The Truth Behind Your Declining Health | Gary Taubes, Science Journalist

I'm an investigative science and health journalist I've been spent the first 20 plus years of my career writing about the controversial science bad science one of the researchers I interviewed for this story took credit for getting all of Americans that infect the whole world to go on a lows salt diet it took credit for this idea that sodium in the diet causes high blood pressure and hypertension that causes rebrov vascular disease Strokes heart attacks and later he took credit for getting Americans not just on the low salt diet but the low fat diet that we were all eating in the '90s and he had played a significant role and I just said to my editor I'm going to investigate first salt and then later fat because if this guy played any significant role there has to be a good story there because everything I had learned previously in my career was that bad scientists never get the right answer welcome to the plant-free MD podcast with Dr Anthony chaffy 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 hello everyone thank you for joining me for another episode of plant-free MD podcast I'm your host Dr Anthony chaffy and today I have a very special guest I'm very excited about uh Gary TOS who is uh someone who's been in this space for a very long time fighting the good fight for better nutrition and health around the world Gary thank you so much for coming on and being a guest it's a pleasure to to see you Anthony thank you for having me oh you're very welcome I did want to say sorry late at night here so I'm a little Punchy do you ever introduce a guest and not say you're excited to have them there I I have I usually try to I usually try to um be excited for all my guests you know I mean that's the nice thing about um not having to do this uh as a as a professionist just as a as a um you know my own entertainment enjoyment is that everybody I have on is something I'm excited about because otherwise I don't have them on so that's that's what I would have thought yeah so yeah okay yeah but good yeah very astute um so yeah so I mean I I think that most people uh would have come across your work but for those who haven't can you please tell us a bit about yourself and uh and your work okay so I'm an investigative science and health journalist I've been spent the first 20 whoa 20 plus years of my career uh writing about the controversial science bad science uh fraad cases um coming fascinated and how hard it is to do science right and how easy it is to get the wrong answer and uh late 90s I stumbled into nutrition and have never been able to get out and written five books beginning with uh good calories bad calories in 2007 which in Australia I think is published as the diet delusion and my latest book which came came out uh January was rethinking diabetes and there uh this much a medical history book as it is well far more the history of medicine than it is a diet book but uh fascinating journey to research and write yeah absolutely I I came first came across work actually watched the documentary with um Vinnie torich I first saw your work there I had I'd come across to the space from a very circuitous angle um and so I didn't know all the all the different sort of figures in this who had been working on this for decades and so I came across your work uh subsequently but I was always very very impressed by it I was very um impressed at how you know even from an early stage you you you went on you know public debates and news programs and you know really uh you know defended that case and arguing like you said since the 90s that we we've got it all wrong with nutrition and this is actually harming people um what what first brought you to that uh that way of thinking what was it your sort of your aha moment uh well okay so beginning again this really dates me but in the in the mid 80s I went off to do my first book so I I had a engineer ing physics and journalism background and was working for Science magazine I thought I had a opportunity to write a book about the what was going to be the greatest discovery in physics in 40 years according to the guy who the scientist who was making these claims and he was about to win the Nobel Prize for his earlier work and so I went off to Geneva Switzerland to today we would say I was embedded with his research team and I watched these very smart talented physicists realize that they had screwed up their interpretation of their experiment and had claimed the discovery of something that didn't exist um and I got fascinated with this issue the book was called Nobel dreams excuse me and I got fascinated with this issue of bad science my second book was called bad science was about this cold fusion which was the great scientific Fiasco of the late 20th century and is now the shows up in virtually every other science fiction movie ever made um after I got done writing about cold fusion my friends in the physics Community said if I was interested in bad science I should look at the stuff in public health because they said it was terrible and it turned out it was so the learning experience in doing these books about sort of hard experimental Sciences was how meticulous and rigorous and critical you have to be because if you're not meticulous and rigorous and critical you're going to screw up nature is somehow going to figure out a way to fool you you're going to misinterpret your evidence and um embarrass yourself for lack of a better way to phrase it so in public health all of this rigor and meticulous experimental research can't be done because it's too hard when you studying chronic diseases you've probably discussed this before in your podcast you want to know if the very first thing I wrote about was uh electromagnetic field from power lines can they cause brain cancer and you can't randomize people to living next to power lines and not living next to power lines and seeing which group gets more brain cancer so you have to just observe the people in different populations and then hope that you can understand all the various factors that might be influencing their disease risk and the reality is you can't and so rather than lower their standards we've seen this happen I this was out in the public with covid-19 and vaccines rather than just lower your standards and admit what you don't know which is whether or not these things are dangerous you the Public Health Community just decided that they didn't have to have high standards for establishing proof or evidence or compelling arguments they just it was all a luxury to them everything that the physicists of the world had taught me was absolutely necessary for establishing reliable knowledge was considered a luxury in public health that they couldn't afford so they didn't have to do it and since the early 90s when I started on this I think that gotten worse and worse not better and better and again it all blew up with covid vaccines um towards the late 90s I stumbled into nutrition I was funny story I needed a paycheck I was living in Los Angeles I was a correspondent for the journal science which is a fancy word for freelance writer I needed to pay my rent I called on my editor in Washington I said you have a story I could turn over quickly and that way I could get a paycheck and pay my rent and he did it was a new article coming out the New England Journal of Medicine on the DASH diet dietary approaches to stop hypertension and uh I won't go into the details but one of the researchers I interviewed for this story took credit for getting all of Americans that infect the whole world to go on a lows salt diet and took credit for this idea that sodium in the diet causes blood pressure and hypertension that causes cerebral vascular disease Strokes heart attacks anyway this guy was clearly one of the worst scientist I'd ever interviewed in my life and I'd written a book about cold fusion that was called bad science where I thought I had interviewed surely the worst scientists in the world um I literally got off the phone with this guy and I said actually it's I did multip interviews with him and later he took credit for getting Americans not just on the low salt diet but the low fat diet that we were all eating in the 9s and he had played a significant role and I just said to my editor I'm going to investigate first salt and then later fat because if this guy played any significant role there has to be a good story there because everything I had learned previously in my career was that bad scientists never get the right answer like nature just isn't that kind and that was my aha moment that that somebody who to me was clearly a terrible scientist and you know it's interesting I've had to explain to my friends over the years why I think I can make those judgments and it's like if you're a book critic after 10 or 20 years of doing your work you're pretty confident saying this writer is better than that writer even if that writer outsells him by a factor a thousand because you recognize what it takes to do good writing which is different from telling a good story or writing a mystery novel or you know good murder mystery so anyway the same thing happens in science there are certain things that trigger um that are only bad scientists will say and there are certain ways of speaking with humility about their evidence that good scientists will say because the good scientists are always afraid they're going to screw up that's what keeps them up at night basically is how could they have screwed up and that's all they think about like how did I misinterpret this because surely I did and the bad scientists are so convinced they got the right answer that they never never crosses their mind that they could have screwed up so anyway that was my aha moment the guy named Jeremiah stamler who I might add to his defense lived to be 101 years old so he might have gotten something right um anyway he was didn't have a clue what it took to establish reliable knowledge and took credit for getting us on this low salt lowfat diets and I spent two years well nine months doing one magazine article for the journal science I interviewed about 85 researchers and administrators like had stacks of documents back then you had to go to library and Xerox them um and uh when I was done with that I spent a year on a doing the dietary fat story and you know as we've been living with ever since the idea that lowfat diets are good for us or we should avoid saturated fat and the diet was based on terrible evidence the researchers came to believe it and then they fell in love with their hypothesis they committed to it and when um they did the experiments to test that the experiments failed to confirm the hypothesis they decided they must have done the experiment wrong which again is sort of classic bad science and everything else has followed from those two initial investigations for science yeah well I think that um well that that's really interesting you had that sort of experience um I think that you know some people some people will say well why why are we listening to you know journalists and things like that I think that's exactly who you listening I mean you you you this is your job this what you do is like digging in getting a story looking at the history and finding out what's going on because we' we've been sold a narrative for decades now so that's someone's journalistic impression of of what's been going on but is that the actual story is that really what's going on and you know who better to to dig down deep and actually find out what's at the base of this than someone like yourself who actually knows how to to dig in and uh and get the real story yeah I mean ideally you'd have someone smarter than I was doing this um I have a brother who's a mathematician at Harvard and I keep thinking if I was as smart as my brother really could have gotten some things done but yeah I mean journalists in an Ideal World this again if the nutrition chronic disease people were good scientists they'd have done all this themselves so you know if they're as bad as I think they are probably the evidence for that is that they left it up journalists basically to do their job for them and then the question you always want and even in journalism there the the reporters for the newspapers who just report the latest news and I don't think they're interested in whether or not it's really true or not they're just interested in whether or not the researchers say it's true and they never look beyond that so the latest paper comes out they quote three people they get their paychecks everything's fine and then you have investigative journalist whose job like scientists is to find out what the truth is in a world of uncertainty and that's what interests me I mean that's what I don't want to report on the latest news I want to know what the reality is and then um that's a it's a job very similar to what scientists do and you could screw up as easily as scientists can and you always have to be aware of your biases and try to fight your biases and think about how you could have screwed up and I slept much better before I started doing this um that's what I worry about at 3 in the morning but um yeah the other thing with the journalist um is we're not we don't we're not necessarily susceptible to group think I mean the group think is the other journalists basically but not the community writing about like my job doesn't depend on the scient agreeing with the the researchers I'm writing about that doesn't nobody's giving me a promotion because I agree with them or I don't actually nobody's giving me a promotion anyway because I'm still a freelancer but um you know so yeah a good journalist with the right instincts um you've got to be comfortable with science one of the advantages I had is having written about high energy physics I mean I used to do stories for science on subjects like Quantum Optics that literally would give me a headache trying to understand what I was supposed to write um after that nutrition chronic disease is pretty easy it's it's you it's um it's understandable you could see the patterns in the paper you could see whether people know what they're doing and um the Nuance is the statistics is usually Beyond me but the the mistakes that are often being made are far bigger than that they know how to use their statistical analysis correctly yeah the the other issue is that is the the own you know the hubris of the the researchers involved and even if they you know not even realizing that they could be going down the wrong path maybe if they do even if they do um are they going to admit it to themselves or others when their when their reputation is sted on this specific position it's such just a reputation it's how how you think of yourself um it's your beliefs it's I mean what and this is true of everyone um and it's interesting one of the things around 2002 2000 and three as I was really digging into the research on Obesity I started wondering if I was crazy um like could they have possibly made the kind of mistakes that they seem clearly to have made and um so I had a I started reading the philosophy of science and studying the sociology of Science and you find people going back 400 years a sort of scientific method kind of begins with this guy Francis Bacon in England these a lawyer in the early 1600s and he's basically say saying the same thing everyone else is saying it's so easy to fool yourself that all of the scientific method is basically created to minimize the possibility that you're going to fool yourself you're still likely going to do it but science is the best thing we have experiment hypothesis testing and testing and testing is the best thing we have to minimize this risk and um what happens with these guys again so one of the mistakes that I pointed out that I think is so profound and obesity is is this really simplistic idea that we came to think of obesity is caused by eating too much and this idea goes back to the history of writing about obesity and it just seemed obvious some people who struggle with obesity are eat a lot of food therefore their obesity is caused by eating a lot and you don't have to understand anything else and in looking at the research and I ended up becoming a medical historian starting as a journalist and becoming a historian in medicine because you just keep going farther and far farther back in time and you find out that prior to World War II the best medical research in the world was being done by Germans and austrians just like they were doing the best physics and the best chemistry it was just the sort of um the the hot bed of good science and these people had come to conclude that obesity was a sort of constitutional hormonal dis problem it was it wasn't a needing too much thing you couldn't explain it by saying people take in more energy than they expend because often you know you find plenty of people who suffer from obesity live with obesity and don't eat any more than lean people do and you find plenty of lean people who eat a normous amounts of food and don't get fat so the whole energy balance thing is is meaningless and they had worked their way through this they started in the early 1900s believing that obesity was caused by this imbalance between intake and expenditure and by the mid 1920s late 1920s after doing hundreds of experiments with obese people and lean people and people who suffer from various like uh you know Unix who tend to get fat um they people have been castrated I mean they studied everything dog they overfed dogs they starved dogs they overfed rodents they starve rodents at the end of it it's like this tells us nothing let's get rid of it and then this German Austrian School evaporates with the second with the second world war and post World War II with whole new generation of young American mostly American Physicians young men come in and say obesity is caused by eating too much and we've been believing it ever since M and the problem is when you grow up believing that and all you work is based on so like when we talk about why do ultra processed foods make us fat the answer is they make us eat too much right they somehow trigger this unconscious consumption of excess calories um when we talk about what how did gop1 Agonist the new wovi uh you uh sem tide uh drugs these weight loss drugs how do they make you lose weight well they make you eat less it's sort of everything is woe is based on this concept that you get F because you eat too much and when your whole career is based on that when everything you've ever done is based on that when everything you've ever written is based on that when everything all your colleagues believe that it's like belonging to a church right and everybody in your church believes one thing and you've based your whole career on that it's virtually impossible to even accept the possibility that it could be wrong not only that it could be wrong but it's funny I gave a a talk back in 2009 that this the pen Medical Research Center which is in Louisiana United States it's the largest academic obesity Research Center in the US and I gave this talk about this how we had misunderstood obesity and how it had to be a sort of hormonal neuroendocrine disorder to use a technical term and at the end of The Talk this very distinguished gentleman the audience raises his hand um and he says got a slight European accent he says Mr tabs is it fair to say that one subtext of your talk is you think we are all idiots because I've just explained to them that they missed they and I'm thinking yeah it's fair to say but I can't actually say that right um that would be insulting so I actually I said look I just think when you people came in like your generation the 1960s you were given this way of thinking about obesity this framework that it was caused by eating too much and it seemed so intuitively obvious you never bothered to question it MH and now it's 40 years later it's too late it's like too big to fail how do you even begin the process I mean I could tell you how to do it but you're not going to listen to me but how do you begin the process of accepting that you screwed up or you even might have screwed up because I could screw up I mean maybe I'm a nut case but um yeah so it's not about your reputation you don't really care about what other people think of you in that sense although if again the church metaphor it's like if you grow up in the Catholic church and you decide there is no God all your friends and family and relatives are going to have issues with you yeah but it's more what you think of yourself how do you accept the fact that you screwed up I mean I'm I'm rambling a bit it's the late night interview thing in the United States imagine you're wrong about the carnivore diet yeah I do you know and I mean I often sit here thinking am I killing myself I mean as soon as you said you're having trouble remembering the name I want to say well that's because you don't need enough carbohydrates um but if you're wrong if we're wrong will we be able to accept it and move on and the odds are very good that if we're like virtually every other human who's ever been on the planet the answer will be no we won't we'll die prematurely thinking I was right it just didn't apply to me or something I don't know I mean you come up with a rationalization yeah yeah well that is something that that worries me because it's not just me you know I I think that you know the way I feel and how my body is working it's like I've never felt better in my life so I'm you know pretty happy with that but you know my my family is doing this and they're doing this because of me and my patients are doing this and they're doing this because of me and the people that that listen to my podcast are doing this and they're doing this because of me and they're listening to me and they're and they're getting guidance from that and that freaks me out because I really don't want people to be hurt and I really don't want people to take my advice and have that be wrong and have that that that hurt them that that freaks me out and which is why I when I was first coming out this War I ever had a platform I started asking I was like okay what am I missing you know what are all these these plant-based people what all the the vegans and the the Walter Willets and the Michael gregers of the world you know what do they know that I don't and I so I went to their websites and I I you know read their works and and um and I did not find anything you know that I was missing there A lot of it was you know predicated on different different sorts of uh you know misconceptions to do with fat and cholesterol mostly and and then some things were just outright lies saying that humans evolved is herbivores I mean that that's just I'm sorry like this just zero that you know no and that's that's all true the problem is it doesn't mean we're right that they're wrong oh yeah that's one of the and that's yeah it's funny I have this discussion one of my colleagues uh allies friends uh guy named Mark Freedman whose work I discussed in the last chapter of of the diet delusion uh Mark was a in a field called physiological psychology and one of the uh the maybe the best scientist I interviewed of the 600 or so scientists I interviewed for my book again making that kind of judgment about the qual by how he talks about his evidence and um I have these discussions with Mark and I said well you know how do we know we're not wrong and Mark says cuz we're not and I go but yeah but the defining characteristic of every quack is that they know they're not wrong so us knowing we're not wrong doesn't mean we're not quacks yeah technically I can't be a quack I think you have to be a doctor to be a quack so a crank might be um the uh yeah I brought this the second and last book I wrote was called the case for keto which was um I really wanted to write a book that just explained why anyone would do such an extreme diet like why you would do an even more extreme diet at one point I wanted to call it the case for fed diets but my Publishers rejected that um and in it I discussed the fact I mean the fact that we can eat this way and get healthier so you actually this is described to me by a South African physician I interviewed for the book who was working outside of Vancouver and Canada um I forget his last name so but I'm not going to take credit for it but he said you know for 40 years we've been told to prescribe diets by hypothesis so the hypothesis is low-fat diets will make you live longer because they'll prevent heart disease but you can't actually experience heart disease being prevented you can't experience any disease being prevented like even uh if you go on a diet for longevity you can't experience yourself living longer than you thought you were GNA live because you never knew how long you were going to live in the first place the flip side is diet by experience you try this diet and you're overweight and you're diabetic you're whatever symptoms you have and you go pick a way to eat and your symptoms go away and you're healthy and you tell your patients to do it and your patients do it and their symptoms go away and now you've got diet by experience you don't know if they're going to live longer because we don't have that evidence but you know that the way they're eating is made them healthier and that's really the best we can do everything else is fingers crossed that Health in the short run translates to a healthier longer life in the long run but we're not telling anyone to trust us nobody's eating this way because they're preventing a chronic disease even though if we're right they are they're eating this way because they're healthier this way than they were and they can experience that change in their health so um on that basis we're in pretty safe teritory T although I did have a friend a screenwriter in Los Angeles who used to say that if I was wrong I would have to flee to Argentina with all the other people who like the Nazis who killed millions in World War II um the uh but yeah well you know I mean but the same same argument uh could be made against the anel keys of the world you know people that that you know purposefully took money to you know fall falsify the data hide the the experimental trials you know disproving these things I mean they they I mean if if that's the case that they turn people away from a healthy path and yeah I don't think this is this is a my interest has always been um and I like all my books on some level about good science and bad science and cognitive dissonance and group think and I don't think these people and anel keys I don't think he did what he did because he took money from anyone even though he got funded by the sugar industry and Jeremiah stamler got funding from the corn oil industry but um yudkin John yudkin who was a major anti-sugar figure and if if we're right was kind of a hero he took money from the artificial sweetener industry because they needed to fund their research back then and ihh wasn't giving out a lot of money and if you get someone to fund your research you lived with it um I don't think they were venal I don't think any of those people did anything for the money I think they did it because they convinced themselves they were right and then they couldn't accept any other answer and they saw what they had to see to be right you know so yeah um I talked about this in uh a chapter in good calories bad calories I remember when I wrote this I told my editor this either the best thing everyone anyone ever written on selection bias or it's insane and tell me now what it is because I'm not going to write the next chapter until we've s but it's as though you know you've got evidence like uh a coin you've got heads and you've got tails and you believe that every time you flip this coin it's going to come up heads and every time you flip it and it comes up tails you say I didn't flip it right or the surface was uneven or the wind was blowing or the sun was in my eyes or you know and you you come up with a you get a Duo for every time the evidence disagrees with how you think and you just people really do think like that that's what Francis Bacon this guy 400 years ago said it's like we just see the evidence that supports our opinions and we ignore the evidence it doesn't and so people be get into that mindset and they just become convinced they're right and I think that's what motivates them um he said a few things towards the end of his well wasn't late in his life he also lived to be over a hundred whatever that means um he said some things that made me wonder if he really thought he was right towards the end but um I've dealt with these people I've interviewed them again the the joy of being a journalist is you get to talk to these people and I really don't think I mean corporate influence the corporations the food industry D pharmaceutical industry have have influence on a much sort of meta level but in the level of the scientists they're just taking the bad science these people produce and running with and then the people who produce a bad science just convince themselves that they're right and then they can't let it go hey everyone really happy to announce a new sponsor for the show and for everybody down in Australia Stockman steaks who are delivering highquality grass-fed and finished pasture raised beef and other meats flash frozen and vacuum sealed tood door something I've been enjoying a lot of myself recently as well they also have a great range of specialty items such as high fat keto mints and carnivore beef and organs mints with liver kidneys and beef heart as well so use code chaffy today for free order of beef mints or another specialty gift along with your order at Stockman steaks.com and I'll see you over there thanks guys yeah it's it's um it is an interesting situation to be in you know when when you dedicated your whole career to something and and you see evidence of it being wrong that yeah you have a have a sort of existential moment where like what's happening um my father was a physicist and and um now retired and computer scientist and he was um he was at Berkeley at the Lawrence Livermore radiation laboratory worked with um uh Louis Alvarez and and those people who was on his team with the you know on the early you know cyclotrons and cracking atams like that um so he was on that those teams and um one of the the physicists that he worked there with I don't I don't recall his name um he walked into his office one day uh at the Lawrence lab and and he just looked like he' just been struck from above and my Del was like are you okay and he said I think I may have just wasted the last 20 years of my life and I said well what do you mean um they at that up to that point everyone thought that you know gravity was the the underlying unifying force in the universe now they're studying you know these other sorts of forces these Atomic forces such as you know the the electrons and and protons and their sort of attractive Force to each other which is 1 * 10 to the 42nd power times more powerful than the gravitational attraction and so he said you know this these plasma forces are 42 orders of magnitude more powerful than gravity it can't be gravity you know gravity can't be the the unifying force it's there but it's it can't be the major factor that I think I've wasted my entire career and he his existential crisis uh ended up being that he actually just went straight out of physics and he went to a completely different uh line of work just said I can't do this I don't know if he didn't trust himself and Trust his own judgment but it it really it really threw him for a spin and he just he left the whole industry well this is [Music] um and this is reality um and this is the nature of science the the thing with physics is you can actually do the experiments and the physicist Community is also willing to pay what ever it takes to get the experiments done so if it takes 10 billion they raise 10 billion if it takes 30 years to build the accelerator and raise the money that's what they do and then you can actually determine who's right and who's wrong and someone's going to be wrong but in again in nutrition and chronic disease and public health you can't do the [Music] experiments you could do the shortterm experiments but you can always find an out you can always find an excuse for why you're right and they're wrong and you know I've been accused of this because it it's experiments again every time you flip the coin it if you're right maybe you'll get eight heads and two tails or 80 heads and 20 tails and that's a good sign that you're right but you're never going to get 100 zero even when you're right some results some experiments are going to be done poly or incorrectly or they're going to be unlucky and they're going to get the wrong answer it's just the nature of the game and then some significant number of people who do it are wasting their career and should do what your father's colleague did by the way Lou Alvarez um Lou was his son Walter I guess his son was Walter Alvarez Louis said only trust would you can prove it's one of my favorite sayings in science and I think I quoted it even in the um rethinking diabetes only trust what you can prove and the problem is you can't prove anything in nutrition in public health so you always have part of the secret to being a good scientist is to not commit yourself like you might want something to be true it's your baby it's your hypothesis or your experimental result but as soon as you commit yourself you're screwed because now you're never going to pay attention to the evidence that suggests you're wrong that if it sometimes you get eight heads and two tails and the correct answer is Tails and you got to be willing to accept that and so the key is you have to remain humble weirdly and offer speak about the evidence with humility and the world is full I used to quote these my when I wrote about physics particular this whole files of quotes about you know um experimentalists talking about the likelihood that they screwed up and theorists tended refuse to believe they screw scw up but they invariably most of them are I I just pitched a article to science I used to write to for in the 90s because in the mid 90s I did a story on the something called String Theory you probably know what string theory is string theory was the latest way to unify gravity with these other uh the electromagnetic and strong forces and it's the idea that the on one level particles aren Point like particles are little vibrating strings and um we're going on the 40th anniversary of the Breakthrough and string theory and there's zero evidence to support it and I don't think anyone even knows how to test it and I want to go back I wrote a article that won me journalism Awards in like 1994 on the third 10th anniversary about the state of the science there and now I want to know if there are people who think they wasted their careers I spent you know the young men who went into string theory in their 20s or now my age yeah do they feel they wasted their career because that's what science is often it's just wasting your career going down a blind alley yeah yeah um funny you mentioned Walter Alvarez people don't know he was the guy came up with the theory that the asteroid killed the dinosaurs and his father Louie helped sort of show that with the different sorts of um materials that they found in that sort of the the black line goes across the world uh that was also my dad's best friend in high school they grew up together in uh at Berkeley High School so they were they were very close friends and keys was from Berkeley by the one oh was he oh I didn't know that yeah yeah yeah yeah interesting up went to Berkeley High oh okay is that why you don't you spend time in the States because you don't have an you don't have a accent to my a no I've I've uh I've only lived in Australia for five years so my I yeah Santa Barb BR and Seattle so we moved up to Kirk and Washington when I was around nine and a half 10 and uh my dad um went into uh uh computer science and programming after uh he the Lawrence lab and uh took a contract with Boeing and was up there doing all the the sort of Defense contracts and things like that that they that that Boeing had up there so we relocated up to to Washington and uh yeah I've only I've I've lived abroad I I you know played rugby and uh played wanted to play at the top levels possible so I played all the top levels in the US and Canada and wanted to go higher than that and so I went and played uh professionally in England and then I decided to stay abroad from medical school and and practiced over in Ireland for a couple years and came back and was doing humanitarian work in banglades in with you know you may have heard of this the the rohinga refugees that um in Myanmar there was like a genocide in 20 like September 2017 sort of killed like 200 unofficial numbers 200,000 people in about six weeks and a million people fled into Southern Bangladesh and there wasn't really anybody helping it wasn't being publicized it wasn't one of the sexy humanitarian crisis it was just a real one and um no one was really going there because it was pretty uh dangerous area Isis was very active at the time and uh targeting Americans obviously the the few that went over there and uh so people were just saying just don't go no matter what you do don't go um but I I went anyway just because no one else was going and I felt that was important to do um and then uh and then after that came down to Australia just to get back going going with uh you know my my surgical training and um but yeah no I I I make it a point not to pick up the a then I I learned how to speak properly once I don't need to to do it again and um so try try not to to pick up the accents wherever I go when I you know playing rugby with people we we travel all the world and there was always one guy on the team that just like immediately adopted the accent of whatever country we're in and like I just felt so embarrassed for him it was like so cringey to me it was just like can you stop like that's just like just sometimes it's just a habit though if I'm around Southerners in the United States I'll pick up a draw and I haven't spent more than I think I drove through the South once proba wa 10 12 hours but sometimes it's just a habit yeah the um is your father still with us he is yeah yeah he's retired now what is what does he think of the carnivore he's been carnivore for six and a half years he has so you convinced him or he convinced you um I he convinced himself um based on my experience and and the things that I had found out and I was back helping them out they my both my parents needed surgery at the same time and I just sort of said why don't I just come back and just help you guys out for a while and um and then I was I was and then I went was in Bangladesh and then when I came back um I was there helping out and that's when I I rediscovered the whole carnivore Di that that was my circut circut sort of um pathway here was when I was in my early 20s and I was doing my undergraduate degree at the University of Washington in Seattle I took a class in cancer biology where the professor told us how toxic plants were and how they were very highly carcinogenic and there were all these dozens of of identified carcinogens and all the different fruits and vegetables and produce items that we eat um you know talking about you know this is the natural defense mechanism of plants and these tox that they make there's about a million of them and many of them can be carcinogenic and so he told us that he didn't eat um vegetables or Salad wouldn't let his kids eat vegetables or Salad because in his words plants are trying to kill you and that was that's where that little statement of mine comes from and that just blew my the top of my head off and you know as as as well as the rest of the people in the class and I just I just refused to eat any plant after that for years and it wasn't until I was in England that I just sort of started slipping off of that and then then many many years later I'm there you know with my with my parents just back from Bangladesh and I heard you know Shawn Baker on Joe Rogan talking about how you know you can just eat meat and this that and the other and within five minutes like I knew he was he was really on to something and you know I IID picked up different pieces like uh my father actually put me on to Robert lustig's work back in 2009 that was my first year in medical school he said hey this is a really interesting talk when you check it out that was this sugar the bitter truth talk and and that was that was very interesting to me and that that sort of um you know put my thinking in a very different direction and um then I started seeing I was in different sort of groups with different doctors and they were and they would talk about different research that was coming out and there's all these research around 2014 2015 you know the um the the Minnesota coronary experiment it was published 40 years later in 2014 2015 large studies with over 60 ,000 um patients showed that actually people elderly patients over 65 if they were on statins and lowering their cholesterol actually died more and they were like they're questioning this like hey is this is this actually um something we should be doing so I was aware of all those sorts of things and I saw Baker talking about this everything just sort of clicked for me they wait hold on a second that's what I was doing for five years when I've never felt better in my entire life and I've always been trying to figure out how to get back there that's what I was doing and like humans just are you know meat eaters we've been eating meat for millions of years we've been apex predators for millions of years apex predators by definition or corn of Wars that's what I was doing get rid of these stupid plants and I just I just cut them out and and I felt massively improved for it and um to the point that I was 38 and I went back and started playing professional rugby again felt like a superhero I felt like I was 22 again and I felt better at 38 than I did at 28 playing professional rugby and so I started really digging into it saying okay what the hell is going on here you know what's the evidence for this what can we prove and as I was doing my own research and and reading about this stuff and I was getting really excited I was Finding I found the whole keto thing I found thousands of studies on high fat meat-based ketogenic diets which a carnivore diet is and I was like look you mean these people are you know doing this and doing this and doing this and it's affecting diseases in these ways like isn't this amazing you know my parents are very very um you know intelligent educated uh but interested people they're very interested in the world around them so they're very you know interested in hearing all the things that I was talking about and after a couple months of this my dad um and my mom who were both having health issues my mom had been you know insulin dependent diabetic for 30 plus years at that point and my dad just said why don't we just you know to my mom just said hey why don't we just try this for a month see how it goes and so she decided you know she did it with him their lives turned around I mean with within a month it was it was remarkable the difference that it made my my father was diagnosed with with Parkinson's around that time and he was uh had just had a bad complication after surgery where he had a very serious internal bleed uh on warrin and um uh thankfully I was there with him because if um if I didn't if I wasn't there with him and recognize what was going on like he probably would have died because my mom said she would have no idea to have called an ambulance or take him in all he had was just back pain but you know people over the age of 65 on blood thinners if you have acute severe onset back pain um that's a bleed until proven otherwise and so I was just like right we need to get you in and sure enough he was bleeding and so um so he was in the hospital for for you know about a week was getting blood transfusions things like that and uh that really set him back and so he his his health was uh you know very poor at the time and he was very weak and I mean I would it would it would be sometimes days between when I would hear him speak and when he would speak his voice was so weak that you just couldn't hear him unless you were right next to him within a month he's he's walking around he's talking normally he's just he's he's my dad again you know it was like you just roll back the clock 10 years and there's no sign of Parkinson he's not stuttering he doesn't have a Tremor he's just just my dad again and um and then he started how long had he had the Parkinson's he asking a very good friend of mine was diagnosed about a year ago and I gave her the diet Spiel and said that's the last I'm going to mention it her husband's one of my oldest friends I about once every three months it comes up but she's got this attitude I like she likes food she likes her wine she's got enough problems with the Parkinson's and I keep saying just try it for a month one month strict see what happens maybe you decide it's worth it best case scenario won't do anything and you go back to your wine and your your pasta but uh I haven't had any luck so yeah well he had um he his doctor had been questioning whether he had Parkinson's for for a number of years there were some some sort of subtle signs that his doctor had picked up on uh but then it was confirmed um uh on on further testing and imaging as well showing that you know substan Nigri had started to stop being as active um but it wasn't it wasn't uh very profound at the time um but he was uh having memory issues and like I said you know there's a combination of things he was very very hard done by that um Hospital experience in that bleed but he his memory issues were gone I mean he he started pulling out his old you know uh grad textbooks from Berkeley and things like that from his PhD and um and uh and then started going through you know his all his physics books and math books and things like that he started teaching himself Greek I mean it's just you know something that that a 78-year-old man typically doesn't do and he wasn't capable of doing even a couple months earlier and U and he just kept getting better and and both he and my mom started losing weight my my dad's um um yeah his his didn't really have many signs of Parkinson's after that his progression has been you know very very mild at I mean at at worst and um and then you but so it's doesn't certainly not following the typical pattern of progression in parkinsonism for the last six years he really hasn't had any progression to speak of and so um you could you could see some sign some there he has has a bit of a Tremor sometimes but it it's not it's not always there you know difficulty getting going sometimes um but it's it's not anything close to what uh you would expect for a six-year sort of on and also he's come off his medication you know he didn't he didn't like some of the side effects he was having with it and so he hasn't been on medications at all so you know no no medications and yet really no progression to speak of uh my mom reversed her diabetes in two months you know her HB andc went from 8.9 to 6.1 in two months as she was coming off medications and um now she's off all night she you said she was insulin insulin dependent but she was type two she was type two yeah but she she burned she she was on insulin yeah yeah yeah yeah so yeah type two but insulin dependent so um she came off yeah all her oral medications reduced her insulin down to a minimal dose within two months and now she's completely off uh her insulin and everything like that so she effectively doesn't have diabetes anymore and so yeah so they both they both improved rapidly and but you know it was um but that but that was you know it wasn't me trying to convince them because I knew yeah yeah well this is yeah it was interesting doing this diabetes book um and we can talk about the history there because it's fascinating to me anyway um but pushing you know keto or carnivore for people are 20 30 40 pounds overweight it's you know maybe it'll help I mean I'm sure they'll get better but often they lose the weight that their life doesn't really change right you still don't like your job your marriage isn't any good being 30 lbs lighter isn't helping and then you know the tradeoff you know I mean I think it's worth it MH but not everyone does I get that and they fall off the wagon it's like this carbohydrate addiction issue and then then so they go back to eating what they used to eat the next thing you know they've gained the weight back and keto is a diet that didn't work for them or carnivore there's a diet that didn't work for them um but if you have diabetes and you're looking at a lifetime of medications and lifetime depending a lifetime of injecting yourself with insulin I mean um it's a much different sort of tradeoff now being healthy means a lot more to you being unhealthy means a lot more to you and so I always had this feeling that diabetes would be the sort of tipping point of this Theory because you could convince people you know look try this diet and you'll essentially be healthy or we can give you drugs um the Montreal physician a woman whose name I'm going to forget now we tell you I'm glad your father's memory is terrific but I may have to give up my broccoli um she said she talks to her patients and she tells her patients look I could I could give you a pill or I teach you how to eat um now unfortunately we have the same or fortunately depending on how you want to look at it we have the same same situation with obesity and Mobi we can give you a shot once a week or we could teach you how to eat but if we teach you how to eat we can pretty much guarantee you're not going to have side effects you're not going to get inured to it it's not going to blow up in your face 10 years from now um if you prefer a drug you prefer a drug and it's not we can do about that but diabetes always struck me as a sort of place where you can go in and say look undeniably you can put this disease into a mission you can be healthy if you eat right okay no drugs no medications no blood pressure medications no blood sugar medications no worry about neuropathies and going blind and kidney failure and all the other complications of diabetes it happens even to people who try to keep their blood sugar good control with drugs they still get these complications and we could teach how to eat and it's good food yeah t good too yeah well you know to to that end know it'd be great to to hear more about your work with uh you know the rethinking diabetes book I saw a lecture you gave on that at the public health collaboration conference in in England I I was very very interested by it um one of the things that that interested me was you know some of the early treatments for diabetes before we had insulin and things like that were low carb diets were they not well that's the thing the the first physician to successfully put a case of diabetes into remission and write about it in the literature was a British physician named John R 1797 treating a colonel Meredith who comes in with all the symptoms of out of control diabetes he was obese he's lost a lot of weight he's hungry all the time he's thirsty all the time he's peeing bucket he um R decides the way you diagnose the diabetes not just the symptoms but back then they would actually taste the urine in an ideal world you would have your assistant taste the urine and if the urine was a little bit sweet you knew that the guy had diabetes so I figured if the urine's sweet there's carbohydrates in the urine the guy is not metabolizing carbohydrates correctly and so let's give him a carbohydrate free diet and the original thing was sort of fatty rancid meat and blood sausages and then um he got rid of the ranid meat later and didn't have to eat the blood sausages all the time but the point is Meredith got better actually lived for another 12 years and so R treats another patient he was in the midle milary so he treats a general who when he's on the diet gets better he then goes back home and his local physician says I you don't have to eat that diet and he eats whatever he wants and dies like a month later um R writes a pamphlet about and he circulates the pamphlet to Physicians throughout the United Kingdom and he says look it worked try it on your patients and let me know this is what they did before clinical trials was sort of you just tell Pat tell the Physicians what you did and they would try on their patients and if it worked they would go from there by the mid 19th century this is a standard of care in diabetes for the US the UK and France and Germany and Italy Austria um all the major diabetes doctors are telling their patients see what they call the animal diet it was basically a key it was animal products and green leafy vegetables and then towards the end of the 19th century often the patients would show up um having experienced significant weight loss so if they were type one diabetics if they were kids they would be emaciated and they were hungry all the time and thirsty and peeing and um weak and that was a acute disease and they knew that these kids didn't live very long one way or the other although this animal diet would lengthen their lives and and the older people who would come in were people who used to be fat but now had lost a lot of weight so their pancreas had become exhausted and they had type two diabetes but they were now insulin deficient also so they wanted to put weight back on these people because they were emaciated both the kids and the adults so you get rid of the carbs and you replace those calories with fat because they knew that Pro would stimulate being converted to glucose so by the early 19th century the diet standard of care is this high fat diet that famous American diabetes specialist Elliot Joselyn says like that butter is the butter and heavy cream are the best friends of diabetics basically that's what you that's where your calories are coming from and they could keep these people alive indefinitely Jocelyn got into uh medicine be into diabetes research because his mother had diabetes and he he went to Germany to study with these great German diabetologists and they taught him how to do this high fat diet and he came back and put his mother on and she outlived everyone in his family nice um and then 1921 insulin is discovered okay and insulin is a wonder drug insulin was to diabetes what w groi is to obesity today um they give type insulin to these emaciated kids who on the brink of death from uncontrolled type one diabetes and you can resurrect them and that's the kind of Physicians talked about was sort of this religious terminology they never seen anything like it people could be in diabetic Comas keto acidosis give them insulin bring them back to life they thought that was beyond hope um but the kicker is that instense is extraordinarily powerful drug and one thing it does is it causes hypoglycemia it lowers blood sugar so much it was hard to figure out it was how to dose it you had to do it by basically trial and error with each patient um they compared it to Morphine they said imagine if patients could dose themselves with morphine um and how many patients you lose it's like thank God you had to use a needle and you know a hypodermic because you could the doctors could control it on some level but the low blood sugar would kill people so uncontrolled type 1 diabetes would kill them if they're kids over the course of weeks or month or adults over the course of years but the antidote The Cure insulin could kill them overnight so now you go from basically treating these people with the diet that had zero carbohydrates in it for all intents and purposes having to tell them to eat carbs to balance out the insulin and so the diets become ever more carbohydrate Rich because the patients don't really want to be on diets the doctors don't want to deal with keeping their patients on diets especially if the patients are kids it's like it's bad enough having type 1 diabetes without never getting to eat an ice cream cone or a birthday cake ever again so they decide to patients do better they just give them a lot of insulin and let them eat as whatever they want like let them eat the birthday cakes and the ice cream cones are going to do it anyway this way at least they'll be following our directions and yeah you try to convince them that they should dose the carbs so that they eat a set amount at every meal and every snack to cover the insulin properly but they go again from you could think of it as having two levers you could pull to control blood sugar one is the diet just carbohydrates raise blood sugar don't eat them and the other is a drug let's give them the drug and then we'll let them eat the carbs and we'll hope the drug solves the problem and because you're replacing insulin that they thought they had lost everyone assumed that it would solve the problem and it didn't short stories by the 30s these people are wait excuse me one second mhm I knew I should have brought water up to my office but I didn't Anyway by the 1930s these people are getting all the manifestations of um the complications of diabetes uh kids who had been kept alive for 10 15 years on insulin are now getting they're going blind they're having kidney failure the neuropathies limbs are being amputated arteriosclerosis is blooming in every vessel in their body and now they're dying prematurely and still tragically young like in late 20s early 30s um the Elder patients are getting the same complications and the doctors assume that the problem is poorly controlled blood sugar you're not doing a good enough job controlling blood sugar so how do you control blood sugar better higher doses of insulin longer lasting insulin new insulins new Oro hypoglycemic drugs nobody ever stops and says why don't we just tell them not to eat carbohydrates and as soon as somebody does somebody else says Ah they don't they're not going to go on a diet or if you don't eat carbs they'll have to eat a lot of saturated fat and that'll come from heart disease so um again the history is f fascinating and the revelatory thing to me was that even as this idea of evidence-based medicine came in in the 1970s 80s 90s and doctors started saying we have to have a strong evidence base for how we're treating our patient you need randomized control trials to demonstrate that what you're doing is to do and better than other approach approaches they grandfathered in some approaches they never really thought about the Alternatives because at the time that evidence-based medicine emerged there weren't they they had long ago forgotten there were Alternatives and so this idea that you treat diabetes with drug therapy rather than diet was grandfathered in and then they start doing all these randomized controlled trials and the trials all fail all their beliefs fall apart as soon as they start to test them but this is where we were talking before they they don't change their minds they don't change what they're doing despite now knowing that what they're doing isn't working and People Like Us come along and say look don't eat scarbs yeah it sounds complicated but it's not just some foods aren't good for you don't eat them and you'll be fine and they look at us like we're Nut Cases bad Di we know how you know it's a very strange situation to be in 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 a 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 there 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 yeah yeah very I um I was speaking to a doctor and he said that he sort of saw this from from the inside and it it really woke him up that uh a patient would come in and they look at their hba1 scene like oo it's starting to go up it's going up it's going up that's not good we're going to have to increase your your medication we're going to have to increase your insulin and then they go to The dietitian and the dietician says oh looks like the doctor's increased your insulin now you need to increase your carbohydrates because now you have too much insulin now you're going to need to increase I have a minimum number of grams of carbohydrates and then then the next you know three months they come back in oh your hb1c is up again going to have to go to your insulin again and then your carb hydrates again and it it just kept going like this it's like when are you you going to figure this out uh that this is uh that you're causing the problem that you're trying to fix I spoke to a type 1 diabetic who said why I couldn't ever do a ketogenic diet because I have to have carbs because I'm diabetic and so I have to take insulin because I'm diabetic and therefore I have to eat carbs because I'm diabetic it's like you you've got those backwards this is so one of the I had a I'm a big fan of epigraphs epigraphs are epigraphs a little quote that starts a chapter it's usually an italics um I love these things I love quotes about good signs and bad signs I had an epigraph at the beginning of rethinking diabetes it was from a patient a young man with type one diabetes who I had interviewed he had actually he had he had been a chef and became a journalist so he interviewed me when I published my sugar book the case against sugar and I he had told me that he had type 1 diabetes and I said oh I got to interview you when I because I'm going to write a book about diabetes so um he's telling me about being diagnosed in his mid-30s with type one and in Russ wallan and when you're diagnosed with any chronic or any disease you're right you're thrown into disease land you know nothing about it you've been living your life thought you were healthy and suddenly it's a whole world of complications and consequences and terms and drugs and treatments and processes you've got to learn about and this happens to him with type one and he's getting his his uh diabetes educator and his physician are explaining to him what the issue is and they say you know look you've got type 1 diabetes your body doesn't make enough insulin anymore so when eat carbohydrates your blood sugar goes crazy so we're going to give you insulin and then you're going to you're going keep eating the carbs to balance out that insulin because otherwise you'll get low blood sugar and die so he says wait let me get this straight so I've got type 1 diabetes uh my pancreas is failing me carbohydrates are the problem insulin is the antidote and you want me to eat the problem and take the antidote why don't I just not eat the problem and the doctor he said the doctor looked at him like he'd never thought about this in his whole life he was like mystified by this idea it's like rather than eat the carbs take the antidote just don't eat the carbs that way you don't have to deal with the antidote then he every drug comes with drug doesn't exist it doesn't come with complications consequences and side effects um he also said the doctor says to him well you know people find it very hard to comply to that diet people don't adhere to it and he said well if I had just told you you that I was going to take up a exercise program on an hour a day would you have told me oh people find it hard to run an hour a day I would wouldn't want you to get disappointed if you can keep it up and the doctor like no of course not I'd advocate for your exercise then let me try the I'm dying see what happens if I don't stick with it I don't stick with it don't tell me in advance that I shouldn't try it because I might not stick with it because I'm going to miss my ice cream cones and my pasta it's a crazy world um and now with again with these new glp1 drugs we've got a whole new world of new drugs that everybody loves I don't doubt for a second that they're better than insulin this is one of the other crazy parts of this history his so like I said insulin's discovered and purified 1921 and tested in early 1922 on these young kids in Toronto um at the time they have no way to measure insulin levels hormone levels in the bloodstream so they assume that they know they different types of diabetes as acute form that kids get and this chronic form that older heavy people get but they assume they all insulin deficiency diseases so you treat the kids by giving they don't make insulin so you give them insulin and you treat the older people you also give them insulin because they're insulin resistant you have to give them enormous amounts of insulin but you give them insulin because they got an insulin deficiency disease so you think 40 years later somebody finally comes up with a test an assay that allows you to measure insulin other hormones ACC in the bloodstream and the first thing they notice in their papers very first papers they ever published type 2 diabetes is disorder of not low insulin but High insulin so people have high blood sugar and high insulin they must somehow be resistant to the insulin therefore they have insulin resistance so now you're giving a patient whose diseas is characterized by high levels of insulin more insulin to cure it and instead of saying to themselves wait a minute if it's a disease of high insulin maybe we should figure out a way to lower the insulin and that'll fix the disease and they never say that I mean I and when I say I never say that I read an enormous amount of the diabetes literature and I cannot find more than two or three people suggesting and quickly being shushed or like n don't never work but suggesting that if it's a disease of high insulin the treatment is not is not more insulin but figuring out how to lower the insulin the way you lower the insulin is you lower the carbs so you get rid of the carbs you bring the insulin down you bring the blood sugar down and patients fine the problem is that they can't eat carbs so don't eat carbs that's my Jewish New York way of phrasing that I do do accents um that's why I'm sympathetic to the geek on your rugby team um by the way when I was I played football in college and um I used to go in before I game I'd get my my knees taped I've a bad knee that has since been replaced I'd get my ankles taped and I I would tape my wrist myself the rugby players when they're getting like their noses taped on and their shoulders taped on and their ears taped and it was like you guys it's insane and then when I went to graduate school and I couldn't play football anymore I figured I'd try give rugby a shot and after two weeks was like no thank you um not for me I if I'm gonna smash into people I want to have a you ads and a helmet yeah what you say yeah it's um it it does make you feel bit a lot more protected to have to have the pads and the helmet um but same time you know I I was sort of thought about it because you can wear you just can't wear hard plastic you can wear like sort of soft pads or a soft helmet um does something but you know I I always thought of it as you know it's not just just patting my shoulders but it's patting their ribs from my shoulders I I wanted that out of the way so could just get my my shoulders in and bang and smash them in there so I I didn't I didn't want protecting them more than anything I was a defense you were what sorry yeah I never got to that I was a defensive linean we don't do a lot of I was a defensive lineman so when you're a lineman you do a lot of smushing you don't do a lot of banging it's a lot of uh yeah the people are running at you full speed but you never really get a chance to run at them full speed maybe twice a game you'll get the shot at the quarterback if you're lucky but uh so I never thought of it like that yeah yeah my Rugby career ended two weeks I was like not not for me oh that's funny where where did you um try to play rugby for those two weeks H Stanford some intramural rugby team that graduate students could play on so yeah nice yeah well that's sort of the nice thing about rugby is it um it wasn't it's getting there now but it wasn't it wasn't recognized by the N NCAA so it was Club so you could sort of you play at sort of any any sort of level and I do find when I travel particularly in the UK or down under I find I spend a lot of evenings watching rugby on television like watching car crashes and just r necking for two hours the violence so yeah it is fun um one of the good things too is is it it's actually come into uh American football is um the technique of tackling because you don't have helmets you're not leading with your face you have to tackle with your shoulders you get your head on the outside and you hit with your shoulder to to protect from uh head injuries and things like that and uh I know at least the Seattle Seahawks back when they were you know the legion of boom and things like that they um uh they actually worked with uh some of the well maybe shortly after the the legion of boom but anyway still still very good defensive team um they worked with the Seattle SeaWolves it's the professional rugby team up there to to start coaching those shoulder tackles as opposed to face tackles which will hopefully help with the concussion rate in uh in the NFL you still get concussions in rugby I my a number of concussions that um that I got but uh but at least uh you know you weren't weren't tackling with your face anyway that's you know when I can't remember something that's always the other it's like Oh either I don't need enough carbo hydrates or if I had too many concussions or I'm just becoming an old man it's hard to tell which of these you know or our head gets full because there's so much information we're deluged with that we're picking and choosing what's worth remembering yeah for me for me it's concussions I a lot of concussions and it's I had I also I also boxed so um oh yeah nice yeah the I've had my share from both from football and from boxing and I can't remember my last fight so that was uh yeah my best showing yeah yeah it's um well you know that's probably you know a good good reason to be on on ketogenic diets it's good for tbis and um and neurological recovery so might you know it's funny I was thinking about um I'm always so for a while I I had co-founded this not for profit uh the nutrition science initiative with petera who has since become wildly famous as a longevity Guru um but uh so we were been funding clinical trial basically experiments that couldest these hypotheses and I'm always thinking in terms of how can you test like even this idea that a ketogenic diets are that carnivore are too hard to do nobody's going to comply with that so why are they harder than being a vegan or vegetarian nobody goes vegan and the doctor says oh you're never going to comply with never eating an animal product again an egg or a sip of milk or teaspoon of butter I mean it's so how do you anyway there one population I thought would be interesting to test would be retired former college football players who tend to get bigger when they get older tend to have weight problems and tend to have memory and cognitive issues from the multile concussions I guess we could throw in retired rugby players as well yeah but that population would be motivated to find something that worked both for their cognitive health and their physical health and uh the problem when I Broach this with one of the former quarterbacks from my playing days as a you know very influential orthopedic surgeon in the US and I approached it to him and he said yeah but how are you going to get him to do the control di which you want to be like a vegetarian or a vegan or a Mediterranean diet who's going to be randomized and do that diet like I didn't think of that um but you need a you need a control group I think still working on it well I think I think Mediterranean diets is is a perfectly reasonable one I mean that that's that's the argument now is that that's you know the that's the ideal yeah ideally that would be um yeah I have to get back on that one I think it's a good idea I think so I think it would be could get the coaches and the athletic directors involved universities have are actively trying to keep their alumni involved and they know what happens to all these people they're in contact they know what they I mean one of the the captain of my team my senior senior year now weighs like 400 lb and has been bedridden for 10 years oh God poor God and bed chair ridden technically not bedridden I want to get to him and say look we can fix this with diet yeah but it's an act of faith that we're not going to kill you yeah well you know I mean like you said earlier like well how do we know we're not fooling ourselves um well one reason is because it it it it is working and when I put patients on these things it does work and I see their objective improvements symptomatically but also objectively in their in their blood tests on their Imaging I mean I have I have MS patients that on MRI their lesions are resolving and that that doesn't happen that's not normal um and so I'm that's crazy yeah and and so that's worth publishing by the way no no I'm I'm I'm I'm looking into publishing a case series on um well probably a number of different patients but because they serve as they serve as their own controls yeah exactly you know you don't you don't need a randomized control trial to show that somebody's experiencing something that people aren't supposed to experience yeah yeah yeah definitely that's sort of how I feel on um cancer as well you know with like because I work well deal with cancer I'm skeptical that I have enormous respect for tumors yeah oh yeah like malaria mosquitoes they're kind of like the evolution cranked up to this fever pitch of efficacy and I believe that they will learn to take advantage of anything they can even if it means feeding off the ketones instead of glucose so I think that the uh way we eat would minimize our risk of cancer although I know I have two friends who ate like we do and died of cancer so to you know very well respected individuals in our community so I don't again you have to yeah can't bury the negative evidence because you don't like it um yeah but I would love to see a clinical trial to see whether it helps with treatment uh well certainly in um stud's been done so far you know my particular field is in in neurosurgery so it's with GBM that's you know CLE blastoma really nasty stuff but that's the the main work of Professor Thomas CED at at Boston College and he's done a lot of animal studies and things like that and um and there are human trials there's there's over a dozen there's another sort of eight or 10 in the works right now they're smaller you know looking at you know sort of 20 30 patients there are there's randomized control trial with about 20 patients showing benefit from ketogenic metabolic therapy all the studies um that have the lower the carbs the better the outcomes typically and so you get under 50 grams they have better outcomes than people are just like low carb which means like 200 grams or something useless like that and um but under 20 grams it's even better and so on and so Professor caed looks at the gki the glucose Ketone index and you get that below 2.0 consider that therapeutic below one's optimal what um sea freed found uh you know continue on the work of OT warberg was that uh cancer cells in particular uh gbms uh run on glutamine as well and so like gbms will get about 75% of their energy from glutamine and and so another way and we make glutamine just like we make glucose um and it's in Plants it's in meat and so it does denature if you cook it um and then there's periods of fasting you can sort of abstain from getting the glutamine and the glucose but he found that the best effects in animal models come from using a glutamine blocker such as Dawn a long chemical name and uh he did a very interesting rat uh trial where they had four groups and one was just given sort of implanted um GBM equivalents in these mice and um there's one group that was just fed this normal rat Chow other one was given a calorie restricted ketogenic diet and all the studies show that calorie restrictive ketogenic diets are are better uh for cancer and one was just given Dawn and uh one was given both so child group died very quickly the keto group lived much longer but still died second um the dawn group lived you know again basically a third longer than the than the keto Group which you would expect if if that's its main source of energy of the Cancer's energies from glutamine and the combination group uh where they were given keto and Dawn they didn't die at all and on Imaging they found that most of the tumors had completely disappeared or at least significantly reduced when they sacrifice the animals and look at them histologically uh the cancer cells are basically just all dead in most of the cells so it's very interesting there are larger studies being done now Cedar Sinai is doing one specifically on GBM and they're trying to get you know upwards of 120 patients going to be a multi- center approach phase two trial and so know happening anyway I hope you're right I mean again I'm I I hope you're right well it's just the one of the the animal experiments something I fellow told me back in uh wasn't even after I wasn't writing about nutrition yet I can't remember why he told me this he was an old Italian cancer researcher Thomas Jefferson in Philadelphia and he said Gary if you can't cure cancer on a rat you shouldn't be in this business it's so easy see nice you know and I I think I mean it's clearly being hyperbolic because it's still not easy to do in the around most of them you know but um it's got to work in humans yeah I hope it does I just I it it's it's a nasty disease and so what what you have that I mean even if you have like the best treatment it's it's you know the cat sort up out of the bag and it's it's um it's very devastating illness and you do everything right and you still might not make it um there are some some pretty good preliminary very preliminary um Studies have been done though and case Series so cedure ciz actually published a a case series I think it was 15 patients that um you have had remarkable results uh with GBM and other sort of cancers complete remissions in some cases and um you know showing improved neurological function being able to read again and and getting you know motor skills back again and uh you know Imaging tumors just shrinking down shrinking down uh the two only two people that actually ended up dying they live much longer and this was like tertiary sort of treatment so it was like uh you know they going through the normal reection chemo radiation then they're on the you know the the the further rounds of t and radiation they're maxed out on that and um and then they go on all these different basically last ditch effort sort of chemotherapy agents that can be quite harmful and um and then it's still you know they're coming coming to the end of their course and they say well you could just try not eating carbs and then they just stop doing that and all these people they all of a sudden they're fine and they're and they're improving their neurological function and their tumors are ceeding uh the two um in that case series that were improving but then ended up dying were the ones that came off the diet and one had been formerly a vegetarian and even though he was improving dramatically and was able to get back to a normal um you know living standard uh he just said no this is this really doesn't work for me as a lifestyle so I'm going to go back uh to eating and he was he was dead within the year and it was very sad send me those papers yeah yeah definitely yeah happen to um I did um yeah that was a that was a case series and I like to think that the the one the book I'm working on now will be the last book already on nutrition and chronic disease and then I think you there's still cancer and maybe by the time I write that there'll be significant clinical trials MH demonstrating either that I shouldn't write not worth writing or supporting the perspective that uh yeah that it can be pretty remarkable well I hope so I mean the interest the history is fascinating because the history is that cancer is a disease of Western diets and Civilizations for the most part much more common in uh westernized populations and traditional populations eating their traditional diets and then the question is what is it in about westernization that this carcinogenic is it sugar is it white bread is it toxic seed oils is it too much food or not enough exercise or chemical in the groundwater pollution or you know pick your poison that's hard to narrow down but yeah can make a pretty strong argument for Di diary cause um but again once you've got it then removing that cause might not be sufficient that's what worries me with cancer so yeah I I think when when you when you have established cancer then you know that's a different different story than just prevention and um but you know but you know the warberg effect is such that cancer cells require far more uh glucose you know 400 times the amount of glucose as normal cells typically uh for many cells and then you other ones rely more on glutamine for example but right um but you know it's it's a just that principle of of excluding or limiting and reducing the available energy to those to those cancer cells you know can they adapt potentially but before they do you know they're in trouble and so maybe you hit it hit it hard enough you know that's sort of that that sort of same sort of principle that we have with chemos you try to you know hit it hard and fast and shut it down um and uh you know before has a chance to think and and and hopefully clear it but before it before it clears you the good thing about the dietary sort of interventions is that it's not toxic you know it's not going to hurt you yeah and uh and there is evidence that it can actually um sensitize the tumor cells to Chone radiation and protect your native cells to uh the the ill effects of chemo and radiation so even if it doesn't have any other other benefits it could could help in that regard as well and so and it doesn't hurt is the main thing you know you're not hurting anybody by doing this and so you you just add it just you know another another tool in your toolbx and you just you throw it in there in the mix it's not going to mess anything up could help and there is evidence that it does help and there's certainly mechanistic um rationalization for it to help and you just see and you know there are there are more and more people coming to this I've interviewed three people with G blastoma that are 10 years down the road and and doing fine whereas a normal normal uh history of a of GBM would be three months average life expectancy without treatment full treatment 95 plus per resection temozolomide and radiation uh it's about to 18 months so they're well past theage anyway and um two of them don't have any signs on um on MRI the third is going back for a rection now and he's the one that hasn't been quite as strict with his diet the other two are very strict with their diet and so it's interesting anyway it's still very in its infancy definitely but yeah certainly certainly interesting it's funny one of my tissue coma when she was 30 when we were dating which was an interesting period um and best friend somebody she's in was an artist back then and had an art studio in lower manhatton in New York one of her best friends was a young woman and another artist who had had a cartilage tumor in her brain removed surgically and this was the mid 90s and the SLO kering surgeons who took it out said don't eat carbs and uh she never did and yeah she also looks about 10 years younger than anyone else any of her friends so uh beneficial side effects perhaps again it's hard not one of the reasons funny back in the 60s when people started thinking that the The Advocates of low carb diets like Atkins or quacks was because they would say you know look it cures everything and that's a sort of another thing that quacks like to say it take it it'll cure cancer your arthritis will go away your dandruff will get better your bad breath will clear up your gingivitis will clear up your tinitus will go away you know your lomago your you name it and weird thing is a lot of things get better when you remove carbohydrates from the diet and so people tend to sound like untrustworthy unreliable that's like my friend with Parkinson's I mean it's heartbreaking and all I want just one month I know it sounds like quackery but one month what do you have to lose you're looking at ideally Decades of a chronic disease that's that going to you and is already and give it a try yeah and with that I should probably get to bed it's late here on East Coast and West Coast of America yeah I was gonna say I've taken up quite a lot of your time and I I really appreciate that um Gary thank you so much for coming on I'm I'm sorry we didn't get to to talk about your other books but it's absolutely fasc ating uh conversation it was really great to hear your perspective on these things um everybody go out and get uh Gary's books especially his new uh book rethinking diabetes and um they they're absolutely fascinating so um where can people find you and get your books and and uh check out your website and things like that uh well my website is Gary tels.com I've been doing a uh substack newsletter with Nina telz on science um that's the good news the less good news is we're apparently going to bifurcate into two News letters and I can't tell you what the new one my new one is going to be hers will still be unsettled science and will still be very much worth reading um hopefully by the time this comes out I don't know when you're going to post this um know what I'm doing um and uh yeah my books are available wherever f books are sold uh so great and then and then social media are you where you most I am I am on X I'm not as active as I should be on anything I am not a fan of social media which is actually not a great thing to be not be in this day and age but uh I can be found on X at Gary to perfect um yeah the uh yeah yeah that's about it um Tony thank you we should do this again someday absolutely no we'll digress less you're great okay well thank you very much K I look forward to seeing you again and yeah absolutely Take Care thank you you too hey guys thank you very much for taking the time out to listen to what I had to say if you like it then please like And subscribe to my YouTube channel and podcast and if you're on YouTube then please hit that that little bell and subscribe and that'll let you know anytime I have a new video out which should be every week if not more and if you could share this with your friends that would help me get the word out and let me know that you like what I'm doing thanks again guys