This is a YouTube video titled "Are Butter and Bacon Health Foods?" containing a recorded conversation from August 30, 2018. The discussion features Ask AI Mark interviewing a respected scientist about controversial views on saturated fats, including the health impacts of butter and bacon, and challenging traditional ideas about calories and weight loss. The dialogue explores evolving scientific evidence and differing perceptions of dietary fats.
You suggest two things that are significant heresy. One is that saturated fats may not be the boogeyman that we thought they were. Maybe they're neutral. They're probably made out of health food, but they're not terrible. And you wrote that review of what was it? Butter is butter back six and a half million patient years, I think 600,000 patients over many years, and there was no link between heart disease and butter, and there was an inverse correlation with diabetes. And the second kind of heresy is that all calories are not the same, that weight loss isn't about eating less and exercising more, and those ideas are pretty fringe, and you're yet in the center of academia and one of the most respected scientists in the world. So how does that all sync up?
Well, you know, I think that what I try to do, you know, what all good scientists try to do is let the science lead me where it will. I didn't start out with any beliefs or notions about what would or wouldn't be good for us. And in fact, you know, you'll find this funny. My first NIH grant, which was a K award, which is an award to support young investigators who are developing their careers, my first K award, the topic of that award was we know saturated fat is bad for us. And so what should it be replaced with? Should it be replaced with protein or monos or polys or carbs? And this is something that I wrote when I was a cardiology fellow. And then when I started doing the research and I started really, you know, going deep into the data, I realized that saturated fat is actually not bad for us. And so my own hypothesis and my own notion changed based on the evidence. I started out intending to understand that saturated fat was bad and what it should be replaced with. And that's not what I found. And as you said, I think it's really important to point out that butter and bacon are not health foods.
I've never- I wouldn't put butter and bacon in the same category though, right?
Exactly. I wouldn't even put them in the same category, but many people do. And that's usually what's on the COVID of magazine articles, hamburgers and from fast food restaurants. so I think that the work that we've done on saturated fat suggests not that saturated fat's inert, but that it's complicated.
