Latest / Fork U with Dr. Terry Simpson / FORK U #100 — The Hall of Fame and Shame

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FORK U #100 — The Hall of Fame and Shame · Fork U with Dr. Terry Simpson

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  >> Dr. Terry Simpson: This is it, episode 100 of 4Q. Over the past 99
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  episodes, we have gone from the blue zones to the
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  bird flu, from Kellogg's enemas to cholesterol
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  chemistry, and from goat gland hucksters to the
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  microbiome. Today, we are celebrating the best and
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  the worst. The scientists who changed medicine and
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  the scammers who tried to sell it back to us in a
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  bottle. Welcome to Fork, you Hall of Fame and
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  shame. I am your Chief Medical Explanationist, Dr.
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  Terry Simpson, and this is Fork U Fork University,
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  where we bust myths, make sense of the madness,
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  and teach you a little bit about food and
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  medicine. I'm going to start with Ancel Keys, the
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  most misunderstood scientist of today, but not of
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  his time. Ancel Keys gave us the Mediterranean
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  diet long before influencers turned olive oil into
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  content. Ancel Keys didn't guess. He measured. He
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  didn't speculate. He studied. Keys built one of
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  the most careful and longest running cohort
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  studies in all of medical history. He and his team
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  went village by village across seven countries,
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  collecting everything people ate, sending those
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  foods back to laboratories for precise nutrient
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  analysis. Every year, they perform blood work,
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  EKGs, physical examinations. They comb through the
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  hospital charts of the patients, death
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  certificates and medical records, not for months,
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  but for decades. That is science the hard way.
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  Observation, precision, patience. For critics like
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  Gary Taubes, who claim Keys left out countries,
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  that accusation only proves he never read Keyes
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  actual papers. Keyes didn't study nations. He
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  studied cohorts of men in villages within those
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  nations, following them year after year to see how
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  the diet and diseases progressed. Keyes wasn't
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  chasing fame. He was following evidence. Even
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  without today's molecular tools, his data pointed
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  straight to what modern lipid science later
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  confirmed. Apolipoprotein B, the protein that
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  escorts LDL cholesterol, is actively transported
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  into arterial walls and starts atherosclerosis,
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  the root of heart disease. So when modern
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  influencers dismiss Keys with a tweet or a podcast
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  rant, remember, they've got microphones, Keys has
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  data, they have followers. Keys left us with the
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  foundation of, ah, preventive cardiology. And if
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  you want to honor him, drizzle olive oil instead
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  of conspiracy. And I owe a Special thanks to Dr.
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  Harry Blackburn, who worked with Keys at Minnesota
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  and still shares stories from those early days of
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  the seven country study, a labor of love that
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  defined modern nutritional science. I'm going to
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  go back in time now to Dr. Frederick Banting and
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  Charles Brest and the children who woke up. I want
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  you to picture this. 1922, the University of
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  Toronto, Dr. Banting and a medical student named
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  Charles best discovered how to collect insulin out
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  of pancreases of lots of animals. They purified
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  that insulin. And then Dr. Frederick Banting, in
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  one of the most amazing moments in modern
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  medicine, went to a children's hospital. Here,
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  children had slipped into a coma, and families
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  were simply waiting for them to die from what we
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  now know as type 1 diabetes. Instead, he went by
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  those children one at a time and injected insulin.
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  And the children woke up, and the children were
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  able to live normal lives because of this
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  remarkable discovery of insulin. Their parents
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  were able to hug them again, talk to them again.
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  And many of these children lived in their 70s and
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  80s, when they were expected to die as teenagers.
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  I want you to think back to the 1920s, when people
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  said, oh, they could feed, and their, uh, food was
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  much better then, and those parents fed them. But
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  diet alone didn't stop death. Good science did,
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  and it still does a century later. Banting sold
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  that patent for a dollar because he thought it
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  should belong to everybody. Too bad modern
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  pharmaceuticals don't do the same.
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  In one of my favorite episodes about Dr. Kinehara
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  Takaki and the first vitamin. So decades before
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  anybody knew the word vitamin, There was a
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  Japanese surgeon, Dr. Kinohara, and he had noticed
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  that sailors were dying of what we now know as
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  beriberi on long voyages. Dr. Kinohara was a very
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  careful surgeon. He had been initially trained in
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  eastern surgery, but he became retrained in
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  western surgery, actually going to london and
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  learning at St Mark's Hospital. He even studied
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  with people like Charles mayo, who was actually a
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  fellow student of his. When he went back, he used
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  epidemiology, and he learned epidemiology from
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  John snow himself, the guy who discovered that the
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  broad street water pump Was the source of cholera
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  in london. Those principles of epidemiology
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  brought kitahara back, and he noticed that the
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  sailors who had a more vigorous diet, balanced
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  diet, didn't suffer from symptoms of beriberi, and
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  he attributed to what became later known as
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  thiamine. Had Dr. Kinohara lived longer, he would
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  have shared the nobel prize for the discovery of
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  thiamine. But unfortunately, he died. But his
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  careful discovery, his careful research, his
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  careful epidemiology saved more people in the
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  japanese navy than anything else, because more
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  people died in the Japanese imperial navy from
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  beriberi than any died from bullets. And he's also
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  known for bringing Japan into modern medicine.
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  Next, I want to come back to someone who's a
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  contemporary of mine, Dr. Leonard Hayflick. He
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  unfortunately died a few years ago, but he was the
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  original longevity doctor. In 1961, Leonard
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  Hayflick, a PhD, wasn't studying nutrition. He was
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  studying life itself. He was looking at cell
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  cultures. And he discovered that human cell
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  cultures divided about 50 times, stopped, went
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  into senescence and then ultimately died. That
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  became the Hayflick limit. And that simple
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  observation has rewritten biology. It proved that
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  aging isn't mystical or mental. It occurs at a
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  cellular level. Each division of a cell uses a bit
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  of our genetic clock until the cell retires from
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  service. He wasn't finding out about food or
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  supplements. It was truth. It became the
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  foundation of regenerative medicine and cell
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  biology, showing us why cells repair slow and
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  rest. Learning the first bit about telomeres, if
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  there was ever a real longevity doctor. That whole
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  science started with Leonard Hainfla. No ring
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  light, no powders, just a microscope and the
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  courage to question dogma.
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  Speaking of modern nutrition, two decades after
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  Keys came the DASH diet and the Portfolio Diet
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  teams. Um, DASH stands for the Dietary Approach to
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  Stop Hypertension. And that came from a dream team
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  of scientists. At Johns Hopkins, it was Dr. Lauren
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  Sepel who led the NIH. At Pennington Biomedical,
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  Dr. George Bray, Donna Ryan, Catherine Champagne
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  built the menus. And at Harvard, Dr. Frank Sachs
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  crunched the numbers. Their 1997 study proved that
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  a diet rich in fruits, vegetables, whole grains,
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  low fat dairy and low salt could lower blood
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  pressure without weight loss. Then there was the
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  portfolio diet. Dr. David Jenkins and his team
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  from the University of Toronto, again, like Dr.
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  Banting and Best, they discovered about fiber and
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  how it was the first drug tools used against high
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  cholesterol. Their combination of soy nut soluble
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  fiber and plant sterols cut LDL by up to 17%.
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  Culinary medicine at its finest. And yet some will
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  say, we need more salt. The DASH team proved
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  otherwise. Unless, of course, you're selling a
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  mango flavored electrolytes on TikTok.
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  And now let's talk about a place where surgery
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  became science. If you ever find yourself in
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  Edinburgh, skip the kilt shops and go to the
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  Surgeons Hall Museum. There you will find where
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  Lister showed how antisepsis improved surgical
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  outcomes. There you will find where Sime, who was
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  actually not only Lister's chairman, but father in
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  law, careful anatomy left dissections on
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  operations that we still use and I have used to
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  this day. There you will find where James Young
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  Simpson discovered how chloroform couldn't be used
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  as an anesthetic in surgery. And you will find a
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  Young medical student named Arthur Conan Doyle
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  studied under Dr. Jose, that sharp eyed
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  diagnostician who inspired Sherlock Holmes. That's
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  where medicine learned to observe, deduce and
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  prove. And from those halls the art of observation
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  became the science of evidence. It was the
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  birthplace of modern diagnosis and the foundation
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  of modern American education. We'll be touring
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  that museum on my TikTok channel this November
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  because understanding where science began and
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  where medicine and surgery begin as it's important
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  to know where it's going. But hall of Fame we also
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  have the hall of Shame.
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  We're going to start with Gary Brecke, the
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  biohacking Hypebend Every generation has a snake
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  oil salesman. Ours just streams in high
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  definition. Gary Brecke calls himself a biologist
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  who can predict your date of death and move it for
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  a fee. No medical degree, no doctorate. He has a
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  bachelor's degree and some borrowed scrubs. He
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  went to chiropractic school but apparently never
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  finished. He sells hydrogen water bottles,
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  claiming that There are over 1400 studies proving
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  it's the best in the world. There aren't that many
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  studies. He says that cold plunges melt flat. They
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  don't. And if they did, every Alaskan fisherman
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  would look like Thor. He and his buddies yuck it
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  up online on his podcast, calling it science, but
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  it's show business with a pulse oximeter. Then
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  there's Dr. No, she's not a doctor. It's actually
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  just Barbara O', Neill, the preacher, not the
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  professor. She's more Seventh Day Adventist than
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  scientists. She claims that cayenne pepper can
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  stop a heart attack and cholesterol is a
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  pharmaceutical plot. She charges thousands of
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  dollars for her seminars while ignoring decades of
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  research. The Crestro that I use costs $0.70 a
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  month. I'm pretty sure she's the only one making
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  money off of that.
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  Now to the shirtless salesman of supplements and
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  scams. Compare the scientists between the
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  Mediterranean dash and portfolio diets to today's
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  influencers and you'll see two different species.
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  The researchers spent decades on data. The
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  salesmen spend minutes on marketing. There's Paul
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  Saladino, the carnivore who discovered fruit when
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  steak stopped selling. The salt slingers hawking
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  electrolyte powder for $39.99 a bag. And Dr. Uh,
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  Gundry, the never shirtless but always pedantic ex
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  surgeon selling bean guard for 60 bucks a month.
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  And of course, who can forget the liver king whose
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  muscles came from a needle, not cow liver.
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  Scientists understand the chemistry and biology
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  and scammers understand lightning and marketing.
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  And so keys with the Hitchens of his day and able
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  to slay nonsense with a sentence. But most
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  scientists aren't showmen. They're too busy doing
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  their work. The scammers pretend their wealth came
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  from helping people, but it comes from powders and
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  placebos. So next time someone with a six pack on
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  a Shopify account say they reinvented nutrition,
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  remember, science doesn't need an affiliate link.
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  And that brings us to the Rio Heroes. The heroes
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  that you may know in your community today. They
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  were the doctors, the nurse, the therapists, the
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  healthcare workers who showed up every day during
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  the pandemic before we had a vaccine. While the
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  supplement salesmen surfed and sold powders, these
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  people suited up and saved lives. Give your fellow
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  nurse and doctor who were present at that time a
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  handshake at the end of 100 episodes. Here's what
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  I Science doesn't need to be sexy to save lives.
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  Our job, our mission, is to build the bridge
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  between real scientists and you, the public. My
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  background's in science and medicine, but my
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  mission is to bring you the quiet truth from labs
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  and hospitals, but not under a ring light. And
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  it's my joy to share the work of people whose idea
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  of glory is a pat on the back from a colleague,
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  not a link on Amazon. Because around every life
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  saving discovery is a scientist who will Never
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  trend on TikTok, but they're the ones who actually
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  change the world. That's what Forku has always
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  been about. Separating noise from nutrition, hype
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  from health, and reminding you that evidence
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  always outlasts the algorithm. This has been Fork
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  U Fork University, researched and written by me,
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  Dr. Terry Simpson, all things Audios and
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  production by Simpler media and the pod God
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  himself, Mr. Eboterra. For references and more
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  episodes, visit forku.com and
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  yourdoctorsorders.com and remember this. I am a
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  board certified physician, but I am not your
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  physician. This podcast is for education, not
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  personal medical advice. After a hundred episodes,
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  thank you for listening, for thinking and being a
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  part of this journey. Here's to the next hundred
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  and to science over salesmanship. Hey Evo, you've
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  been here for all 100 episodes of Fork you and a
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  few of the episodes and our trials before that.
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  Who are the heroes and quacks in this enterprise?
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  And thanks for making me sound better than I am.
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  It has been truly my pleasure, my friend. Oh, and
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  if I'm the hero, can I wear a cape? It.