FAT: A Documentary 2 - What should I be eating?

camera speed 74 take one mark the 20th

century gave us so many misconceptions

when it came to health one egg equals

five cigarettes eggs cannot legally even

be called safe cutting down on meat is a

good idea so is the pendulum swinging

back in the opposite direction where are

we since the last movie came out

is there progress

has meat made a comeback in some cases i

could say yes i swear by the ketogenic

diet i hear more doctors talking about

it the low carbohydrate keto

community is based on science and i can

see a few things moving in the direction

that people want to see it move into

there is a bottom-up revolution going on

but then i see the other side of it

there was another vegan propaganda movie

that came out in this past year surprise

surprise there was a product hooked to

it

the impossible burger is the world's

only burger that looks handles smells

cooks and tastes like ground beef from

cows people are becoming guinea pigs

completely replace animals as a food

production technology by 2035.

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in fact part 1 we talk about the war for

information but i actually think we also

live in a war with ourselves

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it's almost like we're gaming the system

of our own bodies we're trying to get

our system to do what it's not supposed

to do

eat this eat that don't eat this don't

eat that our program is known as a

starch-based diet take this supplement

it'll make your muscles grow bigger

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we have more questions than ever

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in the world always speeds up and it

gets more frenzied all the time and

sometimes even the people who are

so-called experts don't know what's

going on

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this study says this that study says

that well that study wasn't done

correctly

this is healthy that's not healthy

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the answers we're searching for seem to

have these long winding roads that

eventually lead to nothing but maybe it

doesn't have to be so hard

[Music]

in this movie we're going to expand on

what we talked about in fact part one

we're going to talk to the same experts

you saw before

but let them stretch out a little bit

great we're going to discuss why some of

the things we believe are wrong fat

tends to cause you to be fat we're going

to also get into why some of these

things are right based on the research

we cannot say with any certainty that

eating red or processed meat causes

cancer diabetes or heart disease and

also why there's so much confusion

between the two it doesn't have to be

that divisive my name is nina taishals

i'm a science journalist and author of a

book called the big fat surprise i'm

also the executive director of a group

called the nutrition coalition which

aims to ensure that our nutrition policy

is evidence-based nina taisha's was a

one-time vegan she crossed over she she

crossed the aisle and that led her into

10 years of research she went through

all the papers she went through all the

studies to come back to figure out where

we had gone wrong

and it's the work like her book big fat

surprise that has led a lot of this

pendulum swing in my opinion to start

moving in in the right direction i got

into this field just completely by

accident i was doing a series of

investigative food articles for gourmet

magazine and one of them that was

assigned to me was on trans fats well

what are trans fats i had no idea

researching that story really plunged me

into the whole world of dietary fat you

know which is the subject that americans

in nutrition have obsessed about most

and that really

led me down the rabbit hole for nearly a

decade i researched everything i could

find about dietary fat and cholesterol

when i started doing my research i

couldn't believe the kind of reactions

that i got from interviewing scientists

i mean i'm the daughter of a scientist

and

in my father's dreams journal if you

open up there are math equations

i always thought that science was full

of people like him who

rationally soberly would discuss

interesting ideas and consider other

ideas and change their minds based on

the scientific observations and instead

in nutrition science i couldn't believe

what i found people who were afraid to

talk to me people who said if you're

going to take that line on dietary fat i

can't even talk to you there's some huge

story here if people are afraid to talk

to me that means there's a really big

story here

saturated fats butter lard cheese fatty

beef and poultry with the skin on all

said to be bad for your heart but you

should replace most saturated fats with

more monounsaturated healthy fats which

help reduce your risk of heart attack

and stroke limit red meat dark poultry

meat or poultry with the skin on to a

serving the size of a deck of cards per

day in good science you try to do

everything you can not to go public

prematurely because as soon as you go

public as soon as you claim you've

discovered something you haven't or

you've realized something that you don't

have the evidence to support

all these

consequences

kick in and make it virtually impossible

to back out of my name is gary taubes

i'm an investigative journalist

co-founder of a not-for-profit research

organization called the nutrition

science initiative author of good

calories bad calories of why we get fat

of the case against sugar gary taubs is

largely considered a lightning rod gary

has never shied away from media he will

go up against anyone because what he has

on his side is a little thing called

facts i often ask myself when i was

writing good calories bad calories it's

like i have friends who are sort of have

conspiratorial turns of mind where they

think people do things because they're

vino and they're getting paid by

industry and i just think that i don't

see any conspiracy there i don't really

think the industry had much to do with

the industry was given the food industry

was given this enormous gift of this bad

science and these people just

you know literally could not have caused

more harm if there had been a conspiracy

at least if there had been a conspiracy

enterprising washington post reporters

could have

interviewed the right people and

garages in washington and exposed it my

name is dr eric westman i'm an associate

professor of medicine at duke university

medical center in durham north carolina

the us government got

involved in creating guidelines for what

people should eat

and it was not based on science what can

you say about eric westman you know the

original atkins diet has been around

since the early 1970s

but when they wanted to update it they

had to find a doctor to write that

eric westman is that guy he wrote the

new atkins for the new you he also

started his own little obesity clinic

over on the east coast

the guy is just phenomenal i was

involved in research communities where

we would look at a guideline and see

that as a straw man is something to

either prove or disprove so

unfortunately the research that was

going to support and back up the low-fat

guideline never proved that it was

healthy what's the information people

are getting about their health because

everybody wants to know what does it

mean to be healthy and that's such a

difficult question to answer they're

interested in their health they've been

searching for answers and they they

found an answer that has actually done

them more harm than good in the long run

brett shear was this great guy i met

when he came on my fitness confidential

podcast and

just fell in love with this guy he's a

cardiologist who doesn't believe that

red meat will kill you he also feels the

same way about saturated fat and

cholesterol

which is a paradigm shift when you think

about it because there are not many

cardiologists out there that are

thinking that way hormones in our body

play a huge role so things that raise

our insulin are going to encourage our

bodies to store more fat

so

just because you're taking fat out of

something and then you're enhancing it

with increased carbs and sugars that is

actually making this problem worse not

helping it clearly this idea that

we are supposed to avoid

fat

has been a major factor in causing

paradoxically the obesity epidemic

that's the big myth the idea that

it's dangerous to eat natural foods with

fats and cholesterol in it andreas

ianfeld is a great guy who noticed that

the more medicine he handed out the

sicker people got and he felt that there

had to be a better way

so he started working with food you know

pulling certain things out of people's

diets adding other things and the

certain things were you know junk foods

and sugars and grains and this sort of

thing and he started adding in red meat

and fish

and more fatty foods and notice that

people were healing right up if you

avoid fat you end up being hungrier and

you would have to eat more of something

else

to feel satisfied and that something

else is carbohydrates and our society

the way it looks

you end up eating a lot more sugar

processed carbs

that is probably the cause of the

obesity epidemic today by this point

everyone knows there's an obesity

epidemic and while we can argue all day

about fat versus low fat pretty much

everyone agrees that sugar is bad for

you sugar makes insulin work better and

cures diabetics well almost everyone but

we'll get to that later bmi is one of

the most commonly used measurements to

determine if you're obese but the newest

research says that bmi may not be

reliable the biggest problem with

getting useful data has to do with doing

the math honestly we actually have a

problem of philosophy of science right

now we have a replication crisis where

things can't be replicated we have

people who do research that do something

called p mining the p is sort of the

statistical significance of your study p

hacking is manipulating data or analyses

to artificially get significant p values

you can actually

get your data and then find the

statistical model that fits best to

prove that your data is working i'm dr

drew pinsky i'm an internist and a

dictionologist dr drew look like

everyone else in la

we love dr drew all those years of love

line but the fact that he he does what

he does with addiction medicine and the

lives he has saved i i'm happy to call

drew penske a friend the way we examine

populations we're looking at sort of

average effects on on the the mean

so people on either end may have very

different physiologies that have very

different sorts of interventions that

were completely missing there's really a

crisis coming

in the philosophy of science intelligent

people should know the difference

between causality and correlation

and weirdly enough in this field of

nutrition because it's so hard to do the

necessary experiments what you end up

with are correlations

between health and disease and one of

the correlations is that people who

consume a lot of artificial sweeteners

tend to be more obese and diabetic than

people who don't artificial sweeteners

have been a staple for dieters since the

1980s and there's a real debate about

the harm they cause the problem is if

you think about who uses artificial

sweeteners or the people who have weight

problems the people who can't control

their weight drinking full

sugar sodas and so

you have no idea of which way the

causality runs whether these people are

unhealthy because they consume

artificial sweeteners or whether

artificial and they consume artificial

sweeteners because they're unhealthy and

that predisposed to get fat the major

points

about your diet

really sort of hover around two things

fat fruits and vegetables

you've got to really get your saturated

fat and trans fat as low as you possibly

can

and we know that if we do that you can

actually decrease your risk of coronary

heart disease 40 50 there is a

correlation between obesity and heart

disease in that people with obesity

often have other risk factors

like

high blood sugar high blood pressure

dyslipidemia meaning you know

a bad cholesterol profile

and all these things increase the risk

of heart disease it's so easy to blame

heart disease on fat

let's take a hamburger for instance

they'll say well

red meat is bad for you because it's in

a hamburger they won't take into account

that there was ketchup mayonnaise

a big breaded bun

and all of the other condiments around

it and guess what most people never eat

a hamburger without french fries

but they never blame it on the seed oils

they never blame it on the bread they

never blame it on any of the goop that's

put on it they just go to the meat and

say meat bad meat causes heart disease

it makes no sense it's black and white

thinking combined with numerous studies

coming out of respected names like

harvard that lead people to believe that

things may not be true

what does harvard have to do with this

the role that harvard plays in the

nutrition story is

a sad and powerful one extremely

powerful if you compare butter with

calories from refined starch and sugar

it's going to be pretty much a wash

they'll both have adverse impacts on

metabolic factors and on risk of heart

disease and diabetes harvard is home to

two of the largest nutritional

epidemiological databases in the country

what is that that's a kind of science

where they take a large group of people

and they follow them for years and they

ask them what they eat and then they see

who dies or has a heart attack or gets

cancer this is a kind of science that is

so fundamentally weak right i mean

people are asked how many cups of spare

ribs did you have in the last year how

many peaches or how many plums did you

eat on average per week hundreds of

questions well people first of all

people lie about what they eat they they

want to please the they want to please

themselves or they want to please the

interviewers and this has been

documented in science

secondly that that dietary data even

when they try to validate they find that

it is

highly unreliable

so you're talking about very very weak

evidence right and then this kind of

science epidemiology can never prove

cause and effect it can only show an

association so it was only ever meant to

generate hypotheses

which then go on to be tested the way

you test something properly to show

cause and effect is to test it in a

randomized control clinical trial this

week science that harvard

has been publishing on dominates the

whole nutrition landscape and it is what

is echoed throughout all of the media oh

this is only association but not

causation but then they just breeze

right by that with headlines that say

things like coconut oil kills you when

that headline should read coconut oil we

have found a small weak association

between coconut oil and increased risk

of cardiovascular disease people who eat

a lot of red meat who are those people

those are the people who have ignored

their doctor's orders for the last 35

years that means they do a lot of other

unhealthy things they probably drink too

much they don't go to cultural events

they don't follow their doctor's orders

they don't take their medicine

they don't have happy

family lives maybe they live next to a

toxic waste dump because they're poor or

whatever and then they come out with a

finding that said red meat eaters people

eat a lot of red meat are you know tend

to die earlier what was it the meat was

it the unhealthy lifestyle was it the

excessive binge drinking you know it

could have been any one of these other

things but that is why this science is

so fundamentally weak

your overall lifestyle food just being

one factor is going to determine your

overall health if you eat well

change your habits don't smoke maybe

start exercising well you'll be

healthier the problem is that studies

get done where people get healthier by

changing everything about their life and

then the results are touted as food

being the reason they got healthier

this is especially rampant among vegan

studies there have been some studies in

the past

some small studies that have had some

problems with them that have been

propagated over and over again showing

that diet can reverse heart disease and

a big one it was the ornish studies in

the 90s if you eat more calories than

you burn then you gain weight fat tends

to cause you to be fat because fat is

very dense in calories fat has nine

calories per gram whereas protein and

carbs have only four less than half so

an optimal diet is low in fat

low in the bad carbs high in the good

carbs and enough of the of the good fats

and then again it's a spectrum when you

move in this direction you're going to

lose weight you're going to feel better

and you're going to gain health what's

frequently lost in that is that that was

a whole lifestyle program so they got

people to quit smoking exercise more

manage their stress and follow a

vegetarian diet but what's come out of

that is that a vegetarian diet reverses

heart disease and and you can't say that

from that type of a study a vegan

approach a vegetarian approach is

consistent with standard dietary

guidelines and the question is is that

really a healthy approach i'm dr jeff

gerber i'm a board-certified family

doctor from denver colorado i've been a

doctor for over 30 years about 20 years

ago i realized i didn't know much about

nutrition so i took it upon myself to

learn more and i use nutrition as a tool

to treat and prevent chronic disease i

look at jeffrey gerber and i think hero

he looked around and went wait a minute

i'm healing people with food what i'm

doing what i was taught in school is not

working instead of just going down that

road the way the aha or the ada does

where they just keep spewing the same

lies hoping for different results

jeffrey gerber looked around and said

hey we need to do something about this

we think especially with vegan diets

it's quite a challenge because you're

often deficient of macronutrients that

you would get from animal based proteins

most people tell me they feel great when

they go on a vegan diet only to feel bad

later my view has always been well when

you go on a vegan diet you're cutting

out a bunch of crap a bunch of processed

food in your life but at some point it's

not sustainable i think there are lots

of different approaches that can be

healthy you could even do an extreme

diet like a vegan diet and feel great

because you're not having sugar you're

reducing the starches that raise the

blood sugar but in my experience some

people will blindly follow certain diets

including a vegan diet and gain 50 to

100 pounds and never even think that the

vegan diet might be the cause

because they know it's healthy because

everyone else says it's healthy you know

it must be the the plastic in my my

bottle that's causing the obesity it

must be the the microbiome or that i'm

not sleeping when actually it was the

food that they were eating as a

cardiologist i've come across a number

of patients who are vegans and of course

i i read the literature every day that

supports a vegan diet for heart health

unfortunately for a lot of vegans it

takes a lot of work to maintain a vegan

lifestyle you have to think about food

all the time you have to prepare your

food all the time you are hungry all the

time a number of people have decreased

energy so i think that is a downfall to

the vegan way of life not that there

can't be healthy vegans of course there

can

but the question is for how long today

we're going to explore all of the

vitamins and nutrients you might need on

a vegan diet vitamin b12 calcium iron

choline omega-3 fatty acids iodine zinc

selenium they don't make a very good

argument and

especially like they want to come after

meat as being unhealthy in multiple ways

leading to heart attack into diabetes

and you have to understand that

a lot of their comments is are based on

the ethical treatment of animals and we

feel the same way that we do want to

treat animals ethically but that has

nothing to do with health can we

prosper and thrive by

feasting an effect on

animals and i

i mean that worries me personally as

well part of the movement is driven by

the idea that eating animal products are

unhealthy which i think is just bad

science but unfortunately the leaders

the proponents of the vegetarian vegan

movement don't like the argument we're

making because we're saying

not only are we arguing that the problem

isn't red meat and animal products but

we're arguing that people can be very

healthy and perhaps healthiest eating

animal product rich diets one of the

questions today is why we're so anti-red

meat i've really wondered about that

that goes back to the 1970s when they're

really the kind of the burgeoning of a

vegetarian movement

in the united states in my hometown

berkeley california that was the time

the peace movement um we had just come

out of you know two world wars and we

wanted to make peace not war

meat has always throughout all of

history and every culture been

associated with virility it's the food

of warriors it's the food of people who

make war you know it gives men and women

muscle mass it makes them strong for

instance in the messiah warriors who

were studied rigorously by

the university of vanderbilt scientists

in the 1970s they found that the warrior

class

but not the women the warriors consumed

only meat meat milk and blood was their

entire diet so now we're being told

americans are being told in the 1970s

not to eat meat because we want to make

peace instead this was sort of our

modern idea of masculinity and it

totally makes sense for a culture that

does not want to be at war it's so

interesting if you look at the way we

used to eat before the obesity in the

health epidemic and red meat was

plentiful then and then when things

changed with the mcgovern report with

ansel keys seven country studies with

president eisenhower's heart attack with

that conglomeration of events

now fat being demonized and red meat

being demonized that's when everything

changed and it happened to coincide with

the health epidemic that we're having

now red meat is back in vogue again i

mean with the paleo diet you have low

carb diets you have atkins you even have

my very own no sugars no grains approach

to eating all allows red meat so

everything is back on the table again

but it wasn't always that way for red

meat one of the factors that did emerge

as being related to cancer risk was

consumption of red meat especially red

meat a processed red meat in relation to

risk of colorectal cancer and some other

cancers i think the bias against eating

red meat has come from nutritional

epidemiology these studies look at

associations between what people eat and

then look at the

effect on the health over a long period

of time but in the clinical research

world these are thought of as relatively

weak studies

and the association level has been

really low for red meat and cancer for

example why can't people eat meat and

vegetables why is this controversial

it's food

both are real and both can fit into your

diet

this either or argument that's going on

has nothing to do with health and more

to do with ideology they were yelling

like

um don't eat chickens don't eat meat

and i was like

well

i love chicken there's two two these are

two distinct phenomena i think one is

this identification with a group and

tribalism around which diet is just yet

another manifestation of that but this

need to move from fad to fat to fat

that's consumerism that is us needing a

solution to how we're feeling or looking

or how we think about ourselves with

something now buy something now do

something now and fix everything fix how

i'm feeling now and fad diets suit that

beautifully i think the media has a lot

to do with our ill psychological

well-being um to to blame diet and

sedentary lifestyle i mean i i've heard

blame on tv my entire life but it's us i

mean look people that create media only

create stuff that

we watch i mean it's us that they're

creating it for if we didn't watch they

wouldn't create it the way they do so we

need to watch ourselves and learn how to

train ourselves not to consume this

garbage in such a

unthoughtful way bad news for bacon and

sausage lovers the world health

organization says those foods can cause

colon and stomach cancer again a lot of

this information does come from media

who loves to tell institutions like

harvard whenever they put out dietary

findings

harvard said this

harvard said that

why shouldn't we believe harvard walter

willett of harvard university is widely

considered to be the most influential

person in nutrition science today he

presides over the largest two

what's called epidemiological databases

in the country and those databases you

have to understand all they need to do

is to find an association it's just a

whole bunch of statistics in there they

get from dietary questionnaires and they

can just like a mimeograph machine they

can just pull out any of them like you

know meat is associated with this

outcome or vegetables are associated

with this outcome where french fried

potatoes lead to more this kind of

cancer they can run those statistical

tests all the time right there's

associations so they're publishing all

the time well in science sort of the

frequency of publication is part of what

makes you powerful

and compare that to somebody who's doing

clinical trials like they might do a

clinical trial and it takes them two

years and that's where they're actually

feeding people and they they change

their diets and they give them

counseling they get one paper out of

that walter willett really believes a

vegetarian diet high in whole grains um

is what the diet that is the healthiest

and he wants everybody to follow that

diet one i think important concept

that's developed over the last decade or

so is that diet quality the combination

of foods the pattern of foods uh

is important in directly influencing

disease risk but also in helping us

better control our body weight so these

we used to think of were sort of

separate things but now they're

intertwined and

the kind of dietary pattern that doctor

who was talking about like a

mediterranean diet that has lots of

fruits and vegetables low amounts of red

meat

whole grains that actually makes it

easier for us to control our weight than

eating a diet of refined foods that's

directly unhealthy but also makes it

more difficult to control our weight

what i found in my research is that

harvard has also received a great deal

of money from

one of the largest vegetable oil

manufacturers in the world called

unilever

willett is a scientific advisor to

numerous industry-backed consortiums

that promote grain consumption like old

ways and international carbohydrate

quality consortium all funded by barilla

pasta and kellogg's and all these

carbohydrate makers that have will it on

as their top spokesperson or or top

advisor organizing conferences for them

and in 2013 i think when nature magazine

when they had a rare editorial kind of

critique of walter willett they said one

of the things that he did was that he

continually simplified his data

and published data that really

ought not to be published how could we

find out who to trust besides your book

that's what it's about

there's overload of information anybody

can set themselves up as being an expert

and

the public is understandably confused

it's interesting that there's such a

crusade against red meat versus other

meats and this really comes down to the

fact that red meat has saturated fat and

that we've been told that saturated fat

is bad is there a scenario where we

shouldn't eat saturated fat there's no

reason to to fear saturated fat it's

just fine to eat it's

it's not an issue for health if you look

at the medical studies

that have tested this hypothesis if you

break them all together and look at all

of the data

there's no effect on health really

people have been warned for years about

the dangers of eating too many saturated

fats and the risks they pose for heart

disease but a new analysis of more than

70 studies finds that saturated fats do

not necessarily lead to greater problems

with heart health

[Music]

my strength in my background is in

clinical medicine using a keto diet to

help fix obesity diabetes and many other

health problems i've learned a lot by

reading the books good calories bad

calories by gary tubbs and the big fat

surprise by nina teischultz and one of

the things i learned is that the

emphasis against saturated fat

is also a political emphasis so that

because america doesn't make

lots of saturated fat

kinds of products and because the

nutritional epidemiologists are funded

by other

companies that make products that don't

have saturated fats there's a bias

against them which is not scientific if

saturated fat raises your cholesterol

and if cholesterol can in some

situations be related to increased heart

risk

then

anything that is a saturated fat must be

related to increased heart risk it's

this line of illogical thinking

that has led

institutions like the american heart

association to demonize

to demonize anything that's a saturated

fat you know nothing against medical

doctors it's just that when you know

when you're in a club and they keep

telling you the same thing in the club

and this is the only way it is and you

never see any other viewpoint

you just start believing religion works

like that you know

you will be in one religion at the

expense of every other religion

and even though they all say pretty much

the same thing

some people will look at their religion

and go your religion is not good because

mine's the best i tell people who are in

my clinic who are working with other

doctors and cardiologists uh in

particular to just tell them that

they're doing a modified mediterranean

diet and the other doctor will go oh

well that's fine

and they won't ask anymore because

they're not really sure what the

modified mediterranean diet is but they

know it's good so i know it kind of

plays the politics a little bit but

we're in that space where

doctors sometimes knee-jerk against

things that they don't know and using

familiar terms can actually make it

easier for my patients to to not get

pushback from other doctors i guess the

other question though is it's something

magical that's going to help everybody

shed pounds and feel wonderful and the

truth may not be that far either but

it's it's important that we we can't go

out and demonize one type of food simply

because

we think there's a theory that it might

be related to something i mean people

listen strongly to the recommendations

of these guidelines the vast majority of

calories are really coming from bad

stuff and so if you're looking at red

meat and don't specify the comparison

you may not see much with red meat

because you're you're comparing it with

a lot of other bad stuff in a diet a lot

of refined starch sugar

partially hydrogenated oils epidemiology

you know you always find at the bottom

of one of the harvard papers we have to

you know our caveat is that it's only an

association that does not prove

causation more studies are needed

but if you look at the press release

that accompanies it uh the headline is

almost always like you know oh coconut

oil causes heart disease

well there's nothing wrong with coconut

oil it's perfectly safe and actually

very healthy to use in your diet and

then cooking good for your skin not good

in your body but we always hear about

these controversies coming out

and it only has to do with the fact that

other industries who are making

hydrogenated oils don't want this pure

natural oil to be anywhere near their

product the big problem with coconut oil

is it's high in saturated fats and as

the american heart association tells us

saturated fat can increase your bad

cholesterol and that can lead to heart

disease coconut and palm oil have

definitely been polarizing oils over the

past few years

and it's so interesting to see why you

know they're

first they're vegetarian based oils so

based on that you would think

that they should be healthy if the myth

of vegetarian being the best diet is

true but because they have saturated

fats the american heart association came

out against them

cautioning their their ingestion because

they have saturated fat so it's it's

that transitive property of math that

doesn't always work i was invited once

to speak at a palm oil conference by the

manufacturers of palm oil and they

explained to me that they were having

difficulty getting through a sort of

taboo or cartel against palm oil because

of the saturated fat in the food and

because we know saturated fat's bad and

all that and i i think it was a nina

teisholt's book where i first learned

that the whole campaign against

so-called tropical oils which coconut

oil and palm oil

in my research i discovered that this

was

something of just a trade war between

industries

and it's been going on uh actually since

the 1920s and 30s palm oil i think it

was at the time started being imported

in increasing amounts from malaysia

and the um the

vegetable oil industry said we can't

have this happen they're taking over our

market share and underwent this huge

campaign basically to just slander

these oils and actually i think that

what they did is they put a tax on it at

that point they they got the government

to tax these oils because they didn't

want the competition fast forward to

1980s there's a rise in the use again of

coconut oil and palm oil because they

are solid safe fats so they're good for

popping popcorn in movie theaters they

were used by all the packaged food

companies like kraft nabisco used them

for their cereals and their anything

that needed to stay

safe and solid on a shelf in a

supermarket so there started to be this

increase in the importation again of

coconut oil and palm oil well that

really threatened the

makers of soybean oil and the soybean

industry because soybean is far and away

the biggest oil that americans consume

so they started a campaign against

coconut oil and and palm oil they call

them the tropical oils

and this was a campaign really a trade

war campaign sort of

in the shroud of a health concern issue

so if they're gonna say something like

that they

should have very strong evidence behind

it to back it up and there is no

evidence to demonize these oils the way

they have they can be a very

good part of a healthy diet and there's

no reason at all to be worried about

them as it's been proposed there's a lot

of bad science that i think implicates

saturated fat and leads to this idea

that we should replace it with vegetable

oils oh those must be good for us

because they're vegetables in fact

they're not from vegetables they're from

seeds and beans so you know sunflower

safflower corn soybean they're all beans

and seeds and you have to use high heat

and a heavy metal chelate in order to

get the oils out of them winterized

deodorized and stabilized i mean they

initially come out of this like gray

disgusting liquid and then they have to

be turned into something that might seem

like it could be consumed for humans and

they've also gone through name changes

now they're trying to call them plant

oils i think to seem even more appealing

if you compare saturated fat with

healthy plant oils

using those healthy plant oils will

definitely reduce the risk of heart

disease

while they're improving blood lipids at

the same time you know healthy people

tend to eat vegetable oils it's the gist

of the problem when you do these studies

what you

do is you tell people how to eat so in

the 1970s you tell them they should

avoid saturated fat and eat vegetable

oils and then you follow them for 30

years and lo and behold you found out

that 30 years later that healthier

people have indeed been doing exactly

what you told them to do because they're

health conscious by the end of the 1980s

between that campaign and various other

efforts to get rid of tropical oils most

of the tropical oils had been taken out

of the food supply and so they're

avoiding saturated fats and using

vegetable oils to cook with instead

and they're healthier but that doesn't

mean they got healthier because

they use the vegetable oils you know i

do wonder if the recent outcry against

tropical oils that you've seen by the

american heart association and by

harvard i really wonder to what extent

we're seeing just a redux of this same

trade war i know that harvard is funded

by vegetable oil companies that compete

with tropical oils so one really has to

wonder if they're now sort of trotting

out scientists to protect the domestic

american soybean and soybean oil

industries so there are two changes that

i think are necessary first we need to

get away from this idea that saturated

fat is bad for us it's really not a

major factor we need to

accept that saturated fat can be a part

of a healthy diet

second thing we need to get away from is

this idea that is all about calories

that just by counting calories eating

less and running more you would

magically sort of

lose weight it's really not effective

for the vast majority of people and we

need to focus more on the hormonal

regulation of weight

live in a way that makes our body

normalize the hormones including the

fast storing hormone insulin so that it

becomes much easier to maintain a good

weight the fact of the matter is

exercise is very important i always call

it the fountain of youth the problem is

is that it's not good for weight loss

we've been teaching people you have to

exercise you have to exercise and i've

had people who can't exercise because of

a bum knee or or

just they don't like it and they don't

even try to lose weight or fix their

diabetes because they've been told they

have to exercise in fact this is

perpetuated by a lot of doctors as well

and because it's worked for them they

think it'll work for other people now

i'm a big proponent of exercise and i

think exercise is crucial for a healthy

overall lifestyle but it's not the go-to

way to lose weight it was in the best

interest of these snack companies and

the companies making the high

carbohydrate low-fat foods it was in

their best interest to say as long as

you're exercising and as long as you're

burning calories then you can eat

whatever you want and however much you

want that's what padded their bottom

line and that's what sold more products

and that's what helped perpetuate this

myth that exercise was the best thing

you could do for your health and you

could exercise away any amount of poor

dietary indiscretion in theory the idea

makes a lot of sense you burn calories

through exercise which must lead to fat

loss

the laws of thermodynamics is a good

idea it just doesn't work here you

cannot outrun a bad diet so modern

nutrition science begins in the late

1860s with the invention by german

researchers of devices called

calorimeters

that allow you to measure the energy

expended by a large

animal like a dog or a human so you live

inside these rooms and you can get a

measurement of how much energy is

expended and so by the 1860s the

nutrition community for the first time

ever can measure the energy that people

consume in foods you burn the foods in

what's called a bomb calorimeter and you

measure the heat released and that tells

you how much energy was in the foods and

now you can measure the energy out and

for the next 50 to 60 years all of

nutrition science

all of nutrition science was basically

measuring energy in and energy out and

vitamin and mineral deficiency diseases

and protein requirements and a little

bit about things like fiber

and so by the early 1900s when

researchers clinical investigators

physicians interested in these problems

are trying to come up with a hypothesis

of obesity

and related to the food we consume all

they have are energy in energy out

vitamins minerals protein fiber

and they can't figure out a way that

vitamins and minerals and protein and

fiber can play a meaningful role in

obesity so they end up with energy and

an energy out that's it that's because

that's what they can measure and that

becomes a theory ever since and it gets

locked in and it stays locked and that's

a weird thing in 1921-22 the hormone

insulin is discovered in the science of

endocrinology of hormones and

hormone-related diseases starts to

explode

and

but you still can't measure the impact

of food

on

the hormone levels in the blood until

the 1960s

so it's only in the 1960s that you have

another way that you can study that food

influences what our body is doing

and by that time we've had 50 years of

thinking of obesity and energy balance

disorder we realize that

if you change the hormonal status

elevate insulin levels depress glucagon

levels you know growth hormone is

playing a role and our foods are

influencing all of that

nobody cares it's just too complicated

it's who this energy balance idea is too

big to fail and then diet book doctors

get involved like first hermann taller

writes a book called calories don't

count and then

the infamous robert atkins and they read

the research and they say wait a minute

wait a minute it's not about how much

you eat it's a it's a hormonal thing and

it's the carbs are the problem and get

rid of the carbs

and now the research community doesn't

like this idea because it's coming from

these cowboy diet book doctors and they

don't want to listen to them some very

petty human emotions feed into this idea

that we should continue to tell people

to do the wrong thing

and they should do the wrong thing and

if it fails we can blame them we don't

have to never think that our advice is

wrong because we've got the laws of

thermodynamics propping them up we

always get into this argument over

what's the best fuel to put in your body

one thing everyone agrees on is that

sugar is bad for you and when i say

everyone i mean almost everyone some

doctors including one who proposes a

vegan diet says sugar is not the major

cause of diabetes you really have to see

this to believe it carbohydrate

including pure

white

sugar

increases the sensitivity insulin it was

published by bronzelle from the

university of washington in the new

england journal of medicine in

i think 78 brunsell's name he took type

2 diabetics he made a synthetic diet 45

percent sugar and then double white

sugar multi-strokes plain table sugar

doubled into 85 percent white sugar

every aspect of the diabetes improved

walter kempner back in the 40s and 50s

published his results on treating type 2

diabetics

with rice

table sugar

fruit and juice and kempner knew back in

the 50s that sugar makes insulin work

better and cures diabetics but you see

we've got it entirely backwards these

days thinking sugar causes diabetes you

know it's just it's so backward and

bizarre nobody stands a chance i didn't

think we would have to clarify what

sugar does to your body but here are

just a few reasons why it's bad for you

some people

easily understand that sugar is bad and

they can avoid foods that have sugar the

sugar-free things and the problem is it

doesn't explain all of the carbohydrate

effect on the blood sugar so starches

including the breads pasta rice fruit

those things raise the blood sugar just

like real sugar or actual sugar and even

honey natural sugar raises the blood

sugar one of my favorite things when you

walk into eric westman's office and i've

never walked in but people who have

apparently there's a sign on the wall

that says that fruit is nature's candy

the reason that cyan is up there is that

most people don't realize

that having fruit can raise the blood

sugar can

make diabetes worse can lead to obesity

it raises your blood sugar

increases the fat storing hormone

insulin and puts the body into fat story

mode fat in the liver if you eat a lot

of sugar you would end up with a fatty

liver

and that increases

um

fasting insulin levels so you get

insulin resistance and high insulin

levels all through the day sugar is

addictive and it's it may not be

addictive for everyone just like alcohol

isn't addictive for everyone but it's

addictive for a large number of people i

mean i've been spending

the past at least 17 years as a

psychiatrist talking to talking to

people thousands and thousands of people

hearing their stories and when i talk to

people about food

there are many clues to addiction in

their stories my name is georgia eat i'm

a psychiatrist georgia eid the only

words i could come up with for her is

pioneer

she's a psychiatrist she's a medical

doctor

and as a psychiatrist the first thing

that happens if you go to one of these

people with a problem is they're looking

to put you on a medication georgia not

the same thing

georgia is there uh trying to figure out

if she can heal you number one without

medication

number two which is as important as

number one let's try to do it with food

being preoccupied with food feeling

guilty after eating

food that they think is quote bad for

them

and you know spending a lot of time

thinking about food that would be better

spent doing other things and you know i

think that it's one of the things that

people really want a lot of help with

but when i'm when i'm talking to people

about

food i hear the same patterns as if i'm

talking to somebody with any other

substance abuse disorder for the average

person that reward is enough to keep you

going keep you going and i can tell you

personally when i get off carbohydrates

and i've known this for years you have a

withdrawal

i get i get all the same symptoms milder

mind you again so i don't like too

powerful connection with addiction per

se that minimizes the misery of my

patients but i when i come up

carbohydrates get irritable discontent i

have i have pain i have sleeplessness i

have anxiety opiate withdrawal i i have

full on opiate withdrawal for three days

every time that's what we're trying to

protect against on a keto diet to try to

stop that raise of blood sugar to

prevent diabetes or treat it and to

prevent the insulin rise which is the

hormonal state of creating obesity we'll

go into depth about the ketogenic diet

momentarily but we first have to

understand that most of our problems

stems from what industry is doing and as

i said in fat part one industry is a

machine it's not a person it's a thing

that's designed to make money and that's

it it's not good or bad it just is it's

tough if you're the sugar industry

but the beverage industry was always

happy to sell artificially sweetened

beverages because artificial sweeteners

were cheaper than sugar if nothing else

they didn't care what people drink as

long as they drink their products grain

industry they could create grain that's

got a lower glycemic index you know the

lesson of

the 1980s when we told people to create

low-fat foods they were happy to do it

and they changed the way we eat the

problem is they changed the way we for

the worse i think the tide is starting

to shift somewhat people now realize

that added sugars are not good i mean

there was a point it sounds ridiculous

to say but there was a point where

people didn't quite realize added sugars

were unhealthy for you eating sugar is

not essential whatsoever and in fact our

body will make sugar at a certain point

from eating protein the institute of

medicine itself acknowledges that there

is no essential need for any

carbohydrate

the body needs a certain amount of

glucose for the functioning of its brain

and its eyes but your body is able to

make that glucose through a process

called gluconogenesis from the protein

that you consume

gluconeogenesis is the process by which

your body will take excess protein

and convert it into glucose many people

wonder if there is a need for

carbohydrate in the diet at all in other

words is there an essential

carbohydrate meaning the body can't make

it so you have to eat it and that is in

debate it's a it's not clear

the one of the most unbiased sources of

nutritional information the institute of

medicine

actually says pretty clearly there is no

essential carbohydrate you don't have to

eat carbohydrate based on that i wrote a

letter to the editor some years ago just

questioning whether carbohydrate was

essential

it's interesting that that letter has

been cited many many times it was just a

letter to the editor

the science in

regard to how you create an essential

nutrient and what what you call a

macronutrient so when you're on a keto

diet your macronutrients are proteins

and fats the idea that sugar had any

benefit actually stems from fallacies

propagated in the 1970s

ads in magazines saying things like

sugar can be the willpower you need to

under eat there's a famous headline for

an fda study that hilariously reads

government gives sugar a clean bill of

health that clean bill of health was at

the amount of sugar that the fda was

estimating we were consuming at the time

which was

they said was 40 pounds per capita

per year which was probably uh

40 to 60 pounds less than we were

consuming and then they said we don't

know what would happen if we were to

actually consume more than 40 pounds per

capita and virtually the year that they

made that claim sugar consumption then

starts to skyrocket the reliable data

you have is on what's called food

availability how much sugar is being

made available to the american public by

the industry and

by imports and

that number around 1800 was four pounds

by

1984 when the fda said it was 40.

the food availability numbers were

already about 120

pounds per capita and they estimated

that we were consuming about the third

of that they're taking

what they know which is

how much is made available it's a

reliable number and you could use to

compute trends from and then they're

creating this estimate of how much we

actually consume and then say well 40

pounds doesn't sound like a lot but it's

kind of a meaningless number because you

have nothing to compare it to it's

certainly

10 to 20 times larger than what we were

consuming 150 years earlier they started

doing this in the 1940s during world war

ii because we had to know how much food

was available what we could expect

to deal with food rationing during the

war and they kept it up religiously

since the 1940s and they backdated it to

1907

to get a feel for what had happened in

the previous war and world war one and

you know to get this history and so if

you accept the backdated data from 1907

it looks as though we used to be eating

a lot less meat then

and then we added meat to our diets we

added animal products and it went along

with this epidemic of heart disease that

appeared to emerge after

the 1920s and the arguments i make in my

book is both the usda data is

is faulty and perhaps what you have is a

correlation again between two things

change in diet over time

and

change in

health status and

it doesn't tell you that there's any

causality between the two it just tells

you they're correlated now you can

generate a hypothesis and say we think

meat consumption

causes heart disease and then you could

do an experiment which is called a

randomized control trial to test that

hypothesis and that experiment has never

been done as we discussed in the last

film money has a lot to do with this

when you don't spend the money on the

studies it's easy to say there's no

study that says keto works these studies

are extremely expensive and there have

been enough good studies done to support

our moderate approach which is looking

at balanced foods vegetables fruits

grains and lean meat and dairy products

how do you know it doesn't work if

there's never been any large-scale

studies back before i wrote my book

fitness confidential i only had my

clients in la who i worked with

after the book came out and then the

podcast got popular

now it wasn't just 20 or 30 students

it was

first hundreds and then thousands and

then tens of thousands so once you have

that many people doing n1

and it's working well it's not an n1

experiment anymore it's actually been

known for a long time that the root

cause is

eating too much

and

specifically carbohydrates so

150 years ago

the first

treatment for obesity was actually a

low-carb ketogenic diet it was written

about in england

and i find myself

in a curious situation where i'm just

reminding people of something that we've

known for 150 years that one you know

solution for the obesity and diabetes

epidemic is a low-carb ketogenic diet if

you go back to the 1970s dr atkins was

considered a kook i remember the big

joke back then was do atkins you'll lose

weight and then you'll be a really

good-looking carps because you're going

to die from this diet telling people

that you know beef is good and so on is

you know or that butter is good or you

know telling people what they want to

hear is a good way to sell books it's a

good way to you know magazines are

hurting for business now on the internet

everyone's looking for something

controversial that they can tell people

what they want to hear and i understand

that but it does people a tremendous

disservice the low carbohydrate keto

community is based on science and

i understand that there are lots of ways

to be healthy you don't have to do a low

carbohydrate ketogenic diet if you don't

have carbohydrate tolerance or if you

don't have insulin resistance you can

eat lots of different things and it's

this insulin resistance that can drive

so many downstream

markers of inflammation and glycation

and other

detrimental processes in our body that

can then lead to heart disease so

whether obesity itself causes heart

disease or whether it's this

constellation of health problems that

occur in people who are obese that seems

more likely people will say to me

emphatically well keto is bad

and i'll ask them why and there's no

answer they'll just go it's bad my

doctor said it was bad and it throws

your body into a state of emergency

that's what ketosis is as we said in the

first movie ketosis and ketoacidosis are

two completely different things

nutritional ketosis is quite a different

scenario blood sugars are absolutely

under control the patient is healthy in

every single way electrolytes insulin

glucose perfectly perfectly controlled

we have now trained the body to switch

over from burning carbohydrate as the

primary fuel

now the individual becomes fat adapted

and that's really the difference between

a very unhealthy and a very healthy

state if we're going to even pretend

we're on the same page we need to know

that basic fact a lot of the times when

even medical professionals especially tv

nutritionists describe in essence what

ketosis is they always point out

completely harmless and sometimes

unproven things to get you to not do it

there are some really interesting side

effects that come with it your autophagy

process is totally out of whack disaster

pants zero calorie restriction on a

ketogenic diet keto crotch if you have a

sandwich or something right now you

might just want to go ahead and put that

down animal fats and animal proteins

unless you have epilepsy i'm not seeing

a whole lot of upside to this they are

just they're desperate right they're

just desperate bacterial vaginosis rich

in saturated fat um so i actually have

not done keto myself as you might guess

but the keto diet

is the sort of latest thing

which is already promoting pushback from

the community like they're trying to

tell people don't even try it because

it's going to give you bad breath or

constipation and therefore

you know if you weigh 300 pounds you

should just continue weighing 300 pounds

because if you

lost 100 but

your breath smelled like ketones that

would be a tragedy get all the benefit

over here none of the negatives over

here and all the benefits over there for

a ketogenic diet for is a particularly

um

i want to use the word magical diet for

many neurological conditions many brain

uh and uh body nervous system conditions

uh it the when you eat a ketogenic diet

you're using fat uh primarily for energy

and the brain is using

to a large extent ketones instead of

glucose it can't use 100 ketones but it

can use about two-thirds of its energy

can come from ketones if you're eating a

fat-based diet as opposed to a

carbohydrate-based diet so

they're we're not entirely sure why this

diet is so healthy for the brain and has

been able to

you know

help people with early alzheimer's

disease and parkinson's disease and

seizure disorders and you know but but

it stands to reason that if these diets

which have been used to treat epilepsy

now for almost 100 years perhaps longer

if these diets can be helpful in calming

brain chemistry in that way

perhaps they could be helpful for other

brain disorders as well including

psychiatric disorders which have a lot

in common

with neurological disorders that really

psychiatric disorders are neurological

disorders it's simply that they manifest

as changes in behavior and emotion as

opposed to changes in the sensory motor

system

with with

the muscular system for example so the

ketogenic diet the way we think it works

is that ketones burn cleanly and more

efficiently and they

then glucose does in the brain and so

you create less oxidation less

inflammation so i tell my patients to

think of refined carbohydrates in

particular

sugar flour fruit juice cereals as mood

destabilizers

i think that there's a there's a lot of

potential benefit here that the science

is

is very very new when it comes to

psychiatric disorders and ketogenic

diets but it's emerging and it's all

pointing

in the same direction it's very very

promising if we get this message out i

think that there are many doctors out

there who really want to understand this

and and would be open-minded and would

be curious to

incorporate some of these principles

into their practice because we have so

many patients who do not respond to

medication or get side effects from

medication or who don't want to take

medication

and or can't afford medication and so

isn't it wonderful if we have something

else to offer those people when i got

into this field in the early 2000s the

sort of medical orthodoxy the dominant

hypothesis in the nutrition

establishment was that

fat saturated fat uh cholesterol are

terrible for health and if you believed

otherwise or if you wrote otherwise you

would really suffer as a scientist if

you if you said anything against that

orthodoxy in the field so

here i come along saying oh you know but

this paper the the conclusions don't

reflect the data can you explain that to

me or this doesn't seem to add up and

people were terrified to go on the

record saying anything against this

dominant hypothesis

because the cost to them there are real

costs to a scientist in

challenging that orthodoxy people who

couldn't get their papers published

because they had said something that was

challenging to this orthodoxy they were

disinvited from expert conferences they

could not get research grants or their

research grants were canceled scientists

learn to self-censor because

what they want to do is they want to do

science that's their job and if they

can't get money and if they can't

publish their papers because they're

talking out in ways that their seniors

disapprove of then they can't do their

science so they really did not want to

talk about this issue that was so deeply

risky to them but i've been told that in

order to get nih funding they actually

look at how many times your name appears

in the news media so there's this

incentive to make your studies into this

kind of click bait

which is completely irresponsible you

know consumers don't know they're

completely confused one of the clever

kind of rhetorical things that harvard

and others uh somebody like david katz

at yale do is they always say like

you poor consumers you're so confused

and you're all these internet crazies

out there and book authors are making

you confused we are here assembled in

stockholm and all seem to agree that we

need a more plant-based diet and are

talking about how to achieve it and yet

the public is fascinated by the

currently prevailing meme

that we should all eat more meat butter

and cheese we have lost the faith of the

public we are like firefighters who

bicker among ourselves about who has the

right caliber hose the mission is to get

there from here and there is a beautiful

place the place we want to bequeath to

our children what is making people

confused is the publication of this weak

epidemiological data which

almost 100 of the time turns out to be

wrong i mean what is the list of things

that epidemiology has been wrong on

vitamin e supplements vitamin a

supplements vitamin c supplements

hormone replacement therapy turned out

to be killing women

dietary cholesterol caps why we all ate

egg white omelets and avoided shellfish

for all that time that turned out to be

wrong and was retracted the low-fat diet

the government and the american heart

association have backed off the low-fat

diet why were we eating a low-fat diet

because of epidemiology so the people

confusing us are the epidemiologists the

experts themselves most of the current

social media argument is over extremes

go all vegan or go all meat

no one knows who to trust and then both

messages get commercialized and

bastardized now you're in fad diet land

now you're now it's de facto quackery

because if it wasn't quackery why would

you need this cardiologist in new york

or this gynecologist in brooklyn writing

about it instead of it coming out of

harvard or cornell or yale

they've

been fighting this thing for 50 years

and the longer you fight it

again now we're into the cognitive

dissonance the more you have to be right

i have a lot of patients who are

confused or at least tell me about the

vegan diet and how especially among

young women

my daughter included one of them

it's very fashionable to be a vegan and

you're you feel like you're doing the

right thing for animals and all

but

as a scientist i want to promote or

recommend a diet that's actually healthy

for humans not just for animals right so

i mean i'm here to help the person in

front of me in a clinic so i want the

diet to be as healthy as possible and

it's possible with a vegan diet to have

nutritional

deficiencies some of the nutrients of

concern in the vegan diet include

vitamin b12

iron calcium vitamin d

omega-3 fatty acids including epa and

dha and protein

we found that some of these nutrients

which can have implications in

neurologic disorders anemias

bone health and other health concerns

can be deficient in vegan diets low carb

diets for a vegetarian is possibly a

successful approach we actually have

low-carb vegetarians who

perhaps can add dairy or eggs or fish

and chicken to the diet and in this way

they can lead a healthy life but

i think it is fair to say that

we are omnivores and uh animal-based

proteins as well as plant-based proteins

can be healthy for us you know you can

say what the science says and then you

can say what people actually do and

actually stick with and you want a diet

a nutritional program that's going to

make you feel good give you energy make

it so you're not hungry all the time so

you don't have to think about food all

the time we get a lot of pushback from

the vegetarian community where i think

they sh i wish they would say they were

all arguing we all want people to be as

healthy as humanly possible and we want

ethical decisions to be made on the

correct implications so if i'm going to

risk my health for the health of

other species i want to know that's what

i'm doing i don't want to be

have the misconception that i'm going to

be healthier because that's what i'm you

know by also that the ethical decision

is also the one that's supported

by

you know medical science all we do is

talk and talk and talk about health and

at the same time we're just getting

fatter and more unhealthy if america is

so worried about its health

how do we get so fat because we have

such big problems with obesity type 2

diabetes high blood pressure all kinds

of

diseases it's not surprising that people

are more interested in their health than

ever because they they have to be you

don't have to be interested in your in

your health if everything's all right

right

it's only when you have a problem that

you you need to do something about it

the myth is that

is that the health care system is the

best place to go to get healthy that's

that's another

terrible myth that so many people are

falling into that trap and

you know if you're acutely ill if you're

if you need a surgery if you if you're

if you have a bad infection the health

care system is fantastic but when it

comes to these chronic diseases we're

facing unfortunately it is a myth that

the healthcare system is the best place

to address those there's a lot of

information today on the internet it's a

wonderful thing and it's a terrible

thing there are people who have their

own agendas to promote saying the

darndest things and and my patients

watch those and read them and i have to

try to correct them based on the

research we cannot say with any

certainty that eating red or processed

meat causes cancer diabetes or heart

disease the study recommends adults

continue current red and processed meat

consumption it's a finding that's

prompted calls for a retraction the most

prominent critic harvard school of

public health which labeled that

conclusion irresponsible and unethical

it's crazy because the more that we

learn that meat is healthy and people

are getting healthy with these hundreds

of thousands of in one experiments the

more the chasm grows between the

meat-eaters and the vegans i was

watching one vegan propaganda film about

a year ago and they were claiming that

eating one egg is equivalent to smoking

five cigarettes a day one egg i never

really thought about eggs much i just

thought of them as a standard part of a

healthy diet but then i found a study

suggesting that eating just one egg a

day can be as bad as smoking five

cigarettes per day for life expectancy

in that case i'm smoking a pack every

morning it makes absolutely no sense the

problem is is people are going to watch

these movies and believe this

researchers found a stepwise increase in

risk the more more eggs people ate in

just a single egg a week appeared to

increase the odds of diabetes by 76

the reality is that a food that has just

fat or or an egg for example

doesn't raise the blood sugar at all it

has a glycemic index of zero

and so if a

scientist is claiming that there is the

egg has a glycemic effect it's just not

true

eggs don't cause diabetes now unless

you're eating carbohydrates then you put

it all into the one one mix together but

the interesting thing when you look at

the glycemic index of different foods is

that the foods that have no

carbohydrates are not on that list so

oils butter eggs have a glycemic index

of zero

there is a fear

of unfounded fear of the cholesterol

going up

eating more fat more

more eggs and we now know that it is a

increase in good cholesterol as well and

a reduction of the bad cholesterol

called triglyceride or bad fats in the

blood for example so the extreme case of

some people being told not to do this

even though there are clear benefits

based on a worry about a long-term

effect of cholesterol is just sadly

wrong and through the lens of today's

understanding of the science so you look

at who gets heart disease you look at

how many eggs are eating and lo and

behold people who eat eggs get more

heart disease than people who don't

they're probably not as health conscious

as people don't eat eggs because for 50

years we've been told don't eat eggs

so

very health conscious people like the

90s i probably boiled 10 000 eggs in the

90s and i probably threw out 10 000

yolks

okay because the yolks have fat and

cholesterol and we were taught they

would kill people

so you do these studies and lo and

behold you find out that people who eat

eggs have a higher rate of heart disease

that's a correlation and then you

pretend correlation is causation because

that's why you did the study to begin

with and then you make this claim and

then you have this whole world then the

people who want to believe that's true

embrace the claim and act like it's true

because they had a single published

study that said it's true

i don't think

these people really care that much about

whether it makes us healthier

maybe they do i think they care about

the animals and that's a wonderful cause

but that's not what i'm

trying to do at the moment the group

says that activism isn't violence and

that they have a love-based approach not

everyone's like you and don't care about

animals who care about them you care

about animals but you condemn them to a

slaughterhouse when you eat them

if somebody gives up meat

and goes vegetarian or vegan and gets

healthy

and they can control their weight and

their control their blood sugar and

you know then geez that's the greatest

thing in the world and i'm happy for

them and but if they can do it

by eating a

you know a

low-carb high-fat diet which clearly

people can then i think we should be

happy for them

and support it a high fat diet is not

unhealthy on its own and should not be

avoided even if you're a green only

vegan unless in fact you don't like the

food the myth still persists that fat is

going to kill you or at the very least

make you fat it's what i call the tragic

homonym

the fat in bacon is not the same as the

fat on your hips it's different and

another idea that is just

deeply ingrained in us is this idea that

you know all green things are good all

vegetables are good and vegetables are

good but again it's not either or what

does a doctor say about adding fat well

it sure seems logical that the fat in

the food would become the fat on your

body you know under your bottom for

example but it turns out that it's the

insulin

hormone inside that creates the

situation for you to be able to deposit

the fat and insulin is actually

generated by eating carbohydrates so

it's actually the dietary carbohydrates

the sugars and the starches that are

fattening but the confusion

comes into play because if you're eating

carbohydrates and fats then you will get

fat but it's not the fat that caused it

it was the carbohydrates that led to the

insulin that caused the fat to be

fattening so another part of the

confusion is that low-fat diets work the

problem is that they cause excessive

hunger for most people and so they don't

practically work for many people and

we've seen that to be true because the

us has been advocating low-fat diets for

the last 30 years and it hasn't worked

practically for most americans it's not

that it can't work it's just that it

hasn't been a practical solution i've

always thought that our government

should operate according to the

principle like medical doctors

when they swear an oath to their

profession that they should at least do

no harm you know when they started off

the dietary guidelines they knew they

didn't even have to know what to tell

americans what to eat they just simply

said have 7 to 11 servings of bread

every day that was what they told people

then they actually went and told the

food industry you must go out and create

thousands of more low-fat and therefore

high-carb food products for us the

defenders of the nutrition

establishment say oh we could not have

anticipated that people would eat more

sugars um it's not our fault that they

all went out and scarfed down snackwell

cookies well the government told the

industry to make those foods new

snackwells reduced bad candy yes like

luscious chocolatey caramel nut clusters

and the american heart association was

also putting its you know heart healthy

check mark on

you know frosted flakes and cocoa puffs

and all these foods that were super high

in sugar but because they didn't have a

lot of fat they were considered healthy

the only measure of health was that it

didn't have fat in it what a creamy way

to cut the fat is the pendulum swinging

that is

a big question i think clearly it is in

that there is a bottom-up revolution

going on the people who end up in an

obesity medicine clinic like mine

happen to be the ones who have the bad

metabolism where a very small amount of

sugar or starch or grains can be

detrimental and so that's why we're very

strict about teaching people how to stay

away from those foods teaching people to

have great foods things that they

thought they couldn't have like bacon

and and pate and bri and you know

depending where you live there there's

just a wide array of foods that don't

have carbohydrates that are very tasty

and healthy it takes motivation to do a

diet and i've not really been very

motivated to make a dietary change in

the last few years i just just i don't

know why i don't know my my head wasn't

in that space but this is one of the

important psychologists about dieting

you have to decide to make a change and

i was doing a podcast about health and

fitness i thought all right i'll

walk it like you talk it so i better do

it and i but i remember it was a moment

it's like any major change there's a

moment would you go okay i'm going to do

this a lifestyle that you can stick with

that is going to help you control your

hormones your insulin hormones your fat

storage hormones that's going to be the

best way to lose weight in the long run

because we don't care if you're going to

lose weight in two weeks four weeks six

weeks that's not where health is where

health is is permanently reversing any

metabolic damage making you healthy on

the inside and then weight loss will

follow you have to be ready to do it

just like stopping smoking anything else

if you're ready to do it you have to do

it the great thing about this diet is

it's painless the diet itself is

painless and once you make the change

you feel so good it's self-sustaining

you want to stay with it you want to

optimize it and you certainly don't want

to lose what you got there's a credit

suisse report that came out a little

while ago uh saying the the the market

is going to shift on fats so you know

telling business get ready for this it's

going to change

you know we see better sales going

through the roof we see

meat consumption actually increasing

there are there are signs in the market

that the that consumer driven demand is

changing so there seems to be somewhat

of a ground swell you walk into grocery

stores and things are now paleo the way

things used to be vegan you walk into

bookstores and there's books on low carb

and the computer is just full of all of

this stuff look i get it we live in a

society where everyone wants everything

fast just tell me what to do you want no

sugars no grains eat bacon

eat beef eat an avocado

that's nsng

sng you have gray areas um i know you

were in the whole 30 right it's like

either you're in or you're out yeah

yeah in sng you can mess up at noontime

and you're right back in that evening

you know and you just go with it as long

as you're cutting out sugars and grains

you're on point i've done well over 1700

podcasts at this point and i use one

line in each and every podcast your good

intentions have been stolen i'm just

here to try to help you get them back

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