S2:E8 - Mark Ottobre Interviews Alan Watson - The Unintended Consequences of a Low Fat Diet

Hey, hey folks, welcome to the show that punches you in the face with information, but in a good way. It's the Enterprise Fitness Podcast and I'm your host Mark Ottobre, owner and director of Enterprise Fitness. Now, we are dusting off the retro records here at Enterprise Fitness and taking you back to 2012 where I did this interview with Alan Watts. He's the author of A Serial Killer, but not serial as in a serial killer, A serial killer, but a cereal as in the cereal you eat killer. Fantastic book. Alan has so much good information out there. Solid, rock solid, grounded in science, really grounded guy. I personally listened to this podcast back 3, 4 times. I know you might be saying that's weird because I did the podcast, but I listened to it back because I learned a lot from this podcast. So if there's any controversy over the, you know, low-fat, high-fat, where does this nonsense come from? I think this podcast does a great job at dispelling the myths around a low-fat diet and why, you know, there are a lot of unintended consequences when you go low-fat. So hope you enjoy this one and I'll speak to you on the other side.

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 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've got plenty of questions here.

I read—

actually, the way 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 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, and you know, in the industry you start receiving publications. And of course, we have the bipolar environment there where we have doctor 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, uh, 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— two medical doctors, a, a two-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 Dr. Whitaker appeared to be 50 pounds overweight. He was uncomfortable, and he didn't have much clinical evidence that a high carbohydrate diet would prevent obesity or diabetes or heart disease. So in '97, then in April of '97, when I, 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 I was going to say, fast forwarding to 2011, I've been— 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, um, 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, 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 was a 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, uh, 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— 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 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. 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 different 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?

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 in— 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, 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, 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, and 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 protein and water, of course. Fat 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 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, and 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 in 1961, when the American Heart Association first came out with the high carbohydrate diet, all fat was bad. They wanted us to skimp on fat. And because the studies that were trying to validate that never did— there's never been any conclusive evidence that dietary fat is bad— they had to tweak it, and they had to start dividing up cholesterol as good and bad, and fat as good and bad. So the, the change from all fat is bad to good and bad is just the proponents of the lipid hypothesis are just simply trying to tweak— they have to keep tweaking it to, to try to make it valid. But a good fat is a natural fat. Such— let's take butter fat, which is the most complex fat on earth. There are 12 different fatty acids in butter. There are 8 different saturated fats in butter. One of them, of course, is lauric acid, which is a dominant fat in coconut. So we have— all fat in food is a combination of saturated and unsaturated, and these are the natural fats that our bodies easily recognize and process. So all of these natural fats are good. The bad fats are the trans fatty acids that came about when we started to hydrogenate vegetable oil. And then when we started taking these vegetable seeds like soybean and canola, which is made from rapeseed and sunflower, safflower and corn, when we started to crush these seeds and to pull oil from them. Well, those, those highly processed seed oils are bad fats. They're bad because it takes high heat or high pressure and even chemicals like hexane to separate the oil from the seed. And then we're talking about our traditional diets or ancestral diets. Nobody in your country or mine consumed soybean oil or corn oil or, or canola oil in 1910. So these modern, highly processed vegetable oils are truly bad, and the hydrogenated fats are truly bad. All of the restaurants and fast food enterprises serving french fries and Chicken McNuggets They're deep frying these foods in this highly toxic vegetable fat, whether it contains trans fats or it doesn't, it's the same thing. These are unstable Frankenfats that we shouldn't consume.

Right.

So in other words, all animal fats are completely fine, and when people go nuts separating yolks from eggs and skin from chicken, it's not really needed. You know, eat the chicken with the skin, right?

You know, certainly, you know, the idea that to remove the chicken skin, it's usually stated that it's saturated fat, so you remove it. And, and as they should know, chicken fat is 70% unsaturated fat. It's not even saturated. It's a combination, of course. But chicken And, and, and pork fat contain a very important fatty acid called palmitoleic acid. Palmitoleic is a monounsaturated fat and it kills bacteria and virus. So if you remove the skin from the chicken, you're getting less palmitoleic acid and you're— in other words, that's what they've done in telling us not to eat coconut, not to eat to eat lard, not to eat chicken skin, not to eat butter. They've removed the antimicrobial fatty acids from our diets, and in exchange, we were told to eat fats like canola and soybean that do not contain antimicrobial fats.

Do you think it's one big mistake, or do you think there's more at play?

Well, you know, I think initially, Mark, I think the state of knowledge in the '60s and '70s— it was 1977 when the federal government first came out with low-fat guidelines and started recommending unsaturated, polyunsaturated fats. I think at that time politicians in this country, Senator George McGovern had a bipartisan committee that had staffers that actually developed the first guidelines. Our first diet low-fat guidelines were actually written by political staffers that didn't have a scientific background, and they were really responding to the politics at the time. And so I think initially it, it wasn't something we would call evil. But now it's 2011. Now in the US, we have 75 or 80 million people who are either diabetic or pre-diabetic. We have diabetes in this country since 1980 when the guidelines were made formal Diabetes has tripled, type 2 diabetes. Obesity has more than doubled. And now, in the last 5 or 10, 15 years, we have started to discover the nuances in cholesterol metabolism. We know a lot more now about HDL, LDL, VLDL. Now we know for sure But the 2010 dietary guidelines that came out in the United States here do not reflect any of that new knowledge. And now I would say it's evil. Now it's unconscionable that we're not shifting back to a traditional higher-fat diet when we know the harm that's being caused by a low-fat, high-carb vegetable oil-fueled diet.

Do you think it's, I guess, corporate monopoly at play controlling what government's doing?

Yes, it is. And I'll give you an example. The diet— 2010 dietary guidelines, there was a 13-member committee that was appointed more than 2 years ago. There was no hearing, no public discussion. Suddenly we had a 13-member Dietary Guidelines Committee. Well, we have learned, and a lot of people, I should say, in this country sent written testimony, listened to the hearings, read the transcripts. We got involved in a grassroots manner thinking we could change these guidelines, but the 13 members were picked behind closed doors There is an organization— let me see if I can find the name of it here for you. It's called the International Food Information Council Foundation. I know that's a mouthful. I'll say it again: International Food Information Council Foundation. Now, that's a so-called public-private partnership They were heavily involved in the third— in the selecting the 13-member committee. This foundation is funded by Pepsi, General Mills, or should we say Generous Mills, Mars Candy Company, Kraft, and the Dannon Yogurt Company. And their yogurt has no fat and has 27 grams of sugar in it. So So this so-called private-public partnership selected the 13 members, and General Mills, they're headquartered here in Minnesota, they have a vice president on this foundation. Well, when the 13-member committee was announced, a Professor Joanne Slavin from the University of Minnesota where I graduated from. She was picked to be one of the members, and guess what? She announced on the first day that she was going to be the carbohydrate chairperson, and she testified during meeting 1, day 2, and the first thing she said is that carbohydrates are the basis of a healthy diet. That's written right into the guidelines. She said there's no reason to grade carbohydrates, there's no reason to single out high fructose corn syrup, no reason to look at the glycemic index of carbohydrates. In other words, she made every decision about what would be in the final guidelines, and the reason that she was selected is that all of her funding comes from General Mills. General Mills and Cargill, headquartered here, give millions of dollars to the university. In effect, the food industry in Minnesota owns the nutrition department, and they made darn sure that the carbohydrate chair would be one of their own. Wow.

So it really does go to that level of complexity. It's all— yeah. That's exactly right. So it's going to be very hard to change, isn't it?

Yeah, it's going to be hard to change, but I think a lot of us in the United States, I'll say I certainly did, we learned a valuable lesson. The dice were loaded. So for 2015, we're not going to waste our time waiting for that committee. It's very important that the U.S. Department of Agriculture be removed from the process of creating dietary guidelines because USDA and their dietitians are closely connected to this International Food Information Council, which, as I mentioned, is funded completely by food companies. So we can't let them load the dice. As long as they load the dice, nothing's going to change.

Does this relate at all? I'm not sure if you've looked into it, but Codex Alimentarius and the implementation of that, um, food law?

I'm sorry, Mark, can you say that again?

I'm not sure if you've looked into it, but does this relate at all to Codex Alimentarius, where they, um, the, I guess, the, the UN are trying to bring in a food guideline for the rest of the world?

I don't think so necessarily. I think they're two different organizations without any specific ties.

Okay. So let's move on to cholesterol. Can you tell me what— really simply, what does cholesterol do?

Well, you know, cholesterol is almost conditionally essential. There are some people that do not synthesize cholesterol very effectively, and as I mentioned earlier, cholesterol makes up 20% of the cell membrane bilayer. So cholesterol is very vital. Cholesterol would make sure— cholesterol basically waterproofs our cells and, and makes them just pliable enough. So we have trillions of membranes, and cholesterol is part of every membrane. Cholesterol is so important that every cell in the body except nervous system tissue can make cholesterol. So it's estimated that our bodies have to make anywhere from 1,200 to 1,800 milligrams of cholesterol daily to supply what's needed by the body. And in this country, and, and in the dietary guidelines since 1980, we've been told to limit our cholesterol to less than 300 milligrams per day. Now think of it, Mark, if we have to limit our dietary cholesterol to less than 300 milligrams, but our bodies need 1,500 milligrams every day, then instead of eating foods that our body needs, we're forcing our livers to make this cholesterol, and our livers have, have better things to do. And of course, cholesterol is the precursor molecule to vitamin D. Cholesterol is the, the grandmother hormone. Cholesterol precedes pregnenolone and all of the sex and steroid hormones. So, you know, cholesterol, I think you could say, is the defining molecule of animal life. Mosquitoes have LDL. They just don't fret about it.

What are, I guess, the optimal levels? Because obviously, there's people going to go to their doctor and get their cholesterol checked. What would you say the optimal levels of cholesterol are?

Well, you know, the, you know, I'll give you an example. I'll answer it this way. In the United States, if you have total cholesterol over 200, It's a disease to be treated by drugs. I had a physical in the last year, my brother did, virtually everybody I know who gets a physical is told they have a disease, high cholesterol. In Europe, there was a study called MONICA and that was a study of lipid levels, including cholesterol, and heart health in 20 different European countries. And the people in Switzerland had the highest longevity and, and the lowest rates of heart disease, along with the French. But the Swiss also had the highest average cholesterol, cholesterol levels. They were 265 milligrams per deciliter. So isn't it interesting that in the United States— I'm not sure about Australia— 265 is a disease to be treated with drugs. In Switzerland, It's a marker for good health and longevity. We have learned to— this was discovered actually even back in the 1950s by a Dr. John Goffman working at Berkeley that we don't really have cholesterol in our blood when we measure cholesterol, we're measuring vehicles that carry cholesterol like LDL, which is called bad cholesterol. But LDL isn't cholesterol. LDL is low-density lipoprotein, which delivers cholesterol.

Right.

Now, you know, if we think about how important it is that our bodies need to produce 1,500 or 1,800 milligrams every day— it's produced in the liver— That has to be delivered out— delivered from the liver to the cells in the body. That's what LDL does. LDL is not bad cholesterol, it's a delivery vehicle. HDL isn't— is good, but it's not cholesterol. It delivers cholesterol back to the liver. And then the crux of the matter, Mark, is that at least half or more of the people who have a heart attack and die don't have elevated cholesterol. They don't have this disease called high cholesterol. They have cholesterol— total cholesterol below 200. So we've been sold a bill of goods. Uh, it started with Ancel Keys at the University of Minnesota, and it goes right on to this day The mania about cholesterol lowering has, has created this huge industry for statin drugs. We're spending billions and billions of dollars medicating elderly people with statin drugs that may or may or may not lower their cholesterol, but in fact lower their life expectancy.

Right, so it's complete and utter madness in a nutshell, I guess.

It's total madness. I'm hoping that 20, 30 years from now, people look back at cholesterol lowering as the gravest mistake of medicine in the last 200, 300 years.

I remember reading an article on a website a while ago that basically said, yeah, as you just said then, that cholesterol is basically the founding, the founder of all hormones. So to optimize things like testosterone and the sex hormones, and so obviously testosterone helps build muscle, burn body fat, and all those good things, you should eat more fats containing cholesterol. So yeah, basically that's 100% right. I just wanted to, I guess, put a nutshell on it so the listener really gets it. Who, you mentioned Ancel Keys. Who was Ancel Keys and why was he important in the fat and cholesterol lie?

Right, yeah, he was a professor of physiology at the University of Minnesota in the— actually started in the 1940s. And Keys happened to be in Italy after World War II and discovered that some various populations in the Mediterranean area had a— what he perceived as a low-fat diet and low rates of heart disease. And he studied the situation in Japan and found that they had low-fat diets and low rates of heart disease. So he was the first to hypothesize that it was cholesterol and saturated fat— actually, at that time, all fat— in the diet that would predispose us to coronary heart disease. And he conducted a couple studies, the Six Country Analysis and then the Seven Country Study. And, and what's interesting about the, the Six Country Analysis, which came out in about 1953, and we'll use the example of Japan. The Japanese had low rates of heart disease and low consumption of fat, and the United States had high rates of heart disease and high rates of— or high intake of fat. Here's the thing, though. So he could draw a straight line, a linear relationship between mortality from heart disease and fat intake. The problem is that in order to draw that nice straight line, he had to ignore of the 22 countries he had, he only chose 6. He ignored France, for example, which had a high-fat diet and low rates of heart disease. He ignored Mexico, which had a high fat intake and low rates of heart disease. So he selected data, he selected the countries and data that would prove his hypothesis, and Keys wasn't a real nice guy. Contemporaries complained about his manner and method. He was— the important thing now is he was a member of the board of the American Heart Association, and by 1961, he had persuaded the American Heart Association to adopt his low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet based on his 6-country analysis, which was clearly flawed. And a good example is to go back to the Japanese is after the war, they were lucky to eat. The Japanese didn't have a lot of food. They had a low-fat diet, but they had a low-sugar diet. They had a— they didn't eat a lot of processed foods, and they had very high rates of stroke stroke. So Keys was conducting epidemiology, not cause and effect. He didn't consider— he was only looking at one thing. He wanted to prove that he was right, and he did it by selecting data. In 1961, when the American Heart Association accepted his low-fat diet or his high-carbohydrate diet, —there were 7 board members. Quite a few of them on the board were professors at other universities who got all of their funding from food companies. There's a Jeremiah Stamler, still alive, Northwestern University in Chicago. He was an advocate, a supporter of Keys. All of his funding came from Mazola and Fleischmann's margarine. Edible oil. There was a Frederick Stare from Harvard. His funding came from the Cereal Institute, Nabisco, and other food companies. In other words, by 1961, when American Heart came out with this diet that we're beset with today, it was food company paid researchers that made the vote so Keys could prevail. In 1980, when the dietary guidelines came out, the low-fat guidelines, the exact wording from the 1961 American Heart on fat and cholesterol, the 300-milligram limit on cholesterol, went right into our guidelines. And guess what? They're there today. We've had the same restriction on dietary fat and cholesterol for 40 or 50 years. But now today, the difference is that now we're a country and increasingly a world that's getting fatter and sicker by the decade.

When you go out and I guess present this information to maybe doctors that haven't been exposed to this information before, Do you find there's much resistance that people want to hold on to the belief that carbohydrates are good for you and that's what we should be eating?

Right.

Yeah. There is still total resistance. If you go into a vitamin store, a health food store in this here and pick up a magazine, whether it's Delicious or Total Health, it's full of anti-fat, anti-butter, information. The guidelines that just came out are virtually identical to 1980. If— when I went to my doctor, I've had very few doctor visits in the last 40 years, but I thought I should have these lipids done. My HDL was 66, which is good. You want it over 60. My triglycerides were 82, You want them under 100, but my cholesterol was 265. My doctor insisted that I need to go on a statin drug. I said, what about my HDL? What about my triglycerides? Why don't we talk about these things? And, and you know what, Mark, she didn't really know what triglycerides were. Well, she didn't know. All they, they have been— the public may be brainwashed But these doctors, unfortunately, have been programmed by their education, and their education in large part has been framed by the interests of the food and drug companies that control the curriculum, not only in medical schools, but in nutrition departments at the high school and college level throughout the country.

So what do you think is the biggest link to heart disease? Is it C-reactive proteins in relation to triglycerides and HDL?

Well, you know, with heart disease, uh, now more and more, and even in the mainstream, uh, they're starting to see, uh, the metabolic syndrome. Uh, the metabolic syndrome is the higher blood sugar Elevated triglycerides— triglycerides are blood fats made in the liver from excess carbs— low levels of HDL, protruding abdominal fat, high blood pressure. This cluster of symptoms is called metabolic syndrome, and, and the two most important Parts of that are high blood sugar and, and high circulating insulin. So if we have a breakfast of, let's say, 3 eggs fried in butter or lard and maybe a couple lamb chops, protein and fat, we're not going to raise our blood sugar. That breakfast doesn't call for insulin. And by eating that fat in the morning when we're in mild ketosis anyway, We're giving our body permission to burn fat. If we eat good natural fat, we're going to burn fat. But now, if we have a breakfast of a sugary cereal, or any box cereal raises blood sugar, people put skim milk, which has milk sugar, they might have a banana and a glass of orange juice, that excess sugar, that 40 or 50 grams of sugar now Goes into the body, goes into the blood. Well, the liver has to turn that into fat. That's called triglycerides. When your body takes triglycerides and loads it into the blood, you're depressing HDL. That is the link to heart disease. Obesity, diabetes— diabetes, 80% of diabetics die of heart disease. Wow. So diabetes and heart disease overlap 80%. The common denominator of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease are high blood sugar and high insulin levels. The majority of people who have, who have a heart attack and die of sudden death have either low or average cholesterol levels. But they're going to have higher blood sugar, higher insulin, and higher triglyceride levels.

So let me ask you this. I go into my doctor, I get my blood test, um, I have to, to the doctor, the doctor says I have high cholesterol, it's 265. What then do I say to the doctor? What, what, what are some points that people can take home to challenge their doctor on?

Sure. What, what I would do is bring a black marker and just cross out the total cholesterol. It doesn't mean a thing really. The all-cause death rate increases when your total cholesterol goes below 180. People who are dying of cancer, our second cause of death, typically have total cholesterol of 120 or 130. Low, low levels of cholesterol are associated with cancer, heart disease, suicide, accident, leukemia, things like that. A— remember, the Swiss, the longest-lived people in Europe, their average cholesterol is 265. So it's perfectly okay. As we age, we would expect our cholesterol to slowly increase, and cholesterol between, let's say, 180 and about 330 can be perfectly normal. What you want to do is immediately look at fasting glucose. That, that's the most important number. Optimum is about 87 or 88. Dr. Atkins always said 95 is the very highest. When you go over 95, you're risk of death from heart disease starts to increase in a linear manner. And I should note that at 110 fasting glucose, you're, you're diagnosed as pre-diabetic, and at 125, it's full-blown diabetes. So blood sugar, which needs to be in a narrow range, let's say 75 to 95— when you go over 95, you're developing heart disease. Now, only carbohydrates raise blood sugar. Only carbohydrates call for insulin. So our blood work, our elevated triglycerides or blood fats, and our depressed levels of HDL are related to carbohydrate, not fat intake.

All right, let's move on to a different topic that I'm very fascinated by, and that's canola oil. What is the a bit of backstory of canola oil. It's my understanding that it was Gamble and Procter who first started, you know, the canola oil craze, and it basically took off from there. Can you give us a bit of background on that? Sure.

Well, you know, canola, which is short for Canadian oil, canola, they chose that name because I don't know if many people would buy an oil that's called rapeseed oil. Canola is actually genetically modified rapeseed, and rapeseed was always only an industrial oil. You can actually use it as a pesticide in your garden in small amounts. So they genetically modified rapeseed to reduce certain fatty acids in it, and when they, when they reduce those fatty acids, it increased the monounsaturated oleic acid, which is the dominant fat in olive oil. So they, they took rapeseed, which has a lot of polyunsaturates like soybean, genetically modified it to make it look like more like olive oil. Here's the problem with it. One, it's all genetically modified. To— it stinks. And to, to deodorize canola, it has to be heated over 300 degrees. And when, when they heat an unsaturated, dominantly unsaturated oil to those sort of temperatures, it's not edible anymore. Canola is an edible The deodorizing also increases— turns some of the unsaturated fats into trans fats, but it's not on the label because they check for the trans fats before the deodorization process. So if you see canola and it says no trans fats, that's not true. It will have trans fats because it was deodorized after the check. So what are some of the harm? The inflammation. High sugar causes inflammation. High omega-6 or high linoleic acid causes inflammation. Canola does have a lot of monounsaturated fat which has been modified, but it does have a lot of linoleic polyunsaturated linoleic acid, which we find in soybean and sunflower. Unsaturated means unstable, so these are chemically unstable. When you get oil out of a seed using hexane or high pressure or high heat, you damage the oil. So these oils are not fit for human consumption. They're far worse than we realize, and they should be strictly avoided. The best fats are the more saturated or monounsaturated fats that you find in what we traditionally cook with—coconut, palm, lard, butter, and India ghee. The Indians use ghee, you know, which is basically clarified butter with the moisture removed For thousands of years, it was their safe cooking fat. Now there's a Crisco of India. I can't think of the name right now. And as the Indians are using this Franken-fat, this shortening, they now are— I think they're second to China in diabetes rates in the world. So our edible oil industry in this world promoting these unsaturated fats for cooking and exporting them to developing countries is spreading diabetes and inflammatory chronic diseases throughout the world.

So do you think there's, I guess, because canola oil is pretty bad, do you think there's a, I guess, a political factor at play play to keeping it on the market?

Oh, oh, absolutely. You know, the— we— if we didn't know the absolute truth in the '60s and '70s about the processing of cereal grains into boxed cereals, the processing of soybean into an oil, genetically modifying rapeseed into something called canola, If we didn't know the detrimental health effects then, we know them now. They're well documented, and, and there is a shift underway. More and more medical doctors— Duke University, for example, their clinic— they're starting to return to an Atkins or a more traditional higher-fat diet. They're getting away from recommending these polyunsaturated fats. So the shift is on, and the people that are resisting it and that are trying to hide the truth are the people making millions and billions of dollars at our expense.

Yeah, definitely. Let's switch gears and talk calcium. When I tell our clients to cut out things like commercial milk and commercial dairy, The first thing they always say is, where am I going to get my calcium from? Can you talk a little about calcium and the magnesium relationship and why perhaps supplemental calcium is a bad idea?

Sure. Yeah, I think calcium is abundant in a wide variety of foods. I mean, it's not just dairy. Now, dairy can be a good source of calcium if we consume cheese made from raw milk. Raw milk, of course, has all of the enzymes intact. When we pasteurize milk, we destroy the enzymes. When we pasteurize milk, we modify the amino acids, like lysine is denatured the most. Calcium shifts from one form to another. So it's important to point out that dairy is a very healthy food when it's raw dairy, the type of dairy that, that we had throughout much of our history. But when you pasteurize and kill the enzymes and alter the amino acids, dairy becomes like canola, something to avoid. But you can get cheese made from raw milk, and, and those cheeses, of course, provide— Swiss cheese, cheddar cheese— provide plenty of calcium. Cabbage provides calcium. Salmon and various seafoods provide calcium. There's calcium and magnesium in, in green leafy vegetables. So calcium and magnesium are fairly widely distributed. Raw dairy is a good form. But here's the problem, is that doctors and nutritionists recommend that we supplement with about 1,200 milligrams of calcium, and often they don't even mention magnesium. Multiple vitamins have 2 parts calcium, 1 part magnesium. Fortified foods, yogurts, nonfat yogurts and cereals and other fruit sticks are fortified with calcium, so it's a marketing gimmick. People have a fear of fat, but they also have this fear that they're not getting enough calcium. And if you supplement with calcium or eat too much food that's high in calcium and not enough magnesium, What happens is the calcium migrates into soft tissue where magnesium belongs. Calcification, or hardening of the arteries, is calcium ions replacing magnesium in this soft tissue. So it's very, very vital that, that you— we do not take supplements, cheap supplements that have too much calcium. And not enough magnesium. I don't think there's any reason to supplement with calcium if you're eating a wide variety of whole foods. Magnesium is hard— a little harder to come by. In some parts of the world, there's magnesium in water. Magnesium— there is, I should point out, calcium and magnesium in red meat. Pastured animal products have calcium and magnesium, so we shouldn't supplement with calcium. If you supplement with one mineral, it should be magnesium because that will tend to balance any excess calcium. Magnesium— there are good forms like orotate and aspartate. That are easy to— easier to absorb. I think it's important there's an ionic magnesium that is magnesium and trace minerals. So if we saw mineral supplementation is very tricky, but if you do supplement with one mineral, I would make it magnesium, and I would, I would be cautious about using any pasteurized dairy products because they have too much calcium and it's been altered. That's the real problem. I think if you could drink a glass of full-fat fresh raw milk every day, you know, even people who think they're lactose intolerant will do fine because the enzymes haven't been destroyed and you're getting calcium in the— in an original form, and you're getting the fat that you need to absorb calcium. You can't absorb calcium without fat, and especially fat-soluble vitamins A and D. So dairy is good for calcium if it's raw. When it's pasteurized, it flips to the other side and becomes harmful.

Yeah, for sure. And what role does potassium play?

I'm sorry, what role does potassium play in that? Potassium and magnesium are the two most abundant intracellular minerals. So in our heart muscle, potassium and magnesium are most abundant, not calcium. Potassium and magnesium. But potassium is available, widely available in all foods. It's hard to eat and not get enough potassium. Magnesium is the one to watch out for, and it's probably never prudent to supplement with potassium, but it is abundant within our membranes, within our, our cells, intracellular, But when we have a deficiency, an intracellular deficiency, it's more typically magnesium, and that's when calcium then migrates into those heart muscle cells. I believe a heart attack at the cellular level is calcium replacing magnesium, making a cell hard and basically dead. Right. To protect yourself from a heart attack is to keep your magnesium levels high, and that would be emphasizing magnesium-rich foods, which includes seafood and, you know, beans for people who can tolerate the carbohydrates of beans, red meat, even milk has magnesium. But again, Processing is the enemy of food. Too much heat, too much processing. You know, we can cook the B6 out of food. If there isn't magnesium in the soil, it's not in the food. And these are all things we have to consider for sure.

So what are the most important supplements for general health and for protecting your heart?

Well, you know, having been in the supplement business for a long time, You know, I became a little weary, Mark, of people calling on the phone and saying, gee, I was just diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. What should I supplement with? And my question became, what did you have for breakfast? You know, I think it's far more important— the most important thing we have to do is to, to eat high-quality protein at every meal. Make sure we have high-quality natural fat because you don't utilize protein without fat. So having a hearty breakfast that includes eggs or fish or salmon patties, homemade soup, you know, a breakfast that keeps our fat burning— when we wake up, we're in ketosis. Let's stay in ketosis. But so we— food and keeping our blood sugar in that narrow optimum range, the only way you really do that is with your food choices. But we may find ourselves— people over 50, people over 60— as we're relearning how to eat, you know, we may need supplementation. And I think magnesium a good form of magnesium is most important. In Dr. Atkins' clinic, mostly people over 40 or 50, he did an intracellular test of magnesium, not, not a blood test. It's always fine unless you're nearly dead, but an intracellular test for magnesium. 9 out of 10 people were deficient in his clinic. Over a 30-year period. Atkins said diabetes is simply a magnesium deficiency. We need magnesium to metabolize carbohydrates, and we need zinc as well. Well, you know, they emphasize eating up to 65% of our calories as carbohydrates, and those carbohydrates don't necessarily have magnesium, especially the refined ones. So we give up magnesium magnesium. We give up zinc to metabolize a high-carb diet. So we have to make sure we get our minerals. Now we get our minerals— zinc, red meat is your best source of zinc. Magnesium, there's, there's magnesium in red meat, but that's where the fish comes in, green leafy vegetables. Seafoods— the Japanese diet is rich in magnesium from seafood and, and including sea vegetables. When it comes to heart health, then magnesium is vital. I don't think you need zinc if you're eating your red meat, but herbs can be very important for heart health. I think cayenne pepper, not pasteurized hot sauce, But cayenne pepper, ginger root, circulation stimulants like that are important because they reduce fibrin. And fibrin is a blood protein that promotes clotting. And cayenne and ginger will reduce fibrin and reduce the chance of a deadly blood clot. People like people in Thailand or Mexico. Cultures that eat a lot of cayenne pepper in its raw form have very little clotting diseases like heart disease or stroke. Hawthorn berry is, is very good for heart health. It relieves tension from the heart. If you take hawthorn berry over time, it's slow-acting, but it will help your arteries open and close dilate more easily. So I think herbs— ginkgo biloba extract— taken over time, I think, is important for heart health. Again, the first thing is to fix your fats. You know, eat the right fats, eat the high-quality protein. What we need to do is grade our carbohydrates. They're the ones to choose carefully because we need to keep blood sugar under control. And then you supplement wisely. And for the heart, magnesium, cayenne, hawthorn, I think are all important.

Yeah. So where can people learn more about you?

Well, you know, dietheartpublishing.com is, is my website. Some of the things we've talked about today, Mark, On the homepage, there's an article, The Illustrated History of Heart Disease. I have a DietHeartTV with a lot of videos, many of them short, that, that talk about these issues. My book, Cereal Killer, which I published in 2008, A lot of people have referred to it as the Reader's Digest version of Gary Taubes' Good Calories, Bad Calories. I'll have to say that Gary Taubes, his book Why We Get Fat and Good Calories, Bad Calories have— are vitally important books. These are the books that people like Dr. Andrew Weil, other medical doctors are reading and are shifting now to a high-fat. The good thing about Cereal Killer, it's 144 pages, it fits in your briefcase, you can read it on an airplane flying from one city to another, and it, it, it not only concisely deals with these issues, but it points people then who want to do more research and more study to sources like Gary Taubes.

Excellent. And where can people buy your books?

Well, you know, Amazon has sold more serial killers than anybody else. In Australia, there's an Inner Glow Health Products. I believe it's innerglow.com. They sell Cereal Killer, and I should point out Interglow sells a combination of cayenne, garlic, ginger, and hawthorn berry called Heart Food Caps. That's just a circulation stimulant. They've sold that. They were one of my first customers when I was in the cayenne business, and again, I've sold any interest in supplements. I'm not involved financially in any way, but I believe he does carry the Heart Food Caps. He does carry Cereal Killer. So Inner Glow of Australia would be a good place to look. I noticed on his website today they carry magnesium orotate. Which is an excellent compound of magnesium. If you go to my website, you can sign up for Diet Heart News. It's something I started recently. My first 3 reports are about cholesterol, about the terminology, so that people aren't full so that they're equipped. Those first 3 articles, read carefully, will equip any of us when we go into a doctor so that we're able to question the doctor. I mean, does the doctor know what triglycerides are? Maybe not. My doctor didn't know. She did not know. She had no answer. And you know what? She's a bright, pleasant medical doctor, but If they don't know what triglycerides are, if they don't even know what LDL is, how can they help us live a long and healthy life? So I would encourage people to consider going to dietheartpublishing.com, signing up for the newsletter. It's absolutely free, and it's dedicated to equipping— I view myself as a patient advocate. Advocate. I want to help equip people so that when they go to the doctor, they're on a level playing field.

Absolutely. That's a great message, and it's absolutely fabulous that you've taken your time out from your busy schedule to share this great information with us today. So really want to thank you for your time, and thank you for sharing. I mean, I know the readers and the listeners of my blog will get a lot of value from this interview, and And thank you for giving us the information to go to our doctors and equip us with the right questions.

Yeah, thank you, Mark. And I'd like to end by paraphrasing one of your statements, which is train hard, no excuses. And I would say study hard, no excuses. Touché. Thank you very much. Thank you, Mark.

This podcast was proudly brought to you by MaximusMark.com. For more information on Alan, visit www.dietheartpublishing.com and be sure to subscribe to Alan's free newsletter, which is packed full of good information and good nutrition. To purchase Alan's books, visit www.amazon.com and just get it directly from Amazon. And to hear more of the interview series with me, visit www.maximusmark/radio. Feel free to forward these podcasts on to your friends. Remember guys, the only way to win this war on nutrition is with good information. So until I speak to you next time, train hard, supplement smart, and eat well.

And we're back. Hope you enjoyed that podcast with Alan Watts. And just a URL update, it's no longer Maximus Mark, it's MarkOttobre.com if you're looking for my personal blog, but I will direct you you to Melbourne personal trainers for the Enterprise Fitness website, which is where most of our content is. And if you're a personal trainer out there listening to this, you might want to check out personaltrainermentoring.com, which is my Wolfpack mentoring site. Wolfpack is a program that I run. It's a 12-month mentoring program. I don't usually advertise it very much because, to be honest, I don't need to. It sells out every year, but that's the one where I mentor trainers for a full 12 months. We go through about 25 days of learning, so you're looking at 4 to 5 seminars per year, plus about 250 hours of extra content online because I've run Wolfpack now for 3 years. So that means that we've filmed pretty much everything, and all of that content goes up onto the website. So, you know, I've got seminars, full courses inside the Wolfpack with Bob Gill, Andre Benoit. I've got Tony Doherty, Andrew Locke, just to name a few, as well as all of our group calls get recorded as well. So we're constantly adding to that. The next Wolfpack, I'm going to have Greg Cesar, who's one of Australia's best digital marketers, and I've got Dane McDonald coming down too. He's the owner and founder of Clean Health. He's going to be spending a day with us presenting on his story and how he built what he built. As well as later in the year, I've got Tony Doherty again, Andrew Lock, and I've also got Duane Alley. And of course, folks, how can you go wrong? You've got me. So, you know, and I do obviously a lot of presenting and show you what I do at Enterprise to run the business. But that's for trainers, maybe doing some more exciting stuff and different product offerings in the future. But that one you certainly want to check out if you're a trainer. Also check out our internship programs if you're new to the world of enterprise and you want to do a course with me and spend 3 days with me. The internship program is really a good stepping stone for that, so check that out on the enterprise website which is melbournepersonaltrainers.com and you can look up— I've been running internship now for 5 years and it's a great course. It's where a lot of really good trainers start and because I provide a lot of value and I really do believe in that course. I've seen a lot of really good transformations in trainers, uh, as far as the way they've run their business and also their physique. So we go a day on training, a day on nutrition, and a day on business and personal development as well. So it's a very well-rounded course and will give you the kick in the nuts or ovaries, depending on gender, that you need to, to really hit some goals and hit some goals fast. So check that one out, folks. If you want to follow me, you've Of course you can on Instagram, very simple, it's just Mark Ottobre, which is my name. October or Ottobre is October in Italian, so very, very easy to remember, or Ottobre if your Australian colloquialism is a little stronger. You can just call me Ottobre and we'll just call it even. So that's how to remember that one. Obviously I do more Facebooking than I do Instagram, to be perfectly honest with you. I don't get Instagram, but I'm using it more and more. I like the sound of podcasts. I like to listen to things. I'm much more of an audio digital kind of guy, hence I have a podcast show, and I like to talk. And I like to talk to you. So if you want me, if you want to interview me and do a podcast show, if you've got, hey Mark, I'd like to pick your brain for an hour, I'm interested in that. So we can make a podcast together. So if you're interested in that, please reach out to my Instagram. So contact me on Instagram, just direct message me and say, hey, heard the podcast, and yeah, all good. So we're on SoundCloud as well, and we've just cracked 900 subscribers on YouTube. So really love to crack 1,000 subscribers. Again, our videos on YouTube I think are very entertaining and educational, so please subscribe to us on YouTube and check out our videos. I think our most popular video now has about 80,000 views, which is awesome, and we'll want to keep growing the, uh, the video side of things. So till next time, folks, train hard, supplement smart, and eat well.