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Camera speed, Vinnie 4. 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 can 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 a 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.
InFat, part one, we talked about the war for information.
But I actually think we also live in a war with ourselves.
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."
We have more questions than ever.
And the world always speeds up
and it gets more frenzied all the time,
and sometimes even people who are so-called experts
don't know what's going on.
You suck it all up.
Mmm.
"This study says this."
"That study says that."
"Well, that study wasn't done correctly."
"This is healthy."
"That's not healthy."
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.
In this movie we're going to expand
on what we talked about in Fat, 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 Teicholz. I'm a science journalist
and author of 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 Teicholz was a one-time vegan.
She crossed over. She crossed the aisle.
And that led her into ten 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,
The Big Fat Surprise,
that has led a lot of this pendulum swing,
in my opinion, to start moving in the right direction.
I got into this field just completely by accident.
I was doing a series of investigative food articles
for G ourmetmagazine
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,
which is the subject that Americans and 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 is 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 evidence to support,
all these consequences kick in
and make it virtually impossible to back out of.
My name's 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
and Why We Get Fat, of The Case Against Sugar.
Gary Taubes 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 asked myself when I was writing Good Calories, Bad Calories,
it's like, I have friends
who sort of have conspiratorial turns of mind
where they think people do things
because they're venal and they're getting paid by industry.
And I just think, "I don't see any conspiracy there."
I don't really think the industry
had much to do with that.
The food industry was given
this enormous gift of this bad science.
And these people just literally could not have caused more harm
if there had been a conspiracy.
At least if there had been a conspiracy,
enterprising Washington Postreporters
could have interviewed
the right people in 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,
as 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 sucha difficult question to answer.
They're interested in their health,
they've been searching for answers.
And they found an answer
that has actually done them more harm than good in the long run.
Bret Scher was this great guy I met
when he came on my Fitness Confidentialpodcast.
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 fat and cholesterol in it.
Andreas Eenfeldt 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,
pulling certain things out of people's diets, adding other things.
And the certain things were 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 noticed that people were healing right up.
If you avoid fat,
you end up being hungrier
and you have to eat more
of something else
to feel satisfied.
And that something else
is carbohydrates.
Obviously, aside from 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 with 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.
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 addictionologist.
Dr. Drew, look, like everyone else in LA, we love Dr. Drew,
all those years of Loveline.
But the fact that he does what he does with addiction medicine
and the lives he has saved,
I'm happy to call Drew Pinsky a friend.
The way we examine populations,
we're looking at sort of
average effects on the mean.
So people on either end
may have very different physiologies
that have very different sorts of interventions
that we're 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
are the people who have weight problems,
the people who can't control their weight drinking
full sugar sodas.
And so, you have no idea which way the causality runs,
whether these people are unhealthy
because they consume artificial sweeteners
or whether they consume artificial sweeteners
because they're unhealthy and they're 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 percent.
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 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,
or how many peaches, or how many plums
did you eat on average per week?
Hundreds of questions.
First of all, people lie about what they eat.
They want to please themselves or they want to please the interviewers.
And this has been documented in science.
Secondly, that dietary data,
even when they try to validate it,
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, controlled, clinical trial.
This weak 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 who eat a lot of red meat,
"tend to die earlier."
Well, was it the meat? Was it the unhealthy lifestyle?
Was it the excessive binge drinking?
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 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 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 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 Jeffry 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 the road the way the AHA or the ADA does,
where they just keep spewing the same lies hoping for different results,
Jeffry 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 the 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,
it must be the plastic in my bottle that's causing the obesity.
It must be 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 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 and to diabetes.
And you have to understand that a lot of their comments
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, in effect, on animals?
And 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
'cause 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.
It goes back to the 1970s
when really the kind of burgeoning
of the vegetarian movement in the United States,
in my hometown, Berkeley, California.
That was the time the peace movement...
We had just come out of 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.
And it gives men and women muscle mass.
It makes them strong.
For instance, in the Maasai 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 is so interesting if you look at the way we used to eat
before the obesity and the health epidemic.
And red meat was plentiful then.
And then, when things changed,
with the McGovern Report,
with Ancel Keys' Seven Countries Study,
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 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 the 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,
"Don't eat chickens, don't eat meat."
And I was like, "Well, I love chicken."
These are two distinct phenomena I think.
One is this identification with a group
and tribalism around which
diet is yet another manifestation of that.
But this need to move
from fad, to fad, to fad, 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.
To blame diet and sedentary lifestyle...
I mean, I've heard blame on TV my entire life.
But it's us. I mean, look,
people that create mediaonly create stuff that we watch.
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 tout 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 I 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 anything.
Like meat is associated with this outcome,
or vegetables are associated with this outcome,
or French fried potatoes lead to more this kind of cancer.
They can run those statistical tests all the time.
Right? Those associations...
So they're publishing all the time.
Well, in science, sort of
the frequency of publication is part of what makes you powerful.
Um, and compare that to somebody who's doing clinical trials.
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,
is 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 were sort of separate things.
But now they're intertwined.
And the kind of dietary pattern
that Dr. Hu 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 the International Carbohydrate Quality Consortium
all funded by Barilla Pasta and Kellogg's
and all these carbohydrate makers that have Willett
on as their top spokesperson or top advisor,
organizing conferences for them.
In 2013, I think, when Naturemagazine,
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.
There's overload of information.
Anybody can set themselves up as being an expert.
Uh, 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 fear saturated fat.
It's just fine to eat.
It's not an issue for health
if you look at the medical studies
that have tested this hypothesis.
If you take them all together and look at all of the data,
there's no effects 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.
My strength and 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 Taubes
and The Big Fat Surprise by Nina Teicholz.
And one of the things I've 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 anything that's a saturated fat.
Yeah, 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, um,
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's not good because mine's the best."
I tell people who are in my clinic,
who are working with other doctors
and cardiologists in particular,
to just tell them
they're doing a Modified Mediterranean Diet.
And the other doctor will go, "Oh, well, that's fine."
And they won't ask any more
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, um,
doctors sometimes knee jerk against things
that they don't know and using familiar terms
can actually make it easier for my patients
to not get pushback from other doctors.
I guess the other question though,
is it 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 important that 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 the 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 comparing it
with a lot of other bad stuff in a diet,
a lot of refined starch, sugar,
uh, partially hydrogenated oils.
Epidemiology, you always find at the bottom of one of the Harvard papers,
"Oh, you know, our caveat is that it's only in association.
"It 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 in 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 ingestion
because they have saturated fat.
So, 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 is bad and all that.
And I think it was in Nina Teicholz's book
where I first learned that.
The whole campaign against so-called tropical oils,
which is 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 vegetable oil industry said,
"We can't have this happen. They're talking 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 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 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 soy bean oil
and the soy bean industry
because soy bean is far and away
the biggest oil that Americans consume.
So, they started a campaign
against coconut oil 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 going to 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 has 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, sunflower, safflower, corn, soy bean,
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 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,
uh, 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 jest 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 find out 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 used 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 soy bean and soy bean 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 part of a healthy diet.
Second thing,
we need to get away from is this idea that it's 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 fat 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 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 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's expended.
And so, by the 1860s,
the nutrition community, for the first time ever,
can measure the energy that people consume in foods
and 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 in and 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 in. That's the weird thing.
And 1921-22, the hormone insulin is discovered
and the science of endocrinology,
of hormones and hormone related diseases starts to explode.
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 as an 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.
This energy balance idea is too big to fail.
And then diet book doctors get involved.
First Herman 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 hormonal thing.
"It's the carbs are the problem.Get rid of the carbs."
And now the research community doesn't like this idea
'cause 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.
Never think that our advice is wrong
'cause we've got the laws of thermal dynamics 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 to insulin.
It was published by Brunzell
from the University of Washington
in The New England Journal of Medicinein, I think, '78.
Brunzell is his name.
He took Type 2 diabetics,
he made a synthetic diet...
45% sugar and then double, white sugar,
multi-dextrose, plain table sugar,
doubled it to 85% 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.
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 or 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 in to 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 sign 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 storing 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.
You get insulin resistance
and high insulin levels all through the day.
Sugar is addictive.
And 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 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 Ede. I'm a psychiatrist.
Georgia Ede, 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,
"bad for them,"
and spending a lot of time
thinking about food
that would be better spent doing other things.
And I think that it's one of the things
that people really want a lot of help with.
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,
I've known this for years, you have a withdrawal.
I get all the same symptoms,
milder, mind you again. So, I don't like
too powerful a connection with addiction per se.
It minimizes the misery of my patients.
But when I come off carbohydrates,
get irritable, discontent, I have pain,
I have sleeplessness, I have anxiety.
Opiate withdrawal,
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 inFat, 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 drank as long as they drank their products.
Grain industry, they could create grain that's got a lower glycemic index.
You have a 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 eat 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 gluconeogenesis
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's 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.
That is in debate. It's not clear.
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.
Um, the science,
in regard to how you create an essential nutrient
and 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 will power 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 that the amount of sugar
that the FDA was estimating we were consuming at the time,
which 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.
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 a third of that.
They're taking what they know,
which is how much is made available.
It's a reliable number 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 ten to 20 times larger
than what we were consuming 150 years earlier.
They started doing this in the 1940s
during World War II 'cause we had to know how much food
was available and 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 I 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 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 can do an experiment,
which is called a randomized controlled 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 N=1,
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, um, 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, um,
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 corpse
"because you're gonna 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 sugar's 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're just... They're desperate. They're just desperate.
Bacterial vaginosis.
Rich in saturated fats.
Um, so, 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 gonna 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 is a particularly, um,
I want to use the word magical diet for many
neurological conditions.
Many brain and, uh, body nervous system conditions.
When you eat a ketogenic diet,
you're using fat primarily for energy,
and the brain is using, uh, to a large extent,
ketones instead of glucose.
It can't use 100% ketones,
but 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 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,
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,
uh, perhaps they could be helpful for other brain disorders as well,
including psychiatric disorders,
which have a lot in common with neurological disorders...
Psychiatric disorders are neurological disorders.
It's simply that they manifest, um,
as changes in behavior and emotion
as opposed to changes in the sensory motor system
with the muscular system, for example.
So the ketogenic diet,
with the way we think it works is that
ketones burn cleanly and more efficiently
than glucose does in the brain,
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 lot of potential benefit here.
The science 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 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 who get side effects from medication
or who don't want to take medication 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 believe otherwise or if you wrote otherwise,
you would really suffer as a scientist.
If you said anything against that orthodoxy in the field.
So here I come along, saying, "Oh, you know, but this paper,
"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,
uh, 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 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 they're 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.
Uh, 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 it's de facto quackery.
Because if it wasn't quackery,
why would you need this cardiologist in New York, 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, uh, the vegan diet
and how, especially among young women,
uh, my daughter included, one of them,
um, it's very fashionable to be a vegan,
and you feel like you're doing the right thing for animals,
but as a scientist,
I wanna promote or recommend a diet
that's actually healthy for humans,
not just for animals, right?
So 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, uh, 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, um, perhaps can add
dairy or eggs or fish and chicken to the diet.
And in this way, um,
they can lead a healthy life.
But I think it is fair to say that, uh, we are omnivores
and 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 gonna 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, I wish they would see they were all arguing.
We all want people to be as healthy as humanly possible,
and we want the 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 wanna have the misconception that I'm gonna be healthier
because that's what I'm, you know...
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 did 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 have to be.
You don't have to be interested in your health
if everything's all right, right?
It's only when you have a problem that 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 another terrible myth
that so many people are falling into that trap.
And, you know, if you're acutely ill,
if you need a surgery,
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 health care 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 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 N1 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 gonna watch these movies and believe this.
Researchers found a stepwise increase in risk
the more and more eggs people ate.
Even 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 an egg, for example,
doesn't raise the blood sugar at all.
It has a glycemic index of zero,
and so if a site is claiming that
the egg has a glycemic effect, it's just not true.
Uh, eggs don't cause diabetes,
not unless you're eating carbohydrates and you put it all into
one mix together.
But, uh, 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,
unfounded fear of the cholesterol going up,
eating more fat, more eggs.
And we now know that it is an 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're 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 you're 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 who don't eat eggs,
'cause for 50 years we've been told don't eat eggs.
So very health conscious people in 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 were killing 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 this 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 that don't care about animals.
I do care about animals.
-You care about animals? -Yeah, absolutely.
But you condemn them to a slaughterhouse
when you eat them.
But if somebody gives up meat
and goes vegetarian or vegan and gets healthy
and they can control their weight and they control
their blood sugar,
you know, then geez, that's the greatest thing in the world
and I'm happy for 'em.
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, on 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.
And, 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 didn't even have to know what to tell Americans what to eat.
They just simply said, have seven 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."
"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 SnackWell's reduced fat candy!
Yes, like luscious chocolate caramel, not 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 pate and brie
and, you know, depending where you live, 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 the last few years.
I don't know why.
I don't know, my head wasn't in that space,
but this is one of the important psychologies about dieting.
You have to decide to make a change,
and I was doing a podcast about health and fitness,
so I thought, "Walk it like you talk it, so I better do it."
But I remember it was a moment. It's like any major change.
There's a moment where you go, "Okay, I'm gonna 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 gonna be the best way to lose weight in the long run.
Because we don't care
if you're gonna 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've got.
There is a Credit Suisse report that came out a little while ago
saying the market is going to shift on fats.
So you know, telling business, "Get ready for this. It's gonna change."
You know, we see butter sales going through the roof.
We see meat consumption actually increasing.
There are, there's signs in the market
that consumer driven demand is changing.
So there seems to be somewhat of a groundswell.
You walk into grocery stores and things.
There's 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.
NSNG, you have gray areas.
-I know you want the whole 30 right? -Yep.
-It's like either you're in, or you're out. -Yeah.
-Eh. -Yeah.
NSNG, you could mess up at noon time,
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.