How to Lose Weight by Eating Fat (It Actually Works)

This show is proudly brought to you by MaximusMark.com. Hi folks, it's Maximus Mark and welcome to the show that punches you in the face with information, but in a good way. It's Maximus Radio. And today I have one of those shows, you know the ones, the ones where we shine a light on mainstream nutritional and medical errors. Today I have on the line Alan Watson, author of both Serial Killer: The Unintended Consequences of the Low Fat Diet and 21 Days to a Healthy Heart. Alan was also the founder of a herbal and nutritional supplement business in 1989. Alan Alan is the founder of www.dietheartpublishing.com where many articles dedicated to good nutrition and health can be found. And both of his books are available on Amazon, so make sure you grab a copy. So with all that said, let's welcome Alan to the show. Welcome, Alan. Great to have you on.

Thank you, Mark. I'm glad to be on the show with you.

Yeah, we got plenty of questions here. I read— actually, the way I I first heard about you is from one on Facebook by Mike Demeter. He actually posted one of your Q&As about fat and cholesterol, and it was absolutely a brilliant read. So, you know, I'm sure the listeners will get a lot of value. So the first question that we have, how did you get into researching and writing about heart disease and health?

Sure, Mark. As we've discussed, I started a supplement business in 1989. We manufactured some formulas. You know, in the industry you start receiving publications, and of course we have the bipolar environment there where we have Dr. Dean Ornish on one hand recommending a very low-fat diet, and then we have Dr. Atkins recommending a very high-fat diet. And, you know, there was as much confusion within the nutrition industry as people had in this country about whether to eat butter or not, how many eggs a day can I eat. And I, in earnest, I thought as an obligation to my customers who, you know, a lot of our orders were 1-800 at the time, I thought I have an obligation to, to, you know, get at the truth of some of this. It would help to advise on supplements, I guess, if you know what to eat, right?

For sure.

And so I went to the Atkins-Whittaker debate in New York City in 1997, and Whittaker is a physician from California advocating a low-fat diet like Dean Ornish. And of course, Atkins was recommending a high-fat diet. And I thought This would be beneficial to medical doctors, a 2-hour debate, and I was really impressed with Dr. Atkins. He cited a lot of clinical data. You know, he talked about his clinical practice, which had in 1997 had been more than 20 years, even 30 years, and he was rosy-cheeked and healthy-looking and And Dr. Whitaker appeared to be 50 pounds overweight. He was uncomfortable, and he didn't have much clinical evidence that a, a high carbohydrate diet would prevent obesity or diabetes or heart disease. So in '97, then in April of '97, when I was doing a newsletter, I decided that in fact Atkins is right. The clinical data was persuasive, and I started doing more research, and by 2002 then I published 21 Days to a Healthy Heart, which was a pro-Atkins, pro-traditional food, pro-high-fat diet.

So, so far I was going to say, fast-forwarding to 2011, I mean, there's a big surge of, you know, the paleo style of eating. Would you say you're an advocate of paleo nutrition?

Yes, I am.

Yeah. Yeah. So, you— there has been a bit of controversy, I guess, just recently on Facebook with some of my friends on Facebook, where there's been questions about colon cancer and meat consumption. What's your take on that?

Well, the— You know, meat consumption is something that's a little hard to generalize about because, you know, like any food, there's differences in quality. And when I'm talking about meat consumption, it's like the food that my grandfather served. He was a dairy farmer in northern Minnesota. You know, they had lamb, they had beef, they had pork, especially in the winter. They made their own butter from cows fed on pasture. Of course, they had chickens. The skim milk was fed to the pigs to fatten them up, and they were able to get their, their cooking fat or lard from that. Well, my grandfather lived to be 88 years old. He wasn't on any prescription drugs. He died of pneumonia during a harsh Minnesota winter. So, I mean, that's anecdotal, but, you know, this has been repeated over and over again. When you're eating good quality red meat, good quality animal feed, it protects you. These were considered protective foods until the low-fat era began. And now, if you're going to overcook meat, if you burn it on a barbecue grill, or you buy highly processed meats, sausage that has nitrates and food colors and sugars, that's a different story. And like any other contaminated food, animal foods could cause cancer or other problems too. But to specifically answer your question, there's a lot of data from Harvard here in the US. They, they, the Physicians Health Study, the Nurses Health Study, where in the Nurses Health Study, 80,000 nurses were followed for 10 years. And the nurses who consumed the most red meat, who consumed, consumed the most fat and cholesterol, had no more cancer than the, the nurses who consumed the least. In fact, the nurses who consumed the most fiber, who had the highest carb intake, had the highest levels of breast cancer. Well, I think the Harvard studies are definitive that, that there's no association between meat eating or eating more fat and protein and cancer.

Right, okay. And one more Facebook question until we hit to the, I guess, the meat and veg of the interview. Question from in Canada, Mike Demeter. He asked, what's your take on paleo diets in different subpopulations? Say, for example, for children and seniors, does it need to be tweaked?

Does it need to be— I'm sorry, tweaked.

Does it need to be changed a little bit more?

I think so. I mean, that's always true. I think we're more different than alike. We have varying sensitivities to carbohydrates. I think a good example is I live in Minnesota, northern Minnesota, where, you know, some of our temperatures are the coldest in the country. And your breakfast might be a little bit different in northern Minnesota than it would be in Southern California. And, you know, so depending on the climate the type of work you do, I think our diet can vary. I view the Paleo diet and, and that trend as really a variation of Atkins. The traditional hunter-gatherer diet, or the diet that we consumed as humans for a couple million years, did not include corn. Soybeans, cereal grains. It was more fish, red meat. The carbohydrates were berries and, and tubers and things like that. So we always need to individualize our diet, but I'm a proponent of a paleo or traditional diet consistent with what our ancestors consumed.

And would you What changes could you possibly make for, say, a young child? Would there be any changes? Would you give more carbohydrates to a young child, do you think?

Maybe even less. You know, children need saturated fat. They need cholesterol. I mean, if we look at human mother's milk, that's the highest cholesterol food on earth. I don't think God made a mistake. Milk is high in fat and cholesterol for the reason that growing bodies need a lot of fat and cholesterol. I think it's a mistake now where mothers are giving 6-month-old children, like, cereal or rice cereal. It may be appropriate if they can put their own milk or full-fat raw milk in it to balance the carbohydrate, but Children until the age of 2 need a high-fat, high-cholesterol diet. And of course, we're talking about natural fat, not highly processed foods.

Yeah, for sure. So in mainstream nutrition, they tell you fat is bad for you. What's wrong with that statement?

Well, I think the primary thing, the common sense thing that's wrong with that statement is that we're made out of fat and, and protein and water. Of course, that is non-negotiable. We have trillions of cell membranes in our body. Every one has two layers of fat, you know, the fatty bilayers. And these membranes are the key to our cellular health. They are like the body's police force. The, the membrane, the fatty membrane, controls what comes in and what goes out of the cell. The fats in these membrane phospholipids are 50% saturated fat. 20% of the weight of a membrane is cholesterol. So fat including saturated fat and cholesterol, constitute the waterproofing and the, the structure of our bodies. And so we need to eat fat and protein to replace the structure, to remodel our bodies. Our liver, our organs are remanufactured. They're not made out of carbohydrates. So we have zero biological requirement for carbohydrate. And we need fat and protein to build and maintain our bodies.

For sure, for sure. So what is a good fat and what is a bad fat?

Well, I'd say, you know, the first of all, I think we should say that in the United States, in the beginning of 1961, when the American Heart Association first came out with the