The Big Fat Surprise! With Author Nina Teicholz | Ep 77

welcome to the plant free MD podcast with Dr Anthony chafee where we discuss diet and nutrition and how this affects health and chronic disease and show you how you can use this to optimize your health and happiness both mentally and physically [Music] hey guys just want to take a second to thank our sponsor at carnivore bar I don't promote many products because honestly all you need to be healthy is to just eat meat for those times that you're out hiking road tripping or stuck at work and you want nutritious snack that is just meat fat and salt if you want it the carnivore bar is a great option so I like this product not because it's just pure meat but also because I want the carnivore Market to thrive as well and the more we support meat only products the more meat only products that will be available in the mainstream so if this sounds like something you'd like to get behind check it out using my discount code Anthony to get 10 off which also applies to subscriptions giving you 25 off total all right thanks guys hello everyone this is uh Dr Anthony chafee and I have with me a very special guest uh today Nina Ty Schultz who is an investigative science science journalist and author of The New York Times best-selling um bestseller The Big Fat Surprise uh which upended the conventional wisdom of dietary fat especially saturated fat and spurred a new conversation about where these fats in fact cause or whether or not these fats actually cause heart disease she's also a founder of the nutrition Coalition which is a non-profit that works to ensure that nutrition policies are transparent and evidence-based and the work um and her work involved in this has also allowed her to testify in front of the U.S department of Agriculture as well as the Canadian Senate she's also a graduate of Stanford and Oxford universities and previously served as associate director of the center for globalization and sustainable development at Columbia University uh Nina thank you so much for for coming on taking the time to speak with me thank you Anthony for having me it's great to be here yeah so um you know obviously you know that that's a quick sort of rundown on on your background but if you could tell us just a bit about you know more about your background and and what you're doing now uh uh so people can get to know you a bit more if they haven't uh come across you before yeah well well I was a vegetarian for more than 20 years when I started my work uh in nutrition and I got started because I had been assigned an article by a magazine to look into trans fats at the time I knew nothing really about nutrition this is in the early 2000s um even though you know in retrospect I think you know I had most of my life struggled with my weight and not felt particularly healthy but uh but I approached it really as a journalist looking skeptically at everything that I came across and I quickly discovered that there was this Rich world of research about dietary fat which I had been taught and is still people really still obsess about this idea you know what is good fat bad fat how much fat is fat fattening is the fat in meat and cheese is going to give you a heart attack and there was a great deal of strange conflicting research and when I would call up researchers academics at University to try to find out what more about their work I literally felt sometimes like I was interviewing or investigating the mob I mean in the sense that people would hang up on me people were terrified to talk to me I found researchers who would say you know I can't talk about that study I can't talk about the low-fat diet so as a journalist I thought wow there's there has to be a story here um and that sent me down a rabbit hole um I think many of your listeners um and viewers will understand what it's like to feel obsessed about a subject especially this subject which is so rich and Broad and I read you know thousands and thousands of studies I interviewed hundreds of nutrition scientists around the world and spent nearly a decade writing my book uh the Big Fat Surprise which really did two things the first thing it did was it brought together all the evidence in the various strains and different Arguments for why we had gotten it wrong on saturated fats right where did that idea come from who proposed it how was it how was it that we came to believe that saturated fat and cholesterol was the most potent way to cause a heart attack and so I traced that whole story throughout history really going back to the 1950s and and are created the argumentation showing that it really had not been ever proven to be true that idea and um and subsequently I followed up on science and and you know there are now we can talk about what's happened now in the science but it's largely Vindicated the kind of line of uh argumentation that I mate was making um which you know at the time was very controversial it remains controversial but um so and I also in in my book I talk about um it was really the first time where that uh that somebody had put forward all the history of vegetable oils also known people know them now as seed oils more accurately but you know where do they come from how did we end up with a product that had originally been invented to lubricate Machinery in the industrial revolution how did it become around to the idea that that was the healthiest fat um to avoid heart disease so I talk about that in my book and um there's also a chapter on the Mediterranean diet and which focuses on olive oil but overall the Mediterranean diet which many people think is the best diet for health and so we could talk about that if you like but that really plunged me into this world of nutrition science that I have remained in ever since um and then I started the nutrition Coalition which is a non-profit group to try to ensure that our nutrition policies actually reflect the science that the process that produces them is rigorous and transparent and I did that because it was so clear to me after reading these thousands of studies that those that all of that information was not in our guidelines had never been reviewed huge the most important most expensive studies that had ever been conducted funded by governments around the world had actually never been included in the evidence base for our dietary guidelines and so um you know our guidelines are incredibly powerful even though we don't really know about them or think that they affect us but they are very powerful in determining what we think is a healthy diet and what's fed in all kinds of public settings like schools so um so I'm still working as a journalist and I'm still involved in the nutrition coalition and uh you know have been working in the space now for um more than a decade oh fantastic yeah so I actually um just signed up to to speak with a you know vegan nutritionist or you know proposal you know specific plant-based and low-fat uh low saturated fat diet a guy named uh Simon Hill uh who's he was actually the first uh person on the other side of the aisle who's ever agreed to like actually speak with me and sort of discuss these sorts of things but and that's exactly what we're going to discuss he says you know his main his main problem with eating meat is is because of saturated fat and he just believes that saturated fat is just you know this horrible horrible thing is just terrible for you and that's what he you know he was I think he has a masters in nutrition and that's what you know he was taught and um and what he espouses and I think he's coming from an honest place I just you know uh I think that um that but that's the the traditional teaching is it saturated fat is horrible for you so where does that where does that come from and you know am I in am I in for a rough time you know did I did I pick the wrong side in this uh in this fight um well you might be in for a rough time because it's hard to talk about this science um people are quite dug in but I think you can be assured the science is on your side so let me just give a brief history of where this idea came from um maybe you know your viewers already know this but we can just briefly review it comes from a scientist named Ansel Keys who was um was a professor at the University of Minnesota and he was he came up with this idea that saturated fat and dietary cholesterol so the kind of cholesterol you find in egg yolk shellfish that those two um nutrients in Foods were they would cause your blood cholesterol to go up and then that would clog your arteries and ultimately give you a heart attack that was called the diet heart hypothesis and Ansel Keys proposed that in the 1950s and he stepped into a situation of kind of a vacuum of information at that time right heart disease which had been almost non-existent in the early 1900s had risen by the mid-century to be the number one killer in America and notably in 1955 President Eisenhower has a heart attack in the Oval Office and he uh he's then you know not he's taken away from he has to go on bed rest for 10 whole days the whole nation is transfixed and focused on this question like what is causing heart disease because at the time there was no accepted a cause that had been established and there were a number of competing hypotheses there was this idea that it might be the rising amount of Auto exhaust that had come about for more cars um on the roads it could have uh people thought it was a the result of vitamin deficiency um people thought that it was the type A personality somebody going around and screaming at everybody and then having a heart attack and dying those were all viable theories but it was Ansel Keys through his basically his networking and his personal Charisma and his ability to as even his friends say argue anybody to the death that he was able to promote his idea into uh importantly you know with leading doctors of the time including Eisenhower's doctor but probably the most significant event was when he got onto the nutrition Cola sorry the nutrition Committee of the American Heart Association so the American Heart Association was the most authoritative group then and probably one would say now telling people what to do about heart disease Ansel Keys was able to swing that group around in the course of a year based really on no data but he was able to convince this group to endorse the diet heart hypothesis and tell everybody well at that time it was just men tell men 1961 avoid eating saturated fat replace saturated fat in meat and eggs with polyunsaturated vegetable oils in order to avoid a heart attack that is like the little kernel of advice that grew into this huge um oak tree of of recommendations that we now have all over the world and because that has been our advice for now 60 years it's extremely hard to disentangle because it's really a kind of a very firm established Dogma um so but just to continue that through line what happened after 1961 well many governments around the world including yours in Australia they realized that although this recommendation had gone out there really was no rigorous evidence for it which is to say clinical trials randomized controlled clinical trials that is the only kind of evidence that can show cause and effect so these governments undertook large the really some of the most ambitious largest longest clinical trials that have ever been done in nutrition in the 1960s and 70s and these studies uh they you know they had they they were interpreted to imply that saturated fats did in fact cause heart disease but if and so that was sort of what was accepted um for decades but due to my work the work of a journalist Gary taubs we went back and analyzed those trials and looked at them you know one of them had never been properly randomized another one had not controlled for smoking another one had let people wander in and out of their study and not really kept track of them there was there were studies that had been ignored where they showed they had to end the study early because people were dying of people on the vegetable oil diet were were dying um so it turned out these trials did not say what they were supposed to so that's what came out in my book and in um Gary tab's book good calories bad calories and that was in the early so you know that happened in like the 2000s right and so now the last decade has really seen in kind of a real sea change in the science and saturated fat because scientists have been alerted to these clinical trials and they realized that they have been ignored lost um somehow we we never paid attention to these studies in a rigorous way so now there are at least 20 papers that are re have done systematic reviews or meta-analyzes they're called but you know really rigorous reviews of these clinical trials and what have they concluded they have concluded that the data do not support the diet heart hypothesis which is to say the idea that saturated fat and dietary cholesterol cause heart disease is not supported by the evidence even though that idea has been tested it's one of the most tested hypotheses in the history of nutrition science but the results do not support that hypothesis so you know when you really test a hypothesis at that level and it and you you get in what's called null results you have to just move on and say okay you know we have to look at some other ideas but just to emphasize how important this literature is from the last decade these 20 review papers include a paper um that I was someone involved in which is by a group of authors that include four former members of the expert committees who actually wrote Our U.S dietary guidelines so these are people who are saying we wrote the guideline but now we think that's wrong we didn't know about this evidence we've reconsidered it and that paper was published by the Journal of the American College of Cardiology which is a very prestigious it's called a high impact Journal read by cardiologists it was called it was branded as a state-of-the-art review by the Journal it was selected by the editor-in-chief of that journal as one of the most important papers of the year that it came out um I'm thinking it's maybe uh 2019 now but um so that's an extremely important paper um so I think that uh you know what we have found is that the scientific Community different groups of scientists from around the world these 20 papers have really concluded that we got it wrong unsaturated fats and the challenge now is to get that science to rise up and be considered by our our government agencies in charge of these guidelines and there's just a lot of uh resistance to that or stubbornness or difficulty kind of dealing with this change in our understanding on saturated fats and this new data so we can talk about it that gets into the realm of politics but in like in the scientific World there has really been a firm a pretty firm understanding that saturated fats uh we just we made a mistake on saturated fats former editor-in-chief of the British medical journal which is the oldest and most prestigious General journals in the world you know Godley said at a conference you know I think we really have to uh we owe an apology to people like we just we made a mistake on saturated fats yeah and so so now the the sort of on the political side of things is this is this more that there's just this this weight of inertia behind this and just so many people just have believed this that it's just hard to sort of change that around or are there people really trying to stick to this uh for one reason or another and trying to to keep that information away from people well this is where we where we enter into the to nutrition which is to say um there are multiple agendas uh that are that resist change so we can just um you know there there is of course kind of the the difficulty of bureaucracies being more or less sclerotic and difficult to change difficult to be seen as flip-flopping on important issues with their public because that is causes an erosion of depressed and there are there are hundreds of nutrition scientists who have devoted their entire careers to um you know to to this idea that saturated fats are bad who are reluctant understandably to reverse uh themselves on an entire published um history you know intellectual history that they've that they've established their careers on so there's that there's also the fact that um saturated fats tends to raise your LDL cholesterol that's the so-called bad cholesterol and that the biggest Blockbuster drug of the history of the pharmaceutical industry has been statins and statins lower your LDL cholesterol so there is a pharmaceutical investment in maintaining the LDL cholesterol model of heart disease and under that model saturated fats are bad for health even though as we've seen most recently in the virta study out of the University of Indiana that over the long that's a five they have five-year data showing that the rise in LDL is transient and it goes down over time so um so there's a kind of a pharmaceutical investment in the saturated fat LDL cholesterol model there's also the interest of the vegetable oil industry which um because remember vegetables we've been told to eat these vegetables instead of saturated fats so there's and these are some of the largest companies in the world that have included Unilever Bungie ADM Monsanto and all the soybean Growers who uh it's mainly soybean oil that people consume that are whose products end up in these oils those are huge multinational companies who do not want to see uh you know their market share decline in any way I mean they have seen in the U.S at least I'm sure there's a similar curve in Australia but we the the biggest increase in any food stuff over the 20th century has been vegetable oils we went from eating virtually zero of them to now eight or nine percent of all of our calories come from vegetable oils since 1970 in the U.S we've increased them by 90 percent our consumption so there's that interest which is you know resistance to um losing market share I mean there's there are other interests there are there the tremendous push towards veganism um which we see which has many different financial and ethical and ideological movements but behind it for them saturated fats the limit on those fats is what keeps down consumption of animal foods which is important to them because they feel like that's an unethical to ethos or it might be harming the environment from their perspective so I mean that's just a snapshot of some of the interests involved in this so it is it is extremely hard to change but I will say it's becoming harder and harder to resist the science I mean in a paper that I uh was a co-author on we uh we analyzed our own U.S dietary guidelines the expert committee and their recent review on saturated fats for our 2020 guidelines the most recent version their review we can we I looked at all the studies that they had used for their review and it I found that like something between 70 and 100 of their studies depending on what the outcomes were did not support their conclusion so the vast majority did not support the idea that saturated fats cause heart disease and yet their conclusion was the evidence that saturated fats cause heart disease is strong right level recommendation all those 70 to 100 of the studies that they provided for that recommendation stood exactly the opposite from what they said so um you know so this is and this is an area where there's a lot of interest pushing against any liberation of saturated fats and uh and the science is clearly not being heard yeah I'm just going to point out one point because I think that you know when you talk to um this vegan guest um that the arguments that they that are often um put forward and is that saturated fats cause inflammation saturated fats um have negative effects on cholesterol but remember these are all inflammation and cholesterol are what's called um intermediary outcomes right they're important to measure but they don't always predict heart attacks or death and so it's really important to know that these large clinical trials that I talked about from the 1960s and 70s they went long enough or in more powered and it means in other words they had enough people in them to look at heart attacks and death right death is the ultimate outcome as we might call it in science because it's really important to know maybe you are are not having as many maybe you're having more heart attacks but what if it causes cancer instead which is in fact what these trials found in some instances which is that the people on the high vegetable oil diets were dying at higher rates of cancer so you might be seeing some of these intermediary effects on inflammation and LDL cholesterol but really when you have hard outcome data on heart attacks and death that trumps any other data you might have it might be that the data this intermediary data was not quite correct or transitory as we found out with LDL cholesterol so really it's the hard firm outcomes what we call Heart outcomes of heart attacks and death that were studied we have data on and they showed that saturated fats when replaced by vegetable oils do not uh reduce cardiovascular events or reduce um mortality right and that's um and that's looking at the actual data but then also like these recommendations like you're saying you know the the their own support of evidence didn't actually support their conclusions which is why I always always tell people like like never just read the conclusion you know because they can conclude whatever they want like I've read so many studies you know by The Who and elsewhere that you know they come with some conclusion I'm like that doesn't sound right you know I remember seeing it when I was like when I was like a kid they said that like you know Cuba had a top five one of the top five um uh Healthcare Systems in the world and like us was like 76 like there's no way there's absolutely no way and like I read the study and it was and it was you know they you know just fudged around with things they basically they they calculated the the health outcomes and the medical system as a function of the that country's GDP and so because you know we had a good Healthcare System but we had the best GDP we were ranked lower than Cuba that had a horrible Health Care System but an even worse GDP and so I was just like well that's that's complete garbage um and so you unfortunately find these things and um and that's one of the things too uh is that uh to my understanding the you know those original guidelines and you know even Ansel keys and and other professors actually turned out that they were were being misleading on purpose it wasn't that they got it wrong it wasn't it wasn't false it was it was fraudulent do you did you look into that as well um yes I mean there's it's really important to understand for those of us who are coming into this field I remember when I started and I had my father is an engineer and and also worked in computer science and was a professor at Stanford University it was I had so much respect for Science and I thought it was this sober minded ethical slow-moving kind of um thoughtful profession where people would reflect upon the data they would if they saw evidence to the contrary they would consider it and reckon with it maybe change their ideas what I found was at least in the field of nutrition something completely different from that which is and I think this have now come to understand that this is true in quite a number of fields where if there is a prevailing Theory like the diet hard hypothesis and and that's the theory that is embraced by your funders you know the the government agency that provides money for scientific funding there's tremendous pressure on scientists to conform with that because if they don't they're not invited us to conferences their funding isn't renewed I actually you know I talked to a professor from the University of Vanderbilt who had findings to the contrary he had gone off to study a tribe in Africa and found out that there they were eating meat and fat and you know by all accounts should have been dying of heart attacks um right and left and that in fact when he took electrocardiograms of 600 of them he could find maybe only one case of of anybody having a heart attack and so he was you know he came back and tried to present his findings and was at some point told by uh somebody the National Institutes of Health listen if you continue with your opposition to Ansel Keys you're going to lose your research funding and in fact he did lose it wow so there are many stories of scientists who find who are unlike this professor I just described who instead of speaking out they they change their data so they do this in many ways um they do it by not publishing their results the largest ever study of the diet heart hypothesis the Minnesota coronary survey when they came out with the results which showed that in fact that the people who the men and women who lowered their cholesterol the most had the highest rate of heart attacks they they didn't publish their results for 17 years uh you know which in science is is sort of a form of lying because you know you're withholding data it had been a study that had been funded by our National Institutes of Health and you know when asked why they were just said well we were so disappointed with the way it came out um so there's that there you can just not publish data their instances where um a colleague of Ansel Keys named Jerry stamler he did something called the U.S Railway study his results did not support the diet heart hypothesis but he was so invested in the diet heart hypothesis that he presents his results and as you say in the conclusion he says well we didn't find this but we still think the diet heart hypothesis is correct yeah and so and Miss represents his findings and you know this is what's so confusing to people who are new to the field they just they can't understand that this might go on but it goes on all the time I mean it's it was more common than not in the papers that I went through yeah and that's um yeah and unfortunately that we do see that in the Sciences you know I know uh you know people like to think that that in the Sciences you know you have someone who works for 30 years and and sticks a reputation on on a certain uh hypothesis then someone disproves it and he goes up and shakes their hand and like oh I'm so happy you proved me wrong uh I think that's happened once in history you know um yeah when my you know my dad was actually at Berkeley uh you know mentioned he was working with uh Louis Alvarez on the on the bubble chamber and you know um studying subatomic particles one of his professors he he went in um into his office and the guy was just he just thought I obviously had some soul-crushing moment and my dad asked me was like you know is everything okay uh well they just sort of discovered the attractive forces between protons and electrons and and they studied that again you know uh you know versus the gravitational forces and I found that that that attractive force that that those plasma forces the negative and positive charges was uh 10 to the 42nd um to the 42nd power times more powerful than gravity and this guy was saying is like I think I've wasted the last 20 years of my life you know like gravity cannot be the answer I mean there's no way this is 42 orders of magnitude times more powerful than like it can't be gravity and and he actually completely revamped his his research and went in a completely different different uh Direction after that so you know but that's like that's like you know the one the one sort of uh example that I know of and so yeah it's unfortunate people really do stake their reputation and and then they just they just they cling to them and you know what I would think that you would I would I would have more trust in someone if they could just look at and go like damn it yeah you're right that doesn't make sense that that you know what I was saying is true and then go with it you you you you'd see that they had to have some Integrity behind them you know because you know not everyone can be right all the time you just it just can't happen you know and sorry you're gonna say yeah no and I think you know there's another Factor here in this field that you know sort of obvious to everyone but there's a lot of money from the food industry that comes into play and uh and so there's it's more common than not that researchers are getting money from the food industry and and that just distorts I mean the food industry in the U.S they have they have been working at least since 1941 when they started a kind of uh nutrition Association but mainly you know which was basically large manufactured food companies you know the American Biscuit Company and um and and and others who were were they started to understand they've been at this and they've been at for decades they started to understand how to influence science and the best way to do that is to do it and to do that at the very Source right so you fund the scientists you fund their conferences you fund panels you fund at every level of the science you uh you influence it so that you know by the time the science is getting to be considered by experts who are making recommendations there's been money that has been invested every point and there's money then invested beyond anything that any science-minded group could spend there's so much money that comes into the that comes in through lobbying of government agencies so um so you know the food and pharmaceutical Industries are they they're deeply invested in our what we eat what we're told to eat um whether or not that makes us well or sick the the you know as our economies have suffered in the last few years I mean the greatest growth industry in our countries certainly in the US is sickness that is if you go into any town in America where the life has been sucked out of the Main Street and the downtown and and what is the spanking new building in town is the dialysis center or um the new cancer wing of a hospital I mean sickness is a huge growth industry we spend like a billion dollars a day in our country just on Diabetes alone Jesus so that's where the money is and that is there's just no question that that influences our ability to do good science and have that science be heard in this in this world of nutrition and health yeah that was that was one of the things too that I that I wanted to get into this this sort of feel as well because like I actually want I want the opposite like I really want to put a lot of doctors out of business like that's that's actually one of my main goals is to have have them have a lot less to do you know because yeah we have all these people basically spinning their wheels treating diseases that don't need to exist you know they shouldn't be there you know we're we're getting sick because we're eating stupid things and this is causing basically a poison effect you know we're eating poison we're getting poisoned and we're treating this as if it's a disease and we're making you know de novo drugs to mitigate you know the damage and have you die slowly over 40 years as opposed to just removing you know the stimulus in the first place and just and just getting rid of the problem um I think that we could get a lot of brain power and a lot of money pointed in in very different actually useful directions and uh and and be much better off for it and you know it sounds like you know putting people out of business or whatever I'm happy with that they can go and do something productive I'll I'll do the same you know like I mean I like trauma surgery so you know I'm in um you know neurosurgery and I actually really like trauma surgery and so I think that'll I think I'm okay on that end because there'll always be you know drunk idiots but like you know that uh that need to get the you know have their skull taken off but you know it's um I think that that's that's what we need to get back to we need to get back to actually treating problems as they arise and not and not not manufacturing them so that we can then treat them yeah yeah I mean I I think you know my heart actually goes out to doctors because I think that they you know so many extremely smart people go to medical school with the desire to help people but the system that they enter uh which you know has largely you know has evolved to respond to pharmaceutical interests teaches them that first of all nutrition lifestyle are wimpy and don't do any aren't you know aren't part of the calculation um and and fair enough because the dietary advice we've been giving people and that they give people they find doesn't work and hasn't worked because it's not based on good science um you know they tell people go out and eat more fruits vegetables whole grains nuts seeds lean meats I mean and and that doesn't work and has been shown not to work in clinical trials so they don't have any faith in nutrition and then they're taught to see every part of the body as its own different segmented system so if you have a headache you get a pill for that if you have acne you get a pill for that if you have uh you know irritable bowel syndrome you get some kind of medication for that but you know if you have pre-diabetes or diabetes you get insulin but they're not taught to look at the body systemically they're not given the time to think about it and they're they have no unders they're not taught that all of these different symptoms are in fact connected to the body's inability to uh to deal with the amount of uh sugars and starches that are coming into their you know their systems causing hyperinsulinemia excessive insulin in the body chronic excessive insulin the inability for the energy centers of the cells to function because they're not getting the right fuel so all of that is not talk to doctors they don't have the tools to help people so I feel sorry you know I actually feel badly that we have this we have a system that is not helping people and the doctors are you know they really become cogs in at least in the U.S they they aren't really allowed to be thinking people they have to follow guidelines they aren't given the leeway to make their own decisions and and you know they're just kind of Administrators of drugs and devices so it's it's a you know very and that's why I think also there's so much burnt burnout in the profession um yeah yeah I mean it like the whole structure this whole system has to change and doctors are you know they are not the major players in that system in terms of making decisions unfortunately no and uh and yeah you're right I mean I I think it's very easy to burn out I've spoken to doctors about this who've changed around um you know a friend of mine um you know Dr pran uh you can't even over in um Sydney you know he's a he's a gastroenterologist and a hepatologist and he uh you know he just came across this like you know the things that I'm doing aren't really helping people he found it like you know dying Lifestyle Changes actually help people a lot more and he actually took quite a pay cut because he was you know if he's doing procedures he's doing you know colonoscopies and all these sorts of things he gets he gets paid more for that whereas like you know giving them nutritional advising and and bouncing them over to uh you know a dietitian in his practice he gets paid much less for that but it actually helps people and so he you know uh is is much more satisfied with that which is which is good I think most doctors would would find find that that you know and some people are just you know you know there's there's always you know the people out there that are just sort of you know in it for the wrong reasons but I think a lot of people are in it for the right reasons and when you're just seeing that you just sort of just spinning your wheels and it's just not really making much of a difference that that can be then that can be difficult um I remember meeting a doctor when I was down under um there who who had retired when he discovered the uh the whole science of of insulin and and sugar and and and he really started to understand this systemic thinking about the the body and he he was so mortified that all the advice he had been giving to people his entire career had actually been harming them in his View and and he had not been helping people he was so devastated by this it was like almost this it was really a like a tragedy for him and he spent he was telling me he spent all of his time in retirement traveling wherever he could in any setting to talk give talks to people free of charge as really is almost a Penance that or he felt he had to carry out in order to be right uh in his own soul you know but um and to teach people and to about you know what he had discovered about um real science and health and so you know I and I also I'm sure you know stories I know so many stories where people are on the verge doctors are on the verge of quitting they find out about this science and they uh they're you know just revolutionizes they're on you know they literally like take back the retirement paper to be able to practice and heal people which was always their original intention but had just been impossible in in the in the Health Care system as we as we have it yeah so um yeah it's I mean I I think it's yeah it's a bit it's a bit of a a tragedy but I I think there's you know also hope in the sense that there is there's so much research coming out now in this area in so many different areas that you would you would never imagine there are people studying the effects of a carbohydrate restriction healthy proteins on acne there are people studying it on um polyureacistic uh syndrome I think I'm pronouncing it wrong pocs on um you know on fatty liver disease and all these different conditions and these are fields that are maybe a little bit less locked into paradigms um that they have been in because they they haven't really considered nutrition in these fields they didn't even think nutrition could affect their these conditions so um but we're seeing you know in mental health there's like really interesting advances now that are happening and there are so there's I think in the world of science there's an and in medical care in some communities of doctors there really has been a lot of uh progress and change so um you know I'm not without hope that there that there will be um that this paradigm shift that we're experiencing will continue yeah I don't know what your thoughts are about that but curious to hear no I I certainly think so and I think probably in the next I think I think this is it had to start Grassroots right it wasn't going to come top down and so you know enough people had to had to become you know made aware of this and enough people had like yourself had to speak out and and really really dig into the data and then you know publish it and and write books on it and do talks and and then have discussions on YouTube and things like that and then just get this out um by word of mouth but now I think it's it's gone to the point where you know it's getting it's garnered enough attention that you can actually can start doing TV shows or or um you know documentaries and things like that I know you were on uh with uh you know torturich um in the um without a documentary in the Beyond impossible sort of things as well and that and that's I think those sorts of things are huge and just making this making our way into the mainstream um I think it has done that I speak to a lot of doctors you know that I just come across and and they're very very receptive you know to what I have to say and a lot of them just will just come up to me randomly you'll say Hey you that guy that you just don't need me right and you're like yeah okay you know just ask me about it we'll talk about it and you know I have a lot of doctors in my in my department that are now you know fully fully meet based like just just carnivore all together and others and everyone else is just you know increased their intake of meat dramatically and um and which is great and uh and so you start seeing this and then you know talking about you know like you know cholesterol and heart disease and a lot of people are like yeah you know I never bought that in the first place you know they just that just seemed like like rubbish to me and and so and now they're just being a bit more free to talk about it um when I first moved to Australia it was like I was just I had like five heads people like you do what yeah because the the vegan uh movement here was so strong and uh and you know when you talk about like the the regulations and people just sort of regurgitating guidelines in America it's even even worse in Australia because the regulatory body here apra is is very very Vigilant and if you get on the wrong side of them they they will make you pay for it and so you know people really have to tow that line uh or or you know risk risk the wrath of uh of uh the the licensing body so people are quite worried about that but when I first got here like no one had heard of this no one had even considered like an all-meat diet and so I got I was talking about it quite a lot because people were just like just shocked by by what I was doing and but now you know I talk to people and I'm you know sort of having you know lunch at the hospital and I just have like a pile of eggs and bacon and uh someone asked me like oh well you know like well that's that's a lot of meat that's a lot of eggs you try and get your protein up I was like well I just don't need anything else and they're like oh yeah you know are you doing a carnivore diet and I was like yeah it's like oh yeah my brother's doing that like he lost a bunch of weight and like really likes it and all that sort of stuff so now people actually know about it and they know about it by name and uh and now you know people have to go on uh different platforms and and talk trash about it and have to say like oh this is really bad this isn't sustainable for these reasons but you know two years ago it wasn't even on the radar it wasn't big enough for them to even you know uh speak disparagingly of it because they're just just you know wasn't wasn't popular enough so now I think that you know that is starting to turn the corner people are starting to wake up and they're all starting to you know look at your work and and people like use work they're showing up like this this was this was based in nonsense and this isn't actually what what this studies show and then they try for themselves and go my God I just feel so much better and they're reversing their issues they're reversing their uh you know weight gain and diabetes and you know a lot of people are you know actually you know uh treating cancer this way you know I spoke with uh Professor from Boston College um Thomas Seyfried you know he's like pumps over like 150 peer-reviewed um you know Journal articles and studies uh on this subject and he's just really showing he's just like look if you know cancer biology you realize that you know if you have healthy mitochondria you cannot get cancer and if you are if you do have cancer the last thing you want to be doing is eating carbohydrates because they require 400 times the amount of glucose to run as to our or other cells and they cannot run on ketones and so if you're in ketosis and you have low blood sugar you know you're starving on your your cancer cells so this is just a no-brainer in his in his mind and and so I think that it is coming to the Forefront I think I'm hopeful that in the next sort of five years this is going to be a more of a mainstream um notion that like you know the diet is is a really a major major factor in our health and not the way that we've ever been told it was uh it's um I think there really is this on the one hand this growing body of Science and clinicians and people who are finding unprecedented levels of success uh with this approach and then there are there's a huge um Mammoth group of moneyed interests who are against health or are pro-vegan due to the environmental factors and and this is you know this is the kind of the Clash that we're seeing out there I think that most people think well it won't affect me because I will just be able to do what I want and you know I can eat the way that I that I need to for for me for my family um but one of the reasons I started the nutrition Coalition and I I believe this is true um really for everyone is that we now live in an environment where um we've long lived in an environment where our government policies really control what's going on for Children's Schools elderly people in nursing homes or people receiving food um through Assistance programs and that these guidelines because they're these National guidelines because they're considered the gold standard are also downloaded for all the cafeteria food basically food in any institutional setting um and as you you know indicated that if you're a health care practitioner a doctor dietitian nutritionist any of these people who are teaching about nutrition you can get in trouble for not teaching the gold standard you or you can't get a job or you uh so I mean there are ways in which our lives are really controlled and affected by these guidelines we in the U.S can't con we can't constitute a military force we have failed on recruiting goals because in large part so many people are obese and just can't meet the fitness criteria so it affects our military preparedness and now there's a new set of threats to our food supply that are coming um through basically through the United efforts at the kind of the United Nations level but that are are kind of trickling down to various governments whereby they want to um reduce or eliminate the amount of meat that we can eat um they're buying crop they're buying branches and taking them out of production so that people cannot no longer raise cattle or or pigs they are um they're levying taxes on Mead um or proposing them they're um not allowing advertising for meat um to try their there's just many many many different efforts to try to reduce the availability of of meat and particularly beef and that affects us because you know when I go to the supermarket I mean I there's I mean I went to the supermarket the other day I live in New York City and a steak this big was twenty dollars I don't know what that is in Australian currency but that's that's expensive that is really out of the range of the average um the average American budget so all of this that's happening on a on a political level nationally internationally that does affect us even though we might you know we're trying so hard just to carve out a little world that makes sense to us and where we can feel metabolically well but um this other you know what's happening politically globally is is still it just has to be of concern to us I think yeah and and why do you think that is why is there this huge attack on meat and beef in particular foreign well again it's like where do you start but I mean there's there's definitely the very strong um and Powerful group of people who believe that cattle is the is the single most important thing you can do for climate change I don't think we have the time to get into those claims but I will say one really important fact about that which is that there has never been a conference where uh various sides of that issue people arguing for you know about how cattle maintenance not necessarily be a cause of climate change due to many many com studies that show otherwise or or conflicting uh or people representing the The View that meat is nutritionally important vitally nutritionally important for many populations or the people arguing about the economic importance of livestock for many people's livelihoods none of those views have ever been presented in a conference so what we have is a Viewpoint that has never been discussed and debated scientifically that has taken off right that has like it's become accepted wisdom without any debate that's not the way it's supposed to work so there's the the climate change forces there's the animal rights views which are very well funded many people feel very passionately about that um you know why eat animals um we when we're a civilized race of people and again people do not talk about the nutritional importance of meat you know where are you going to get your iron folate B vitamins Where Are You Gonna your your source of a complete protein where are you going to get that if you remove animals um you you you can't um so um and then there is this huge Gale wind of financial interests that have grown up around the fake food industry trying to replace every kind not just meat everything fake eggs fake milk fake um chicken everything that they are trying to create fake products those products are the the profit in the food industry comes from processing right you're talking about highly processed foods huge profit margins a lot of uh investment payback on these even if they fail there's just these bubbles that are created that create that generate huge amounts of wealth so and and these are not small companies they're sort of there's just enormous investment in all of these companies and they're seen as a like one of the most promising new sectors of the food economy so I mean those are just some of the forces that are behind this um push towards veganism but they're you know they're they're incredibly well-funded and very powerful and have the ear of of influencers at every level yeah well that's unfortunate yeah yeah and um so that um you were saying also before like vegetable oils how these things these came up I mean that that's one of the arguments is that you know humans yeah I mean since I was a kid everyone I was always taught that you know humans are apex predators top of the food chain that was very clear as far as the data was concerned uh at least you know when I was growing up that was what that was that was what people were it wasn't even a discussion you know that was that was just this is this is pretty straightforward this is what the the data shows now people are saying well no not only is it it's not ethical to eat meat we actually never ate meat we actually only ate plants and we're actually herbivores for all these different strange reasons but even if you were to argue that I don't see how anyone could argue that we like evolved on seed oils because those didn't exist you know those those were a manufactured product you know but what what's it what's the story behind those and and what you know obviously you dug into the data you know quite uh thoroughly what are the health ramifications of seed oils so seed oils as I mentioned the beginning of this uh conversation they were um they the original one was cottonseed oil that was made pressed out of cotton seeds they were a byproduct of the cotton crop in the in the southern part of the United States and that oil was used to lubricate Machinery which was important in the late 1800s because whales whale oil had been dependent upon it heavily but whales were being hunted nearly to Extinction so they needed a new source of oil here was cottonseed and then various entrepreneurs looked at uh this oil and thought well we can use it it's cheap we'll use it and sneak it into butter um and and we'll you know see if we can and there was so there was adulterated butter that uh came into um into being in the late uh sort of the turn of the um the 19th century so and then in uh there was a soap maker and and a Candle Maker um there's Procter and Gamble were these um two men who in 1911 they they introduced a product called Crisco well Crisco was really the first human uh the first food product for human consumption that was made from these oils and it was it was they had these Procter Gamble had figured out how to harden the oil which was critical because oils in their oil form are highly unstable they oxidize easily they go rancid so they had figured out how to harden it through a process called hydrogenation or partial hydrogenation which is the big industrial process involved involving a metal chelate and they made Crisco they marketed it with a huge amount of marketing dollars and this is what um and convinced people that this was a safer and better than butter um there's just a really fascinating history around this about how they were able to convince Housewives you know they you know butter comes from slaughterhouses and is or you know cattle are dirty um and lard comes you know you have to kill animals to create lard and but Crisco comes from a clean shiny laboratory and uh and it's a new thing and of course Americans were always into the new thing because we had come people had emigrated to America to be in a new place and leave their grandmother's recipes behind people wanted to assimilate this was part of being the the uh an American you know then in the 1940s there was a further developments um in chemistry Labs where they figured out how to sell the oil as oil um and they how to stabilize it in oil form and all of a sudden we had Crisco oil and we had you know all different brands of oils that were touted as being good for cooking and frying use them in your salads um and it's super interesting fact around this time was that Procter and Gamble really they they poured a like millions of dollars into the American Heart Association um in the late 1940s which I discovered through Procter Gamble's own company history a book you can't get anymore now since I reported that everything this disappears from that from the internet the moment you publish something and of course Procter Gamble went on to recommend these vegetable oils to prevent heart attacks so and and they still to this day get money and have a relationship with Procter and Gamble but you know so so then we saw the rise of vegetable oils because they were dubbed as being good for health they lowered your cholesterol they were better than saturated fats endorsed by the American Heart Association and that that has seen this tremendous rise in the use of vegetable oils but just brief ly go over like what are their health effects well that instability and oxidation turns out to be a big problem I mean you know I think all of us have heard of antioxidants why do we take antioxidants why do we think those were a good idea because oxidation is bad for human health it drives inflammation and these oils are they oxidize what that means is they basically the the molecules um their bonds kind of open up and and bond with oxygen that's oxidation and then and this happens especially quickly if you leave an oil out in the sunlight or if they're heated remember you know your early chemistry experiments if you heated something that would speed up the reaction that happens when you heat oils uh so there's a huge literature that I um sort of dug up and and cover in my book about the problems of heating these vegetable oils and how they they create these hundreds of oxidation pro products some of them are known toxins like acrylene which is um you know which is actually identified as a toxin so aldehydes is another one a known toxin that is known to to cause heart disease to cause cancer so and those oxidized oxidative products they enter into the food supply that's been studied um there are over 200 oxidation products that were found in a single piece of fried chicken from Kentucky Fried Chicken and they've also been shown to pass through the blood-brain barrier they get into your brain so there is really they they hang out in every cell membrane which is your membranes of your cell controls what goes in and out and if you have them in your cell membranes your cells are not as intelligent as they should be so they are you know he especially when he did they are very unstable and dangerous um products for human health and just one other finding which I mentioned earlier which is that in those large clinical trials where they had half you know one group on the high saturated fat diet the other group was having a high vegetable oil diet and those studies in in five or six of those studies they had what they call the inconvenient finding that the people in the high vegetable oil diet were dying at higher rates from cancer yeah they were so concerned about that finding that there was three or four um high-level meetings at the National Institutes of Health where they gathered everybody together to try to figure out what to do about this finding and they could never they couldn't figure it out and they you know there was just these basically these inconclusive reports and they said well we still believe we should tell people to reduce saturated fats replace them with vegetable oils because that's so important for our Public Health message yeah so those findings have never been explained and um so yeah I mean I think that the story of seed oils uh is starting to get more publicity but it's um you know it remains it remains some Thin I think in the community of people who understand about sugars and starches there's you know there's a lot of information also about seed oil so people understand that but um but you know this this all of this story in this history and these health effects are I think are not yet really understood um in the mainstream scientific communities yeah yeah like yeah yeah well it's it's it's funny too because you know these things just don't get discussed you know I mean you know when I was in medical school none of this gets discussed and I think it's true people say well well doctors aren't you know really taller stuff we are not taught anything at all I mean we have to think about chemistry that's that's a prerequisite so you actually do have to sort of understand you know and that that's really what nutrition is you know it's nutritional biochemistry that's how these these molecules work in our body and our Energy Systems uh if you think about it in the correct way that's that's that that is what it is and and you can you can actually glean a lot of information from that um and um but you know in medical school you're really not taught anything and and really what it is is just basically all your preconceived notions just get solidified because now I'm a health expert I'm a medical expert and I know all about health and whatever you thought was true now that that's now now I'm a Doctrine I can say that we're not taught any of this though so it's not like you know we're taught that you know sometimes you'll mention your cholesterol something like that but it's very very limited um but um I I know that you um you have to go soon I want to be respectful of your time but um you know one of the things that that maybe just as the last question you know the answer to sort of the response that you it would commonly get is like well what about the eat Lancer trial and the Blue Zone studies and the you know the China studies and these sorts of things you know what about those don't those show that you know plant-based diet is really the best right that's not a small question yeah sorry so The China Study never appear reviewed never it came to not computer it came out in a supplement of a journal it was never subject to peer review it's also um a uh it's a population study sorry there you go strange yeah so it's also a study that shows Association not causation a very weak form of evidence um the blue zones a cherry-picked group of um of communities that you can I mean the short answer is you can also find plenty of communities that are long-lived that had very different diets had high diets very high in animal foods like there and so there's a there's a tremendous range out there and um the blue zones are are you know are not unique I'm in the sense that there are other long-lived populations also in the blue zones um there's you know there's so many other things going on they're all populations where people are they have tight-knit communities they are connected to their Traditions they have they all kind they do all kinds of other things that contribute to long life and do we know that it's diet we don't know do we even know the diet is accurately measured in the one Blue Zone that I investigated for my book which was the one on Crete it turns out that that whole story is based on data on 30 to 33 men and one of the sample periods was during Lent when there was no animal Foods being eaten so how good is that data you know not very good yeah and that's just the one that I happen to investigate you know Okinawa is another one I mean okinawans if you they they investigated that population right after World War II and they were devastated in being occupied by American forces is that a fair snapshot of that diet not really you know that's was also known as the island of lard or the island of pig lard or something so and the bluesons came out in a book without any footnotes so there's no way to validate any of any of that research the eat Lancet study is uh is its whole owned topic but it is um it was did not cite any clinical trials um and and when analyzed it was highly deficient in many nutrients any diet that does not provide the nutrients that you need for life health and life is a diet that cannot be considered ideal or even adequate for human functioning so the eat Lance it was the product of a real effort to try to create a diet for climate change um but not for human health it's really not a diet about human health if you look for again the clinical trial is grade a quality data that can show cause and effect if you look for that data on vegan the vegan diet uh what you find is almost nothing like very few studies and in many of the studies that are most often cited Studies by Neil Barnard Studies by John McDougall the very well-known vegans those studies do not show benefit from their diet or in the one by esselton that was had no control group that's not a proper trial so you know there's all there's a lot of holes in that literature or um and you know when you compare that to the clinical trial literature on the low carb diet right that's over a thousand clinical trials now have been done on on the low carb approach so there's really just no comparison in terms of the evidence base so I'm afraid you know that veganism although many people feel very committed to it it just doesn't have the evidence to support it either historically or in the scientific literature well nice well thank you for that I'm sorry to Ambush you with this such a such a long question um but yeah so are you low carb yourself or what what do you do to keto or carnivore or what is your your go-to diet I am basically low carb and um most of the time but I'm not um I'm not like a perfect adherer to that diet I have to say so that's all right you know I sometimes have chocolate I sometimes have things I really like crackers I mean you know I'm just not perfect but um but um but yeah I'm basically I'm much more low carb than when I was a vegetarian I'm much more low carb than when I used to suffer you know chronic sinus infections you know my health has improved enormously um and uh and so you know I by any normal person's standards I'm I'm low carb okay well great well thank you so much for for taking the time out I know we've um been talking for a while and I really really appreciate you taking the time out it's been an absolute pleasure and I think very very informative uh for me and I think everyone watching so thank you very much thank you Anthony it's great to talk to you and I really appreciate you having on your show you too all right we'll see you soon foreign