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Seeds of Doubt: Nina Teicholz, PhD on DarkHorse · DarkHorse Podcast

• 0:00
  Hey folks, welcome to the DarkHorse podcast Inside Rail. I am sitting this morning with Nina Teicholz, who many of you will not have heard of for an interesting reason.
• 0:13
  Before I get to telling you who she is, let me just say, Nina, welcome to the podcast.
• 0:19
  Thank you. I'm really happy to be here.
• 0:23
  All right, so Nina, you are in many ways the OG of the consciousness that is dawning on so many of us about the upside down nature of the food health advice that we have been given over our entire adult lives and that our parents were given when we were children.(...) In some ways, you suffer, I think, from the fact that you were so early that the tidal wave that you are largely responsible for triggering is not understood by many people to have anything to do with you.
• 1:01
  You published a book called, is it the Big Fat Surprise?(...) Yeah. Big Fat Surprise, which is a New York Times bestseller back in 2014. Am I right about the date? There's the book.
• 1:13
  And you covered many of the issues that are now on so many of our minds, including things like seed oils and highly processed foods. So what we're going to do is we are going to(...) delve into your knowledge base and talk about these issues. I should probably say you have a PhD in nutrition science from the University of Reading, the University of Reading in England. There are other Reddings. There's a Reading Pennsylvania.
• 1:43
  There's a Reading California, but you got your degree from the University of Reading in England.
• 1:49
  In any case, I find your story fascinating. We met at a Brownstone event and I, with some degree of shame, will say I was not aware of you until we met, but now I know. And I want the audience to get the full depth of the story that you have brought to light. So tell us a little bit about how you ended up in this space and what you discovered. Our first sponsor for this episode of the Inside Rail is Masa Chips. Masa makes delicious, healthy chips that aren't going to make you sick because they're made with real whole ingredients, the way that all food used to be made. These chips are fried in 100% beef tallow, no seed oils ever. You can taste the difference and your body can feel the difference. America's health is declining fast. Chronic illnesses, obesity, and autoimmune diseases have exploded. Why? In large part because we've swapped real food for cheap industrial substitutes. All chips and fries used to be cooked in tallow, but in the 1990s, corporations switched to cheaper seed oils, which include soybean, canola, sunflower, safflower, and corn.
• 2:55
  Seed oils are linked to metabolic health issues and inflammation. And today, seed oils make up 20% of the average American's daily calories. Think about that. 20% of our total calories come from seed oils. Big food companies also use artificial dyes, stabilizers, and other toxins.
• 3:13
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• 3:26
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• 3:56
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• 3:59
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• 4:01
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• 4:27
  Yeah, well, I am a journalist first before I got my PhD in nutrition and had no interest in nutrition.(...) But like a lot of people had a number of health problems, mainly that I was about 25 pounds heavier than I am now, and that had plagued me my whole life. But I had, you know, I'm from Berkeley, California.
• 4:51
  I had been on a largely vegetarian diet, didn't eat red meat at all.(...) Just thought it was terrible for me, baked my own bread, and sort of followed the basic standard advice.(...) And, and then I was assigned in the early 2000s, a series of investigative food stories for Gourmet magazine, if any of your readers are old enough to remember that a Conde Nast magazine.(...) And it was on trans fats, which were becoming big at the time, really, but not the story really hadn't broken. And I ended up doing a story that was just hugely popular for Gourmet magazine about seed oils. And trans fats were a byproduct of seed oils when you harden them like you need to make Crisco, one of the byproducts of that industrial process is it creates trans fats, which at the time were major public health concern.
• 5:51
  And for that story, I had I spent quite a lot of time interviewing scientists inside the seed oil industry getting to know they're called oil chemists. And I learned about their tactics. And, you know, I learned about sort of brave scientists who were challenging the healthfulness of seed oils in the late 1970s, and how they were attacked by industry scientists, how the Institute for shortening and eligible oils, which is the trade group for seed oils,(...) how you employed people to go to conferences to, to criticize any researcher who was presenting problems with seed oils or raising questions about them to the point of really driving people out of the field.
• 6:43
  And I grew up in it, my father is an engineer, and I just grew up in a household where we literally thought, like, oh, hypothesis, antithesis, arguing around the dinner table. And I thought that science sort of proceeded in this kind of reason methodological way where everybody played by the rules. And what I just found was so radically different from that.
• 7:09
  Literally, the the the a margarine company executive go calling up an editor journal and trying to get an article yanked from a an academic journal because and going to and visiting and harassing the researcher who had written the article things that were these stories were so extraordinary and appalling to me, that I just decided that I really wanted to research the more that article read to led to a book contract.
• 7:40
  I was going to write a book on trans fats. And I ended up writing a book, really about our history of erroneous nutrition advice with a particular focus on how we had really gotten it wrong to advise people to cut back on saturated fats and replace them with seed oils.
• 7:59
  Okay, hold on, I want to pause you there and go back and just collect some stuff.
• 8:04
  Yeah, one, I will say I grew up also in California, in a decidedly scientific family. And we had the same dinner table culture where we hash stuff out ad nauseam. And I, it's one of the most important contributors to who I ended up being was that that's how you figured out what was true was you had you had the discussion, you presented both sides, you reasoned it through at that same table margarine, which I didn't even understand.(...) You know, I guess I technically knew that margarine was sort of a replacement for butter. And that butter was understood now to be bad due to science, and that margarine was the reasonable thing to eat. I now, you know, having been through story after story where the science turned out to be not scientific at all, but basically propaganda, it does not surprise me terribly that that was nonsense. But in any case, even the scientifically minded have this stuff put over on them all the time, you can't be vigilant enough. And so anyway, I want to get to this story. But you've mentioned several terms, and I want you to define them, because I think people talk about them very frequently without understanding them. You've talked about trans fats, I assume these are not heavy people who switch their gender. This is a chemical term, right?(...) So can you define trans fats?
• 9:36
  Yes, I mean, this is, you know, 20 years ago now. But so seed oils are long chain molecules. And when you go through this process of hydrogenation that was really invented in the late 1800s, but the first hardened seed oil was Crisco came into the food supply in 1911.
• 10:00
  And it was discovered in I want to say I think the 1970s that one of the byproducts of this process were actually dozens of long chain fatty acids in formations, chemical formations that were completely unknown and and not part of the, you know, the natural universe.
• 10:25
  All right, hold on, I want to do a little translating for the audience.
• 10:27
  Hydrogenation, okay, you are and by the way, I'm going back now to my basic biological education, who knows what I've got wrong, but hydrogenation is the process of I think literally bubbling hydrogen through a lipid of fat in order to get the the chains to be as saturated with hydrogen as possible. Is that correct?
• 10:54
  Yes, yes. And I just want to take a moment to explain something to the viewers or listeners.
• 11:01
  Because it helps you understand so much about fats, which I gather we're going to be talking about today. So the reason that an oil is an oil is that the there, these long chain carbons have some hydrogens on them, but they also have double bonds which cause those chains to kink. So the kinks in those chains make them wiggly, and they can't stack on top of each other neatly, which is why they're an oil, right? They, there's kind of air and space between them, or not air, but you know, there's space between them. So that's why they're an oil.
• 11:36
  Maybe we'll talk later about why those oils aren't stable.
• 11:38
  So let me let me let me fill that. And I think this is really important. And I think almost nobody who hasn't studied the chemistry gets this. The idea is the what you're describing as double bonds, okay, you can have the two carbons bonded together twice where they share two pairs of electrons, or they can surrender one of those pairs of electrons, and they can start each picking up a hydrogen instead, leaving only the single bond between them. And you just stop me where I get something wrong.
• 12:06
  That's correct.
• 12:07
  Okay, so then the point is, this sounds like who would even know if this is true?
• 12:14
  Is that just some story in the textbook, except for the observation, that when you saturate these fats with hydrogen, they change phases, they become solid at room temperature, because they stack neatly.
• 12:30
  And the idea is if they have odd shapes, then it's like a bunch of things that you've thrown into a closet. And you open the door to the closet, and they spill out kind of like a liquid, as opposed to a bunch of boxes that you put in the closet, that if you open the door, they remain a stack of boxes. Is that fair?
• 12:47
  That is exactly right. So you just think about like a whole bunch of squiggly,(...) I don't know, squiggly things, I can't think of an analogy, but a bunch of, you know, like toy snakes, like a wiggly toy snake.
• 13:02
  So you can't you they, if you put them in your hands, you can't get them to, there's going to be air between them.
• 13:09
  That and so that's what creates this, the distance that is makes it an oil. When you stack straight molecules or straight anything, you know, those things in the pool on top of each other, there's no space between them. And therefore, they are a solid. So when we say we saturated fats, which we all sort of throw around that term, but literally what we mean is that they are saturated with hydrogen atoms, they so so you have corn oil.(...) And again, any place I get something wrong, you just jump in, you've got corn oil, okay, corn oil is an oil, because the chains, the carbon chains are not saturated with hydrogen, they're kinked, and they don't stack neatly. Somebody bubble some hydrogen through it, maybe under some special conditions to get those double bonds to break to pick up the hydrogens. And the next thing you know, you've got a substance that is the basis for margarine,(...) and now you got a problem,(...) which is it's sort of in the neighborhood of butter.
• 14:21
  But it doesn't taste good, and it doesn't look good.(...) So yeah, it's going to accept it as a substitute. So now you got to fix it, right? You got to make it look yellow. And you got to flavor it so it's a little closer to butter or something like that.
• 14:36
  Yeah, well, first you have to I mean, it comes out as this I actually went to hydrogenation plant.
• 14:44
  And I didn't report on it in my book, because the plant manager was so terrified that he would get fired for letting me come visit it.
• 14:50
  But even though the perfect title suggests itself, you could have had an article called the hydrogen bomb.
• 14:58
  Yeah, that would have really played well with his superiors.
• 15:03
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• 15:53
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• 18:01
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• 18:11
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• 19:03
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• 19:30
  So yeah, I mean, it's, it comes out as like this grayish murky liquid or substance and it needs to be deodorized, winterized, stabilized, because the process takes out all the nutrients, some of the nutrients need to be added back in, and then you get a hard substance that, well, as I said, initially was Crisco. Crisco was aimed to take the place of lard in American kitchens and there was this massive marketing campaign to make that happen. You know, cookbooks went out and all the ladies magazines, it was all about get rid of the, you know, those dank dark, you know, odors of lard and here's a new shiny new thing made in laboratories with steel counters. And so this was sold and, you know, I think one of the themes that runs through all of American food history is that because we are a nation of immigrants who want to assimilate and we do not have our grandmothers or mothers maybe hanging over our shoulders saying, this is not the way you do it. You have to, we do it the old way.(...) Everybody wants these many American women were looking to women's magazines on how to, how to be domestic, how to cook food,(...) unlike say,(...) modern, how to be modern.
• 21:01
  Literally, there were ads saying, cast off the old food of your grandma like the spinning wheel and join the modern American woman. This was hugely persuasive. Crisco is made by Proctor and Gamble, whom we will, I think revisit again in this podcast.
• 21:20
  And so this, so it was Crisco replacing lard.
• 21:26
  And just in parentheses, the two main fats that have been used in the Western world, you know, going back millennia were lard and butter. Those are the two principal cooking fats. So you've got Crisco replacing lard. And then later in the 1920s and 30s, principally, you had, you had margarine replacing butter. But there is a whole really interesting fascinating chapter of history called the margarine wars, because the dairy industry, of course, resisted the intrusion of margarine, which was appealing to many housewives, because it was cheaper. There were literally wars, there was white blocks of sort of a proto margarine that were sold and you would buy it and you'd have to need with a yellow capsule, you would have to need in the yellow color to make it look like butter.(...) And then there were, you know, every state had its own set of laws that, and it was really raging, women would march into other states so they could get cheaper margarine to replace it with butter.
• 22:36
  There was a campaign to try to make this seem like an elite food that would be seen on, you know, even the Tony tables of wealthy women. And so,(...) and I think that came to an end, I don't remember the date, but it was like, in the late 1940s, there was finally a federal solution that allowed margarine to be sold nationwide.
• 23:01
  So, yeah, so it's the, it's really the takeover of natural animal fats with these ersatz fake foods(...) that we were told were healthy. And like, like you, I mean, we didn't have margarine in my house, but we definitely had skim milk, skim milk, you know,(...) didn't arrive in America until the early 1970s.
• 23:28
  And cereal for breakfast, also the result of a marketing campaign. So anyway, I think we started...
• 23:37
  Hold on, I want to say one thing, just I am now realizing, as Heather and I have become aware of the fact that our level of vigilance, though it was really high with respect to, you know, false stories, dressed as science and all that wasn't a quarter as high as it needed to be to understand the stuff until recently. And who knows what we don't yet know? But what I'm realizing was that the very scientific bent of the family that I grew up in was more or less weaponized against them. That the idea that science has finally come to understand what foods truly do make us healthy, and a bunch of the things that do come from the old country are really bad for you, right? They're going to shorten your life and we have understood that the right things for you to be eaten are these products of a mysterious process you know essentially nothing about, fits with this ethos of, you know, in the past there was ignorance and now we are becoming enlightened. That sense that you want to eat enlightened food is upside down and backwards, I now know having spent a, you know, a career in evolutionary biology, I know why that story is wrong, but the average person, the more scientific they are, the more susceptible they likely are to the idea that here is what the data say about healthy food and that is, it's like opening the gates of the city to the, you know, propaganda hordes.
• 25:21
  Yeah, I mean it's very much what we see today in other fields which is the, you know, the allure of new technologies that will make us better, faster, brighter, and the desire to go along with what are truly horrifying and fake technologies that will seem destined to probably rob us of our essential human nature, but this was, these were, these were campaigns that I think the overarching theme of all of this was in various different areas of our, let's say our dinner plate to say, you know, the whole universe of foods, we were, there were campaigns to remove what is natural and to believe in this industrial food, fake food, miracle that could, that was, was to be modern, but I think then there's an added dimension to this which we also see today in many of these kinds of conversations, but which was fear, the fear, the nudging to drive us, so we talked about the shift to margarine which was largely about lower cost and sort of the allure of the modern, but then by the 1950s the story was, and really the whole foundation for why we have guidelines today and why they are wrong, was the marketing of fear, fear of heart disease, fear of disease, and lo and behold these newfangled foods would protect and cure you from disease.
• 27:04
  And, you know, it will be a surprise to none of our listeners that that story turns out to be effectively the inverse of the truth, again for evolutionary reasons that are in retrospect totally obvious, right? We are creatures built for an environment. We are each as individuals and together a nested set of complex systems and our knowledge of those complex systems is far from complete. So the idea that people who know something about human physiology are in a position to tell you, you know, what you should be eating to make your health better is predicated on some world we don't live in where we have a complete understanding and therefore can detect all of the effects of swapping this food for that food. Really the best guidance almost invariably is going to be you want the environment that you're built for.
• 28:09
  That's the environment in which your health will be optimized and any environment that is distorted and our environments are distorted across the board, psychologically, physiologically, socially, all of these ways, those environments will make us sick.
• 28:25
  So the argument that our immediate ancestors did not have at their disposal(...) was something like the chances that that health advice is right are exceedingly low. This even before you get to the propaganda incentive, the you know, the perverse incentive to sell you a product like margarine, just the simple arrogance to believe that we understand how you function well enough to optimize your diet in a high-tech sense is ludicrous. But you can imagine, you know, a housewife in the 50s, 60s, 70s not having the courage to say, no, actually I'm shopping in the aisle people are afraid to shop in, but that's the right aisle because it's closer to what our ancestors ate and I'm not going to shop in the fancy aisle that I'm told is quote unquote heart healthy because that aisle is liable to have all kinds of unintended consequences that we'll know about 40 years from now.
• 29:32
  There's so many things that you just said that I want to pick up on, but I would say that even the evolutionary argument, which we seem we've come to maybe just in the last decade, even that argument has been twisted and used by, I would say, you know, the corporate agendas, like this idea that we evolved to eat plants, like the famous food writer and sort of food guru Michael Pollan who would say, you know, eat food, mostly plants and eat what you're, don't eat what you're, you know, eat like your grandparents, right?
• 30:08
  Well, our grandparents were not eating mostly plants.
• 30:12
  The vegan diet or even the vegetarian diet is not one that we evolved eating.
• 30:18
  That's just abundantly obvious.
• 30:21
  Yeah. Oh, go ahead.
• 30:25
  No, no, no. I mean, we're in some ways to me, this is part of like long before we started having debates about biological sex that seemed a little crazy because it seems undeniable.(...) We, you know, going back to, I would say the early to the 2010 or so, really when the vegan diet became started taking off, it was asking us to suspend our belief in basic human biology as if we evolved eating plant foods. And there's even an inside the field of evolutionary biology to try to, I would say pretend that we, we evolved as mostly plant eaters(...) in order to justify the current nutrition recommendations.
• 31:13
  Yeah. In fact, the argument is tied up in a battle over, I mean, I hate to pile on here, but it's tied up in a battle over feminism, frankly, because the story of man, the hunter is it is not a story of equity.
• 31:37
  So I do think that there is a complex tale to tell.(...) Our ancestors, our hunter-gatherer ancestors certainly did eat a lot of plant matter. What they were eating is not the food pyramid. That's for sure.
• 31:52
  But nonetheless, the idea, I agree with you as with all of these scientific claims, the fact that there's a vast amount of money to be made by creating the impression that the science tells you one thing rather than another has caused the evolutionary argument to get muddled to where really the evolutionary argument comes down to you'd be wise to adhere to the precautionary principle.
• 32:19
  But I wanted to pick up on your, your Michael Pollan point, because Heather and I have proudly cited Michael Pollan. In fact, the exact line you're referring to eat food, not too much, mostly plants, right? His other proclamation of this kind, which I think has fared better, is shop the outside of the supermarket,(...) right? The fresh foods are on the outside of the supermarket, whether that's meat in the refrigerator cases or, you know, fresh vegetables, but those foods tend to be better than the highly processed stuff. But watching, you know, it's like it is in some sense layers of an onion. There was a point at which Michael Pollan's advice was a breath of fresh air relative to the advice, the high tech advice that we had been given.(...) But even that advice is distorted by this received wisdom about, you know, the vegetarian diet would be ideal. And if you're not going to be a vegetarian, you should certainly be leaning heavily in that direction, which just doesn't comport with our ancestry or our instincts. Right.
• 33:37
  I mean, whole foods, the whole foods movement, which is what Michael Pollan was a part of and Oz waters and shape in East and Berkeley.
• 33:46
  The problem with whole foods is that it's it just lacks definition in the crucial way that people are looking for. Is it mostly plants or is it mostly animal foods, which I would say is pretty much at the heart of the diet debates.(...) Now, like, yes, we would all agree, eat unprocessed, mostly, you know, whole foods. But where you go in the supermarket is is a critical answer to that question.(...) So but maybe before we get to that, I don't know where you want to go, but I was thinking maybe we could talk about why we all went through this nutrition transition, right? Like why you and I in our childhoods, we're eating, we're drinking skim milk or eating margarine.
• 34:38
  (...) And probably early in our childhoods, we were not probably that's my household. I grew up, you know, in the 70s.
• 34:49
  We went through the transition nutrition transition in my household. We when I was very young, we were getting milk in a bottle delivered to our door, whole milk.
• 34:57
  And then somewhere along the line, we were having skim milk and my mom bought a wok to do stir fry so that we could, you know, be healthier, no more bitky and sour cream sauce from my grandmother. So why did that happen, which I think we could talk sort of about the history of how we came to be in this confused state that we are in. I mean, I mean, obviously, some of this goes back to the early 1900s, when we started having processed food companies and but the real big bang of the nutrition change starts in the 1950s when heart disease is on the rise and is number one killer in the United States. Heart disease had been known, documented in textbooks, but was quite rare, not seen in hospitals in the early 1900s and then shot up. So these are men having heart attacks in the prime of life and their fathers had not even known heart disease.
• 36:04
  President Eisenhower himself has a heart attack in 1955 is out of the Oval Office for 10 days. That seems like, unbelievable, we just had three days of Trump not being around and we're all apoplectic. This is 10 days in 1955. And there's a vacuum of information. What is causing heart disease? There were various viable hypotheses proposed by leading scientists at the time. It could be nutrient deficiency, it could be the rising tide of auto exhaust in the air that people were experiencing, could be the type A personality. We go around yelling at people and then, you know, have a heart attack.
• 36:44
  Into that vacuum steps, a scientist from the University of Minnesota named(...) Ansel Keys.
• 36:51
  He is, and his idea is that it's dietary cholesterol, like the kind you get in egg yolks and shellfish and saturated fats that raise your total cholesterol, which is all they measured at the time, in your blood and like sort of like hot oil in a cold stovepipe, it clogs your arteries and then you have a heart attack.
• 37:18
  So that was called the diet heart hypothesis.
• 37:22
  And so in that case, hold on, in that case, the saturated fats in question that became suspect were animal fats.
• 37:31
  Correct.
• 37:32
  Correct. Okay.
• 37:33
  Animal fats.
• 37:34
  We were animal. We can come back later to why animals store fat in this way rather than as a liquid, but just suffice it to say.
• 37:43
  I can see what like some liquid fat would look like in my underwear, probably not a very efficient way to store fat.
• 37:52
  But, um, yeah, and it impinges badly on moving around, right? A sloshing bag of liquid fat is not good. It's also, I'm going to extrapolate here. I don't know this from evidence, but I'm going to argue that the density of saturated(...) animal fats is actually, you know, the reason that we store energy as fat is because fat is comparatively light. And so the cost of carrying it around as an animal is low. If you're a plant, the opposite is true. You can afford to have heavier fats because, and in fact, you can afford to store energy in other ways too, um, because you're not moving around. So you're not paying a price for every step.
• 38:35
  I am not sure about that theory, but I like, I'm not sure I, uh, you know, yeah, it's complex, like saturated fatty acids are necessary for all kinds of functions in the body and, um,(...) evolutionarily, like I can't answer that question, but, um, I can hop over that and, and say, uh, that this basically, if you're, if you're condemning dietary cholesterol and saturated fat as the enemy, the most likely enemy, uh, for heart disease, as the dietary villains, you are targeting animal foods, right? What has cholesterol in it are animal foods, eggs, butter, meat, cheese. It's also got saturated fats in them and all to varying degrees.
• 39:25
  And one really important note is that is for everybody is just that all animal foods are not just all saturated fats, right? Like even a porterhouse steak is one third saturated fat. And, um, and the other bits are polyunsaturated fats, which are the same kind that you have in seed oils and the kind of what's called mono unsaturated, which is what's in olive oil. So all foods are, have a combination of different kinds.
• 39:54
  Mono unsaturated and sorry, mono unsaturated and polyunsaturated refer to(...) the number of kinks per chain. Is that right?
• 40:04
  That's right. So if we end up talking about oxidation, that's an important point why it's better to use olive oil than these other seed and bean oils. Um, so,(...) um, so Ansel Keys is a very colorful, charismatic individual.(...) Uh, he is extremely aggressive. There are counts of him or even his friends and colleagues call him impossible to argue with anyone because he will argue anyone to the death. He had enormous overconfidence in his own beliefs. He had the erroneous, uh,(...) assumption that he was right until proven wrong, which as you know, and I hope many of your listeners do is the opposite of how science takes place, which is that you're, you are really wrong until there's a body of evidence where you feel like you can be semi-right about something. And then it always can be disproven by, uh, the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.
• 41:09
  But Ansel Keys was also a very self-promotional sort of person, and he was able to get himself into the American Heart Association nutrition committee such that in 1961,(...) the American Heart Association, which is the premier still is, but at that time, even more so the lone public health organization giving Americans advice on heart disease, desperate to provide some kind of guidance to Americans who are clamoring for guidance on how to prevent heart disease. Again, the number one killer, they come out with a statement in 1961, the first anywhere in the world saying,(...) avoid saturated fat and dietary cholesterol as the best measure of prevention against heart disease and replace those saturated fats with what we now call(...) seed oils, then called vegetable oils.(...) So that is really the little acorn of advice that grew into the giant oak tree that we now have really worldwide. Um, but it all started with the American Heart Association, 1961. And I just have to tell a little story here, which is that Procter and Gamble, remember, make of maker of Crisco also then later came out with Crisco oil.
• 42:27
  They really launched the American Heart Association in 1948 with a, they made them the beneficiary of a fundraiser radio show, and the walking man contest, and they, they, they then collected all the money from that fundraiser and gave what is the equivalent I think today now like $20 million to the American Heart Association from this contest in 1948.
• 42:57
  And according to the company's own history, that really catapulted the American Heart Association into being able to open chapters all over the country and, um, becoming sort of the beginning of the powerhouse that it now is today.(...) So, and there are other stories about how the president of the American Heart Association was called out by his colleagues for posing with a bottle of Crisco oil and educational videos. So, and they, and Procter and Gamble has,(...) is the last time I checked was still a donor to the American Heart Association, but it's really to say, hold on, hold on.
• 43:32
  This is such a mind blowing fact. I remember when I first heard this having to fact check it because it's so,(...) it contravenes our understanding. When you hear American Heart Association and you see that logo, you think(...) these are medical people who are telling me things based on the evidence that has accumulated in science and medicine. You don't understand that this has been launched by a for-profit corporation(...) that has an interest in what you believe is good health advice.
• 44:10
  Um, and you know, am I wrong that they invented the term heart healthy to give?
• 44:19
  That's right. I mean, so, uh, yeah, I mean, I remember when I was research investigating this story, like coming across this memoir by a former vice president, American Heart Association, just couldn't believe my luck. I had been like, I had one of these alerts on my eBay to like the moment it came up, I bought it. Um, and now it's just impossible to get a copy of that book.(...) But, uh, yeah, they actually, so that announcement in 1961 by American Heart Association, which by the way, was accompanied also in the same year by Ansel Keys getting himself on the cover of Time magazine as the guy who's cracked the mystery of heart disease.
• 45:05
  Um, that was the beginning of the medicalization of seed oils. Uh, and you might say the medicalization of foods. So all of a sudden seed oils are being marketed as heart healthy, you know, rip out this page in the magazine and take it to your doctor and buy Misso, tell them to, you know, prescribe Missola oil to you. And, um, it was also the beginning of our(...) decreased consumption of animal foods.
• 45:36
  And it, but it really represents this shift from instead of trusting our ancestors for, or our cookbooks or recipes that have been handed down to us, we started looking to our doctors to tell us what to eat. You know, instead of your recipe pad, that came from the doctor's prescription pad. Uh, so your food was medicalized and, uh, and, and a big, big part of that was switching over to these seed oils, which, you know, which, yeah. You want to say something about where these things come from? Why did we have them to switch over to?
• 46:14
  Well, going back to the hydrogenation story, um, and Chris, so, so after see, so oil squeezed from a seed, it started, I'll just tell a little bit of the history here. It started in, in a major way with cotton seeds, which were a byproduct of the cotton crop. And they figured out if they could squeeze, they could squeeze them and they would make cotton seed oil that was then kind of snuck into butter. There was adulterated butter and there was a ways of, but, but basically, yeah, hold on. I want people to understand as soon as you say that that there is immediately an evolutionary question because plants make seeds for a reason.
• 47:01
  When animals open those seeds to get the calorie rich contents, which exists in seeds for plant reasons. In other words, the plant is feeding the, the seedling by loading calories and nutrients into a seed.(...) The plant has an interest in preventing the animal from accessing those resources, which are obviously otherwise highly desirable. So what does it do? It puts secondary compounds into the seed in order that it isn't worth it to an animal, that the cost of eating the oil in that seed exceeds the benefit, which prevents most creatures who are not in a position to detoxify what's in that seed from engaging in this behavior.(...) So at the point that you say, Oh, well, we've got all of these fats that we can learn to squeeze out of seeds. It raises an obvious question that we all should have been asking all along, which is how safe would it be to eat that stuff given that the plant has defended it from exactly this behavior?
• 48:09
  And in large quantities, right? I mean, even if you were able to consume some of those seeds, such as in sunflower seeds, you wouldn't be expressing the oil just to consume the oil, right? It's a little bit like, I guess, a parallel is fruit juices. Like it's, it's just you're, you're the seed comes with, you know, it's a whole nutrient package and you're not just taking out the oil.
• 48:37
  So, but I wanted to the extent that there are secondary compounds in it, the chances that you can detoxify a little are high, but that you can overwhelm the system by taking in so many of those secondary compounds that you're going to cause health impacts is highly likely for a creature that is not specifically adapted to do it.
• 48:57
  Right. Well, and that we could just maybe put a pin in that because plants beyond just their seeds contain all kinds of what we call anti nutrients that inhibit nutrient absorption or cause inflammation or various things. Because they're not, yes, they do that because they can't run away.
• 49:17
  Right. So, so there is an entire class of molecules that does not serve a function inside of the plant that makes the function it serves is to disrupt animal physiology to dissuade herbivores.
• 49:32
  Correct. Right. And they do a very good job of that.
• 49:37
  You know, we've, anyway, let's I don't want to get too far down that, but I want to say going back to the seed oil story.
• 49:46
  So the reason oils were first produced from cotton seeds was that there was a desperate need for oil to lubricate the machinery of the industrial revolution.
• 50:01
  This is something that whale oil had been used. In fact, whales were mainly hunted for their oil.
• 50:09
  And when we hunted all the whales out of the ocean,(...) then replacing that dearth of this commodity was cottonseed in America, at least. And, and then so that's the kind of the history of how they came into production. And then as I said, in the early in 1911, Proctor and Gamble, who was a soap maker and a towel maker, because oil is also used to make candles, fats in general are used to make candles. They looked at this hardened substance and thought, ah, let's try to feed it to as food. I mean, that was really the kind of the essence of the thought process.
• 50:54
  So I can't remember how we got started down this, but you know, this is oh, and then so then what happened that there's a missing piece. So remember that so oils are fundamentally unstable, as we've described, they, because of those double bonds in each of those molecules that we talked about, and the fact that those double bonds at any time can open up and attach themselves not only to hydrogen, which is what happens in hydrogenation, as you explained, but oxygen.(...) So and especially under conditions of heat and light, they will like any chemical reaction, they will speed up, they will attach to the bond, double bonds will open up and they will attach to oxygen.
• 51:43
  And that's called oxidation.
• 51:45
  So oxidation is not good in many ways.
• 51:50
  That's one of the reasons we take antioxidants is to combat oxidation in the body, which drives inflammation. But as a food product from a manufacturer's perspective, it's also unusable. That's one thing, you know, oils go rancid, you can't you can't eat, you can't use oil anyway, as a shelf stable for a shelf stable food item, because it's greasy, it doesn't hold together. So so they had to figure so with hydrogenation, they figured out how to make it solid. And then they had to figure out something called we call partial hydrogenation, which was a little touch of hydrogenation that would allow it to stay as an oil, but not go rancid, not spoil.
• 52:37
  So and I didn't understand this part of the story.
• 52:41
  The idea is the more of those double bonds you have, the more vulnerability to going rancid it is the less suited it is to some long supply chain or sitting on a shelf. So they want to hydro hydrogenate it enough to limit the opportunity of oxygen to bond to that chain without causing it to go solid.
• 53:01
  That's right. So there's hydrogenation is something that exists along on continuum.
• 53:07
  You know, fully hydrogenated or almost fully hydrogenated vegetable oil becomes something really hard, like the coating of a chocolate candy hard. If it's a mid range of hydrogenation, you get something like a cake frosting, or you get, you know, something that's softer. Touch hydrogenation allows it to stay as an oil, but be shelf stable on the shelf.
• 53:31
  And that is how we got Missola oil, Crisco oil, all of those oils, and they started being marketed to the public in the 1940s, ironically, as perfect for frying things. When we know, even when they're hydrogenated so that they stay stable on the shelf, they're certainly not up to being heated in the kitchen, especially like repeat uses, but it was sold to American Housewives, you know, this is what you fry your chicken in.
• 54:00
  And the reason it can't, you know, it's especially bad to heat those oils is, again, those chemical reactions speed up.
• 54:07
  And you're talking about more and more oxidation and something called perioxidation products. Anyway, that's a whole subject.
• 54:15
  I mean, it's(...) one of the main it's really the main reason that we have turned on seed oils in the last, say, six, seven years is that they have they are so easily oxidized and can they yield hundreds of oxidation products.
• 54:33
  So, but you're taking a cocktail of molecules, uncatalogued molecules.(...) If you have heated them extrapolating from what you're telling me here, you heat these things. It's a little bit insidious because if you overheat all of oil, it smokes. So you know, it sort of trains you to cook with it better, right? Like not the smoke point is not the same as the the heat at which an oil will start to oxidize. Like an oil will start to oxidize even on your kitchen shelf with no heat, just over time. And you can, you know, if you leave, say, sunflower seeds, which are rich in these oils, or even nuts, you'll notice that they go rancid just sitting on a shelf. And that's the oil. That's the oils in them oxidizing.
• 55:25
  (...) The smoke point is unrelated to the oxidation.
• 55:30
  Well, all I'm saying is if he I'm again, extrapolating from what you're telling me, if heating,(...) Westin oil is bad because it causes oxidation products that are potentially hazardous to you, you don't get a warning with it because it does have a high smoke point. So it encourages you to use high heat because it doesn't, it doesn't, you know, set off your smoke alarm.
• 55:53
  And I would also just throw this in here.
• 55:57
  I remember from decades ago, advice on how to season cast iron cookware so that you get that nice anti anti stick natural coating. But the advice was to use seed oils that actually they create these very durable polymers that stick to the cast iron, presumably, they can stick to the iron for the same reason that they stick to oxygen. All right, they bond there permanently.
• 56:28
  Well, that is a fascinating point that you bring up. And let me just put it in a slightly different light, which is that oxidation of seed oils results in some of these oxidation and perioxidation products, which there are hundreds.
• 56:48
  Some of them are like shellac like substances, polymers, and not too long ago, I won't go into the whole history, but restaurants basically had to get rid of hydrogenated oils when trans fats were banned and switch over to just regular non hydrogenated, mostly soybean oil, that's the main oil we consume in America in their rest in their fryers.(...) And so this is happening in the mid 2000s.
• 57:15
  And according to these industry scientists that I interviewed.
• 57:22
  So these are regular oils that that haven't been stabilized, right? So they wildly oxidizing and restaurants like McDonald's and Burger King were having problems because the fumes from these restaurant fires were turning into like shellac like substances on the walls. And they were clogging up the fryer drains and they they could not clean them. They had to invent a new type of cleaning solution in order to depolymerize these oxidation products. And they invented things like silicon beads to that they could put in the oil to absorb the oxidation project products, nitrogen blankets on top of the fryer, again, to absorb the oxidation products. And I'll just tell you one more story, which was that when this was going on, and these restaurants were dealing with this, the oxidation products would saturate the fryer worker uniforms such that they would they were so volatile that they would spontaneously combust in the back of the trucks taking them to the dry cleaners,(...) or the cleaners, and then even after they had been washed, they would spontaneously combust and cause dryer fires.
• 58:40
  So this is from industry insiders who like who I talked to the guy who invented this new cleaning chemical. He's like, Yeah, it's harsher, they have to wear gloves and this and that. But you know, we had to do it because we were having all these problems with this regular old soybean oil, which I want to connect some dots here for people. Sure. The polymers that you're talking about, anybody who has done the dishes, following cooking with seed oils will have encountered these stains that just simply soap has no impact on them, right?
• 59:19
  (...) That's, that's what you're talking about. The fact that it causes the uniforms that have absorbed these things to get fire spontaneously sometimes is fascinating. Some of you will have had the experience of using, you know, some sort of oil based product to stain a piece of wood or something and throwing away the rags and the rags get extremely hot, right? I'm imagining this as a relative of that process.(...) But here's, here's the the missing piece of this. You, all of us take in whatever is aerosolized in the air, and then the body has to figure out what to do with it. So not only are these creating a problem for how to clean in a restaurant, but they're creating an undiagnosed problem in the people who have breathed these things in. And now they have polymers that their bodies are not evolved to deal with. And what are the health consequences? I don't know, maybe you do, but let's put it this way, the chances that there aren't health consequences, I would rate at approaching zero.
• 1:00:33
  Well, there have, there were a bunch of studies that I found that were done in Asian countries where women have much higher rates of lung cancer than men do.
• 1:00:45
  I'm talking about in the 80s and 90s, maybe these, and maybe even more recently. And they, they did a number of analyses to try to figure out whether it was these really enclosed cooking spaces in which they would be frying the oils.
• 1:01:02
  (...) And there's a lot of big literature on that. There was never a clinical trial, but there's a lot of associational evidence that seems quite powerful.
• 1:01:13
  You know, I would not want to be a fry cook for that reason. There were also experiments done in the Netherlands on this subject.(...) And so, you know, just to also plant an idea in everybody's minds, one of the, you know, one of the confounding factors of our understanding on meat and the study of meat is that we're talking in all those studies that are these observational studies, and they ask people about their meat consumption, we're talking about cooked meat. Meat cooked in, most likely seed oils. So, and in fact, that's the body of literature that makes us think that seed oils, or that meat causes cancer. That's the body of literature that the WHO used to condemn meat and say that it caused cancer.
• 1:02:03
  I actually did an article on that decision, which I feel like I keep distracting us, but I interviewed the,(...) one of the scientists on that panel that made that decision in 2015, I think.
• 1:02:19
  And I said, did you ever consider, actually in his testimony, he says, you know, we don't know what the confounding effect is though of the oils that the meat is cooked in. I asked him about that, and he's like, well, we just never really dealt with that.(...) So.
• 1:02:33
  Why? It's a hell of a confound.
• 1:02:35
  It's a big,(...) no kidding, especially since we're on the seed oil topic, I'll just stay here for one minute longer, which is, and hopefully we'll, I can reconnect this back to the other story we're talking about, how we got our erroneous dietary guidelines.
• 1:02:50
  But in the years following this 1961 dietary advice by the American Heart Association, there were a number of really large government funded clinical trials of enormous size and duration that tested the diet heart hypothesis. And basically they had one arm of the study eating a high seed oil diet. The other arm eating a diet, which was what was considered normal and saturated fats, which is pretty much twice of what we think is normal. We're told to eat today.
• 1:03:21
  But in any case, the point I'm making is that the folks on the seed oil diet in several of these large experiments ending ended up dying at higher rates from cancer inexplicably.(...) There was no, there was a tremendous amount of concern about this. There were three or four high level meetings at the NIH with all the top scientists in nutrition of the day, trying to understand why were, why did this supposedly heart healthy diet and yield people dying at higher rates of cancer? Ultimately, it was decided that the, you know, the importance of lowering dietary, of lowering your cholesterol was just so overwhelming(...) that they were going to push aside these findings on cancer, which were never really adequately explained.
• 1:04:11
  So I think there's some, you know, I mean, clinical trials are the highest level of evidence that we have. Not all clinical trials are perfect, but that's some pretty rigorous evidence showing that seed oils may cause cancer.
• 1:04:27
  Yeah, I would say, you know, years ago I did some research on the process of senescence, which is what most people would call aging, but the process by which we become feeble and inefficient as we grow older.
• 1:04:42
  And cancer is really one of two failure modes of the body, right? The overexpression of the tendency to repair tissues is a tumor. When it starts to spread, it becomes a cancer and the under expression of repair capacity causes organ failures like a heart attack, you know, emphysema, these sorts of things.
• 1:05:09
  So the body is trying to dodge both of these bullets and these perturbations tend to push you in one direction or the other.(...) And so, you know, really these results are screaming, stop disrupting the normal relationship between people and food rather than, you know, try to deduce what it is in your food that, you know, is causing this and, you know, alter the diet in some medically recommended way, you know, we keep shooting ourself in the foot in the identical fashion and it's horrifying to hear a story like this one, but I guess not surprising.
• 1:05:58
  Well, and I wanted to say that I think people rightly wonder where are the scientists talking about seed oils? Why is this just all over social media? But where are the high level scientists?
• 1:06:14
  Where are the people we can really trust?
• 1:06:15
  What do we really trust? Why, you know, I don't want to read about this in the book. I want to read it about in the peer reviewed public literature. And so one of the things that, well, first of all, there's the big story of how food companies drive research.
• 1:06:31
  And so what you will not find research in are the areas of science that would undermine the food industry.(...) So, or it's so I, in my book, I document how in the early 1970s, there were, I actually found a scientific conference on seed oils at Columbia University. And there were a number of really shocking studies that were presented by researchers from all over the world, including just one that sticks in my mind about how rats were found on high seed oil diet diets to this is such a disgusting image, but to stick to the bottom of the cage because they had shellac like substances in their feces, which is may or may not be related to the slack on the walls and McDonald's. But in any case, but what you don't see is any kind of attention or any conferences or anything, any there was no oxygen for research because there was no money. I hate to keep interrupting you. It's really rude of me, but, but I, you know, I'm part of me is just listening on the audience's behalf. And you're saying so many bombshells that I just want to stop and highlight them and point out whatever I might know that's connected.
• 1:07:52
  The idea that you've got an absence of the scientist that you would expect to be sounding the alarm on this issue. And if you have been in the space for any period of time, you know, it's that pattern one topic after the next, the scientists who should be telling us this don't exist. Then you say, well, you can't come up with a conclusion if it's really bad for a very powerful industry, which implies a level of capture and control that most people don't into it. But point is, well, so what would you want if, if industry finds ways to advance conclusions that aren't even right and to hide conclusions that are important? What would you want? Well, you would want an agency to level the playing field so that the truth could find its way into a place that we can all go read it and learn from it. You would want, you know, the NIH, the CDC, the FDA, you would want these agencies to play that role. And the problem is there is so much money to be made that it is inevitable that the industries, an industry that did not attempt to capture these regulatory agencies would perish in competition. It's not doing its job.
• 1:09:11
  Right. It is not doing its fiduciary responsibility to its shareholders. So what we see is industry after industry, the ones that have survived are the ones that have successfully captured these agencies, which then deliver us what appears to be science is the exact opposite. It is propaganda. It is not only propaganda that gets us to buy things for which there is no positive evidence, but it actively hides the evidence that we need, that we are actually endangering our health and the health of our children.(...) And that is the battle that you see Bobby Kennedy involved in. I mean,(...) I think we are all lucky that we are not him because it has to be absolutely maddening to be fighting that battle daily with these incredibly powerful forces.(...) But the, you know, it is hard for the public to imagine that what passes for scientific advice is almost always wrong because of this process of capture. But you don't have to see terribly many of these stories to understand, oh, that's a natural, that's basically an evolutionary process of capture that is going to be attendant to any industry that becomes wealthy and powerful and is dispensing a product that you probably shouldn't be eating.
• 1:10:27
  Okay. So let me, you put it perfectly and I want to flesh out the specifics of this story for people in nutrition,(...) because it is astonishing. There's sort of a story out there that it was the tobacco industry that created the playbook of deceit and all kinds of tactics to confuse and create, you know, that the science has settled all these various tactics. But my contention is that it, sorry, just going back for a second, and that it was RJR, this tobacco company that bought Nabisco food, and that was the beginning of the tobacco industry giving its playbook to the food industry, which has then unfurled those techniques.
• 1:11:21
  What I found is that probably the reverse is true, which is that the big food companies in 1941 got together and created something called the Nutrition Foundation.
• 1:11:34
  I'm talking Quaker Odes, General Mills, the National Biscuit Company,(...) Hines, they created a foundation and their sole stated goal was to influence the science on nutrition.(...) So this is before the NIH is even formed. That's in 1948.
• 1:11:53
  To influence the science on nutrition.
• 1:11:56
  Correct.
• 1:11:57
  What a mission.
• 1:11:58
  Yeah. And one of the earliest examples I had of that, and this was such an extraordinary wake up call for me, because I was just, again, as I said, so naive, but was looking at the very early studies pre the Nutrition Foundation in the 1920s when they were examining this new thing called margarine. And there were studies that said it was questionable findings about its health, and there were all these unknown fatty acids that were created by it. And then there were other studies by folks who were loosely connected to the margarine industry. And there's actually documents saying like, yes, this is what we do. We put in studies that confuse the record. So you can never, and this, of course, goes on today, you can never say for sure that anything is true, because there's science on both sides of the question. It's just that one side of the question is more or less honest science, and the other is industry putting its foot on that side of the scale.
• 1:13:09
  So just to continue this story a little bit, because(...) I want folks to understand what happened with the science on saturated fat and cholesterol, and with NIH, it's just it's a little bit of a twist on what I think people think happen, and as you described it, which is that just going back to that moment in time, American Heart Association in 1961, don't eat saturated fat and cholesterol, diet, heart hypothesis, scientists all over the world, really, they sort of glommed on to this hypothesis, but they knew that there was inadequate evidence.
• 1:13:47
  At the time, there were, it had not even been published, but there was something called the seven countries study.
• 1:13:54
  I mean, I spent maybe six months of my life studying the seven countries study.
• 1:13:58
  It was very ambitious, pioneering almost 13,000 men from seven countries in Europe and also the US and Japan. Ansel Keys was the lead investigator, and it purported to find exactly what he had set out to do, which was a relationship, an association between saturated fats and cardiovascular disease.
• 1:14:21
  There's so many, many problems with that study, but I think the principle one from a scientific perspective is that it's an association. It does not demonstrate causation.
• 1:14:33
  Also, there were all kinds of problems with the collection of the dietary records on only 3% of the men, very uncertain how they collected that data.
• 1:14:42
  But at the time, it really was the kind of blockbusters study.
• 1:14:48
  Nobody had data to counter it.
• 1:14:51
  You had Ansel Keys, again, very aggressive scientist as its champion.
• 1:14:57
  That study is probably one of the maybe the most cited study in nutrition science. It's like sort of the big bang of modern nutrition science.
• 1:15:09
  I wanted to say something about the point you made about randomized controlled trials.
• 1:15:19
  I think the public is very confused on this issue.
• 1:15:22
  They're told that these are the gold standard and there's a reason that they are very high quality or can be, which is that they're very sensitive.
• 1:15:34
  They can reveal a pattern that is very subtle.
• 1:15:38
  But at the same time, they are highly susceptible to bad design, either unintentionally or because somebody is pushing a conclusion that they want to have revealed in the data.
• 1:15:55
  It is that ability to manipulate the conclusion in the structure of the study that I think is why we have been sold the story that it's effectively the only kind of evidence you should accept is that when an industry has a story that it wants us to believe, you can build it in. You can create what's called a systematic error in a study so that the study spits out a conclusion that may seem very strong and it may be exactly the opposite of the truth.
• 1:16:29
  But in any case, you don't get anything for free. The sensitivity of those studies makes them sensitive to very subtle processes, but also sensitive to bad experimental design.
• 1:16:40
  Well, in nutrition, it may be a little bit of a different story because actually what you're describing to me in terms of being able to manipulate science better describes what we call observation or epidemiological studies where for a large number of reasons, they,(...) well, first of all, as an experimental design, they show association, not causation.(...) And in nutrition,(...) so what you will find is say the people eating lots of ultra-processed foods also exercise less, smoke more, do like they do everything wrong. And the people who are eating whole foods are doing everything right.
• 1:17:26
  And there's something called the healthy user effect, which is that people who are healthy are healthy in so many ways. They have better relationships. They may go to belong to a religious community that gives them a sense of sustenance, but just the smoking, the alcohol, and the exercise alone,(...) and even though in those kinds of studies, the researchers will try to adjust for what we call confounders, they're impossible. There will always be what's called residual confounding, which some amount of error in the results will come out.
• 1:18:09
  And I just make another point, which is like epidemiology is better used in other fields. The particular reason that it's especially bad in nutrition is that it's based on self-reported dietary questionnaires.(...) And I don't think I need to explain at length how we all lie about what we eat or that we can't remember what we ate even yesterday.(...) So, and they take these at intervals and people give some version of what they ate. And that's also very, it's a very unreliable, basic dataset that they're working from.
• 1:18:46
  So there's numerous problems with nutrition, epidemiology, I mean,(...) just to layer it on top of that is that now the most influential nutritional epidemiological studies are run mainly by Harvard, which gets tons of money from the food companies. I mean, talk about the ability, those studies are very, very easy to manipulate. The reason that I will still err on the side of clinical trials, it's true, clinical trials can also be manipulated, but they do by isolating an intervention. Half of you get the pill, half of you get the placebo, half of you get the diet, it would be half of you get the high saturated fat diet, half of you get the seed oil diet, you are isolating the thing you're studying. And if there's a different outcome in whatever your health outcome is, you can isolate the intervention as the most likely probable cause. And so that's what we call, you know, you know, this, but it's like a cause and effect relationship, which is, which is, I think, a more rigorous form of data and has been demonstrated, you know, I will just add this other factor, there was a paper in 2011, where scientists went back and looked at all the nutritional epidemiological findings. This was mainly on the antioxidant effects and the beneficial effects of various vitamin supplements.
• 1:20:20
  And none of those were confirmed in clinical trials. So, or zero to 11% of them were confirmed in clinical trials.
• 1:20:30
  So I think that form of data, even though we rely on it a lot, every headline you say linked to maybe all that uncertainty, language is a reflection of a study based on epidemiological observational data.
• 1:20:48
  (Dr. Seheult) Well, they both have their weaknesses.
• 1:20:50
  And I will just say, yes, if the study is properly designed, then randomized controlled trial is the best kind of evidence. But the chances that it is structurally broken in a way that is not evident in the data, that is evidence in the evidence in the methods section, if the methods are even correctly reported, which they are often not.(...) So, you know, biasing who's in the control group, for example, can radically alter the apparent conclusion of the study. And you know, it's very hard to figure out where the bodies are buried sometimes.
• 1:21:27
  (Dr. Patrick Seheult) I totally agree with you.
• 1:21:31
  And part of my steady growth and dissolution with science was realizing, reading scientific studies from the 70s and 80s, 90s and onward, where when you read the abstract of the paper, it doesn't even reflect what the actual data report. So, in so many ways, very, very common. I was so shocked when I first came across that. But let me go back to the story that I'm slowly unfolding here, which is seven countries study was basically weak data. That was what our policy was based on.
• 1:22:12
  Clinical trials then took place, what we call now called the core clinical trials, testing the diet-heart hypothesis in the 1960s, 1960s and 70s. These are trials all over the world in Oslo, London,(...) Australia. The biggest ones took place in the United States.
• 1:22:31
  These were enormous studies. This is like the golden age of nutrition research. The NIH was pouring huge amounts of money into the question of what is a healthy diet and should we avoid saturated fat and cholesterol.(...) So, these studies had thousands of people in them.
• 1:22:50
  Recently, on Substack published a whole long list of them.
• 1:22:54
  But the universal conclusion of them was that a high saturated fat diet had no effect on cardiovascular or total mortality. So, that's your likelihood of dying from heart disease or anything at all.
• 1:23:10
  And there was a somewhat mixed effect on heart disease.
• 1:23:16
  But those studies, that body of literature, so this is on all together worldwide, almost 80,000 people. I just want to let you know if you have a clinical trial on the front page of a major newspaper that probably has maybe less than 100 people. This is 80,000 people being tested on Ansel Kiesa's hypothesis.(...) The results are basically null,(...) plus that cancer effect we talked about.
• 1:23:45
  And all of those trials were basically, the results of that, those were basically just submerged and ignored, not included in review papers. They were not really accounted for. There was one study that was, the authors, this is actually the biggest ever test of the diet heart hypothesis, something called the Minnesota Coronary Survey.
• 1:24:13
  It was in the 70s, the principal investigators, which originally included Ansel Kies, did not publish their results for 17 years, which is a form of malfeasance in science. And when they finally did publish it, it was in this very out of the way journal, I guess they hoped nobody would notice. And when asked why, the principal investigator, Ivan Frant said, "Well, there was nothing wrong with the study. We were just so disappointed in the way it came out." Well, that's fascinating.
• 1:24:45
  That is such a profound violation of the scientific method that it inverts the nature of science, which actually goes back to something you said a few minutes ago. You said you were disillusioned with science. And I wanted to point out that the thing that looks like science that you're disillusioned in ain't science. It takes place in science departments by people who call themselves scientists, but science is that which adheres to the scientific method.
• 1:25:16
  And that is sufficient. You don't have to have a degree or a lab coat or any technology whatsoever to conduct science.
• 1:25:24
  (...) And no matter what degree you have and how high tech the experiment you're running is, if you don't adhere to the scientific method, it isn't science. And so it's kind of in some ways, this is a theme that runs through the whole story.
• 1:25:39
  Right? You know, are you disillusioned with food because vegetable oil is bad for you? No, it's not really food, right?
• 1:25:49
  It's an industrial product that was dressed up to be a food because it was profitable to do so.
• 1:25:56
  And so let's not lose faith in the thing that actually works that, you know, yeah, granted, it's pretty rare to see a properly scientifically run study these days. It's not the majority of them, but the science still works as well as it ever did. It just, you know, it's not fashionable.
• 1:26:13
  Well, yes, I think everything you say is true. I think that these core clinical trials were intended to be as ambitious as possible.(...) They were, some of them took place in inpatient facilities, like mental homes, veteran hospital, the kind of thing you can't do today because it would be considered unethical, but allows you to have very high level of control over the subjects because you're feeding them their food. You're not just simply handing them a diet book and an hour a week of counseling, you actually can control what they're eating.
• 1:26:50
  So I think they were for nutrition, they were pretty well controlled experiments.
• 1:26:57
  And they, the story is that they yield the results that were contrary to the prevailing nutrition dogma.
• 1:27:06
  And they were at that point, the diet heart hypothesis had really so quickly(...) kind of congealed and hardened to be the dominant hypothesis in the field. At the NIH, it was fully adopted at the American Heart Association, as I mentioned.
• 1:27:27
  And so the cognitive bias that exists at, you know, every one of these, in these institutions or at universities is so strong. In fact, a number of these papers, the authors write in shame about their results. They're saying, well, we didn't find an effect of saturated fat, but we, you know, the diet hypothesis still must be true, but there must be something wrong with our experiment.
• 1:27:55
  I mean, I know you know this in science, but staying in the kind of the popular crowd is vital to remaining a scientist.
• 1:28:06
  Otherwise, you're disinvited from conferences, you don't get invitations to write in journals, your papers don't get published. So the lifeblood of science(...) is to be, you know, part of the scientific community, get research friends from NIH.
• 1:28:22
  Then NIH jumped on the diet heart hypothesis almost the moment they were formed.
• 1:28:30
  So I write also- Hold on.
• 1:28:32
  I just want to point out, this is not uncommon, right? We are now(...) living through the same story over and over again, multiple different fields, right? So the diet heart hypothesis, which has altered people's diets for how many decades now?
• 1:28:51
  E85, I guess, 75.
• 1:28:53
  Yeah, 75. So back 1975, diet heart hypothesis, well, a properly run studied reveals that it doesn't predict anything. It's just not true.
• 1:29:05
  Okay, but it was the prevailing wisdom, and you were only able to publish if you said things that were consistent with it.
• 1:29:12
  That is the inversion of science. But we see the same thing with the chemical imbalance theory of mental disorders, right? That never had any support with it. Or the causal hypothesis of plaques and Alzheimer's, all of these very fashionable ideas have basically created a bias in what was allowed to be published, which invalidates all of it.
• 1:29:44
  You can't infer anything from the portion of the evidence that was allowed to be published if it is biased, right? You can't look at a study and say, well, this study says X if the point is, well, I don't know how many studies that said the inverse of that were never published because they went against the prevailing wisdom. So, you know, those people, those aren't the scientists. I know it sounds wrong, but those people who themselves, I'm sure go home and think I am a scientist, that's what I do. They're not scientists because they're not practicing science.(...) Publishing only things that comport with your pre-existing notion is the inverse of science. So they're inverse scientists, they're not scientists.
• 1:30:30
  You know, the English biologist Thomas Huxley, who is famously known as Darwin's bulldog, he talks about the propensity to fall in love with your own hypothesis, to treat your hypothesis like a favored child, that you nurture and you lavish with love and there creates an intellectual barrier to challenging it as the way that Karl Popper would insist that we do, right? And having that degree of bias towards one's own ideas is, of course, deeply human. We all possess that kind of bias.
• 1:31:11
  It's just that in science and myself, I've tried to do as a science journalist, we(...) have to go through, we are taught to go through the exercise of trying to challenge our own beliefs, trying to disprove it. I mean, you can imagine me as a nobody journalist in my, you know, Upper West Side New York City apartment with like two young kids lying on the floor thinking, "I can't be right about saturated fats. How is it possible that I could be right and all these people could be wrong?"(...) And I would revisit all of the, you know, everything that I had looked at and question myself, "Am I biased? Do I have bias? Like, is there bias here?" And, you know, I want to, I guess I want to say on my behalf that there are now, and also for the mainly for the listeners, there have now been 24, roughly, systematic reviews and meta-analyses that have(...) been published in the last 15 years, going back and looking at all those original core trials, in part because my book really brought them all to light.
• 1:32:20
  And so this was sort of a new renaissance of thinking unsaturated fat that happened. Papers were published,(...) rigorous reviews all over the world that say there is insufficient evidence to recommend caps on saturated fats. The clinical trial evidence doesn't support it. The observational evidence doesn't support it. There are major bodies of evidence that contradict it. And so we should no longer have caps on saturated fats.(...) So that, you know, that makes me feel better.
• 1:32:55
  But, you know, mainly, you know, and what motivates me throughout all my work is just that you want to see, you want to see truth revealed for its own sake, for people to know, that you also, or I also, have a, you know, a tremendous desire for people to know about the foods that will make them healthy, given like the devastation that we have really all over the world, but, you know, of chronic disease in our country.
• 1:33:25
  So. Well, so the experience that you had is one that I wish every student I had ever taught could have. The experience of concluding something that seems like it can't be right because everybody disagrees with you.
• 1:33:46
  And then being vindicated reveals what in retrospect is obvious. If you've got all of this corruption, that means you've got a lot of experts saying things that aren't true. It should be relatively easy to find those wrong stories and figure out what a more accurate story would be.
• 1:34:06
  The problem is people get socially driven away from it, right? You're told you're out of your mind and you begin to question whether you might be.
• 1:34:17
  So anyway, I think, you know, that experience you had while you describe it in terms that are, I don't know, frightening, is actually, it's the most liberating experience you can have, realizing that the experts, you know, science is a very delicate process. If the experts aren't doing it, then what they're telling you isn't of any use at all. It's probably, you know, motivated by perverse incentives and upside down and backwards, which is again and again what we find. So I wish people would just learn that lesson and then apply it across various different domains.
• 1:34:55
  And yes, it is true in so many disciplines and the added element in the food, in nutrition science and the reason that my more recent reporting has really shifted to financial conflicts of interest, corruption, is that I realize this is not(...) really a science, it's a problem of science, but it's a science that has a multi-billion dollar industry attached to it. So really the problem, the question is who is, who are the actors that are influencing this science? Who is really pulling the strings here? Can I pull back the curtain a bit to help people understand not just the food industry, but the pharmaceutical industry and, you know, a few other interests that are,(...) I mean, I won't go into it all, I don't think we have time, but you know, the animal rights movement, the global warming movement, which depends on vilifying animal agriculture, you know, animal livestock agriculture.
• 1:36:03
  And in a wild story, the Seventh-day Adventist Church, which is highly influential in this field and believes that the Second Coming will not happen without all of us becoming vegetarian, if not vegan.(...) So there are so many forces bearing down on this science that it's got added dimensions, you know, the dimension of religion, the pharmaceutical angle, which was not(...) really obvious to me when I started.(...) So it is an even more distorted scientific field that others might be.
• 1:36:44
  So I think people should start with the following question.
• 1:36:52
  Given, I don't know how many, how many billion dollars do Americans, for example, spend on food per year? Do we have any idea?
• 1:37:06
  I wish I knew that number. I don't. I mean, it's just, you know,(...) trillions of dollars.
• 1:37:12
  It's a huge amount of money. So in light of that fact, let's say that you had a product that was making tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars, but that was not really fit for human consumption.
• 1:37:32
  Well, normal nutrition science would reveal that.
• 1:37:36
  And your good thing would disappear.
• 1:37:40
  So do people really expect that industries that are selling something that's bad for your health are going to sit idly by as a bunch of know-it-all nutrition scientists reveal the danger of their product, maybe even put them in legal jeopardy for selling it? Or do we think that they are going to put their thumb on the scales in science and push the science in a direction that makes their product look good?
• 1:38:10
  And if you think, well, an industry would be expected to advocate for its product in spite of proper nutrition science, do you think science is so well-defended that they would be unsuccessful? If so, by what process is it defended? Well, there is no such process. So therefore, we should expect industry to be feeding us propaganda dressed up as science fed through our scientific institutions because nobody built an immune system for those institutions that would have fended off those attacks. That's what we're experiencing. You're going to get propaganda because there's no bar to it working its way into science and displacing the information you actually need.
• 1:38:57
  And those same companies also are funding our media outlets and they are funding our public health supposedly trusted institutions like the American Heart Association, like the American College of Cardiology.(...) I mean, just to exemplify your point a little bit, the low carbohydrate diet, which has been studied now rigorously in clinical trials for, I would say more than 25 years and has been shown to be effective for really the only whole foods diet that well, that has been demonstrated in(...) clinical trials to reverse type two diabetes, reverse is hypertension, reverse is most cardiovascular risk factors, reverse is fatty liver disease. I mean, a very highly effective(...) intervention that unfortunately for that field of science is whole foods based. A well-formulated ketogenic diet does not involve processed foods. And anyway, to accomplish that diet, you really need to mainly eat whole foods.
• 1:40:05
  So what is, I think it's fair to assert that that diet has now been studied in more trials on more people than or equal to the famed Mediterranean diet.
• 1:40:21
  And this is an enormous body of scientific literature that has systematically been suppressed by these, not just the food companies, right? It's the pharmaceutical companies, which are dependent on a model of everybody taking four to five medications every day for their chronic diseases. That's, you know, and you just can't be too cynical about that.
• 1:40:46
  So what transpires are, are, you know, basically, I have to call it propaganda campaigns by the American College of Cardiology, by the American Heart Association to demonize low carbohydrate and ketogenic diets, to the point where I just a quick story, like about a year and a half ago, where a woman at the American College of Cardiology annual conference gave presentations in the form of a, she just spoke about a study that she was researching that apparently looked at the ketogenic diet.(...) She didn't present really any, you know, hardly any facts or figures. It was not, there wasn't even an abstract that was published, like very, it's just was a very inchoate form of a presentation that was taken by the American College of Cardiology and blasted out as a press release that then resulted in, I would say, you know, dozens and dozens of articles saying, oh, a keto like diet.
• 1:41:53
  (...) I can't remember now, but it was, you know, a keto like diet likely to increase mortality or, you know, increase your risk of stroke or whatever it was.
• 1:42:03
  (...) But the fact that the American College of Cardiology, which is funded largely by pharmaceutical companies, the fact that they did that, I actually went through all their press releases from that conference to see if there was any other press release based on just the mere presentation of data without even an abstract. And that was, they had not done that in any other instance, you know, it's either a published paper or at least an abstract or a trial protocol had been registered. Anyway, that to me is hard to understand as anything but propaganda designed to keep people from learning about or being continuing their fear of this kind of way of eating.
• 1:42:46
  You know,(...) I'm plagued by a question across many different domains. And the question is, I'm sure most of the people at the American Heart Association are decent and think that they are on the side of science and health.
• 1:43:08
  But some of this stuff is so cynical that I have to imagine that there are people who are both dispensing this dangerous propaganda and protecting their own families from it.
• 1:43:22
  In other words, what I would love to know is if the people who are in charge of, you know,(...) demonizing ketogenic diets are availing themselves of the health benefits of those diets, are the people who are demonizing the so-called anti-vaxxers actually steering their families away from adjuvanted vaccines or maybe all vaccines because they're aware of the downsides that have been buried.
• 1:43:52
  I don't know how to get the answer to that question. But again, I think most of the people involved in these organizations are probably good people who've been duped.(...) But some of these strategies are so cynical that I have to imagine the people deploying them are smart enough to ignore their own advice.
• 1:44:13
  Yeah, I mean, it's impossible and really not to conclude otherwise. I can, you know, I know many people in the field tell me a lot of things privately that they won't say publicly for fear of losing their standing or falling out of their community or, you know, I'm sure you have had similar experiences. Oh, yeah. I remember a medical school professor(...) who was teaching the approved, let's just call it the food period, but the government's dietary advice, low fat, high carbohydrate diet.
• 1:44:54
  And a student went up to him afterwards and said, "You know, have you heard about the ketogenic diet?" Because it turns out it's really quite effective for chronic disease reversal. And he said, "Well, I personally am on a ketogenic diet, but I'm not allowed to teach it." So, I mean, that's a, you know,(...) a version of the story that I can actually tell.
• 1:45:23
  But yes, I mean, I know many people who will confidentially tell me that they,"Oh, I'm cutting carbs. I'm not talking about it."(...) I mean, I have to wonder, like all these movie stars who, you know,(...) publicly are on the vegan diet, there's no way post age 40 or so as a woman, unless you have a miraculously good metabolism, that you can stay thin if you aren't cutting back a little bit on the grains, the rice, the starches.
• 1:45:56
  It's just incredibly hard to stay slim on that diet. And sometimes when I see a fat movie star, I think, "Well, that person is watching me. I think, "Well, that person is walking their walk." Well, all right. But can I just spend one moment of annoyance here?
• 1:46:16
  What kind of ghoul do you have to be to dispense advice on health that you don't think is healthy? In other words, the idea that, "Oh, I'm on a ketogenic diet, but I can't talk about it publicly," translates to, "I'm actually willing to let people who listen to me be advised into poor health when I know better because I'm too much of a coward or too selfish to actually pay the price of what I believe." And then you actually, if that was your story, right, "Oh, I can't talk about a ketogenic diet even though I'm on it," you actually have an obligation to go Paul Revere on that, right? You should be saying, "Hey, I was in an industry in which we were dispensing advice that privately people knew was bad and the New York Times was broadcasting it." You should be alerting the public, "Hey, this field is phony." And instead, you're going to continue to pretend that it's a real field while you're doing privately the opposite of what you're saying publicly?
• 1:47:35
  Well, I mean, we've, you know, cancel culture we've been living with now for more than a decade, and I think people well understand the loss of their professional lives, their, maybe there's economic loss, loss of friends.
• 1:47:51
  Cancel culture has been going on in nutrition for an extremely long time. I documented people losing their careers and being cast out, very high level scientists in the mid 80s.(...) And one of the purposes of cancel culture is to instruct other folks that if they raise their head above the parapet, that they too will be shot down.
• 1:48:17
  And so what are the consequences of my being, as you say, it's sort of an early person talking about this in the field is that that's also my role in this. You know, I was, when I came out, I had a cover story in the British Medical Journal, which is a pretty big deal as a journal.(...) And on, it was the first major critique of the US dietary guidelines, going into a lot of detail about all the clinical trials they had ignored, how they had never reviewed, done any proper systematic review on red meat, even though they called for the reduction in red meat, a number of pretty serious accusations.
• 1:48:56
  And that was subject to the largest retraction effort in modern history, at least that I can find.(...) So, and I think that quite a few people would see me as a cautionary tale.
• 1:49:10
  Yeah, but I'm sorry, I'm I can't let this go. Okay, look, I'm not a religious person, for whatever reason, the home I grew up in wasn't a religious home. And I have a complicated relationship with those stories, which I think are very important, but not literal. But never mind that. I'm wondering if the problem here is that people have become so secular, that they actually think it's reasonable to betray the public, not only to fail to say what they know, but to, to say the opposite, with the credentials that cause people to listen to them is to harm those people. So I guess I get it, cancel culture is frightening, it can ruin your career, absolutely. But we need more people who will say, you know what, that's bad. But it's also my obligation.
• 1:50:11
  It's not the worst thing in the world to lose your career, especially if your career is involved in advancing the phony wisdom of a field that's lying, right? At the point you're in a field that's lying, you really want to stay in it, or, you know, I guess I'm just wondering if people who have a, you know, a deeper relationship with, with God, for example, are more likely to say, you know what, yes, I'm going to lose my career, but I don't want this career because there are more important things.
• 1:50:45
  Well, I obviously relate deeply to that story.
• 1:50:51
  I'm thinking of this one Randall Wood scientist who was also an early scientist in the 1970s on seed oils and was harassed for that. And he, he was a religious, is still alive, a religious person and left the field. And last I talked to him, he was raising cattle on a ranch in Texas. He seemed pretty happy, but you know, if you go up to Harvard and Tufts and Stanford, those, you know, there's,(...) I don't think those are institutions run amok with religious sentiments. And I will say probably the most corrupt and well cited scientist in the world at Harvard, the most influential nutrition scientist ever, has, has, you know, joined an effort by the World Economic Forum to shift us all to a even more grain-based diet. So the allure of power, connection, prestige, globe, the global stage is, I mean, this is emblematic of what's happening in our time, but obviously that is greater than, than the call to moral clarity, goodness, honesty for many, many people in our, in academia.
• 1:52:22
  Well, you know, at some level, this is parallel to the, the technical story that we've been discussing, because the technical story, you know, we can(...) say, well, what does the evidence really suggest about what kinds of fats you should be eating and how much, right? At another level, the answer evolutionarily is very simple. You're built for an environment and the closer you live to something that resembles it, the healthier you're going to be.
• 1:52:49
  And in this case, we can tell all kinds of stories about the perverse incentives and the nature of fields and what was discovered when, but the basic answer is, look, if you have a public and a private scientific position, you're not a scientist.(...) You are betraying the public. You are doing wrong. If your field happens to be anywhere near health and medicine, you are actually hurting people.
• 1:53:22
  It's wrong. Cut it out. Whatever the costs.(...) I gotta tell you, I've just seen so much of this. And you know, you focus on the scientist saying the thing that's just wrong and that's all very antiseptic. But then you've got the other side of the equation where there's the person who lives their life obese because somebody told them the wrong stuff about what they were supposed to eat. That person has been maimed. They had a right not to be maimed. And I guess I'm just wondering, how did the world get full of so many people who even in the case that their misdeeds are maiming other people, they won't stop?
• 1:54:08
  I don't have an answer to that. I mean, it just like it breaks my heart.
• 1:54:16
  Continually.(...) And I think any of us doing what we're doing are just struggle not to become too angry and bitter and find ways to try to contribute to exposing what's going on in a way that like spiritually is not too burdensome because it is confronting an almost unspeakable world where I'm a scientist.
• 1:54:44
  I see somebody walk, you know, with a cane, I see, you know, walking around the street, barely able to walk. I know that they would be healthier if they got correct dietary advice. And yet I give them the opposite through official channels.
• 1:55:00
  And that is basically what our government has been doing. I never finished my story, but 1980 is the beginning of our dietary guidelines where the US government, USDA and HHS basically adopt the entire platform of the American Heart Association.
• 1:55:18
  Diet low unsaturated fats, cholesterol, low in fat overall, high in grains.
• 1:55:24
  And that becomes the law of the land really hugely influential(...) in terms of, you know, it's really considered the gold standard and downloaded by every single(...) doctor, dietician, nutritionist, nurse, and also is then implemented through our school lunches and feeding programs for the elderly and our educational programs for the military, how they should eat. So that has, we have been, and also in 1980, so in 1980, you know, obesity rates had been really in the mid to low teens among adults in America in the 1960s, 70s, and in 1980 on the dot, there's a sharp turn upwards in our obesity rates.
• 1:56:15
  You know, what happens in 1980, the dietary guidelines, because it also has an impact on the whole food supply. All, you know, all pork is bred to be lean, all, you know, everything changes. All the labels are changed to make us aware of fat, low fat milk comes, you know, into the picture, skim milk.
• 1:56:32
  So, you know, there's tremendous disillusionment to think that our government policy has maybe innocently at first, but certainly not now been delivering a diet to us that almost assuredly drives chronic disease is the most likely explanation for our chronic disease epidemics today.
• 1:56:56
  Yes. And the idea that we are fighting a public relations machine, none of this is scientifically that hard.
• 1:57:08
  All of these questions are studyable. We can have the answers. What we need is a system that is immunized from industry so that it is capable of figuring out what the evidence actually points to. And, you know, a message I've heard you speak on elsewhere,(...) you know, you've touched on it here, is that actually not only do we have the ability to feed ourselves better and reduce the chronic disease epidemic, but we actually know a certain amount that's highly useful and actionable and works quickly that reverses disease. So, you know, it's not just a question of what you should eat to stay healthy. It's a question of what you should eat to restore health after your health has been broken by some of the bad advice you've been given. So you want to talk a little bit about that before we close out here?
• 1:58:08
  Yeah, I do. Thank you.
• 1:58:11
  And it's just a fundamentally important point, which is there is a healthy diet, what we would consider, let's say, an ancestral diet that is what is the way that you should bring up your children and the way that you should preserve your health. A healthy person should eat.
• 1:58:31
  Once you tip over into metabolic, what we call now metabolic ill health, but let me explain. Like you have obesity, diabetes,(...) fatty liver disease, heart disease,(...) any one of these chronic conditions, even like autoimmune diseases, irritable bowel disorders, even skin conditions are caused by, they, I would argue that they, and this is fairly well accepted now, that they have a root cause, which is called insulin resistance.
• 1:59:02
  And once you have insulin resistance, which I'll explain, you can no longer sort of eat like a normal person.(...) And the basic way to explain it is insulin resistance means that you're normally functioning pancreas, which secretes insulin to deal with the incoming glucose, right? Glucose is the sugar that comes in not only sugar, but also starches. So even whole grain, once you eat it, becomes glucose in your bloodstream. Starch is just sugar molecules holding hands. Normally, the pancreas releases insulin, takes the glucose and sticks it in your body tissue,(...) right? That can either go into your muscle tissue and then you feel like exercising, or it can go into it when your muscle tissue becomes what we call insulin resistance, which means it can't really take its insulin receptor cells, sort of get tired of accepting glucose, it will start taking insulin will start taking your glucose to your fat cells. And then you will start to get fat. But insulin resistance has, you know, many manifestations are people who get diabetes without getting fat, they're, they're, they're different ways it has an impact on the body.
• 2:00:19
  But insulin really is the king of all hormones for it is a hormone, and it's the king of all hormones for making you fat.
• 2:00:25
  Once you are insulin resistant, meaning you cannot deal with the incoming glucose, you have to pump out more and more insulin to deal with it, you can you're it's another way of expressing that is to say you are basically intolerant of carbohydrates, you really cannot take in so many carbohydrates anymore.(...) And that means you have to reduce the amount of carbohydrates you eat. And that is a diet that may feel restrictive, but it is truly what you have to do once your your metabolism is broken in this way.
• 2:01:02
  And it's probably a little closer to, you know, how,(...) you know, I believe like many of us, we evolved to eat, which was not that many certainly not refined process carbohydrates, but not that many carbohydrates overall.
• 2:01:17
  And so that's, I think it's people try to say, well, what is the healthy diet, but it really depends on your metabolic health.
• 2:01:27
  You know, how tolerant are you of carbohydrates? Are you a 19 year old boy who's an athlete?
• 2:01:33
  You know, no problem. You're, you're probably going to be quite tolerant. Are you, you know, a woman of my age, you probably are not going to be able to take in too many carbohydrates, especially after growing up eating Captain Crunch as a kid.
• 2:01:52
  So I have to also wonder what the impact.
• 2:01:57
  I don't know anything about what the actual evidence base looks like.
• 2:02:03
  But I've heard a lot more in my adult life about pancreatic cancer. And I'm actually wondering if putting the pancreas on overdrive with a focus on carbohydrates in the diet as if that was healthy is actually driving that as well.
• 2:02:21
  You know anything about that?
• 2:02:22
  I do know about pancreatic cancer specifically, but there is a truly fascinating body of scientific literature that is on the idea that glucose is really the preferred fuel for cancer cells. And so glucose is what fuels really glucose and glucogen gone, which is a stored form of glucose in your liver, but that those are what fuel cancer. That's a hypothesis that actually goes back to Otto Warburg in Germany under, under Hitler and was very well developed at the time and then largely disappeared until quite recently. But there are case studies of reversing particularly brain cancer. Brain, your brain is very susceptible to glucose and the complete remission of brain cancer by going on a ketogenic diet. And those are case studies that have been published.
• 2:03:26
  So, and because cancer is associated with, is always tracks with obesity. In other words, your risk of cancer in every part of your body goes up with the ink as you get, as you gain weight. I have to assume that there is, you know, a connection there most likely. I think that this glucose explanation.
• 2:03:53
  All right. Did you, so ketogenic diet has a tremendous capacity to actually restore health to people who have got a metabolic syndrome.
• 2:04:08
  Is there anything else that you want to add before we close out here?
• 2:04:14
  You know, I think that's, that's good. I mean, I feel like that's just a super important concept for people who are like, well, why can't we like the Japanese? Because, because you're metabolically unwell. It's just a different story for you.
• 2:04:29
  So anyway, yeah, we've gone over our time. So that's good.
• 2:04:36
  Okay.
• 2:04:38
  Nina, this has been fascinating.(...) I'm of course left with a huge number of questions. Maybe we'll revisit this another time.
• 2:04:48
  Your book is the Big Fat Surprise. Is that right?
• 2:04:52
  Yes.
• 2:04:55
  Okay. So people can get that anywhere books are sold. You are the founder of the nutrition coalition, which has been tremendously important in raising awareness of these issues. Where can people find you?
• 2:05:14
  I have a column called unsettled science on sub stack.
• 2:05:20
  And I do, I only read my social media on X slash Twitter. So you can find me there at Big Fat Surprise.
• 2:05:30
  All right. Excellent.(...) Nina Teuschols, this has been fascinating. And anyway, I thank you for your work and for waking a lot of us up to the nonsense that we were sold about food.
• 2:05:43
  Well, thank you. It's been such a great conversation. So thank you for having me.
• 2:05:47
  All right, everybody.
• 2:05:48
  Thanks for joining us.