The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet (& What They Don't Tell You About The Mediterranean Diet).

We've got a great podcast today, all about fat, the Big Fat Surprise. You're gonna dig it. Let's do this. In this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Show.

We are so divorced from our history, you know, really, in just two generations, whereas my grandmother would have chopped liver for breakfast. And now we think that's just completely disgusting. But, you know, the liver, the heart, the kidney, the awful, as you call it, that's where all the nutrients are. None of these populations ate any sugar or very little sugar. And so that was an alternative hypothesis. I'm pretty much of the belief right now that there is a desire to condemn red meat that is based on these other agendas that have nothing to do with health.

He's an expert in human performance and nutrition, voted America's top personal trainer and one of the globe's most influential people in health and fitness. His show provides you with everything you need to optimize physical and mental performance. He is Ben Greenfield. Power, speed, mobility, balance, whatever it is for you, that's the natural movement. Get out there. When you look at all the studies done, studies that have shown the greatest efficacy, all the information you need in one place right here, right now on the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast. Hey, it's Ben Greenfield. And if you saw the title for today's podcast episode called the Big Fat Surprise, why Butter, Meat, and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet, then you might have been tempted to skip this episode. Because let's not beat around the bush here in health circles. It's kind of old news now that saturated fat just might not be bad for you. And we even know now, and I've talked about this before and interviewed people about this before, that things like sugar and starches and vegetable oil could instead be the primary contributory factors to things like heart disease or other chronic health issues. And so when I got this book called the Big Fat why Butter, Meat, Meat, and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet in the mail a few weeks ago, I kind of figured it would be the same old, same old advice like, eat the egg yolk when you have your eggs and don't be afraid of butter and drink whole milk instead of skim milk, blah, blah, blah. But I was actually pretty surprised. I was big fat surprised. Ha ha. See what I did there? And here's why. In the book, the author, her name is Nina Tykels. I don't know Nina. Well, Nina's on the call with me. I'm just gon. Is it ticholes or Teichols?

It's teichols.

Teichols, but go ahead.

You're pretty close.

What is that, German? Jewish.

It is, yeah. German and Jewish. Right? Exactly.

It was German and Jewish.

Yes, it is.

Okay. Okay, cool. Anyway, so in that book, Nina lays out this really comprehensive history and treatise and extremely full argument, probably the fullest I've ever read, as to why saturated fats, which are the kind of course that you'd find in dairy and meat and eggs, aren't bad for your health, but then takes a really deep dive into some cool things that I hadn't read about before, like myths behind the Mediterranean diet and the heart killing replacement for trans fats you probably haven't heard about yet. To the ethics of eating meat. And a whole bunch more that make this a really unique book. As a matter of fact, the Economist named it the best science book of 2014 and called it a nutrition thriller. In the Wall Street Journal. Forbes, Mother Jones Magazine, Library Journal, and Kirkus Review also named it the best book of 2014. The British Medical Journal praised it in a pretty extensive review. The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition said, all scientists and every nutrition science professional should read this book. So apparently some other people thought it was pretty good too. And I actually had a chance to hang out with Nina a couple months ago when I spoke at the Weston A. Price conference where we were able to stuff our faces with copious amounts of lard and pork and ghee and all sorts of crazy sausages and fats. And so I'm sure, Nina, you were. You were in like heaven over there. And Nina was a reporter for National Public Radio and a whole bunch of other publications like Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, the New Yorker, and the Economist. She went to Yale, she went to Stanford. So she's a pretty smart cookie because she studied biology there and also American Studies. She has a master's degree from Oxford. She served as the associate director for the center for Globalization and Sustainable Development at Columbia. She lives now in New York City. And of course, she now takes very deep dives into researching nutrition science and writing about it. And I'm guessing, Nina. Well, we're recording this on a Tuesday morning, I'm guessing. Did you have, like, eggs and bacon for breakfast?

Well, that'd be so predictable. Actually, I don't eat breakfast, so I haven't had breakfast yet, but when I have lunch, I tend to have bacon and eggs for lunch, so yes.

Oh, I figured you'd just like, be walking around with a. With a carton full of heavy cream all the time.

Yeah, that's me. Just mainlining cream and butter.

One of those people who puts the two sticks of butter in the blendtec blender in the morning.

No, actually, I really don't do that. And it's funny, you hit. You went right to the heart of what people criticize, those of us, you know, who have tried to exonerate saturated fat. And I think, you know, it is true that the main argument of my book is the exoneration of saturated fat. The story of how it was unfairly demonized to begin with and based on really weak science. And then it really, you know, that that unfair idea became codified into policy and we just have never been able to get rid of it. But one of the chief criticisms is, aren't you just telling everybody to go around and eat sticks of butter? Because that's sort of what the opposition would like people to think, right? That this is what we advise. And some people. There is this guy on the web who said his name is Bob and his website is I ate butter till my pants fell off, which he ate like nothing but sticks of butter. But anyway, I don't think there's any harm in it. I just. But the point of my book was just to say, let's let saturated fats out of jail. Like, just don't. There's no reason for them to be in jail. You could eat them. They're good for you, but you don't have to go overboard on them.

Right, right. And later on, I actually want to talk to you about some of the mistakes that people make if they do kind of like look at the COVID of your book, which, by the way, I had it out last night and it's essentially a rack of ribs with a halo over it. And my son Taryn was sitting at the table as I had your book out, kind of thumbing through it because I knew I'd be interviewing you today. And he said, why does that meat have a ring on top of it, dad? And so I explained to him the angelic meaning of the halo over the big cut of fatty meat. But I do realize that there are sometimes some issues that people develop when they kind of just look at the COVID of a book like this and decide they're going to say, you know, eat copious amounts of coconut oil and butter and perhaps get some skewed ratios. So we'll talk about that in a little bit. But I actually want to get into what on earth compelled you to write this 500 page book instead of because you were an editor at Gourmet. If I Understand correctly, when you started writing this. So, I mean, you could have done a story on like sesame soy flank steak and kind of called it good and made things easy on yourself. And instead you wrote this enormous book. So what. Why is it that you. That you took this deep of a dive?

Well, first of all, I wasn't an editor at Gourmet. I was a writer. And I was doing a series of investigative food stories for a really great editor there. And she assigned me a story on trans fats, which I had never heard of. And I had never done a story on nutrition before and really didn't know anything about it. But it opened up this world to me, which was just sort of seemingly incredible. I mean, the first stories of the scientists whom I interviewed for a story on trans fat were people like someone named Mary Enig, who was telling me stories about how margarine guys from margarine companies visited her office and would tell her stories. Things like, you know, we're going to try to shut down your research. She was one of the first researchers to sound the alarm bells on trans fats. And people, other industry officials calling medical journals, trying to get her papers yanked from them before publication. And stories about, seriously, about scientists who had been hired to go around and harass other scientists at scientific conferences and meetings. Just unbelievable stories. And I would interview people, and they were terrified. Some people were just terrified to talk to me. And I. And I would get off the phone sort of shaking, feeling like, am I investigating the mob or am I? Yeah, what am I doing here? And I.

Seriously, the guys in margarine T shirts walking around with AK47 shoved into their pants?

Yeah, you just, you know, you imagine as an outsider that science just sort of progresses rationally and calmly and soberly forward and, you know, one step at a time. And instead I found this world that was this sort of seamy underworld where there was outright bullying going on. And it just, you know, when you're, as a reporter, you're, you know, every tentacle in your body just is. Goes up thinking, this is a huge story. There's a huge story here. So from that story, which led to a book contract on trans fats, I started researching contract trans fats. And, And I really. Then I talked to Gary Taubes and read his book. This was before his book had even come out yet. And I realized, oh, there's just a huge story here about all.

Are you talking about good calories, bad calories?

Right. So this is. So that book came out in 2007. I started my book in 2004. And during those years, Gary shared with me some of his research and work. And I interviewed him a number of times. And, you know, I just realized we had just gotten it so completely wrong on all fats following on Gary's work. And so this is, you know, and anybody who's interested in this field, I think you must know this yourself. Like, it's so incredibly fascinating that not only the science, but the politics, you know, it turns out that I'm just an obsessive, compulsive kind of person. And one of the reasons that I got out of radio journalism, which is where I got my start, is that it wasn't, it did not allow for the full expression of my obsessive compulsive nature, which it turns out has its perfect, its perfect landing spot in the 10 year book project, which is, which is what it turned out to be. I mean, I just, you know, you, you feel like you must track down every bit of original research. And, you know, there's so many lies to track down. You find so many things by going back to the original data and you discover researchers who are lying about their work and review papers that lie about the papers they intend to summarize. I mean, there's been just a massive cover up going on in this field for decades now, plus the role of industry. And it's wildly complex and incredibly interesting. And then I guess at some point I felt like I understood that what I was doing was so robustly controversial, that if I didn't make a watertight case and track down every single last line of opposition or criticism or anything, I had to make a really, really solid case. And that meant really tracking down everything, every single paper I could find, every criticism, every letter, and every response to every paper. I mean, it's just an exhaustive effort, but in the end, I guess it was worth it.

It's shocking that one would take nine. I mean, I took about a year and a half to write my last book, and that seemed like a long time. Nine years or almost 10 years, I believe, to write this book, that's a commitment. And there's certainly quite a bit in there. And I want to delve into some of the things that you talk about in this book. But by the way, for those of you listening in, if you would like to access the show notes for today's episode and everything Nina and I talk about, just go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com BigFatsurprise that's BenGreenfieldFitness.com bigfatsurprise now, one of the things that you talk about in this book, Nina, is this son of Icelandic immigrants, this guy named Stefansson, who went and lived with the Inuit and observed their 70 to 80% fat based diet and how they would, for example, go after the fat deposits behind, like the caribou's eyes and along their jaw and then their head and their heart and their kidney and their shoulder, and they would feed the lean parts like the tenderloin, to the dogs. And they actually would only really eat vegetables when they were in famine. And it's quite interesting how healthy they were and then how healthy he and some of his colleagues were after adopting this diet. But then you also go on and you talk about another gentleman who I think about half a century later over in Africa was seeing some similar things over there. And this guy's name was George Mann. Can you talk a little bit? I thought it was really interesting how you talked about George Mann because I've heard this talk about the Inuits and the Eskimos before and how they do pretty well on a high fat based diet. But can you talk about what George Mann found when he was over in Africa?

Yes. And just to provide a little context to this and the Stefansson story that you just told about the Inuit and all these stories, many of which are chronicled in my book, it's just to show there are healthy people eating high fat diets that have been discovered and chronicled and documented around the world. And the reason for recounting these stories is not to say you need to eat this diet, but simply to show that these were documented stories that existed and that our experts and authorities ignored. So one of the most prominent ones is this story of George Mann, who was, he was actually a biochemist at the University of Vanderbilt. He went out to Kenya and took a mobile laboratory there. He studied the people, the Maasai warriors, and he studied the men and he found that they ate three to five pounds of, sorry, liters of milk every day. That was their main staple. And then when they could get it, they would have 4 to 10 pounds of fatty meat which they would eat in a single sitting. And then other than that, they ate blood. That was their diet. Milk, meat and blood. They didn't take any vegetable matter, although the women in their tribe did. And yet George Mann found that their blood pressure was 50% lower than the average Americans of similar age and that it did not rise with age, which was kind of a stunning finding. This was all in the late 70s when he was out there. A stunning finding because, you know, it was just accepted that people would, their blood pressure would go up and they would get sick as they got older. But here was a tribe for whom that was not true. They were normal weight, they were muscular. And then Dr. Mann took 400 electrocardiograms of the men and found no evidence of an infarction. He also did.

Now, what about. Just to play devil's advocate here, sorry to jump in, but I mean, these were like hunter, gatherer warriors in Africa. Is it possible they were just like exercising more than their counterparts in the Western world?

That's possible. But he found that the elder men who did not hunt just sat around the village and didn't really do much at all. And that they were. They similarly were in good health and not fat at all. And their health didn't get worse with age. So exercise did not seem to provide the explanation. You could also say maybe they had some kind of genetic protection. And actually Dr. Mann followed a group of them who had moved to a city, Nairobi, and took their blood pressure and electrocardiograms and found out that their. And their cholesterol levels found out that they looked a lot more like the city people. And so there didn't seem to be any genetic protection that they, they enjoyed and nor did they suffer.

So you mean they adopted more of a Western diet, these folks who had normally been eating like milk and blood and meat and fat and they actually developed the same cardiovascular abnormalities that you would see in a Western population.

Exactly. Thank you. And so it seemed that the food that they were eating was what was determining their health status. And also the Maasai warriors who kept to their meat, fat and milk diet, they didn't suffer from any cancer or diabetes. So this was all written up in medical journals at the time, including the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, which is the most widely read journal, if I'm not mistaken, in America. And it was all ignored by the top nutrition experts. They were aware of Dr. Mann's work, but they did their very best to try to, well, to try to bully it out of existence, really, you know, either ignoring it, that's one tactic that has been used historically, or they would write, they would nitpick it to death to try to find errors with everything that he did. So George Mann became one of the sort of the chief dissenters to the kind of the status quo thinking. But he pretty. I interviewed him right before he. In his 80s when he was in a nursing home. And I found him really to be A broken man, because none of his findings had been accepted by his colleagues and he had sort of been drummed out of science. Wow.

What would be the reason that you would drum something like that out of science? Is that more. Is it like a lobbyist issue? Is it a big fan food corporation issue? Meaning, I guess what I'm asking, would this be more like an issue of the fact that just like Kellogg's cereal has more advertising dollars, or is it more like government subsidy of grain and corn? Like, in your opinion, what would be the bigger, the bigger driving factor behind research like this being suppressed?

So this is a huge question. I'm going to give a somewhat simplistic answer. Food industry money infiltrates nutrition science really at its very source. So they fund nutrition scientists, they fund studies, they distort the science in a number of ways. They fund scientific conferences. In the case of nutrition, I think it's fair to say that the nutrition experts themselves have come over the last 50 years, really, truly, to believe that fat and meat are bad for health. And so George Mann was drummed out of nutrition science by his fellow scientists. And this is how it happens. You submit a paper, it doesn't get accepted for publication because your fellow scientists are on the boards, editorial boards, the journals. You are no longer invited to be on expert panels. You're not invited to give talks at conferences. George Mann actually told me this story that he was a very prominent scientist, actually, and had participated in some big government studies. And he told me the story of being at the National Institute of Health and his secretary pulling him into the hallway and saying, you know, if you continue your vocal opposition to Ancel Keys, who is one of the major leaders of the kind of status quo idea that fat and saturated fat are bad for you, if you continue your opposition to Ancel Keys, you're going to lose your research grant. And shortly thereafter, he did so, losing your funding. A big reason that scientists can just no longer do their work. And I heard many dozens of stories like this. And in fact, these kinds of stories continue today. And it means that not only are scientists with opposing views marginalized, but it also means that the younger scientists, seeing that happen to their older colleagues, they self censor. They learn to self censor. They don't. They don't write things, they don't study things. They won't, for instance, talk to me about dietary fat. You know, 10 years ago when I started this, they're too afraid to talk to a journalist about dietary fat because there's such kind of a pallor that. That falls over the whole, you know, the. The whole process of scientific inquiry, which requires openness and acceptance of alternative ideas.

Yeah, yeah. And you know what? More than the kind of like the. I shouldn't say conspiracy theory, because there's a great deal of truth that you outline in the book. And I mean, obviously, since you took nine to 10 years to write it, there's a ton of evidence that you include in it. But some of the things that I found even more about compelling and interesting than that, maybe it's just because I'm obsessed with being an outdoor savage. Running around in my underwear in the snow was like some of your stories about these Native American populations. I mentioned the Inuit and the folks up in Alaska. And then we talked a little bit about the Maasai. But then you talk about the Sikhs. S I K H. Is that how you pronounce that? The Sikhs and the Hunzas, who were studied by Robert McCarrison in the early 1900s. And these were folks who were also eating a diet primarily comprised of fatty cuts of meat and an abundance of milk and milk products like butter and cheese. And the majority of their fat was saturated. And you talk about how they displayed none of the major diseases of Western nations like cancer and peptic ulcer and appendicitis and dental decay. And of course, many of us have heard of that conference that you and I were at, Nina, the Wesnay Price Conference, where Wesson A. Price traveled around the world and found everything from better facial symmetry to stronger bones and people who were eating diets like this. But another couple of folks who you talk about that kind of struck close to my heart was Lewis and Clark. You kind of talk about how Lewis and Clark were actually a bit disappointed in what they were getting in terms of the game as they were traveling with their hunting parties. And the reason this is dear to my heart is I grew up in Lewiston, Idaho, across the river from Clarkston, Idaho. And so I was very, very close to where Lewis and Clark kind of traveled up the Snake river area. So I'm always interested in stories that feature Lewis and Clark. But can you talk about why they were kind of disappointed at what they were finding with the game meat they were hunting?

Yeah. So this is in 1805 when, during their travels, they Were they surviving off of the game that they hunted? They returned from one hunting party with 40 deer, three buffalo, and 16 elk. But the haul was considered a disappointment because most of the game were too lean for use, which meant there was plenty of muscle meat but not enough fat. And of course, this is something that is found throughout many accounts by explorers and where they find. And trappers, where they find. That meat which was too lean, did not give. Was considered inedible. It just didn't give the people strength that they needed. There's another story. In 1857, a party of trappers exploring Oregon's Klamath river, where they were starving because they. Although they consumed an enormous amount of meat, from five to six pounds per man each day, but they continued to grow weak and thin until after 12 days, quote, we were unable to perform even just the littlest bit of labor because we were continually craving for fat. So this repeated theme of meat, lean meat without the fat was considered. It didn't give you strength. It was not digestible, which is so ironic for those of us today having our skinless chicken breast shooing fat. Like, how is it that we don't know that that's inedible?

Right, Right. Especially when you look at animals. For example, you talk about lions and tigers in the book and how they'll ravage the blood and the hearts and the kidneys and the livers and the brains of the animals they kill and usually leave the muscle meat for the vultures. And in many cases, that's like the loins and the ribs and the flank and the chuck and all these things that we the prize and pay a lot of money for. It's kind of funny. We call it awful right offal. But a lot of people really, truly think it's awful. Awf u l when we include these things like Braunschweiger and head cheese and I mean, I don't know if I've told you about US wellness meats before, Nina, but I order quite extensively from them. I usually get a big box from them about every quarter that's just chock full of pemmican and, you know, head cheese, which is a, you know, a mix of a whole bunch of these different fats that you talk about in the book and Braunschweiger, which is very similar, and you feel like a superhero after you eat this stuff. You know, you can almost feel it hitting your bloodstream. And, you know, and you go into the book about, you know, these folks, like, you know, our explorers and our ancestors and how they would literally starve when eating what we would pay 60 bucks for at a. At a steakhouse.

No, I mean, it's just a recurring theme about, you know, how we are so divorced from our history, you know, really, in just two generations Whereas, you know, my grandmother would have chopped liver for breakfast and now we think that's just completely disgusting. But you know, the liver and the heart, the kidney, the offal, as you call it, that's where all the nutrients are and so that's why people would eat them. Every society has some. What is haggis? Haggis is like rotting intestines or something.

It seems disgusting, but you have to say it like this. Haggis.

Haggis. I think John Burns Night is coming up next week. But it's. So all the organ meats were prized for their nutrient density and of course the fat was prized as well. So that all the hunting strategies were designed to find the animal when it was at its fattest. You would never want to hunt an animal in the spring. You want to hunt the animals in the fall when they're putting on weight and getting ready for to go into hibernation. So, you know, all the hunting strategies were designed to find the fattiest animals, the fattest part of the animal. That was consistently the way that humans survived up until nutrition. Scientists got into the picture and told us to start avoiding all of that.

Right. You actually talk about this a little bit in the book about how Americans used to eat, lest we give people the impression that this is all just folks running around in loincloth throwing spears. I'm not trying to sound racist, but you talk about the Hunza and the Maasai and these African populations, for example, and they're ancient tribes that are eating milk and blood. But Americans used to eat this way. Can you get into how Americans used to eat?

Yes, and it is important to use examples closer to home because, you know, one of the criticisms of George Mann and the Stefansen studying the Inuit is that those were quote unquote, exotic peoples who have nothing to do with us. Right. Similar argument to, you know, against the Paleo diet today. Oh, you know, we can't eat like hunters and gatherers. But in fact, if you go back and you can look, you know, close to home at early American settlers who were considered, and this is incredible research that I came across, were considered completely indifferent farmers. They, they were considered lazy. They barely grew anything at all. And that was because they lived off of the incredible abundance of game that there was then. I mean, if you remember, this was the land before it had been over hunted. There was. Some of, some of these images just are mind boggling. They would have migrating flocks of birds that would darken the sky for days. One of them was quite called the Tasty Eskimo curlew that was apparently so fat that it would burst upon falling to the earth, covering the ground with a sort of fatty meat paste. New Englanders called that bird, which is now extinct, the doe bird. The woods were full of bears, which were prized for their fat and bobolinks, opossums, hares, and just thickets of deers. And they didn't even consider it worth their while to hunt moose and elk and bison because hauling and conserving so much meat was just considered not even worth the effort. So. And even in the mid-1800s, according to one researcher who went back and really exhaustively looked through all kinds of market entities and logs for slaves, how much they fed slaves, and all kinds of different documentation, he concluded that Americans ate, and this is the mid-1800s, 175 pounds of meat per person per year. And you have to compare that. So what we eat, and that's all red meat. There was barely or mostly red meat. You know, people ate very little chicken. Now we eat about 100 pounds of meat per year. So we were eating, you know, a good 3/4 more per year than we do today. And this is before the epidemics of obesity, diabetes, heart disease. So it really is astonishing to think, you know, how different our diets were not that long ago and how quickly we forget.

Yeah. And to put that into context, we're eating more, from what I understand, more poultry, but less red meat and poultry. It's not necessarily bad for. I mean, I raise and eat chickens and eat them and their eggs. Of course, I primarily eat the roosters because my wife does not like the. She doesn't like the taste of the males. And I've figured out how to brine them and get them somewhat tender and tasty, but they're tough to cook because they're so freaking low in fat compared to all the conjugated linoleic acid and the omega 3 fatty acids that you find in good grass fed beef or red steak or the marbly cuts, you find quite a bit more. Even not considering the component of the liver and the kidneys and the heart and some of these other things that we talked about. Yeah, poultry is just a whole different can of worms. Horrible analogy there. A whole different can of worms than. Than something like red meat. It really is not the same. I mean, people who want to step up their meat consumption, you kind of do have to look at some of these other sources. And for me, not only is this part about how Americans used to eat fascinating, Nina, but my background is in Biochemistry and physiology. And so I like to look why is it that you would feel so much better or that our ancestors would have almost intuitively prized these fattier cuts more? And when you look at, for example, the amino acid profile of meat, we find really, really high levels in red meat of the amino acid methionine, which is great and which you need, but there's actually some evidence that that can increase risk for some of these chronic diseases that you see, like heart attacks or cardiovascular disease, for example, when it is heavily imbalanced without as much of the amino acid glycine, which you tend to find in these fattier cuts and like the bone broth and the bone marrow. And so people who do a lot of meat and decide they're going to go out and eat meat but ignore some of these other sources that you talk about in the book, they tend to develop these methionine and glycine imbalances that kind of tip the scales in favor of health issues. And you know, our ancestors, I'm wagering, had very much higher amounts of glycine in their diets than we get these days. And so, you know, that's one thing that I think folks are kind of missing out on. And then of course, you know, the other thing that you and I, you know, experienced quite a bit when we were at the Weston A Price conference a while ago is just much, much lower amounts of these fat soluble vitamins in the the meats, like vitamin A and D and E and K, compared to one of the most nutrient dense fuels on the face of the planet, which is liver, which is just chock full of those vitamins. And so this isn't just like historical lore. There's some definite biochemistry to this practice as well.

Yeah, I mean, one thing to just realize is lean meat was not a thing to eat until you were talking about the settlers who couldn't eat lean meat. Now that's all we have in our supermarkets. Right. Lean meat started being developed starting in the 1980s, really when the US Dietary Guidelines began. The entire cattle industry, in order to comply with our government's guidelines, entire cattle industry changed the so cattle are bred to be leaner, pork is bred to be leaner. Why it's so dry and tasteless. So all our meats changed, which is why it's harder to get fatty meat now. But you're right, you need to have the fat with the protein in order for that meat to be healthy. You don't want to overdose on protein without the fat. I mean, what's healthier is a higher fat diet with moderate protein.

Yeah, yeah.

And just going back to chicken point, you know, the consumption. So red meat is also much more. Has much more dense in vitamins, has many more vitamins and minerals in general than chicken does. And you know, historically, like in the, in the 19th century, chickens were really not raised for their meat. They were raised for their eggs. And chicken was kind of a rarity to eat. So it's just, you know, and now, you know, we have had a greater increase in chicken. I think it's like since 19, since 1970 to 2005, we've had like 121% increase in our chicken consumption and actually, you know, a decline in our red meat consumption.

Yeah. And that's another, you know, not to kick this horse to death too much because I want to. I want to move on and talk about a few other things as well. But there's, you know, we talked about heart disease, but there's also, you know, this recent study, relatively recent, looking at the association between red meat and cancer. And I think primarily it was colorectal cancer that they found to be an issue when it comes to red meat. And I think that what they looked at was the ability of red meat to cause cancer or some kind of causation between red meat and mortality. Did you look into that study at all or did that come out after you had already published this book?

I have looked into the red meat and cancer issue, and I'll just say that all of that is based on weak, what's called epidemiological data, which shows association but not causation. The associations themselves are extremely weak and unreliable. And in the two large clinical trials, cancer trials, where meat was significantly reduced, it did not decrease the incidence of cancer. So in the more rigorous research, cancer was not reduced when meat was cut back. So the reason that we have this scare about red meat and cancer, in my view, has a lot more to do with this kind of anti red meat moment that we're living in. Because people think red meat is bad for the planet. They think it's bad. They don't. They. They offended by factory farming. There's a very strong animal welfare movement. There are many reasons that people are upset about red meat, but. And so they're trying to rope, in my view, I think they're trying to rope in nutrition to go along with that story, but there really is not good evidence to confirm that.

Yeah, and a couple things to note about that study was that the hazard ratio in terms of the increased Risk for cancer was primarily found in kind of two different scenarios. One was the high consumption of processed meats, like really high in nitrates. And those can cause nitrosamine formation in the body. And that can tend to increase risk of cancer. And so if you're switching to a diet high in meat and you're kind of doing lots of sausages and hot dogs and bacon and, you know, ham and cold cuts and what's the one that comes in the can? Is it Spam? Yes, Spam.

But I want to jump in.

That would certainly be an issue. Go ahead.

I have to jump in and tell you that the ratio, so what you're calling the hazards ratio, but it's the number for processed meat is 1.18 difference and for red meat generally it's 1.17. And that difference is really not meaningful in my opinion. So I don't see it for processed meat either. I just don't see that data.

Interesting. Now, in terms of the risk for colorectal cancer, I do know that the risk goes up much, much higher. But that was from what I understand in the research that they did in subjects who smoke and also was influenced by subjects preference for well done meat, which I know can really increase the risk of carcinogens. When you look at heterocyclic amines and some of the hydrocarbons and people who just eat grilled meat or really well done meat or my wife's family's from Montana and so bless their hearts, they really like it black and super well done and grilled. And I think that that does actually make red meat or has the potential to make red meat a little bit more risky when it comes to getting exposed to some of the things that occur when you burn or heavily process or heavily cook meat. Do you have any take on that?

That may be true, but all I can say is that the science that the strongest association they can find between red meat and any kind of cancer is that 1.18 number. And I will say that any. So that that risk number, that relative risk number, anything below 2 is completely unreliable and could be due to any kind of confounding factor. So when you're at 1.18, that tells me. That tells me nothing. That tells me you should go study something else. I really don't, I just don't see it. And I don't see it in that literature. And I think the literature has been greatly exaggerated. And you know, all that, even that 1.18 number. Think about like who's Been eating red meat for the last 30 years. It's all the people who completely ignore everything their doctor tells them, right? They're the people who smoke more, they don't go to the gym, they don't, you know, go to cultural events or they don't, you know, those are the unhealthy people. They're, they're, they don't listen to anything their doctor tells them if they're eating red meat. Right. So all those factors are confounding. What's called confounding factor. Any kind of like slight increase you see in cancer could be due to any one of those, those things because you can't really control for them in those studies, which is why those studies are so unreliable.

You know what you just said kind of, kind of gets after the kind of the last like chemical thing I want to talk about when it comes to meat and that's that TMAO compound. You know, I don't know if you, if you heard much about this, but I have. It was. Okay, so basically this was the latest on the red meat cancer link and it was this trimethylamine N oxide that can increase risk of heart disease. And they were finding more of this in the guts of people who ate red meat. And it turns out if you look at the ability of this TMAO to cause things like cardiovascular disease, it could be very much related to the gut microbiome. And if you look at red meat eaters like you just alluded to, in many cases they are kind of like that. Again, not to be racist, but like that red blooded American male baseball player and football fan who's sitting on the couch engaging in other unhealthy behaviors that can lead to gut dysbiosis that could make that TMAO production a lot more of a problem. Eating fewer vegetables so you get less fermentable fiber. Eating more processed flour and sugar and seed oils and vegetable oils and all of those would result in some pretty undesirable changes in the gut microbiota and in my opinion again, make red meat an issue.

Yeah, that TMAO issue, just another giant canard really. It's. Where do you find the highest levels of that? Not red meat. You find the highest levels of that in fish. Why are they targeting red meat? Because there's an anti meat sentiment amongst in the nutrition world right now. They're not talking that you can, you know, why are they not going after fish eaters anyway? They're trying to relate a bunch of tiny mouse studies which show Some kind of association between high levels of TMAO in the gut and heart disease, but no causation. So really it's just very tenuous science. I mean, I'm pretty much of the belief right now that there's a desire to condemn red meat that is based on these other agendas that have nothing to do with health. And so they're scouting around for little bits of science they can kind of cobble together to find a story that's anti red meat. Which I know sounds kind of extreme, but really when you look at the science, and I have corresponded with the scientists themselves who've done this research, I have gone back and forth with them about their studies, and you just cannot build a case for it.

Now when we switch from red meat and we look at something like, let's say, coconut oil, which is a pretty popular compound these days for people who want medium chain triglycerides and to be in ketosis, There was a study too that showed that there could be, again, I'm kind of playing devil's advocate here, but an inflammatory reaction to coconut oil. And I believe that this study was done in rodent models, but it found a high amount of inflammation of gut inflammation and some inflammatory autoimmune type of issues in these mice that were eating large amounts of coconut oil. And this was kind of where I wanted to get into the problem if people take what you've written in this book and potentially adopt it in their diet without making other dietary changes. Because what they found, found in this study was that the inflammatory issues caused by high consumption of coconut oil were actually balanced out and removed with a high intake of short chain fatty acids and fiber, such as you would get from high vegetable intake. And so what I wanted to ask you about based on this is do you see an issue these days with people who would read a book like yours and start eating a whole bunch of meat and pork and coconut oil and butter and perhaps not get enough vegetables to allow for a healthy gut microbiota or for enough short chain fatty acid production to get rid of some of the inflammation that could occur with excessive saturated fat intake?

Well, that's an interesting question. First of all, the mouse study with coconut oil tells you that mice should not eat too much coconut oil. What that tells you for humans is zero. It really is not. It's really the mouse model for something like that is really, I think, not applicable to humans. So that's what they have found for saturated fats. Like, the bigger question, like, is there, can you eat too Much saturated fats. Can that be unhealthy in some way on humans? And actually, in all the clinical trials that they've done on saturated fats, when back when they were doing these huge clinical trials to see if reducing saturated fats would cause. Would spare you of a heart attack, they fed people like 18, 19% of their calories of saturated fats. That was what was considered a standard normal American diet at the time in the 60s and 70s. And then they compare that to people eating half that amount of saturated fat, which is the amount we're told to eat now, 9 or 10%. So the people eating more saturated fat at 19%, all kinds of saturated fat. Right. They didn't. They just, you know, dairy, cheese, meat, they. They had the exact same health outcomes in terms of heart disease that people did who restricted their saturated fat. So, and those are trials with hard endpoints, meaning the more rigorous kind of endpoint, meaning, like they follow those people to a heart attack or death. And that's a lot more reliable than just following people for a few months or. And seeing, you know, what happens with their cholesterol or inflammatory markers. And it's a lot more reliable than just following mice.

Yeah, and I agree with you. Although in this case, you know, in these studies, they weren't, you know, it wasn't heart disease as much as what they primarily were seeing was an increase in T cells and autoimmune disorders and an increase in inflammatory markers with a high intake of saturated fat compared to a high intake of saturated fat with the inclusion of fiber. And so the reason that I'm getting at this is because I personally followed when I was training for Iron Man, I even took part in Jeff Volek's ketotic study, where I was 80 to 90% fat for 12 months. And I tracked markers of inflammation. And what I found is that both diets seem to result in low amounts of inflammation. You know, when you look at things like hs, crp, and cytokines, and some of these other inflammatory markers. But what I found from my own n equals 1 testing was that when I began to allow for the carbohydrates from vegetables, right? Because there's kind of like two ways to do ketosis. You either count the carbs from vegetables or you don't count those net carbs. And what I found was that when I didn't count the grams of carbohydrates from fiber, my HSCRP markers dropped to rock bottom. And so now I personally follow a diet in which I eat copious Amounts of fats. Right. I eat lots of seeds and nuts and all those things I just mentioned from US wellness meats and oodles of coconut oil, et cetera. But I also eat the equivalent, and I'm not kidding here, about 15 to 20 portions of vegetables per day. If you add up my morning smoothie and my big ass afternoon salad and all the vegetables that I eat with dinner. And so for me, I've actually found that to be quite favorable for my biochemical markers. And so if you, if you look at the front of your book with the halo over the meat and you've got the little sprig of, I think that might be mint off to the left. My kind of diet would be like that piece of meat just covered in the sprigs of green. So I do a bit of both and I kind of wanted to get your take on that and where you recommend the vegetable component come in. Do you think that it's necessary when you're eating a high fat diet to include a whole bunch of plant matter? Are you neutral on that or where do you fall on that?

You know, I just, I don't really know the answer to that. I think that, you know, we know of these populations eating high fat diets. Like we discussed the Maasai warriors, no vegetable matter, you know, did they suffer from autoimmune diseases? I don't know, but I, it seems like they were, seemed to be in perfect health. The Inuit also very little vegetable matter in very high fat diets, although theirs was not so much saturated fat. But I think, I'm not sure, I don't really know the answer to that. I know that, you know, billions of dollars spent on research trying to show that dietary fat is bad for health during that time. What did they not research? They did not research all, you know, the various ways in which you could have a high fat diet that would be healthy. Right? Because they thought that fat was bad for you. So we're just like in the absolute infancy of this research of understanding. Wow. If we reverse what we think is healthy and think eating more fat is reducing your carbohydrates a little bit, but there's so little research has been done yet. That's why we're sort of grasping for straws or these mice studies or this or that, we really don't know yet. Do we know if sucrose is worse than fructose, worse than glucose, or what are the various pathways? And what if you reduce these carbs or those carbs in combination with this food? And that food, we really just don't know the answers to most of the questions now because our paradigm has only really shifted around in the last decade. Really.

Yeah. And I know the last point, not to kick this horse to death. I do know that the, the Maasai do include, I believe some kind of like a, I don't know if you've heard of this, like a porridge, like it's called Ugali or Ujali or something like that. It's like a little bit of a fiber rich porridge. I think it's got like 4 to 6 grams or so, you know, in a serving. And I do know that they include a little bit of that. I'm not quite sure if that's more of a modern thing or if that's something like the more ancient tribesmen were consuming. But regardless, I do know that they're not eating as many salads and smoothies pushing, they're definitely not pushing the giant shopping carts full of kale down the aisle of whole foods. So yeah, it is interesting. They're definitely not eating as much fiber as a guy like me is. So I should, what I may do at some point is another one of these n equals 1 experiments. And instead of following this extremely high ketotic based diet in which I at that time was doing lots of coconut oil and a lot of a decent amount of meat, but I actually at that point wasn't doing a lot of organ meat meats. I'd be curious if I did it again include a lot of these organ meats if things would change at all. And maybe, I suppose if I can get my hands on some blood, I could start drinking blood, I suppose blood pudding.

Move to Ireland and have blood pudding.

That's right, baby and haggis. Let's switch from Africa to Greece. You talk a little bit about the Mediterranean diet. And for example, you go into how, when Ancel Key was looking at the Mediterranean diet, how I think you describe it as a remarking and troublesome omission, a remarkable and troublesome omission that was discovered when he was looking into this diet, I believe of the Cretans. Can you go into what occurred when it came to Ancel Keys and what he was looking into when it came to especially the, the Greek diet.

Yeah, so I'm sure your listeners know about Ancel Keys. He's you know, famous scientist who really, who really authored the hypothesis that saturated fat and cholesterol are bad for health. And that was based on his seven countries study and one of the Countries he visited was Greece. And his star subjects were the islanders on the, on Crete who were these peasants who tilled the land all day long. They seem to be exceptionally long lived and they seem to eat very little animal foods. And so they seem to be. They just fit his hypothesis perfectly. So I took a deep dive into exactly what the data. He had, his data on those people. It turns out one of the things was that he had only studied 33 or 34 men on the entire island. And that was his entire data set, which was. Which then, you know, are the founding men of the Mediterranean diet. But I also discovered that, that he had gone. So for all the populations he studied, he studied them during three separate weeks. And in, during one of the weeks that he had gone to Crete, he had showed up mistakenly during Lent. And he describes the Greek Orthodox fast as being a strict one, meaning they abstain from all foods of animal origin, including fish, cheese, eggs and butter. And so that he probably, he must have undercounted the saturated fat that they ate by at least half, according to one calculation that was done. So I mean, it's just.

So he showed up, they were fasting basically in Crete. And so of course they weren't eating fish. And my dad, by the way, he's Greek. He's Greek Orthodox or follows us a Greek Orthodox diet and religious practice. And so half the time he's not eating, you know, fish or cheese or eggs or butter when I'm hanging out with him. You know, like we went out to, or we went down there for Christmas dinner. And I think he was having, he had some kind of like potato with vegetables, you know, for dinner. And so what Keys found was that these people were super duper healthy. And lo and behold, they weren't eating fish, cheese, eggs and butter. But he didn't take end to have found the fact that they were freaking fasting.

Yeah. So he, you know, he calculated how much saturated fat they were eating. Right. But he went during Lent. So the calculations that he got were, you know, it's just a total undercounting of how much saturated fat they normally ate. Then he concluded that it was the absence of saturated fat is what made them long lived and healthy.

So don't they attribute, though, in many cases, longevity? When I say they, I mean, we know that fasting is associated with a decreased rate at which telomeres shorten. And certainly there are benefits, everything from intermittent fasting to having occasions of time when you do protein sparing. So you downregulate mtor and all These things. Are you saying that it's not fasting that's necessarily the longevity enhancing component of the Mediterranean diet and it is in fact something else. I guess what I'm asking is why are the cretins, for example, so long lived? Why are they considered to be like one of the blue zone populations?

Well, Ancel Keys thought it was the lack of saturated fats. Right. And he. Or basically what you would. Low animal foods, a kind of what you would call, some people might call a plant based diet. Right. And you still see that interpretation, that idea today. Right. The blue zones, this idea that all long lived people live on a blue plant based diet.

Right. Okinawa and Seventh Day Adventists and stuff like that.

Yeah. I mean, what Ancel Keys missed and purposefully missed it's come out since, is that they ate almost no sugar. None of these populations ate any sugar or very little sugar. And so that was always an alternative hypothesis for why there are more vegetable oils.

Right. And I'm not saying this based on anything I read in your book, but. But from what I understand, I actually recently read a book by Dr. Kate Shanahan called Deep Nutrition. She goes, and how vegetable oil might be even a bigger culprit than sugar. But I don't think any of these blue zones do. Barely any vegetable oil either. Right.

Well, I haven't studied all the blue zones, but certainly there were no vegetable oils on Crete. They were living off the land. Vegetable oils are a highly industrialized food product.

So.

Right. So no vegetable oils. So there were. Whenever you see a healthy, long lived population, there are a number of hypotheses that come to mind about why they're healthy. You know, is it the lack of sugar? Is it a lack of vegetable oils? Is it because they seem to eat not very much meat and cheese? Ancel Keys had it in his mind that it was the meat and cheese that was just. He came to that conclusion in the 1950s and he did not sway from that idea his whole life. And he found what he set out to find and ignored evidence to the contrary, which is, you know, not good science. But that's what has happened in nutrition science is just focusing on what you want to see and ignoring possible, you know, possible evidence to the contrary.

Yeah, it's really interesting. You go into how Keys, like ground up all the food that he found that the Cretans were eating when he was over there. And as you said, this was during Lent when the animal foods were really restricted. And then he sent the mixture back to his lab in Minnesota to Have it analyzed. And it really wasn't showing that these people were eating things like mutton and liver. And you talk about in the book how they're even eating snails, but instead, it was just like. It was just a list of macronutrients, how much saturated fat and protein and carb, et cetera. And the saturated fat content turned out to be pretty low because he visited during Lent. And so we now see, when we see most Mediterranean. Mediterranean diet recommendations, they aren't including things like we see. You have a quote from the Iliad, which I love. I read the Iliad and the Odyssey when I was in high school. And you have this quote, how, Patroclus, you're Greek. How do you pronounce Patroclus? Patroclus. Patrocles, you're Greek. What'd you say?

I said, you're the one with the Greek Orthodox father.

Yeah, that's true. That's true. But he's not. But Jeannette, it's more something he adopted as, I guess, a midlife crisis. But anyways, Patroclides put a big bench in the firelight and laid it on the backs of a sheep and a fat goat and the chine of a great wild hog rich in lard. And most of what you see in the Mediterranean diet, I suppose, is primarily olive oil and fish. Right. And not like lard and mutton and.

Liverpool, which were ancient foods. I mean, long before olive oil existed, olive oil actually was used as, like, a cosmetic to shine the muscles before athletic competitions or.

That's funny. I smear it on my face every morning, actually.

Right. So I do. And it was used. So it was used to make your muscles shine and to make yourself beautiful. But it wasn't eaten as a foodstuff until, like, the mid to late 1800s. So before that, what did everybody cook with in the Mediterranean? Lard. Lard and butter. That's what they cooked with. And, you know, and like the Americans, they didn't really eat much chicken. The reason that the Mediterranean diet, you know, the official Mediterranean diet recommended out of Harvard, recommends chicken, is that those that ground up food that was sent back to Ancel Keys laboratory when they popped out the macronutrient content, you know, percentages, and it seemed low in saturated fat. They're like, well, I wonder what meat does that match up to? That seems looks more like chicken to us. Even though they didn't eat chicken in the Mediterranean, they, you know, they ate lamb mainly. Anybody who goes to the Mediterranean knows they eat lamb. But, you know, in The Harvard version of the Mediterranean diet. They're not advising that you eat lamb. They're advising that you eat almost no meat at all. So, you know, it's just bizarre how. How that research got distorted into these official diets that we now have really have nothing to do with the original reality, much less the idea that there's one Mediterranean diet. That was another discovery. And Ancel Keys himself knew this and talked about it in his book on the Mediterranean diet. He's like, actually, they eat vastly different things all over the Mediterranean and really we shouldn't be having one Mediterranean diet. But then he went ahead and wrote a book on it anyway.

Yeah, it's crazy. And folks, if you get this book, you need to read this chapter about the cretins and their true diet. You know, why the Mediterranean diet that you've probably seen in popular literature really isn't the true Mediterranean diet. It's super interesting. Now, another thing that you go into that I definitely didn't want to neglect in my chance to chat with you, Nina, was this idea behind trans fats. Because I know that's one of the things that kind of sucked you into researching this book for so long in the first place. I mean, most of us know now. You know, we remember back when, you know, the French fries at McDonald's were vilified and trans fats got banned. And you have a chapter entitled Exit Trans Fats. Enter something worse. When trans fats got banned, what worse thing entered into the equation?

All right, I'll try to make this as simple as possible.

Which is, yeah, it is a 500 page book.

I realized it's such a complicated. So trans fats exist because vegetable oils, when they were invented in the early part, early 1900s, they're unstable. If you squeeze oil out of soybeans or cotton seeds or later soybeans or corn or whatever, you're squeezing that oil out of. You get an oil that's basically a byproduct that they can't use. So that's why it became. They started using it for human consumption. But mainly it's unstable, it oxidizes, it goes rancid, it's not shelf stable, it can't be used in anything. It can't use it for cooking. So they developed a process to harden the oil, which is called hydrogenation. And one of the byproducts of hydrogenating oils was trans fat. So trans fats, they discovered. And this is going back to Mary Enig, whom I mentioned earlier, she was one of the early researchers on trans Fats, Trans fats are a really what? Margarine is made up of hydrogenated oils. So is Crisco, which is, you know, margarine was supposed to replace butter. Crisco supposed to replace lard. Mary Enig started researching trans fats. She discovered they're bad in the late 70s. Okay, so we get rid of trans fats. What replaces them? Well, you still can't use liquid oil. It still oxidizes and goes rancid and is highly unstable. So they've developed, they had to go back to the chemistry lab to figure out something to replace hydrogenation because they could no longer use that process. It was actually a massive undertaking for the food industry. Probably the biggest transformation of the food industry of the last 20 years was this problem of replacing all the oils in all their foods. So. And they can't go back to what are naturally stable hard fats. Right. They can't go back to lard and tallow. McDonald's used to fry their french fries and tallow because those have saturated fats in them and there's a kibosh on saturated fat still. So they have to go back to the chemistry labs and find a new way to stabilize their oils. What do they do? They come up with something called. One idea is interesterification, where they go in and they swap the triglycerides in every molecule. What are those? What's an interesterified oil? And has that been tested? And how do we know that's not going to be another trans fat in 20 years time? We have no idea.

Have there been any studies yet on interesterified oil? Have we gotten any clues yet?

You know, very little. And it's all industry funded, so who knows. And then they modified soybeans to produce less of the unstable kinds of fatty acids. So those are more stable. It's something called high oleic. And there's all these new chemistry, these new chemicals have entered into our food supply and we really don't know anything about them. And then the scariest thing that I found was that like in the, in many cases where they could, because it was the cheapest, they just reverted to using regular old oils. And they do this mainly. The place where it's scary is in restaurant fryers, right? And the reason that's scary is that oils are unstable. And what increases instability is heat. So here, this environment of heating oils over long periods of time produces hundreds degrades into hundreds of oxidation products. What does oxidation product do? They cause massive inflammation in the body. Some of these are known toxins and they, this was a huge problem with these trans free oils in, I'm talking about like McDonald's, you know, burger King, all the major chains. And they had to basically develop with all kinds of new technologies to try to prevent these oils from oxidizing too much. Like so, you know, they have something called a nitrogen blanket that they put on top of their fryers now. And they have something like silicon beads that they stick in the oil to absorb some of the oxidation products. But when they test the fried food that comes out of those restaurants, they still have in them hundreds of oxidation products. Over 200 oxidation products found in a piece of fried chicken alone.

Yeah. Which is really sad when you take into account the fact that when you and I were hanging out at that conference, I think one morning for breakfast they serve sweet potatoes in lard, like sweet potatoes that have been cooked in lard. And oh my gosh, they're just like out of sight.

Absolutely.

And of course the lard is extremely stable. And one of the things. Exactly. I do some work for Wellness fx. I do a lot of their blood and biomarker consultations where I get people on the phone and go over their lab results with them. And one of the things I point out when their cholesterol is high is the fact that if cholesterol is high, I don't care in most cases. There's one genetic issue that can be at play in which I do care. And perhaps we'll touch on that in a moment. But I tell them there are a few other things I look at. One, is glucose elevated? Because that when cholesterol is elevated can be a risk factor if you have a lot of glucose and cholesterol simultaneous in the bloodstream? Two, is there high amounts of inflammation, which can also be an issue if cholesterol is high. And then three, what's their HDL to triglyceride ratio, which is a very strong independent risk factor for heart disease when triglycerides are extremely elevated compared to hdl. And you go into a very important point about this inter esterification process in which the fatty acids are bound by this glycerol molecule. And when you inter esterify fats, you basically distribute all the fatty acids on the glycerol and that produces a ton of new triglycerides. So you're essentially mainlining triglycerides into your bloodstream when you consume some of these new fats that have been a replacement for trans fats. And so it's enormously concerning. And by the way. And I'm, and I don't know if you talk about this in the book at all or not, Nina, but trans fats aren't all bad. I mean, there are trans fats we find in nature that have all. Well, they're a mix of what are called CIS bonds and trans bonds. And all these industrial trans fats have only trans bonds. And when you have CIS bonds and trans bonds in a trans fat, one example of that is actually something very healthy that we find in, in grass fed animal products and that's conjugated linoleic acid, which we know there's a ton of health benefits to high consumption of technically a trans fat that we find in nature, this conjugated linic acid for things like lowering risk of type 2 diabetes and playing a role in cancer prevention. And so even trans fat in general, we don't have to completely vilify.

Yeah, I mean, the trans fats that are in ruminant animals, they have the same chemical formula, but they're different. As you say, they're different bond structure. But that's just one of the things that became really gnarly issue when the FDA was banning trans fats is that they, it was very hard to carve out an exception for these conjugated, conjugated linoleic acid naturally occurring trans fats that have been shown to at least do no harm if not good. And so I don't know if they actually did carve out an exception for them, I would be, I'd be shocked. Yeah, I'd be shocked if they didn't. But, you know, there's so much, there's so much bad food policy that it's certainly a possibility. But I know that they were fighting that and trying. It just makes no sense. I mean, those, as you said, they're naturally occurring and they're not like industrial trans fats. So.

Yeah, yeah. I had one other thing that I wanted to ask you about and that is the issue that I alluded to just a few moments ago when I was talking about how there are some cases where I do get concerned if people are eating a high fat diet or they're eating, or they're showing high cholesterol in their blood markers. And that's this, this genetic factor, this genotype, the APOE 4E4 genotype, which you can get tested if you go to Wellness FX or whatever, and it changes the way you metabolize cholesterol. And basically you tend to have very, very high amounts of lipoproteins when you consume A high fat diet and you're one of these carriers of the E4 genotypes. Basically it's linked to a higher risk for things like Alzheimer's disease and cardiovascular disease and hypertension and obesity, et cetera. And I believe even, I really hope that I don't misattribute this to him, but I believe it was even Chris Masterjohn, who's another kind of Weston A. Pricer, who is there at the conference with us. He's mentioned that for this small subset of the population, eating something closer to something like a Kitavan diet might actually be beneficial. A Kitavan diet being a diet that's somewhat higher in carbohydrates from tubers and fresh fruit and coconut and fish and vegetables. And so do you think that prior to shifting to a very high fat diet or taking into heart all the recommendations in your book, people should consider whether or not they have that APOE gene?

You know, here's what I think. I think first, I have no idea what the prevalence is of that gene in the population.

I think it's like 8 to 10%, something along those lines.

That seems quite high to me. But in any case, here's what I would do. This is what most people do. If you are suffering from, if you would like to lose weight or you have diabetes or you're fighting heart disease, it's worth trying to go on a lower carb, higher fat diet and then be supervised by a doctor and watch your, watch your lipid panel and see if there are people who go on that diet. And then they see something called their ldlp, their LDL particle number skyrocket. And again, here we are. We don't really know why that happens to some people and that maybe they should back off a higher fat diet. So I think you just, you know, one way you can do it is just is to, and I don't know how much it costs to get a, to get a genetic panel, but I.

Mean, sure, it's like, it's like next to nothing, you know. Well, I mean it's not much, it's like 100 to 200 bucks.

But you know, I think for most people is to go, you know, to go on and they should be on a medically supervised, under medical supervision anyway. They're going to dramatically change their diet. For some people they have, there's all kinds of symptoms and making transitions to a different, to a higher fat diet. So you should do it under medical supervision and watch your numbers and see, you know, make sure that they're all moving in the right direction.

Yeah, yeah. And that's obviously a really jam packed discussion. And what I'll do is I'll hunt down the podcast episode where Chris masterjohn, he has a great podcast, I believe it's called the Daily Lipid. He talks a little bit about this, how some people have this heterozygous familial hypercholesterolemia, which means they're like, they tend to get really, really high cholesterol from a high fat diet and in this case, like a high lipoprotein count. And they might benefit from a low fat, low cholesterol, high carb diet. And again, like you mentioned, Nina, it's a small percentage of the population. I don't have the percentage memorized, but I'll link to that in case those of you listening in want to take a listen to that or go read the transcript because Chris has some interesting thoughts on that and this diet called the Kitavan diet. So that's another kind of wrench to throw into this equation, but something to consider as well.

Well, you know, I just have to geminate if it's hypercholesterolemia you're talking about, I didn't recognize that specific gene as being the mutation, but that has, that's in like 1 to 2% of the population. It's very small. It's a very small number of people. And in fact, it's very interesting, just historically, it was that population that was studied and kind of set off this idea of the low fat diet to begin with because researchers saw them and understood that they did not do well on a higher fat diet and then sort of extrapolated from them to the whole American population through a series of like disastrous leaps of logic. So, yeah, so there are people who, and they just naturally have extremely high cholesterol, but they're real outliers.

Yeah, yeah. And that may be, you know, sometimes when I'm talking and trying to remember these things off the top of my head, it might be the APOE4 gene that's more of the Alzheimer's disease gene. And it could be a different Apogene responsible for this familial hypercholesteremia. I, I don't remember off the top of my head. My apologies to people. I should have had an extra cup of coffee before we started this episode. But regardless, I'll put a couple links for you in the show notes over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com BigFatSurprise because you could go get a 23andMe test done, and you could not only find out whether you're a carrier for that ApoE4 allele associated with Alzheimer's, but you could also find out with whether you carry this genotype associated with hypercholesteremia. And you could make decisions accordingly, educated decisions accordingly, so that you don't paint yourself with too broad a macronutrient brush when it comes to your dietary intake.

Yeah. And just say, I'm sorry, but if you have hypercholesterolemia, you know it because you have very high cholesterol and your parents have very high cholesterol and you're.

Like very, very high.

A lot of times more than like 300, 300 above. And everybody in your family is diabetes from heart disease. I mean, that's not a subtle trait to have in your family.

Right? Right. Yeah, it's a good point. You make a lot of good points in this book. And for those of you who really. We really scratched the surface of what Nina has in this book as far as, like, the Ancel Keys studies and a lot of what she found in, I mean, again, almost 10 years writing this thing. So there's a lot in here. I recommend you read it. It might take you a little while to get through, I won't lie. But I love books like this that are super dense and that just, just knock your socks off in terms of their content. So it's called the Big Fat Surprise. If you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com BigFatsurprise I will link to the book. I will also link to the shownotes for some of the things that we talked about, other books I mentioned, the Chris masterjohn podcast I just mentioned, and any of the other little things that we talked about in case you want to take the deep dive. But in the meantime, Nina, thanks for coming on the show today and sharing all this stuff with us. And I suppose now you can go have your eggs and bacon for lunch.

That's right. Now it's 2:30 here. It's lunchtime. But thank you so much for having me.

Awesome. Well, thank you for coming on the show and for sharing all this stuff with us. And for those of you listening in, I'm Ben Greenfield along with Nina. Ty Scholes. I'm gonna get it. Ty Scholz, the author of the Big Fat Surprise, is signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have a healthy week.

3, 2.

You've been listening to the Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast. Go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com for even more cutting edge fitness and performance advice.

Sam.