Butter, Meat and The Science and Politics of Nutrition l Doctor's Farmacy with Dr. Mark Hyman EP2

Welcome to the Doctor's Pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman. I'm excited to have an extraordinary guest today, Nina Teicholz, who's written a book that inspired me to write my book called Eat Fat, Get Thin. Her book was called the Big Fat Surprise, which turned all of our conventional notions about what to eat on its head, meat, fat, or bad, and you write that they're good. So Nina has really done quite a bit of work on this, and she's no slouch. Her book was probably one of the best written books I've read. both from the investigative journalist point of view and also just from the literary point of view. It was a pleasure to read. She published a number of articles in the Lancet and British Medical Journal about her work and about these ideas. And the Lancet wrote that this is a disquieting book. It's ruthless sciencing and dissent that has shaped our lives for decades. Researchers, clinicians, and health policy advisors should read this provocative book. The Big Fat Surprise was named the 2014 best book by the Economist, the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Mother Jones, and Library Journal. That's pretty impressive. Mother Jones in the Wall Street Journal in the same sentence, that's pretty good. She's the executive director of the Nutrition Coalition, which is a nonprofit group that promotes evidence-based nutrition policy, and I'm on the board of directors, full disclosure. She graduated from Stanford and Oxford universities, and she served as the associate director of the Center for Globalization and Sustainable.

Development at Columbia University, and she now.

Lives in New York, with her husband and two sons. Welcome, Nina.

Thank you, Mark. It's great to be here.

Thank you for that nice introduction. Of course, you deserve it. And your story is kind of fascinating because you used to be a restaurant critic, right? And reviewed restaurants and suddenly you were eating loads of fat and the whole story behind how you got into all this. Could you share that story?

Yes, so I, but to be clear, I wasn't really a restaurant critic. I've been a journalist for decades, but I, I actually sort of inherited this little restaurant critic gig in a throwaway newspaper in my neighborhood on the Upper West side of Manhattan, where there was no budget to pay for meals, which is the proper way to review restaurants, where you go in and, so I just had to eat whatever was sent out to me. And at that point, I had been a vegetarian for over 20 years. And my instinct was to go into a restaurant and say, I'll have the stir-fried vegetables, please. I mean, what was I doing being a restaurant critic anyway? But instead, they didn't wanna send out that food. What a chef wants to to showcase is their red meat and cream sauces and things like foie gras or tripe or all these things I had never eaten in many, many years. And I dutifully ate them. I found that they were kind of rich and delicious and textured and interesting and they filled me up. And I ended up like losing 10 pounds almost effortlessly. I go to my doctor, he says, you, cholesterol levels, they look better than ever. So that was part of what got me on this journey, which is like, how is it that I'm eating all these foods that are supposed to make me sick and fat, and yet I'm thinner and feel healthier than I have in years? I mean, that's just a huge mystery. So it took me like a decade to write my book to try to get to the bottom of that story.

That's impressive. So what was the reason you were a vegetarian?

It's nothing high-minded. I wanted to be thin. And so starting from when I was a teenager, you know, I was taught like, So many people, like all of us, that fat is bad, meat is bad, makes you fat. And so I stopped eating almost any bit of fat, no butter, no skim everything. I used to put water on my cereal in the morning, 'cause like, why even have the skim milk? I don't know how I bared that. That's discipline. It is. And I didn't get thin, of course. I was overweight most of my young adulthood, but I just thought this would make me thin. the less fat I ate, the better chance I had of being thin.

But of course it never happened.

For 20 years it didn't work. But it's just, I don't know, it's so ingrained in you that I don't know why I never questioned maybe the basic advice is wrong. That really never came to my mind. I think I did what many people do, is they just blame themselves. If only I try harder, if only. So what happens when you are on.

A very low fat diet like I.

Was, is you get depressed. Yeah, well I was depressed. But you also, you're hungry all the time because you're trying to stay full on carbs and carbs, you know, make your blood sugar go up and then it crashes and then up and it crashes. So, and you don't, it's not satiating. So then I'm, so then you're binging. So then you're like trying to get by on like bagels and then you have to go sneak the cookies because you're starving. And I mean, my story is just.

Like so many people's, which is that you're just on a low-fat, sad diet. Your experience sort of contradicted all the dogma, which is that fat makes you fat because it has more calories than carbs and protein, and that fat causes heart disease and messes up your cholesterol and is not good for you.

Right.

And that's the meme that we all believed for decades and decades. And in your book, it was fascinating because you really unearthed the origin story of why we came to believe that fat was bad. And you kind of turned it upside down and revealed all the flaws in the science and the thinking behind why fat wasn't the culprit in particularly heart disease and particularly saturated fat. So can you talk about the origin story and what you discovered and the surprising things you found as you were researching your book that were like, oh my God, what happened? How did we get in this mess?

Yeah, so I mean like any idea, the idea that fat and cholesterol are bad for you, they have their origin in a moment in time. We've been living with it for so long, we just kind of think it's always been true, but it hasn't. So it really started in the 1950s when the nation was in a panic over the rising tide of heart disease. Had been pretty much non-existent in the early 1900s and had risen to become the number one leading killer, right? Even President Eisenhower, 1955, has a heart attack out of the Oval Office for 10 days. Everybody's attention is fixed on this public health emergency, what causes heart disease? And there were a number of explanations. Maybe it was auto exhaust, maybe it was vitamin deficiency, maybe it was the type A personality, remember that? But there was one theory.

I think both of us probably have.

And we're still alive. And there was one theory proposed by a physiologist by the name of Ancel Benjamin Keys from the University of Minnesota. And it was his idea that it was saturated fats, the kind you find in animal foods, but also coconut oil, saturated fats and dietary cholesterol think egg yolks, shellfish, that cause heart disease. And so that was called the diet-heart hypothesis, right? And there were some animal studies on.

Rabbits who never eat that stuff and gave them high levels of cholesterol to eat and they got heart disease. So, oh, it's cholesterol in the arteries.

So must be the cholesterol we're eating and the fat we're eating. Yeah, I mean, when you talk about the weak science behind, you know, when he came up with his idea, it was just an idea. And there, you know, there was a tiny bit of evidence behind it, including these animal studies where they look at, they gave rabbits a super high cholesterol diet and the rabbits got cholesterol in their blood. Well, rabbits are herbivores, you know, they're not omnivores like we are.

So.

And so there was like, there was just like a little bit of piecemeal evidence out there, but it was this moment, there was this vacuum of information and into that stepped Anselm Keyes with his diet-heart hypothesis. saturated fat, dietary cholesterol. He was this incredibly charismatic, powerful man who was, according to his peers, able to argue anyone to the death. He was called aggressive even by his friends. And he was really able to get his idea implanted into the American Heart Association such that in 1961, the American Heart Association comes out with a recommendation saying, don't eat saturated fat and dietary dietary cholesterol cut back on meat, full fat dairy, cheese.

And meat was vilified because it contains saturated fat.

Because these, they contain saturated fat and they contain cholesterol, right?

Which by the way, saturated fat in meat is a specific kind that doesn't raise cholesterol called stearic acid. Right, ironically.

And meat, the kind of fat in an average like Porterhouse steak, only a third of that is saturated. All foods contain a mixture of different kinds of fatty acids. Olive oil is 20% saturated fat, right? Mackerel, has more saturated fat per 100 grams of fat than meat does. But it was just this really simplistic kind of science that they were using. And it was taking a stab at trying to prevent heart disease, but it became policy. So that 1961 American Heart Association policy was the first time anywhere in the world that people were told cut back on meat, cheese, eggs in order to prevent a heart attack. and that was the beginning of it all. So it's really important to say that at that time it wasn't the total, a low-fat diet. They didn't say reduce fat overall. It was just saturated fat.

No, in fact there was a lot of evidence around that time that carbohydrates were driving obesity and carbohydrate restriction was a standard recommendation for weight loss.

Yeah, and also for controlling diabetes. It was, you know, in the early 1900s, and actually there was a large amount of science on, in the early 1900s, mainly in Austria and Germany, and the story is that that the science disappeared with World War II. Those scientists kind of like were dispersed. But they had done the science on showing how weight gain is really not controlled by energy and energy out calories and calories in. It was really controlled by hormones. And they understood that. They didn't at that point understand that it was the insulin hormone, which turns out to be the most powerful hormone for fat deposition. But they understood there was something going that was controlling fat deposition that was not about calories. And then all that was lost, that science. It was all written in German, and then the whole field of nutrition moved over to the United States, didn't read the German articles, and then was just lost. So instead, Center Stage is Ancel Keys and his colleagues, and they become the most influential nutrition scientists of the 20th century. They're very closely tied in with the National Institutes of Health. that they're the people with all the money for all the research grants. They kind of take over the whole nutrition establishment, really. They're the editors at all the major journals.

They're the top people at all the expert conferences. And they suppress dissent, right? So this is- John Yudkin was another scientist at the time that was showing that sugar was really the driver of all the cardiovascular risk factors. Yes, so- and they completely silenced him, and he ended up sort of dying in disgrace at the end of his career, basically kicked out of his lab in London and the high fat crew didn't do well and the low fat crew ascended.

Well, there were, these were, you know, so these were, like Yudkin, as you say, he was a professor in London, in a London university. His theory was that it was sugar that caused heart disease. And there was another man, MD in the US called Stefansson and he had traveled all over with the Inuit in the Arctic, the Canadian Arctic. and he saw them being devastated by carbohydrates. So it was his theory that it was carbs and sugar. So there were these other thinkers with other hypotheses, and it is true that they were silenced, which is a shorthand way of saying they were criticized, they were told that really in the same way that we see today, they're accused of being backed by industry, their science was attacked, they were attacked, they couldn't get their papers published in journals. I mean, that's the way that science is silenced.

And the data that Dr. Keys used was based on looking at patterns of consumption of foods in a certain number of countries in Europe. There were seven countries. And it was just looking at correlation. And most people don't understand that science is not all the same. Science that shows correlation doesn't prove anything. It just shows a correlation. I could wake up every morning, the sun comes up, They have nothing to do with each other, but there's 100% correlation.

I'd like to see the sun shines because of humor.

Oh, thank you. I don't think that's it. I don't believe that. And I think that they tried to follow up on that research because they believed the theory and they saw this association. But when they did the follow up research, it was fascinating because they did a study that could never be done today. There was unethical, it was 9,000, patients in mental institutions who were captive, they gave half of them high saturated fat diet and half of them vegetable oil or corn oil, and they were sure that the corn oil group would do better, have less heart attacks, less deaths. And in fact, their cholesterol dropped on the corn oil, but their heart attack rate and death rate was dramatically increased. For every 30 point drop in cholesterol, there was a 22% increase in heart attack and death, and they suppressed that data for 40 years because they didn't believe it and they didn't want to publish it. And it was just published a couple of years ago.

So, yeah, that's the Minnesota Coronary Survey. Ancel Keys was one of the primary investigators, and you're right. It was the biggest, most ambitious test ever funded by the National Institutes of Health of his hypothesis, right? And at the end of that study, what happened was they did actually publish it in 1979, but that was 16 years after they had finished the study. So the study results come out, they don't publish them for 16 16 years, and they finally put it in this little out-of-the-way journal that they know nobody will read. And when one of the investigators was asked, why wait so long? Because it is, of course, a form of cheating in science not to publish your results. And he said, well, there was nothing wrong with our data. We were just so disappointed in the way it turned out.

But wasn't there more data that came out?

So then, yes. So then in 2015, these researchers at NIH went back to that study, and they went back to the son of the investigator, and they found out that in the basement there were these magnetic tapes from the study that had never been fully analyzed, and they analyzed them and used special machines to try to get the data off of them, and they discovered that they had never published the full results. And so in 2015, they published the result that actually the more the men lowered their cholesterol, the higher their rate of heart dying from heart disease. So everything that... So, and there's the exact opposite.

And the butter group did better, basically.

And the butter group did better. Right. And so, you know, it's and actually, so the story is, the bigger story is that that study, the idea that study results are ignored, not published, that is not the only example of that.

I mean- and this was a randomized controlled trial, which is the highest level of evidence. It's not like a population study where you can see a pattern, but you can't prove anything. This data is more convincing.

Right. So this is the kind of data Randomized controlled clinical trial, gold standard of evidence. It's where you can demonstrate cause and effect, right? That's what they do for drug trials. They have to do a trial to show cause and effect. Otherwise, as you say, it's just this kind of weak observational data. That data relies entirely on people recording what they ate. You know, these food frequency questionnaires. It's like, how many peaches did you eat in the last six months? How many pears did you eat in the last six months? And then, like, and repeat that for other 200 items on the list.

Somebody asked me what I ate yesterday.

I can't even remember. I can't remember what I ate this morning. So that data has been shown to be just notoriously unreliable, right? And they've actually done tests on it, you know, see what do people actually eat and then what do they remember they ate. People, it's all confounded. Like the fatter you are, the more likely you are to lie about the data. I mean, it's really fascinating, but the.

Point-- It also depends on what the prevailing view is. If you think meat is bad and you eat meat, you're gonna minimize reporting of how much meat you ate.

Right, and you minimize your-- they've shown that people will under-report how much sugar they eat.

They overestimate the exercise and under-report the.

Well, that just sounds like human nature to me. But I think that the point is that's really unreliable data. And that was the data that Ancel Keys used as the foundation for that first American Heart Association policy. But then, you know, and that was in 1961. So what I want to say is that the What happens after that 1961 policy is the government, the US government and governments around the world realize, okay, we have to test this more rigorously. So they did these trials, these government-funded trials, including this Minnesota Coronary Survey. They actually tested like more than 75,000 people all over the world in a number of randomized controlled clinical trials. That's again, gold standard of evidence. And I described these trials in my book. I mean, they were as you say, many of them, the kind of experiments you couldn't do anymore because they were in mental hospitals, you're not allowed to do that anymore. If you like force people, their food. But they were really, that makes it very what we call well controlled, meaning you're controlling everything that everybody's eating. It's not like giving somebody a diet book and saying, you know, yes, right. Yeah. And then you don't know what really happens. So, and none of those experiments could show that replacing saturated fat with vegetable oils was able to prevent heart disease or cardiovascular death, right? None of them. One of them that was done in Australia showed the men on the corn oil diet died at much higher rates than people on the regular diet. And none of those, I think the kind of the blockbuster thing to me, which I didn't even really know until after my book was published, is that none of those studies, the billions of dollars spent by governments around the world, none of those studies have ever been reviewed by our dietary guideline committees, which is our expert bodies making our national food policy. They've just ignored all those trials.

So, the best possible evidence on fat and saturated fat was completely ignored.

Paid for by taxpayers everywhere.

Right, and it's absent from our guidelines, which we're gonna talk about. So, back to Dr. Keys, because I think it's a fascinating story. He, at the end of his life.

Changed his mind, didn't he? He did on cholesterol. He decided that dietary cholesterol, which is why you have egg white omelets instead of regular omelets. In the late 1980s, he said, I don't think cholesterol is such an issue. And he recanted on that part. I don't think he ever recanted on saturated fats that I know.

And the data from that study, you went back and looked at it. And what was fascinating to me was that the signal that came up even far stronger than fat was sugar.

Yes, so this is going back to the Seven Countries Study where they looked at what people ate in seven countries and then they looked at to see who died and who had heart attack. And what he decided was that it was a saturated fat consumption that was most closely correlated with your likelihood of death, right? It turned out, or cardiovascular death. So I went and looked at that study in a lot of detail and one of the things that I found was that that later on when they re-analyzed the data, they found that sugar and sweets were actually much more highly correlated with cardiovascular death. And I actually asked some of Ancel Keys' colleagues, like, well, why did you not report on sugar? And they said, well, we had discussions about it, but Keys was just so opposed to the idea that it was sugar that caused heart disease, and he was very sure of his own idea that it was fat. So, I mean, one of the things.

About Ancel Keys- so much for the purity of science and independent researchers. It's fascinating. I mean, honestly, Nina, when I was in medical school, I thought that science was this beautiful, pristine, honest field full of integrity and truth. And as I've learned and as I read the data, it's highly influenced by the food industry. It's highly influenced by bias. It depends on the design of the study and who's looking at it, who's paying for it. It's fascinating. Marian Nestle is writing a new book about how the nutrition science that we have is corrupted by the food industry, which basically obfuscates the truth. And they try to promote basically false science, like fake news, like soda doesn't cause obesity and dairy is great for your bones and all sorts of ideas that we have pretty much taken on in the society are often corrupted by the food industry. So science is not this pure field of truth. It's essentially a often corrupt thing. And you have to know how to read it and think about it. And that's what's impressive in your work is that you really go through the nitty-gritty and you don't just look at the headlines. You go between the lines, you look at the data, you look at the appendices of the data, you look at the appendices, the appendices of the data.

And you really kind of find out what's going on. It's very impressive. Well, thank you. I mean, but like you, I started off thinking like science was this sober, reasonable, rational processing. My father is a scientist and was a professor at Stanford and and, you know, his journals, like, you open up his journals and, and, and there's, like, math problems on the page. Like, I I mean, I just grew up in this world thinking this is, you know, science is about responding to observations, honestly. And then if you're, if your explanation doesn't, doesn't explain the observation, then you have to change your hypothesis. But the thing about nutrition science is, you know, the food industry is huge, and they have a stake in what Nutrition Science says. If there's a study coming out that says that, you know, five walnuts a day helps lower your risk of heart disease, you can be sure the walnut industry is probably behind that study, but it makes a big difference for them. Like, what can they put on their packages? And, you know, can they claim they lower heart disease? So the food industry is really... and they know how to corrupt science at its very source, right? They know how to fund studies and get them, get how to distort even the study design so that they can get a favorable response. But I think in this field, there's another factor at play, which is maybe even stronger, which is that the scientists and experts themselves, I don't believe that they were going back to the 50s, 60s, and 70s. I really don't believe that they were corrupt. I didn't really find evidence of that so much as I found that they fell in love with their own ideas. They were really just unable to see data to the contrary, and they couldn't accept it when there was contrary data. And Anselm Kiefe kind of did the opposite of a scientist, which he believed that he was right until proven wrong.

Yeah. Science, like, you-'re supposed to prove yourself wrong.

You're supposed to prove yourself wrong, and then only after you gradually accumulate data do you think, well, maybe I'm right. But let me see how I could prove myself wrong again. That's the way science is supposed to work. So, and then I think the other factor is that these ideas became institutionalized, right? Once they're adopted by public health institutions, medical institutions, the entire government, and then you have this thing where the institutionalization of science, it's like institutional science is almost like an oxymoron because science requires self-doubt, the ability to change according to data, the ability to be flexible, ability to be flexible. Institutions just need the exact opposite, right? They can't flip-flop on their publics. They need constancy. They need it for their credibility. They can't be changing. So it's very hard once this was adopted by the US government, the idea that you should not eat fat and cholesterol, it just became so hard to reverse out of those positions. That's true.

I mean, I work at Cleveland Clinic and Steve Nissen is there who's one of the leading cardiologists in the world. He's the head of cardiology there. the vice chairman of cardiology, cardiothoracic surgery also had these discussions with me that, you know, they think that the whole idea of that fat is bad is wrong. And they maybe even saturated fat and that's bad is wrong. And yet at the Cleveland Clinic, when you go into the hospital for heart surgery, you are prescribed a heart healthy diet, which is high carb, low fat, even though they know that's a problem. It's just so institutionalized and embedded, it's hard to change.

It's really hard to change.

-So true. So when you wrote the book, we had a certain set of beliefs that were pretty prevalent around fat and saturated fat. Have you noticed anything change about our beliefs about fat and carbs in the last few years since you wrote the book?

-Yeah, I mean, has the conversation changed? So when I started my book, of course, I was a vegetarian eating a low-fat diet. And then that was in the early 2000s. I used to track do a word search on saturated fats to see what the conversation was about saturated fat. That debate has really changed in the scientific literature. So there's now like eight major review papers from teams of scientists all over the world saying that saturated fats have no effect on cardiovascular mortality. So in the scientific community, there is debate over that. I don't think it's really changed so much. You see a many, many more articles in the lay press about it. But there's so I would say it's sort of a wobbling open question now. And that was not true before. Before 2014, that really was just it was like sealed, settled science. And now it's unsettled science. And there have been two changes that I think will probably really surprise your audience's mind, which is how many people know that there's no more caps on dietary cholesterol? In other words, Eat as many eggs as you want. Don't worry about shellfish, eat liver if you like it. That is no longer, there are no more caps on cholesterol. We had them for 35 years. I love what I heard about that.

One of the people on the guidelines committee said, you, know what? We never really looked at the science. We just thought it was bad. So we eliminated it for 35 years and told people to eat egg white omelets. And, oh, sorry, and they call it no longer a nutrient of concern, which.

Is pretty amazing to me. And they did kind of, so that was in 2015, the Dietary Guidelines dropped that limit, and the American Heart Association did the same thing a couple of years before. And that went all the way back to Ancel Keys, right? That was his idea. Nobody really ever looked at the science too hard, but they did kind of tiptoe away from that advice. I mean, there were no big headlines. There wasn't a big, there was no press release around it, right?

It's not a nutrient concern.

And we were wrong and we're just not gonna, we don't wanna talk about it anymore. So true. But the other amazing thing is that they no longer recommend a low-fat diet. Yeah, that's pretty shocking.

And again, there was no headlines about it. Nope, they didn't, they just removed the limit. It used to be 30%, 35%, now they were like, it doesn't matter, right?

Now they're like, we don't talk about it. So what they did is actually they did a little, it's a little bit of a rhetorical jujitsu, I think, which is that they just stopped talking about the low-fat diet. If you go to the Dietary Guidelines American Heart Association, you search low fat, it's like it's gone. Like, wow, that was my life. And then what they've done is they've shifted over to talking about dietary patterns. So now we have dietary patterns, which are all fruits, vegetables, whole grains, nuts, seeds, fish, low fat dairy, and lean meat. And they don't talk about how much fat you should eat. Yeah. They talk about lean meat and they.

Also talk about low-fat dairy and they also talk about low saturated fat. Yeah, there's still a cap on saturated fats.

That's why you're supposed to have lean meat and low-fat dairy is because of the saturated fats. But the low-fat diet is gone. But again, no press release, no announcement, nobody knows that they should stop avoiding fat. I mean, it's still news.

I still go everywhere, I see egg white omelets and skim milk everywhere. I think people haven't got the news. I'm like, I said this guy was getting coffee, I'm like, why are you having this skim milk? He says, well, isn't fat bad? And I said, no, that's old news. It's pretty amazing. So one of the things in your book I loved was this sort of taking us back in history and looking at populations and what they ate. And the truth is that there's never been a voluntary vegan society in the history of humanity. And in fact, there's been varying amounts of animal food that we've eaten. We often ate a lot of plant foods that average indigenous cultures ate up to 800 different species of plants, but they also ate a lot of animal food. And some of the stories you tell, for example, about the Plains Indians, who pretty much consumed only buffalo or the Maasai had incredible health and longevity. Could you talk about that a little bit?

Yeah, I mean, I include a bunch of examples in my book of populations that ate a lot of fat. Okay, so one of them is the Maasai warriors who were studied quite rigorously by a scientist a biochemist from the University of Vanderbilt named George Mann who went and looked at them in the 1970s and discovered they were eating... the warrior men ate nothing but meat, like five pounds of meat a day, and milk and blood. That was their diet. Total, no fruits, no vegetables, total failure by our standards. And they had extremely low levels of cholesterol. He measured their cholesterol, they had low levels of low blood pressure, their cholesterol did not rise with age, which was just assumed to be normal, and their blood pressure didn't rise. And then he did electrocardiographs of 600 of them could find maybe a slight indication of a heart attack in one person. So they seemed to be, they had seemed to have excellent cardiovascular health, even though they were eating a diet that was the very opposite of what we're told to eat.

And, and then, and it wasn't just the average meat or milk or blood. It was grass fed, it was organic, it was heirloom, it was very different than where you are.

It was what they could hunt. Right. So it's not coming from a feedlot. That's definitely true. But high in saturated fat. I mean, their diet was like 70, 60, 70% fat. A lot of it was saturated. They didn't drink lean milk or low fat milk. And then there is that the Plains Indians who lived, Their main food source was buffalo, while they also had some root vegetables. So they ate a lot of meat and they were known to be very long lived. There were more centenarians living in the Indian populations, according to an anthropologist report, that there were anywhere in the world. So they seemed to be really long lived. And I include these examples not to say you should eat a diet of milk and meat and blood or buffalo, although it seems likely that you could and be healthy, I'll tell you one more example of that in just a second. But I include those examples just to show these are data points that are contrary to our thinking, right? So, if you have a theory or hypothesis, you have to explain this. How can these people even be alive according to our theory? They should all be dead. The same thing in the South Pacific.

They weren't having animal food, but they were having coconut fat. 60% of their diet was saturated coconut fat, and that's the most saturated fat we have. And they had no obesity, heart disease.

Their cholesterol, their blood sugar, it was all fine. It was all fine. And there's what I wanted to tell you that there was actually a year long experiment by that MD doctor I mentioned, named Stefan Son, who had gone to the Arctic to study the Inuit. And when he came back to New York, he decided to, along with a colleague, to eat nothing but meat and fat for an entire year. And they did this experiment, part of it, they actually stayed at Mount Sinai Hospital and they stayed under a team of supervised by doctors. And then they were allowed out for the rest of the year eating nothing but meat and fat. At the end of that, They were, they were, had every test they could think to give them. There were six peer-reviewed papers published out of that study and they were found to have absolutely been perfect health. They could find no deficiency, not even, you think they would have like vitamin C deficiency because they weren't having, I mean thought, but somehow from the, you know, they ate every part of the animal, they ate the brain, the whatever. So they were getting, it wasn't just the muscle meat. So they got all the nutrients that they needed to live.

So let's go with this because, you know, there are a lot of people out there who strongly believe that, you know, meat is bad and that being a vegan is the way to long life and health and that we should really be eating no animal foods because they promote heart disease, cancer, diabetes. And, you know, this is a huge debate out there. And I, I think, you know, I used to be a vegetarian for 10 years. You're a vegetarian for 20 years. like, how do you address this, this debate in literature? Because there are studies that show that people who eat more vegetables and eat less meat do better and live longer. You know, there's a seventh country, I mean, the seventh day Adventist, there's Dan Buener's work around blue zones. How do you sort of address that?

So I just want to acknowledge there, you know, people don't eat meat for ethical reasons and they're, or they, you know, they don't want to eat animals, and that, that is whole, I mean, I respect that and that's a whole separate, if you're a, that's, you know, that's your own, that's a different, I want to just like, let's just address the question of health.

Health, yeah. And we can leave environment on the side because we have to address that, but I don't think anybody agrees that we should be eating factory farmed animals of any type because of a lot of reasons for the environment, other effect.

So putting all that aside, let's just address the health claims. So, so, There's kind of two sides to this. One is that is meat bad for health? And originally it was convicted because it contains saturated fat and cholesterol. So cholesterol is no longer a nutrient of concern, saturated fats wobbling, we can't have, there's no rigorous science to show saturated fats have any effect on cardiovascular mortality. So meat has kind of been exonerated on those counts, right? And now there's an effort to kind of convict it based, you know, that it causes cancer or maybe diabetes. And all of that data is that weak observational data that we talked about, right? So relies on food frequency questionnaires, really, really unreliable data. And then here's the other thing.

There's a lot of contradictory data. A lot of studies show it helps, some studies show it hurts. Yeah. And it's very confusing.

So, and then when they actually, like, what do they actually find? People who eat processed meat have a 0.18 greater risk of-- I mean, their numbers are tiny, tiny, tiny, and they're so small that they are not really-- they're not considered reliable by standards of the field. And just a tiny other sort of--.

Just to help people understand that for a minute, because this is important in science. If you do a regular randomized control trial, that can prove cause and effect, and you may not need a lot of numbers. if you look at studies that are observational studies, which are looking at populations over time and tracking what happens and what doesn't happen, you have to have a big effect to really consider there's any cause there. For example, smoking was a 20 or 30-fold increased risk of cancer with smokers. Whereas me, you're talking about a 0.18 or 0.2 increased risk, which sounds like a lot when you say it's a 20% increased risk. But in terms of these types of studies, unless it's two or three or four, it's not really relevant.

Right, and the ones in meat are all below two. So again, 0.18 versus 20 to 30.

Right, exactly.

Yes, smoking causes lung cancer, does meat cause cancer? Data don't support that.

Four pieces of bacon a day for your whole life increase your risk from 5 to 6% of getting colon cancer.

Which based on, if you even believe the data, which is, and the other thing about that data that makes it unreliable is especially with regards to meat, is who has been eating meat over the last 30 years? Okay, these are people who don't listen to their doctor's orders, obviously. They've been shown to be people who don't exercise as much, tend to be fatter, tend to drink more, tend to do everything wrong. They're what we call in science, the non-adherents. They do not adhere to anything. They don't wear their seatbelts, you know? So those people, they knew it was.

Bad and they still did it.

Yeah.

They didn't care about their health and they had all these bad habits.

So that's what you're measuring in meat eating. So if you see any greater risk of disease, if you're seeing it, it could be any one of these factors and they can't really control for them in these studies. They can't go around and saying, tell me about your risky behavior. So that also makes that data unreliable. So I don't see any rigorous, by that I mean clinical trial data, showing that meat is bad for health. fact, there are a bunch of clinical trials that I've just been reading that show that looking at lean meat versus regular meat, not lean. So all of your cardiovascular risk factors look better on regular meat compared to lean meat. Isn't that amazing?

I'm sure. I mean, I once read a study where they compared kangaroo meat to feedlot meat, and they found that this sort of wild kangaroo meat reduced inflammation, whereas feedlot meat increased inflammation. same thing, meat, same quantity, but very different biological effects. Food is information, not just calories, and it has biological effects independent of the calories.

Right, not to mention all the nutrients it contains. So, all the B vitamins in their right proportions, vitamin B12 you can't get in plant foods, iron, folate in the right form that is bioavailable for humans to absorb. So, you know, when people have a conversation about meat and they're like, well, I just, Why not give up meat? That's sort of the approach. Why bother eating meat? It has all these problems associated with it. So let's just not eat it. But the reason to bother, especially if you're a woman who wants to have a child, is that you need those vitamins. Vegetarian mothers, such as I was for my first pregnancy, tend to have children, infants who are deficient in B vitamins, especially B12. And taking folic acid doesn't help with that.

And they get deficient iron and omega-3.

Fats and vitamin D. And their babies are much more likely to then have a bunch of deficiencies, which are exactly the same symptoms as autism, which is just a scary thing. I mean, it's just like you just have to be careful when you're make... This is like the story of nutrition science, which is you have to be so careful what you do because what are the unintended consequences, right? We as humans evolved eating meat. What are the unintended consequences of then deciding you're not going to eat meat, right? I mean, even if you have to hold your nose, if you want to be healthy or your baby to be healthy, you may need to eat a little meat.

One of the things I've recognized recently is it's pretty well known that our factory farming of animals and the way we grow the corn and soy that actually is used to feed these animals, by the way, 70% of our agricultural lands are used to grow food for animal consumption. that we will then eat the animals. And 70% of the world's water is also used for animals to grow food and to also feed the animals that leads to water shortages. But what most people don't realize is that the factory farming as we do it now has enormous impact on climate change and can have increasing greenhouse gases and methane and so forth. The soil depletion that results from the way we grow the food, but it turns out that in order to actually reverse climate change. And this is work done by Paul Hawken and a team of scientists. He wrote about it in his book called Drawdown. Using regenerative agriculture, in other words, grazing animals, you literally can restore soil. And soil is a huge sink for carbon, and it sucks out the carbon from the environment and prevents it from heating the climate and affecting the oceans. In fact, some say that we could, by doing this at scale, could reverse climate change completely and take it back back to pre-industrial levels. And people don't understand that the soil is so important. We used to have 60 million buffalo in America. 80. I thought it was 80 million cows, 60 million buffalo, somewhere around there. But it's a lot of them and they weren't causing climate change. They were actually restoring soils by treading on it, digging up with their hooves, peeing and pooping on it, and building soil. That's why we have tens of feet of topsoil in the Midwest. Now the way we grow animals is not doing that and it's actually the opposite. so from a climate change perspective, it might be better to eat meat to reverse climate change if you eat the right meat.

And if you look at the science on climate, you know, on cows causing global warming, I think, you know, that is, it's, I would say that it's unsettled science at this point, you know, in my reading of it. But, you know, I think the other, really, the argument that people make and has been made since Frances Moore Lappe wrote her book, Diet for a Small Planet in the, in 1970s, early 1970s, is that how can we afford to produce a pound of meat versus a pound of plants if the meat consumes so many of the Earth's resources? That doesn't seem right. And there are people starving around the world, and we should eat plants instead because they don't consume so much water and inputs. But what we're finding is that a high carbohydrate diet, a high grain diet for humans, is what is very likely to fuel obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. So you're looking at the pound of plants all of a sudden, and you have to add $300 billion a year in diabetes, this and obesity, that doesn't look so cheap anymore. Right.

Right.

What's the cost of that? Not all calories are the same. So a pound in a pound is just not equivalent. You have to really look at what the externalities of health are.

Yeah, right. We don't include all the true cost of food into the price of the thing we buy at the grocery store. Right. And there are a lot of other studies that are showing this. The 42 country study looked at not just seven countries, but food consumption patterns in 42 countries and found that those who consumed the most cereal, grains, and potatoes had a higher risk of heart disease and those who had the most.

Animal protein and fat had the lowest.

Which I thought was fascinating. You're talking about the PURE study. Yeah, no, the PURE study is another study. That was 135,000 people, I think 10 years, 19 countries, five continents, showed a very similar thing. And so some of the data is just sort of looking at this quite differently. And what's fascinating is that, you know, there's a lot of lands that we can't use in agriculture. They're grasslands, 40% of the planet is grasslands. and that's the kind of land we can use in a regenerative way with grazing animals that can actually increase production and actually decrease climate change.

Right, well, I know they're doing this incredible experiment in Brazil where they took arid land that had absolutely nothing growing on it and they planted trees and grass and they put cows on it to roam and the whole forest came back.

That's right.

Because they need the nitrogen from the feces is what fixes the soil and then they need them walking around on the land I mean, I think that's tremendously promising. So let's talk a little bit down.

A different road because saturated fat is bad according to the experts, but vegetable oils are good according to the experts. And then we should be consuming a lot of these polyunsaturated, basically omega-6 refined oils like soybean oil, which is 10% of our calories, corn oil, safflower oil, sunflower oil, canola oil. And they're all saying these are great. We should consume more of them. What do you have to say to that?

Well, okay, so going back to Ancel Keys, when they said avoid saturated fats, you were supposed to replace them with vegetable oils, right? That was the idea going back to the 1960s. Well, this is where the food industry does come in a little bit, just to start off this story. So the vegetable oil industry was kind of born in the early 1900s, right? The first vegetable oil product was Crisco.

Oh, yeah.

Right? So it used to be that those oils were used for the Industrial Revolution, They were lost to lubricate machinery. And then they figured out how to harden them to make them, and they learned how to bleach them and make them look white. And then they thought, and it was actually Procter and Gamble that figured out how to do that. They were gonna make it into a soap. Soap is made from oil. Instead they're like, that looks an awful lot like lard. Let's try to sell it as a food. So they started to sell it as a food. And it's fat. Yeah, so it turns out that they contained, it's what they hardening vegetable oils is done through a process called hydrogenation and that produces trans fats. But so these trans fatty hardened oils were started to be sold to Americans in 1911. So coincidentally heart disease starts to take off right around maybe like 10 years later. We started seeing increases in death from heart disease. So then Procter and Gamble figures out how to just sell oil as oil. So one of the things to understand about these oils is they're processed- so.

Procter and Gamble produce like shampoo.

Yeah, well, they were a soap maker, so that's why they came up with this. But they were like, but Crisco was like a best-selling thing. They convinced, you know, in America, so all these immigrants, so, and they want to become American, right? And so Procter & Gamble had this brilliant advertising campaign basically saying, you know, give up lard. Those are the bygone days of your grandmothers, like the spinning wheel of the olden days and, you know, have Crisco instead. And this is the newfangled thing made in, you know, shiny scientist kitchens. So Proctor and Gamble figured out how to then make vegetable oils that were fluid in bottles. They kind of tinkered with the fatty acids to make them stable. And then, so here's where they started to influence nutrition science. In 1948, the American Heart Association, which is really just an association of cardiologists, right? Remember, heart disease is new. Tiny little association, they barely had an office. They were just like, they barely had any funds. Procter & Gamble comes in and says, we're gonna make you the designee of this radio show for a week. And it was this huge deal. Overnight, literally according to the official history of the American Heart Association, they said millions of dollars flowed into our coffers. We became overnight the powerhouse, opening offices all across the country that we are today. They're still the number one largest non-for-profit in the country.

Amazing.

All thanks to Procter & Gamble. And pretty soon thereafter, they started to recommend that you start eating vegetable oils.

To prevent a heart attack. Which was the worst idea because it turns out that trans fats, everybody agrees in this, have killed hundreds of thousands.

Millions of people over the decades. Yeah, the trans fats and the hardened vegetable oils in Crisco are bad for.

Health, clearly bad for health, but in the liquid form. And now they're ruled as not safe to eat by the FDA after. 50 years of pressure to change that.

Right.

And finally took a lawsuit from a 97 year old scientist who first discovered this 50 years ago to get them to change.

Right. Right. And that's also another story I tell in my book about how he tried to get it to change, another woman, a scientist who was trying to, you know, lobby for change and they, and, and how they were vilified and how they were raked over the coals by all the scientists who disagreed with him and how people would literally, they The vegetable industry literally had people assigned to stand up in conferences and yell at these people when they were giving their presentations. I mean, this is the state of nutrition science. Which again, continues today.

Food hecklers.

Vegetable oils, so it turns out that when they're in the oil form, they're also dangerous. So they don't contain trans fats, right? But in the oil form, oils are highly unstable. stable. That means that they oxidize easily. They go rancid. Oxidation is, remember, that's why we take antioxidants, because oxidation causes inflammation in your body. Yes, that's actually true.

On the inside and the outside.

It causes heart disease on the inside. Oxidized LDL is what's thought to provoke that unstable plaque that causes heart blockage.

Rancid cholesterol, that's the problem. Yeah.

So this is what And in that, on all those studies, remember we talked about the Minnesota Coronary Survey where they had some people on vegetable oil diets, in all of those studies again and again and again, the people on the vegetable oil diets died at much higher rates from cancer. This was considered a side effect of this heart-healthy diet. And they actually had a series of very high-level meetings at the NIH in the early 1980s to figure out what was going on with this side effect of cancer, and nobody could figure it out. And they basically just said, look, we believe that vegetable oils will help people prevent heart disease, so we're gonna ignore the cancer effect.

So how do we explain to these top Harvard scientists who've studied this data for decades saying that we should all.

Be consuming more of these oils?

You know, I have- what's the dirty backstory on that?

You know, I don't have the whole story. I have to assume that a lot of it is cognitive dissonance, right? We're in the third generation now of scientists who believe saturated fats are bad and must be replaced by polyunsaturated vegetable oils.

And.

That is just their boiled in the wool belief that they cannot back out of, right? 100 papers written on that subject, you're not going to change your mind. It is also true that the Harvard scientists and have a close relationship with Unilever, one of the biggest vegetable oil manufacturers in the world, if not the biggest.

They're a big food company.

Unilever, another big vegetable oil manufacturer. In fact, recently, Harvard published a paper in which three of the authors were employees of Unilever.

Wow.

What? And they have Unilever fellows who come and work with them. One of the biggest promoters of vegetable oils is on the Scientific Advisory Board of Unilever. So, I mean, I just think that the veg-- and what I found out from my research, because I actually started my book by writing about trans fat. I thought I was writing a book on trans fats when I started. I didn't realize I would get sort of dragged into this whole larger world. So I spent like a year doing nothing but talking to vegetable oil executives when I started. And I came to understand how much they have controlled nutrition science. for like the last 50-60 years. They were involved in every single one of those trials. They would give them their products for free. They were intimately involved in trials at NIH. I mean, they've just had, they've really been brilliant. And executives from the vegetable oil industry have almost always served as the top general counsel role at the Food and Drug Administration. So they just, they're very, they've been.

Intercoastal Vegetable Oil Lobby.

Yeah, it's called the Institute for Shortening and Edible Oils. Wow.

They still call it that? The Institute for Shortening. Shortening.

You know what they call it shortening, right?

It shortens your life.

That's good.

Shortens your life. Yeah, that stuff is not good. And what's fascinating is that we've increased our consumption of this. This is a new food. You know, I always worry about when we add new to nature foods. So, we had olive oil, we had lard, we had tallow, we had other fats, but we didn't have vegetable oils. And these seed, they're not really vegetable like seed and nut and bean oils. Yeah. These were sort of invented 120 plus years ago, and we now have increased our consumption of soybean oil, for example, a thousand fold. And it's 10% of our calories, and it's in everything. it's stuff that you wouldn't imagine is in. So any processed food that you buy, it's made in a factory, probably has this oil in it or some variety of it. And I think, you know, when you look at the data, it is confusing. There's a lot of people who, who are looking at large observational processes that show that there's a risk for, you know, saturated fat and a benefit for Omega-3 or Omega-6 oils. And there's other data that show this. some actually randomized trials that show the opposite. When you just have people eat only the vegetable oil, they do worse.

Right, and let's just remember that latter data from trials is the rigorous cause and effect data, right? So, yeah, I mean- so what do you recommend?

No vegetable oils?

Well, I was just gonna tell briefly about my visit to a vegetable oil factory to explain like- oh, what a bungee factory. What a brutal process it is to get oil out of a bean or a seed, right? They have to go through this, process of extracting the oil, it's not even really oil when it comes out. It's this gray, rancid, disgusting fluid. It's chemically extracted with hexane and other nasty chemicals. Right, they have to use hexane as a solvent to extract it. And then they have, and then it's this bad smelling gray liquid. It has to be deodorized, winterized, bleached, and all this. So it goes through like 17 steps in this giant industrial plant. And then it's Crisco. So compared to, and this is what we're told to eat instead of churning butter. She's like, you just milk the cow and then you churn the butter. So I think that it speaks to our, to me, it speaks to the craziness about food that we live in, which is so divorced from our history. Can you really believe that something that goes through this 17-step process in a factory is what you should be eating to restore your health?

How many steps did it take from the field to your fork? If there's more than one or two, it's probably not a good idea. I always joke, I say it's easy to figure out what to eat. If man made it, leave it. If God made it, eat it.

That's good.

Or olive oil, man made it, but they step on the olives and smoosh it. and then you get the olive oil. It's not.

Well, you know, the story of olive oil is a little bit funny because actually it was originally used in ancient times. It was not eaten. It was used as like a people put it on their bodies like an ointment to make their muscles shine and they used it to make their skin look good, but they didn't eat it. They didn't start eating olive oil until like the late 1800s.

Interesting.

So it wasn't actually an ancient food stuff.

What humans I remember being in Greece and everybody was rubbing all over their bodies. I was like, wow, this is fascinating.

Everybody smelled like a salad.

Did they really put it on their bodies? Yeah. Oh yeah, I went to Mickey and Nost when I was 17 and there were these beeches and everybody was rubbing.

Olive oil all over their bodies. And I'm like, okay. Yeah. The other thing you notice in the Mediterranean is like, of course the Mediterranean diet high in meat, right? That's another thing that was kind of not, it's not been accurately transferred through history. But so olive oil is relatively stable. So the huge worry about vegetable oils to my mind is that when they are heated and even if they're left out in a bottle where it's exposed to light, they will degrade.

Oxidize.

Right, they oxidize, they degrade. That means they break down into these oxidation products. When you put them under heat, that, like any chemical reaction, that speeds up and it creates literally hundreds of degraded oxidation products, some of which are known toxins. Look up the word aldehyde and see what that is, a known toxin that has created.

Deep fryers, they call it acrylamide, which is super toxic that is formed.

Acrylamide is another one. And they occur, so without going into too much detail, but when all the big fast food chains like Burger King and all those McDonald's switched over to trans-free oils, oils without trans fat, They went right back to using just regular old vegetable oils. I mean, much as we don't like trans fats, what they did is that they stabilized the oil. That process of hardening the oil made it stable. Now we have these totally unstable oils in these fryers. They create hundreds of degraded toxic products. Those products are now known. There's experiments have been done to show that they enter into the food and that food enters into your body and that those those products go past the blood-brain barrier. And if you eat a lot of those, you know, chicken McNuggets or french fries or whatever, they are going to build up in your body and cause toxic inflammation in your body.

I used to work when I was 17. I used to work in this mother's sandwich shop. And my job was to, you know, deliver the sandwiches in a little Volkswagen. But at night, at the end of the shift, I would have to go in the kitchen and clean the oil. so literally it would run the oil through a filter so they could reuse it. And we used the same oil for a month. Heated, heated, reheated, reheated. It was terrible. And, you know, I think people don't realize that McDonald's and all those companies used to use beef tallow to fry in. And now they switched to Crisco, basically, trans fats. And now they've gone to vegetable oils, which in some ways may be just.

As bad, if not worse. So. Oh, definitely. Frightening. I think it's definitely worse. And, you know, Actually, ironically, it's probably like places like McDonald's and Burger King are probably safer than your mom and pop shop, right? Because they have all these regulations in the big stores about not reusing their oils too much. And then they know about this oxidation product. So they've developed things like nitrogen blankets and silicon beads they put in the oil to try to absorb all the toxic oxidation products. So their oils are probably better than your local, chinese stir fry or whatever where they're, I mean, that's probably where the real danger is.

McDonald's over chinese takeout, is that it?

Yeah, that's the take home message.

I don't know about that. We're gonna work on that messaging.

Stay at home and cook. No, but I wanted to just tell you the amazing story that I discovered, which is how they found out that these trans free oils were causing all these problems, is that when they switched over to trans freeze oils, All of a sudden, they were having this polymer-like build up on their walls and in their fryers that they couldn't scrape off. It's like paint stickiness. And those toxic oxidation products were so unstable and volatile that they would take the used uniforms from the workers to the dry cleaner and en route they would spontaneously combust in the back of the car. Because they were so- Go on fire. 'Cause those products are so unstable. They're so unstable. They're mutating and changing minute by minute. And then they would put the, they'd wash the uniforms, put them in the dryer, and the dryers would combust. So there's just like this, it's just.

Unbelievable that we're eating this stuff. Yeah, yeah, that's a good take-home message is to stay away from the refined oils and deep fried stuff.

Maybe a treat once in a while, but definitely not a staple.

You can fry things in lard. That is stable. If you can find it.

Yeah, I mean, I know a big.

Food company that switched over to beef tallow for their fries and everything. everything now.

Yeah. So I always say you can eat.

French fries, but you have to make them yourself and you have to make.

It home and you have to do it in lard or Tallow. Right, right. And, you know, or we should start a citizens movement to get Tallow back.

Into McDonald's, you know, fryers. Because that's what actually Tallow was. What led to the development of America with Lewis and Clark Expedition and the settlers, they all ate pemmican, which was basically bison Tallow, which was 70 fat. about 20 something percent protein, about five percent carbs and four berries. And that's what led to the settling of America.

That's amazing. And there's another quote in my book from Lewis and Clark that I remember reading where they were, as they were traveling across country, where they said that they had gone out to kill meat, but it was in the spring and all the meat was too lean and therefore inedible. Which just tells you something about, like, we used to think a lot differently about fat than we do today.

All right, now before we end, I want to dive into a topic that I know you're passionate about and that matters. So we've heard all this conflicting evidence about what to eat, about the recommendations from the government. And these recommendations, which are called our dietary guidelines, have really shaped a lot of our thinking about what's good and what's not good to eat. And we followed it. And we followed it in terms of public health recommendations, in terms of what doctors say, nutritionists say, what scientists say. and more importantly, what the government tells people to eat in the form of nutrition programs, from our school lunches to our military programs, and so much more. And, you know, I just want to give you some credit because people say, oh, what can one person do to change the world? You know, Margaret Mead said, never doubt that a small group of people who are committed can change the world. In fact, it's the only thing that ever has. And you understood the challenges with these guidelines that really were, promoting ideas that were killing millions of people. And you said, I'm not going to stand for this. And you went to Congress and you shared this perspective and you said, we need to think about the guidelines in a different way. And you basically got the Congress to commission a million dollars to the National Academy of Sciences and Medicine would review how we come up with these guidelines and whether there was integrity in them, whether they looked at all the science, whether there was corruption in them. and this report that was really initiated by you has come out and it says some pretty shocking things. So can you tell us about what's wrong with the Dietary Guidelines and how you set about to go fixing them and what's next?

So, okay. Well, so first of all, no one person can take credit for what Congress does. Congress does what Congress does and I-.

But you gave them a little zets in there.

Yeah, and it was that That report by the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine was the first ever peer review of the dietary guidelines since they were launched in 1980. Amazing, 35 years of policy. And if you look at their, I mean, if you judge the guidelines by the outcome measures, the dietary guidelines were meant to prevent disease. We got pretty bad. How has that progress gone? How's that working for you? Obesity going up, diabetes going up, heart disease still number one killer. cancer going up. So by any outcome measure, they have been a total failure, right? And the conventional explanation is that people don't follow the guidelines. And who even knows about the guidelines? I don't go to my.gov website to find out about a diet, and you don't. But they're- you- know about the food pyramid. You know about the food pyramid, and the reality is that they are just downloaded into every doctor's office, every nurse, every dietitian, every nutritionist. When you go to their office, they are giving you the guidelines. with rare exception. And they determine school lunch programs, feeding what your elderly parent gets at their nursing home, all of that. And hospital food. So I came to understand how powerful they are. They have such a powerful control over how Americans eat, probably the single most important lever. And they clearly are not working. The argument that Americans don't follow them, I looked at that. I was like, well, maybe Americans don't follow them and it is our fault. But I went and looked at all the best available government data that I could find since 1970. I mean, in every food category you looked at, you can look at Americans follow the guidelines.

Low fat, less meat, less eggs, less... Everything. High fat dairy.

Meat is down by red meat is down by 28%. And we've increased our chicken by 120%. Animal, you know, vegetable oils, we've increased by almost 90%. Animal fats down by 17%. I mean, everything. There's not one area where we have deviated. Eating more grains, right? 40% more grains, more fruits and vegetables, and the vegetables is not ketchup. It's like the greatest single increase in vegetables has been leafy greens.

You mean iceberg lettuce?

I don't know, kale. We're all eating kale. It's the age of kale. So that argument that it's just that Americans don't follow the guidelines is not supported by the data. And then people also say, well, Americans eat more cow. and that's true. We do eat 270 something more calories per day than we used to, but if you look at every single one of those calories is carbohydrates. So what we did, what the guidelines did is they put us on a high grain diet, right?

Seven to 11 servings of bread, rice, serum pasta day.

Every day, and we did it. And just the way you can fatten cattle on grains, it turns out you can fatten humans pretty well on grains. So I did, I mean, I felt like the But in Washington, D.C., there's just so much defense of this policy and the status quo. And, you know, they're renewed every five years, and the expert committee that is supposed to review the science instead just kind of rubber stamps the status quo.

Nobody wants a change.

And many of them have conflicts of interest. Many of them, you know, have conflicts of interest. They're funded by a food industry, people in the food industry. Nobody wants to change, rock that boat. I mean, because, you know, to say that the guidelines are wrong, is really a kind of heresy, right? So that's what I've done. I've committed an act of heresy. I wrote a paper that was on the COVID story of the British Medical Journal saying that guidelines are not based on good evidence. They've ignored all those clinical trials we talked about that were never in there.

The best available evidence about fat, they completely ignored.

They ignored. So, you know, those of us who study the science, if you go and read the expert report, you're like, well.

Where'S all the science I studied?

-Yeah, why do they say we have to drink three glasses of milk a day? There's no evidence for that. There's no evidence for that. So there's also, and I look to see like there's been this huge body of evidence that's grown up around the benefits of ramping back your carbohydrates a little bit and eating a little more fat. There's more than 70 clinical trials now. There were 64 when the 2015 Dietary Guidelines Committee was reviewing the science. None of those were in there. So actually they reviewed them, but they decided to put it in the methodology section of the paper. And one of the committee members, I know this from emails that I got through Freedom of Information Act request.

One of the committee's spam emails, right?

They get to you. That's right.

Be careful what you write in your email.

So one of the committee members said, you know, I don't think we should be burying, that was the word he used, burying this data in the methodology section where it doesn't belong. And then it was like, well, that was the end of that email chain. Yeah. So, you know, I started this group, the Nutrition Coalition, and our goal, it's really, you know, we get no industry money. We we don't want to be conflicted in any way. We just, our whole aim is just to say we want science in our guidelines and we want the best science and we want it not to be cherry-picked. We want the whole body of science. We want you to review those clinical trials that we paid for and put that in the evidence base and we don't recommend any one diet. You know, we're not an advocate for any one diet. You know, I'm confident if the clinical trial research is actually reviewed, which is the best, most rigorous science that will get good guidelines. And the reason it's important for everyone is that even if you fix your own diet, you've still got, unless you live in a very privileged sphere, you've still got your child in school lunch program, what food you get in a hospital, your parent at a nursing home are military. Do you know what the rate of obesity is in the military? Obesity, not overweight, it's 14%.

Unbelievable.

And you cannot say those guys are not exercising, those men and women are not exercising enough.

No, you can't exercise your way out of a bad diet.

Who said that?

I did.

And actually, two-thirds are overweight or up to two-thirds are overweight or obese. And they have due to illness and injury, and illness is something that happens is associated with being overweight, right? Yeah, of course. 10% of our armed forces at any one time are not deployable.

No, it's frightening. We are literally poisoning America. I hate to say this, but I think it's true that our government recommendations in the original food pyramid, which was 6 to 11 servings of bread, rice, cereal, and pasta a day and very little fat, really led to millions of deaths. Not intentionally, but I think the consequence of that advice has really led to this greatest health crisis globally that we've ever seen in humanity. And you're really a pioneer in fighting for this. And I think, you know, it's curious to see what's gonna happen next with the guidelines. Do you think they're gonna shift? Do you think there's gonna be shift in the recommendations?

Well, I'm somewhat hopeful in that I think that, you know, the USDA, which is the agency in charge of the guidelines, I believe that they are actually interested in real reform. They put it out as one of their legislative priorities to have reform of the dietary guidelines so that they are science-based, those are their words. And they've taken a number of steps as they started off doing this next set of guidelines that suggests that they really are going for transparency. Yeah, it was the first time they.

Ever invited comments, right? Right.

They had public comments on sort of the topics that they want to focus on for review. And among those topics, like hallelujah, included low carbohydrate diets and saturated fats. And, you know, so those are two big areas where if you could change the current guidelines, like if you if you just simply allowed lower carbohydrate diets as one possible dietary pattern, that would be huge. And if you could recognize that the caps on saturated fats are really not, it shouldn't be a strong recommendation, if at all a recommendation, if you could get rid of that, that would also be big. That would reflect good science. It's true.

And there's more and more emerging research. One of our colleagues, Sarah Hallberg, just published a paper on diabetes. Now, this is a condition that in medical school, I learned once you had it, you got it. There's no reversing type 2 diabetes. Type 1 for sure not, but that's an autoimmune disease. Type 2 is really a disease of carbohydrate intolerance. And in this study, which was remarkable, showed by using a very high fat diet with lots of saturated fat, you literally could reverse 60% of type 2 diabetes in a year. You can get 100% of people off the main diabetes medication, which potentially is harmful. has been linked to heart attacks, and you can get people off insulin or dramatically lower insulin in 94% of the people. That is unprecedented. And the average weight loss was 12%, which is unheard of in dietary studies or about 30 pounds. This is radical, and yet it's not mainstream. It's not something that doctors use or recommend. But there's an increasing awareness that different kinds of diets that actually restrict carbohydrates and increase fats may actually help with certain metabolic conditions. And we're seeing this across the board in terms of diabetes, obesity, even things like cancer, fatty liver disease, Alzheimer's, autism, epilepsy, brain tumors. I mean, it's pretty interesting, this data is starting to come in at a rapid rate and now I go on Amazon, look at the best-selling books and a lot of them are ketogenic diets, which I find really fascinating.

Yeah, well, and just to emphasize one of the numbers that you just said about that Sarah Hallberg study, that was at one year, 60% reversal. Okay, that means they no longer have a diagnosis of diabetes. If you look at that same number, if you go on the standard American Diabetes Association diet, that number is 0.1. I'm sorry, give them credit. 0.1%. 0.1, all right, 0.1 compared to 60. But I mean, just speaking to the politics of this field, you know, when I talk about my work and or my book, yes, it's about science, but really the story here is really about politics, right? I mean, this is really so much more about politics than it is about science. Because as we've seen, the science is ignored so much of the time, and that is politics. And the story of Sarah Hallberg's diabetes study is like the current day version of that, because can she get... I've been working with her to try to help her get an op-ed placed or get any press coverage. There was zero mainstream press coverage of that study, which should be if, you know, headline news. Headline news. We can reverse 60% of our nation's diabetes in a year.

Yeah.

She, everybody ignored it. And we, and she, we've actually, she's gotten back, like, angry notes from editors saying, how can you say this?

Yeah. Well, it's, it's not something we actually believe is possible as doctors. So. we have to think something's wrong with the study.

That's the assumption.

Yeah, I guess so. We're saying that, I mean, we were in our clinic in Cleveland Clinic last weekend. One of the patients who'd been on insulin for 20 years was off insulin in three weeks.

It's unbelievable. It is. But you'd think that doctors would at least be, and this is the surprising thing, that they're so closed-minded. You would think there are some doctors who are open. I mean, in the Nutrition Coalition, we have hundreds of doctors among our members, our people who are now successfully helping people through by ignoring the guidelines, basically. But there are so many-- Including me. oh yeah, including most famous among them. But there are so many stories of people who go to their doctor and they find out about a lower carb diet, they go to their doctor like, Hey doctor, guess what? My blood pressure is down, my weight is down, all my cholesterol looks better. Oh, and my skin problem went away and the floater in my eye is gone, or whatever. And then the doctor is like, well, just be careful of that dangerous diet you're on.

Right, right. Don't confuse me with the facts. My mind's made up. All right, final question. If you were queen for a day and you could change something in our food space, what would it be? And if you had one piece of advice for people listening to change in their lives, what would it be?

Wow. My family asks me that every morning. Nina, would you like to be queen for the day? I don't think so. I have to just be boring and say, I would change our dietary guidelines. They're so powerful. so I would change them to be evidence-based. That would be the single biggest lever on how Americans eat.

The truth is our guidelines influence global dietary guidelines. So it's not just here.

It's the whole world.

And what would you suggest to someone listening to change in their life?

In their diet. Well, if you're still frying anything in vegetable oils or using vegetables, don't do that. look up a good large supplier. And I think that, you know, I think, you know, don't fear fat, right? The fat you eat in bacon is not going to be the fat in your hips.

You know, it's fat that goes by your lips won't end up on your hips, is that it?

Yeah.

That's great. That's great. Thanks, Nina. It's great having you on the show. It's been an amazing conversation, and I'm so glad you all listen out there. and got to the end of this. And if you like this podcast, leave a review and share your perspective and your thoughts. And you can also follow me on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, and I hope to see you next time.

Thank you so much for having me. It's been great to talk to you. And goodbye to all your listeners. Great. Thank you for listening.

Thanks, Ina.