet which is like fantastic little PR campaign but they're very powerful and they really have all this support by the vegan diet doctors you know these are very powerful men Cleveland Clinic Caldwell Esselstyn Dean Ornish dr. too many people who've suffered death and disease but no anyway sorry about that no here's Cletus Clinton's doctor I mean he has been at this since the early 1970s and he's at every elite gathering des Vosges TED ideas festival every elite he has really been networking his way into the elite for decades and they're all so United there's a kind of unit there these diet doctors are now United with much more mainstream folks so again Frank who vegetarian at Harvard his Walter Willett who's run the Harvard Department all these people are part of a number of different groups one of them know where they come together under is this American College of lifestyle medicine which I believe Belinda FET he's gonna tell us about this I think they're either largely supported or owned by the Seventh day Adventist Church which has a vegetarian group anyway and you know our friend David Katz is there and so there's just this real convergence of elite and fringe groups that are all United around this plant-based diet and and this group of course also receives a lot of money from all those companies that we've been talking about the grain based companies so what can we do it is you know that's a formidable lineup of forces and it's very intimidating you know I think the first thing is you're here for your yourself and your own health and it's really important to learn about that and take care of the people that you love and around you take a book to your doctor you could take my book to take another book you know try to convince people in your community and if you want to get involved in advocacy for change you can give me your business card or your just your email address and I've started this group called the nutrition coalition because I really believe that there just has to be change and that it has to be organized change and so this is a not-for-profit group we don't take any money from any interested industry and we're working in we started working in Washington why in Washington well this is our theory of change there is a limited number of people who are willing to stand up to Authority like us you are relatively rare a group of maverick people with open minds and you're willing to entertain different ideas many people are not this is me and my mother so I routinely go home to my mother's house when I came on how about not having low-fat yogurt in the morning and with all that sugar and she's like okay Nina I'll ask my doctor about that you know they're just people who are never going to do anything without their doctor stamp of approval and the other thing there's just a lot of rules about what doctors nutritionists dietitians are allowed to say and do you know I know many doctors who are part of big medical practices and they say I am NOT allowed to hand out you know information on low-carb it's simply not allowed and that is because a very top-down system there's a fear of being sued and legal issues and there's just a lot of so really and you know this and the source of all that bad advice where does it what is at the top is the Dietary Guidelines it's it's what I call the evil Death Star of all that advice and everything flows down from there you know all the medical associations everybody they just download the guidelines and then they spread it out to everybody so even if you feel like I don't go into a dot-gov website to find my advice that advice finds you through every front every health care practitioner on the front line that's where they get their information and I should say that it started in America and we have also it's really we spread it out all over the world but really all began in America so I'm truly sorry for that and it all is all still this very you know heavy grain-based advice 6 to 11 servings of grains every day even though they don't picture it this way it's exactly the same thing fats and oils use very sparingly your yours is the same I put yours yours up here just for a second because I just want to I hadn't really taken a look at this until I came here and I just find certain things hilarious like you can eat bread and you can eat meat but down here you can you can't put bread and meat together in a hamburger because whatever I don't know that's bad so it's just like it's so little of that makes any kind of sense like you can have you can have olive oil and you can have potatoes but you can't have french fries which are potatoes fried in olive oil so anyway everything is crazy in the world so and they're high carbohydrate diets which is I just want to show you this is the way they are modeled by the USDA themselves all over 50% carbs all relatively low fat and I just want to compared people who don't realize how different our diets used to be I mean this is what according to the best available government data that Americans were eating in 1965 before the obesity and diabetes epidemics we were all on a low-carb diet what we would now call I mean not a ketogenic diet but you know that's low-carb you know we just our whole everything has shifted in the way we see diets now and you know the dietary guidelines in it you know among the other things that I found on my other findings were you know not just that they had been based on weak evidence that when it came to the low carb diet they completely ignored the evidence they just said they couldn't find it they did exploratory searches but they couldn't find the 74 randomized controlled clinical trials that could had been done why is that so and actually I did some Freedom of Information Act requests which you can even get emails that in the government emails and I found that they had actually done a systematic review of the low-carb literature but they stuffed it in the methodology section and when one of the committee members saying hey this is a sizable body of evidence showing really good results we shouldn't we shouldn't we shouldn't bury it literally we shouldn't bury it in the methodology section and and that was the end of that maybe email chain so so what have we done so far what has the nutrition coalition been so far well the first thing that we did is back in 2015 when there was a lot of attention on our dietary guidelines we went to Congress and said this cannot happen again we need to put something in place before our next Dietary Guidelines iteration which is in 2020 there every five years to stop that from happening so and we got Congress to appropriate $1,000,000 for a report by the National Academy of Medicine which is our highest scientific supposedly independent body in land and they just came out with this report their report on the guidelines saying that they are not scientifically rigorous they don't use proper standards of systematic reviews they're not transparent they have a number of findings that are really powerful like like what we've been saying but now the National Academy of Sciences is saying it so that is a huge step forward and and based on that there's a MD US congressman who wrote this op-ed saying the guidelines need to be reformed and that is also a first so you know I think and we're you know we're working with in Washington to try to really get some kind of maybe you know legislative reform to really change the guideline so that they that they are forced to be based on good rigorous science I think you like simply like you must consider all the clinical trials you can't cherry pick them so I'm hopeful that this will and you know and again like if we can fix the US dietary guidelines I think it would really have this this echo effect all over the world and we have made progress so far so I'm hopeful I think that it's just so obvious that you know we need new thinking that the experts who have overseen our policy for 30 years have to see you know their record is not one of success so it's time for new thinking I think it was Albert Einstein who also said who also said the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and over again and expecting different results so we need to do something different so that's why I believe we all need to join together and create this change anyway thank you very much [Applause]

Channel: Low Carb Down Under

Views: 128,004

Rating: 4.9052343 out of 5

Keywords: Low Carb Down Under, LCDU, www.lowcarbdownunder.com.au, Low Carb Gold Coast 2017, #LowCarbGC, The Big Fat Surprise, Nina Teicholz, Low Carb Healthy Fat, LCHF, Carbohydrate Restriction, Nutrition Coalition, Dietary Guidelines, National Academy of Medicine

Id: 7Lww5WH7INI

Length: 37min 39sec (2259 seconds)

Published: Thu May 10 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/dem0n0cracy]

Reposted this. Thanks u/Heidi631

[u/WunderkindErinaceous]

That woman is so incredibly brave. You can see she's often on the brink of tearing up when she talks about the suppression of her, or others science.

Yet she dismiss it with a joke and just keep pushing on. A true hero. I think I'm going to buy a book or two from her to show my support. I've little doubt they're probably good books too.