Latest / Common Sense Health / 6 Myths Debunked
Transcript
- Stephen Thomas BSc. Hons: Hello. If there is one thing you can absolutely guarantee when you switch to a low carb or a carnivore or ketogenic way of eating, it's that polite company will suddenly treat you like a walk in medical emergency. You tell someone you're surviving on energy drinks and pastries and they barely blink, but tell them you had an excellent rib eye for breakfast and suddenly everyone with a Netflix subscription to a vegan documentary becomes a self-appointed cardiovascular sp- specialist, know, expressing their deep unsolicited concern for your impending doom. anyway, recently I had a brilliant time chatting on the frankly, wonderfully named meeting wellness podcast. We tackled the classic fears that stop people from trying a meat based diet or make them panic even when they have tried it and just three weeks in when their family doctor has a look at the lab results. So let's use bit of joined up thinking, dust off the physiology textbooks and demystify the top six myths keeping people trapped in that cycle of carbohydrate dependency. Number one, the cholesterol conundrum. They say, if I ate all that meat, my cholesterol will shoot up and my heart will explode. Well, first, let's get one thing straight. And I shout this from the rooftops. I do not use the terms bad cholesterol or good cholesterol. because it is the exact same molecule whether it's being carried by an LDL or an HDL particle. The idea that your liver, a highly intelligent organ, would manufacture a lethal substance just to sabotage your heart is, as Spock would say, illogical. The entire lipid-heart hypothesis is heavily based on a 110-year-old experiment in which a researcher fed cholesterol dissolved in cedars to a rabbit. a rabbit, an obligate herbivore, and panicked when the arteries showed signs of damage. You might as well feed a lion a bowl of corn flakes and declare cereal a deadly toxin. Anyway, there is a shocking lack of compelling evidence that LDL causes heart disease. In fact, in 2019, there was a study published in Scientific Reports tracking 12.8 million Korean adults, and that concluded that those with higher LDL cholesterol levels actually exhibited the lowest. or cause malatality. yeah, more LDL the longer they lived. I'm a bit more convinced by the thrombotic theory, by the way, in the views of Vladimir Sabutin and Malcolm Kendrick anyway. Regarding the vassal visorum, the tiny little blood vessels that supply the walls of larger blood vessels, they seem to play a key role in plaque formation. Arterial plaques, by the way, they occur in predictable places where there's high pressure and turbulence and they require endothelial damage to form. And what could cause that damage? Well, maybe the sheer stress from chronically high levels of circulating sugar and like I that high blood pressure. So the next one is the saturated fat drainpipe delusion. Saturated fat clogs your arteries exactly like grease down a cold kitchen sink and drainpipe, ⁓ which is the classic mechanistic analogy. So here is my general rule. If people come at you with basic, fundamentally flawed primary school level statements, We need to reply at a similar level to highlight the sheer absurdity of their logic. Then we can explain the actual science if we want. So if someone uses the kitchen sink drain pipe argument, simply hand them a knob of butter and ask them to hold it in a closed fist for five minutes. Of course, it will melt into an absolute puddle. You see, the human body operates a core temperature of 98.6 Fahrenheit, 37 degrees centigrade. We are significantly hotter than room temperature. Well, if butter melts in exactly the same way in your body as a warm hand, well, how exactly is that going to solidify and cause a plug into our drain pipes, our arteries? And then next hand them a teaspoon of sugar, add a single drop of water to it and ask them to rub it between their fingers. Ask them how sticky, gummy and cloggy that feels. And that is what glycation looks like. That is what might be gumming up the works anyway. Saturated fat is incredibly chemically stable, meaning it is highly resistant to oxidation and damage. If you want academic reassurance, the massive PURE study, Prospective Urban Rule Epidemiology study, tracked over 135,000 people from 18 countries and found that higher saturated fat intake was associated with a lower risk of stroke and had no significant association with heart attacks. So it certainly isn't the butter that's causing the blockage. Then we come to red meat in the cancer scare. And they say, our World Health Organization says red meat causes cancer. Now this persistent myth largely stems from a 2015 report by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, an organization that notoriously declared that processed meat is as dangerous as smoking or plutonium. To reach this terrifying conclusion, they essentially ignored gold standard randomized controlled trials, RCTs, and instead they sifted through about 800 purely observational epidemiological studies. Observational epidemiology is riddled with uncontrollable healthy user bias. People who eat lots of red meat in modern studies often also eat deep fried potato chips or They smoke or they drink heavily and avoid exercise. Out of those 800 studies, they cherry picked just 14 to base their sweeping global warnings on. Unsurprisingly, a heavily disproportionate number of the panel members happen to be vegetarians or vegans. In 2019, the Nutri RECS consortium published a massive review in the Annals of Internal Medicine. After reviewing the evidence, they concluded that the link between red meat and cancer were weak to non-existent, advising adults to continue their current meat consumption. As global red meat consumption has dropped over the last 50 years, cancer rates have climbed. The mass simply does not add up at population level. Then they say, I have IBS and eating red meat makes my digestion so much worse. Now, this is incredibly common and it usually involves blaming the state. for what the bread did. When someone complains of this, they have almost always kept all their standard inflammatory foods, such as grains, sugars, seed oils, in their diet, while simply eating a heavy piece of meat on top of it. Now, if you have spent decades avoiding fat and eating heart-healthy grains, your gallbladder is sluggish, your bile production is weak, and your stomach acid, your HGL levels are likely incredibly low. So when you suddenly introduce a nutrient-dense, fatty piece of red meat, your compromised digestive system simply doesn't have the physiological tools ready to process it efficiently. It is not the meat. It is the damaged environment it is entering. And this is why a strict 30-day trial of a proper carnivore, keto, or low-carb diet is vital. By removing the plant toxins, the fiber, inflammatory compounds, the gut is finally allowed to heal. I've yet to see someone with IBS Crohn's or ulcerative colitis who doesn't experience massive symptomatic relief when they commit to doing this the right way. Number five was salt, blood pressure and real water. You eat way too much salt on a meat diet. Your blood pressure is going to skyrocket. Now, let's refine this one carefully because it is a tragic misunderstanding of basic human physiology. mean, blood pressure is a dynamic mechanical system managed by your baroreceptors in your arteries, constantly adjusting to your body's demands. So the myth that salt inherently causes chronic high blood pressure stems from a very archaic study where researchers literally selectively bred rats. These are the famous dull salt sensitive rats to develop hypertension from salt. are fed them the human equivalent of a thousand times their daily allowance of sodium. The true hidden driver of chronic fluid retention and high blood pressure seems to be insulin. When you consume carbohydrates, your insulin levels do rise. High insulin actively signals your kidneys to hold on to sodium and to water rather than excreting it naturally. Furthermore, for every single gram of glucose stored as glycogen in your body, you naturally retain about three grams of water. So you become essentially a walking water balloon. If you're worried about retaining water, carbohydrate is the sponge you need to drop. So when you adopt a low carb or carnivore or keto diet, your insulin plummets. Your kidneys can finally release that excess water because of this diuretic effect. You actually need to consume high quality salt to maintain your essential fluid and electrolyte balance. So blaming salt for the vascular damage and water retention caused by insulin is like blaming the fire, sorry, the firemen for the fire. And finally, the fibre fallacy. But how on earth do you go to the bathroom without any fibre? Well, fibre is essentially an undigestible sugar. The idea that something you fundamentally cannot digest is absolutely essential for your digestive health was born from a mere hunch by Dr. Dennis Burkett decades ago. And we've been clinging to his hunch ever since. So think of your digestive tract like a motorway. If there is a massive traffic jam, you do not add you do not solve the blockage by adding more cars to the road, adding bulky fermenting, undigestible plant matter to the compromised gut only causes bloating gas and further impactation. So in a landmark. 2012 study published in the World Journal of Gastroenterology, researchers took patients with chronic constipation and put them on a zero-fibre diet. The result? 100 % of the patients on the zero-fibre diet experienced the complete resolution of their constipation, their bloating, and their pain. So people argue that fibre is needed to feed gut bacteria so they can produce butyrate, a short-chain fatty acid, to heal the gut lining. Do you know what else is absolutely packed with butyrate butter. It literally is where the word comes from butyrate butter. So you can nourish your enterocytes directly with high bioavailable animal fats and proteins entirely bypassing the bloated gaseous fermentation process of digesting bark and stems. So when you're navigating the carnivore or keto or low carb space, you can feel like you're walking through a minefield of well-meaning but utterly backwards misinformation. Physiology, however, never lies. Stick to the basics, use a bit of common sense and trust how your body responds when you fuel it with the exact foods it spent millions of years evolving to thrive on. It really is that simple. And if you're looking for a like-minded community that values joined up thinking over the pharmaceutical sponsored dietary guidelines, why not come over and join us at the Common Sense Carnivore Community online? There is a link in the description. Anyway, with that said, don't forget to stay healthy, stay sane and please don't let your uncle advise you on saturated fat at the next family gathering. Hope you enjoyed that. See you on the next one. If you did enjoy it, please consider liking, sharing and subscribing. And if you got to the end of it and you didn't like it, well firstly, thank you for listening and hearing me out and maybe I'll do a bit better on the next video. Bye bye.