Culture Apothecary with Alex Clark - “We Were Scammed: The Food Pyramid Farce.” - Taking On Big Food With Denise Minger

Episode Date: April 28, 2023

After absolutely WRECKING her own health by becoming a vegan as a child, author and journalist, Denise Minger, set her sights on investigating Big Food. From tearing apart the questionable origins of the Food Pyramid, to proving fallacies within veganism, she found herself to be enemy number one of the food industry. She’s here to tell us that food journeys are deeply personal and no diet is one-size fits all. Find Denise & Death By Food Pyramid HERE!Receive 15% off your first month ...

I've moved quite a few times for work to places where I didn't know anyone. I never sugarcoat how hard it can be to make friends as an adult. It's awkward. You don't know where to always meet somebody. And then you have to add on the pressure of wondering if they're conservative or not, because that is so much unnecessary drama that we just do not need at this stage in our lives. Am I right? So here's something I did a few years back that introduced me to so many other women who shared my values.

And some of them ultimately became lifelong friends. I went to the Young Women's Leadership Summit. It's a huge women's conference. Turning Point USA puts on every year in Dallas. This year, it's June 9th through 11th, and women of all ages from across the country come together to hear from the biggest female conservatives in the movement.

Think Kaylee McEnany, Riley Gaines, and Candice Owens, to name a few. I speak too, which is super fun. And guess what? It's okay to go if you don't know anyone going. I didn't. It was scary, but so worth it. Find more details and get tickets at tpUSA.com slash YWLS with code Pauplitics. Go to TPUSA.com

slash YWLS with code Pauplitics for discount and to learn more. I couldn't believe it. The food pyramid was a sham. Yeah, that little triangle we all grew up with. It was honestly very frightening to learn that lobbyists and politicians were who actually decided to tell Americans what to eat and how much. Instead of telling Americans to eat less, we were told to avoid too much in order to, you know, protect the processed and fast food industries. The corn and wheat industries lobbied their way into having a bigger suggested serving size to line their own pockets, and it seemed like almost every category was bought and paid for. Was any nutritional science used at all to shape an entire generation's eating habits? My guest today is skeptical to

say the least. She is an absolute badass who rang the alarms about the food pyramid scheme and also blew up the internet when she destroyed the so-called study that vegans used to allegedly prove how healthy eliminating meat was. It all started when she decided to create a little blog where she described leaving the vegan cult herself. Her website is now a powerhouse used to examine the science behind many nutritional beliefs and question everything we're talking. told from the so-called experts about food. She is the author of Death by Food Pyramid, how shoddy science, sketchy politics, and shady special interests have ruined our health that was released in 2014 and changed countless minds about big food and how its dangers

cannot be overlooked. It is my honor to welcome Denise Minger to The Spillover. Denise, your goal has really always been, you say, to talk about nutrition and health, but without the biases and dogma that can come along with that, which I really love. And you claim that you have no agenda to promote. You're just a truth seeker. I say that you're like the house and habit of nutrition, which is like she's like this huge investigative journalist, you know, in the pop culture space. And I feel like you're kind of doing that too, debunking a bunch of claims in the health

and wellness space and nutrition space. And really, you have an incredible personal story before we get into all the things that you've debunked throughout your career. you became a vegan as a child, and then your health completely plummeted. Yes. So when I was seven, I was eating steak with my family for dinner, and I started choking on like a piece of steak. And I freaked out so bad that I actually decided to go vegetarian because meat started like scaring me. And it was like one of those childhood things where you're just like, this thing is bad and you carry it with you and you don't really have a lot of, you know, cognitive processes that are online yet. And so it kind of clustered with me, for me, with like, these ideas about vegetarianism being healthy.

You always hear that vegetarians are healthier people. It just made sense to me at the time. And my parents were nice enough to just let me go with it. So I stopped eating meat when I was seven. And everyone thought it was a phase, but it was, I guess it was a phase, but it was a very long phase, right? And your parents were very supportive. They were like, okay, that's fine. Yeah.

My mom was, she didn't eat a lot of meat herself, so I think she understood. And I was a little stubborn as a kid. So I think I was very convincing with my plans. Yeah. But that was my introduction into not eating certain foods. And so meat for me was just not a food for many, many, many years. And then when I was about 11, I started getting really sick. And how would you describe that?

What do you mean by you started getting really sick? So I, if you think about what it's like to have the flu, and then it just doesn't go away. It's like upper respiratory stuff, you're really tired, my hair was falling out. I couldn't keep weight on. I was just like, I was so fatigued and, like, kind of congested all the time. And my parents started taking me to doctors trying to figure out what was wrong. And nobody had any idea. Like, they're like, let's give you some Claritin.

Let's give you some antibiotics. Nobody said, hey, maybe it's the fact that you've been eating exclusively vegetarian or no, vegan. Was it vegan or vegetarian? So it was vegetarian initially. Okay, okay. It transitioned to vegan. That's right. So nobody thought to say it has nothing to do with your diet for the last.

couple years. No one thought to say that. And incidentally, it wasn't actually at that time because of vegetarianism. I developed a food allergy to wheat. And so I went from doctor to doctor. They gave me, they thought maybe it was allergies, but they gave you like those skin prick test where they're trying to test for different types of allergies and pollen. And like, yeah, allergic to some mold and some pollen, but nothing was actually, you know, there's nothing that could take out of my life that was improving things. That was just so sick. I don't even remember fifth grade. Like I was so sick. And it was a very difficult period of my life just because I just felt terrible all the time. And I didn't know why.

Nobody knew why. My parents didn't know why doctors didn't know why. They took my adenoids out as like a, you know, hopeful surgery. Like, it was like near your tonsils. Didn't help anything. So it was just like throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping something would stick. And I finally went to a naturopath. It was like this woman who had an MD and an ND.

So she had like, she had her feet in both worlds, right? And she just looked at me and she was like, you know, a food allergy. I know those circles under your eyes. And so I went to this doctor, and she was like, you have to go on an elimination diet. And no doctor before her had said anything about food. They were just like, oh, let's give you different medications and cut out different parts of your body. So I unfortunately, you know, my favorite food at the time was like crackers, right? And I remember eating this bag of goldfish crackers on the way to the doctor.

And then on the way back, my mom just took them away from me. And she's like, you can't eat this now. The end of an era. It was the end of an era. And incidentally, you know, after just a few weeks of not eating wheat, they took me off everything initially, like dairy, wheat, soy. I think I was eating like rice and vegetables for a while. And I felt better. Like everything got better.

I was completely fine after the like two or three weeks of just not eating any dairy or wheat or anything that I was sensitive to. And so how many years passed before the next health issue kind of arose for you? So I will say that I never like got totally better. I was still, my immune system was never really good. I was one of those kids that would get sick at, like, every week. And I always felt fatigued. I never felt great. And I look back on that, and it was definitely diet related, especially with, like, animal foods, right?

Like, I just had taken those off the table, and I was eating a lot of, like, fake vegan stuff at the time, like tofu pots instead of pot dogs and that kind of thing. And so it was a few years after that, I stumbled across the raw vegan diet on the internet. Are you familiar with this? I'm not super familiar with it. Tell me. Okay. So if you think about veganism, right, no animal products. Raw vegans don't cook anything.

They eat fruits and vegetables, nuts, but only raw nuts. It can't even be sauteed or anything. No heat. No heat. Why? What's so beneficial about no heat, allegedly? This is, thank goodness, this is like past as a trend. But for a while, like, in the early 2000s, it was one of those, like, cress.

It was like a diet that people were, like, learning about. and like, this is the reason people are sick. It's because they cook their food. And I was 15 at the time. So I'm going to play the I Was 15 card right now because it's not, you know, you don't know a lot when you're 15, especially about health and science and your body. And so I was reading these things on the internet about people going raw vegan. So they just stopped cooking their food.

They started eating salads and fruit and nuts and like fermented like like nut things, nut cheeses and just all this stuff. And they were claiming to have really profound health benefits from it. like cancer being cured and like, like, fibromyalgia getting reversed and just all sorts of stuff. And I looked at myself and what felt like a very weak immune system and the fact that I never felt like good. And I was already very aware of what was in food and I was very careful about my diet because I couldn't eat weed, right? Like I was, this was before you even had ingredients labels, really, that listed things on food. So I had to be, I couldn't eat things at restaurants for the

most part. I was just very aware of like my diet. And so I saw these claims and I was like, know, I'm going to try that. And so I stopped eating all the cooked food that was in my diet. I started eating tons of fruit, like a cantaloupe, like a whole canaloupe in one sitting, right? Oh my God. I know, right? Like, if you Google this, like, raw vegan diet and look at pictures of people's, like, food halls. It's insane. You're eating raw cantaloupes. You're doing the raw vegan diet thing. I'm assuming that right away you start feeling even better than you were. I felt amazing. I felt like I could run a marathon. Like, it went from feeling like, like, this like weird subdued, never feeling really good, to waking up, feeling like I could see

better, feeling like I could smell things more intensely. And in retrospect, it's kind of a fasting diet. Like if you're familiar with what happens when people fast, like there's a period where you feel really amazing because your body's actually kicking into like a cleaning process and you're, you have immune cells that are going and gobbling up all this like, you know, junk that's basically in your blood and throughout your body. And I think it's a very real phenomenon. I think a lot of people get hooked on to like diets that are very restrictive because they feel so good initially. Yeah. And it's not actually a sustainable diet, but it does feel amazing on the front end.

And so what I went through was this incredible period of feeling like better than I'd ever felt my whole life. I could, I was just like, I can't even say enough good things about how I felt at the time for a few months, right? And that's when, I would say, the decline began after that first hump of like humming, honey mood period. I started noticing that I was really spacey. It was hard to keep weight on. I was losing a lot of muscle, even though I was eating like a ton of food, like just piles and piles of fruit, wasn't getting a lot of protein. Obviously, wasn't getting any animal-based nutrients.

And at least prior to this, I was still eating eggs and stuff as a vegetarian. And in retrospect, I think that was really helping me a lot. Yeah. So when I went raw vegan, I got very seduced by that initial honeymoon period. And I felt like I had stumbled across this like holy grail of diets. and I think that's what gets a lot of people with diets like that. It's just like this initial amazing feeling. And so by the time I was 16, so this started when I was 15.

By the time I was 16, my parents were getting really worried, right? Because I'm still a teenager. I'm still living at home. I'm, again, very stubborn, pretty independent, like to try my own thing. You were a strong-willed kid. I was a strong-willed kid. Yes, I like that. I like saying it that way, right?

That's not a positive. Yeah. It's a strong will. Yeah, so it was a beautiful period at first, and then the cracks started showing. And at the time, all of this was online. Like these raw vegan communities, there were so few people doing it in the world that, like, to meet other raw vegans, it was all online communities. And so there were a message board set up for people to go get support. And what I didn't see initially was that it's only for support.

There was no people saying, hey, I'm having adverse side effects or things like that. Or if they were, maybe they were being censored or taken down. They were being deleted instantly. Now, why is that? Why can there never be any dissent or any alternative opinions on these fad diets, you think? You have to keep it. Well, people turn it into a religion, right? And then they fight really hard because they have to believe in it.

Because if they lose that, then they lose their whole identity and they lose their whole structure of belief that they've built. And that can be really painful for people, especially if, like, if the diet is the only thing that they have going, that gives them the sense of, like, worth and, like, belonging. And especially when you have a really specific, you know, kind of niche diet, the community feels like your family. Yeah. And when you lose that, you lose a lot. So were you looking to see if anyone was going through the same things as you? I started posting about my problem. So this is what clued me in that people were just getting banned and censored.

I posted something because actually what happened is I went in for blood work. Like my mom dragged me to the doctor and she was like, okay, we gave you a year. You look terrible. She didn't say this. You know, you can see it in her, like, motherly eyes. Like, I'm worried. Like, I'm worried. For you.

And so she took me back to that same doctor, actually, that diagnosed me with food allergies. So it was, like, a trustworthy, you know, person in my life. And that doctor took my blood work, and it just came back. Terrible. Like, I was deficient in a whole bunch of stuff. Like, everything was kind of out of range. My thyroid was being impacted. And so I had to admit that point that this was not working.

Like, my hope that had been, okay, I felt so great initially, there's a way to get back there. You just have to keep going. And with this particular community, when you would post something, like, if you did say, like, I'm not feeling good, or my hair seems to be falling out a lot, or my teeth are getting really sensitive, or like, I'm losing too much weight, they'd always respond with something like, oh, you're detoxing. You're just getting the toxins out of your body from all the bad food that you ate. And, you know, it might take a year. It might take 10 years. But you're going to, you've got to keep going with it. And are these people that are just in the community, not necessarily experts, or even the experts that promote things like,

a raw vegan diet also saying stuff like that. I would say no one's an expert. I would say that as soon as you become an expert in that diet, you're not going to be eating that diet anymore because then you start realizing, oh, this is not a good idea. So what did count as experts were the people who'd been doing it for a long time. So they become the veterans, right? And you're like looking up to them and you're like, okay, you've been doing this for 10 years and you seem to be okay.

What's your secret, right? And I will say that I think some people genetically can do well as vegans, like or better than other people. I think there's a lot of variation that's individual. It depends on so many factors. But to say like one person is doing well as a vegan and then every other person in the world can also do well as a vegan, that's where that fallacy is. It's not, that's just not true. And so the disillusionment period was pretty intense because as I started posting things about my problems, the responses were either you're lying. You're cheating on your diet. You must be eating cheese burgers every weekend. And you're like, what the heck? No. 16. No, help me. It was hard. It was hard. Yeah, there's no support once you weren't doing well. It was all trying to get you back into the cult, essentially, and I do feel like it was a cult at the time. That's a strong word. It is a strong word. I didn't use that for a lot of things, but it had all of those elements of, you know, as soon as you are a dissenter, you get pushed out and, like, ostracized, and people will try to defame you. And even years afterwards, I mean, people from that community were still. still, like, there's, like, accounts online set up, like, to debunk me, right? Like, because I was, like, this person who, like, wrestled this world up and it was, it was, you know, that wasn't acceptable. So you have to take me down.

And it's a very strange thing to experience because that's, you know, that was my experience in the raw vegan community, but it's all over. Right. It's just all over. Every, every field of health, every, everything in the human experience can kind of get to that point. You're teetering on the edge of leaving the raw vegan diet. completely. Yeah. But something else must have happened for you to say, I'm for sure done with this. All right. So the elephant in the room wanted to take some time during this show to tell you that I had to

stop using Mimi Skin Care. It was just unforgivable to me that as a skincare brand, making products for women, they hadn't used a man to tell me about the joys of girlhood. I hated that they were made in America, I was disgusted that on the literal front page of their website, they use words like faith, family, freedom, and femininity. Scyke. Those are actually all the reasons I love Nimi Skingare. Plus, the products being 10 out of 10 is a very nice bonus. Vitamin C cleanser, get that glow up, girl.

Hydrating toner, please. Hydrating cream, you already know it's cracked to me. Going on three years strong this summer, I am pretty sure. flies when your skin is snatched, try Mimi Skincare today at MimiSkinkare.com with code Alex Clark for 10% off. That is n-I-M-I skincare.com with code Alex Clark for 10% off or find the link in the description. You won't actually hate it, but the left does. And that's why we love it. This is the part of the story where you go to the dentist, right? I hadn't been to the dentist in a couple years, but prior to this perfect dental health, right? Like I think I had like one baby cavity

when I was like eight. And it was like traumatizing because I wanted perfect teeth. But I took great tear of my teeth, always floss, brush, everything. And so finally I get like this dentist appointment. And I go in, I didn't expect anything to be wrong. So they tilt me back in the chair. I'm used to like, you know, praise, right? They're like, oh, your teeth look so good.

No praise. But a lot of like, hmm. Oh. Noises you don't want to hear coming out of your dentist mouth, right? And so I'm like starting to sweat a little bit like, what's going on? This isn't right. I haven't been through this before. I had something like 14 or 15 cavities after one year of being a raw vegan. So this is when I was 17. This is like at the tail end of like this like come like went to strict raw vegan kind of came out of it but not fully period of life. Your teeth were rotting out. They were completely like yes. In a word yes. They were completely vulnerable right to like the. I think the fruit acids that I was eating, they were not getting the nutritional support, right?

Like, there's a lot of minerals, right? And many nutrients go into supporting healthy teeth. And I was getting very few of them. Did your dentist know that you had a raw vegan diet? No. So was he asking you, like, Denise, what are you eating? I think they just wanted my money at that time. So I think they're like, you know what?

She is going to make us bank today. No, I shouldn't say that. I think they're very lovely people. But I think they went in and they were just like, okay, we just got a lot of stuff to fix. We have a lot of stuff to fix. And it was humiliating, honestly, because I had a lot of pride in my dental health. And I know, you know, there's people out there who don't brush for like seven years. They go in and their dentist's like, your teeth are perfect.

Yeah. And so I was like, man, all this work for nothing. So was this one of the things that you ask on the forum on the message boards? Like, hey, so I had a dentist appointment and I have like 15 cavities. Is this normal? I think by this time I didn't trust anybody out there. So you just kind of held this one. within.

Yes. Like something maybe with my diet isn't working, but I'm still going to hang on. Yes. It was, I think that was, I think at that point I'd lost so much faith in the raw vegan community. And I also just didn't trust like the mainstream medical establishment. Like there was a complete lack of trust in everything. And this is part of why I started doing like research on my own and like learning how to

read studies and stuff because I didn't know who out there I could listen to. I will say this. So, you know, there's this period where I was still. I still really wanted to make it work. And I was struggling internally with the reality that that just wasn't working. And so I very reluctantly started eating eggs again. Those helped a little bit. But like not fully.

I think my body was just in this huge deficit. And I think I probably could have eaten like 12 steaks in a row and just devoured them. I think that would have been amazing. But I wasn't eating red meat yet. And what ended up happening was actually when I was, I think, 17. And I was in a, I was taking some college classes. Maybe I was 18. Some late teens, right?

And so I was in, it was like a poetry class or like a writing class in college and a community college. And we had a potluck. And I was still mostly raw vegan at the time. Like I was raw vegan with some eggs. Somebody brought in a platter of sushi and sashimi. I had never eaten that before. I had never, like, you, like, you tell me, like, raw fish is food and I'll just throw water in your face, right? Like, that doesn't make sense.

It's gross. It's gross. So somebody brought in this big platter from a local sushi place. And I brought in, like, this fruit bird. so that I would have something to eat because I knew everything else I'd probably get any of it. It was like this, no one eat my fruit bird

understandably. It was just melon balls like stacked on each other. Like that's for Denise. That's for Denise. That's gonna be my meal. So, you know, I was looking at somebody just started eyeing this like sushi plate, right? And I was just like, I kept looking at it.

I was like, it was the weirdest thing. I just like my eyes were like just drawn to it and my hand reached into the sushi platter. And I just like an animal, like a woman possessed. I just started grabbing. raw salmon and just like shoving it in my face. Like I, I like blacked out. I like, I don't know what happened.

Was it a massive endorphin rush? It was so endorphine. It was amazing. You think it was just your body or the primal state of your body just craving meat and that happened to be raw fish at the time because that was in front of you? I think so. I think maybe psychologically too it was still raw. And I was still like in this like, cooking does stuff to food that, you know,

and it's true there is there are things you can do to cook food to cooked food. that will generate carcinogens, like if you charmed meat, you know? And so there's like there's a tiny bit of truth, like this much truth, right? Like, like, raw veganism is like this much like not truth. We have like a few things that they got right. But in my mind, like there was something very clean and pure about raw meat, raw fish in particular. And I think that's what happened.

I saw this like beautifully like unadulterated piece of like flesh. Yeah. Because it just looks straight from the ocean. Yeah, it was like, okay, well. And then it just into my body it went. And I felt so good. I felt so good. And so did you immediately start incorporating regular meat, fish, or otherwise into your diet after that?

I think I ate more sushi in the following months than like any other human on the plant. I'm not kidding either. So I was living in Flagg, so I went to school in NU. Okay. And there's like only a couple sushi places at the time. So I couldn't like do this, you know, big circuit of different sushi places so they wouldn't recognize me. Like I had to go back to the same places. Now I just walk in and they'd be like, oh, sushi girls.

And it was amazing. Like I felt so good and so nourished just from that one thing. I still had a lot of psychological hangups around red meat. It actually took me a long time before I started eating red meat too. But that fish, I went hard on that fish. And I felt it's like I started building muscle more. Like even without changing my exercise routine, everything felt like it was working better. And that was the only thing you had changed was just incorporating the raw fish, correct?

Yeah. How old were you when you completely decided to abandon veganism in general? And then what did you try next? I guess that would be my like 19-20 kind of era. It's hard to say because it was really a slow transition into like other foods. So the fish were the first ones to come in, actually I guess eggs and then fish. And then at some point I think I was eating chicken just out of convenience. Like if I was out in a social group, I didn't want to be like super weird and just order like the salad and get a bunch of modifications.

And so I was trying chicken. And then it was actually at a conference that I was speaking at. So I was at least maybe 23 where they served some beef. And it was like, you know, the best, like, happiest cows you could possibly imagine. Like, it was like the West Night Price Foundation. And they had like a conference. They invited me to talk at. And it was my first, like, of that conference of that type.

And we had like this speaker dinner. And it was like this really beautiful piece of beef. And I hadn't eaten beef since I was seven. How did your body handle it? Like, did you get sick after eating it or it just did really well? Slurped it up, slurped it up. You know when you need something when your body just like hooveres it up like a vacuum. It's just like no problems.

I never see I know if there's a lot of rave or a lot of ex-vegans who say that they have problems when they eat meat, like they can't digest it. I never had that problem. It all, it all, like if anything, it digested better than vegetables. There are a lot of people out there who really refuse to listen to anyone's analysis on diets or food if they don't have a Ph.D. in nutrition. What should they know before we dive even deeper? Because now we're about to get into the stuff that like borders us on cancellation. Ah, I love it. That's the best spot to be, isn't it?

I will say this. Okay, so there's a very strong mentality that you can only listen to somebody who has a certain, like, you know, set of credentials. Consider the fact that there's a lot of people out there who have credentials, very similar levels of impressiveness, and they disagree with each other. Right? You know, there's credential. people who support veganism. There's credentialed people who support the ketogenic diet. And there at some point you have to go and use your own critical thinking skills to figure out not just who to listen to, but like also assessing whether what they're saying is true. So at no point can

you really outsource your thinking. And so I don't want anyone to just listen to me just because I'm saying things, right? I hope that people challenge me. I've been wrong. I've been wrong. I will always be wrong about other things. And I'm very open with that. But at the same same time, I want to point everyone towards their own personal compass, right? Because that's ultimately your relationship with your body, your relationship with your life, your relationship with your food that's personal, that is you. No one can tell you what that is. And so everything I've discovered has been, you know, part of this journey to kind of heal myself. But everyone else's path is theirs. Well, and it can be really hard because there are, you know, quote unquote

scientific evidence studies and backing or whatever about why all these different food systems or food beliefs or diets are the best. I think that's really hard for people to navigate. Yes. You know, what is right and what isn't. Yeah. Yeah. That's, I think is, that comes also back to what skills are you going to refine within yourself? And again, it's listening to your body. I think being aware of how the food industry manipulates us with their products is very important. Because that's kind of like, that's the thing that usually stands in the way of people being able to connect with their own body intuition. Right.

It's like if you're eating foods that are designed to overwrite your hunger signals and they're designed to keep, like hijack your brain, right? Like your brain's reward centers to like feel like you were getting these drug hits from like the donuts you're eating or whatever, right? Those are going to stand in the way of you actually being able to know how you feel. Yeah. And beyond that, I think that the human body can thrive on a very wide range of foods and a very wide range of diets. And there's no one-size-fits-all anything. Let's get really juicy. Okay.

What were the first things that you noticed the food industry was telling people that were absolute lies? Okay. So obviously eating a grain-based diet, which, I mean, at this point, I hope that everyone's questioning that. Grains are one of the least nutrient-dense foods out there. And they are very cheap calories. And that's a big reason that they have been pushed so much. Because a lot of what the USDA has done in terms of steering their guidelines has been to keep costs down with things like the food stamp program. And like, you know, there's a big incentive to get people to eat cheap, easily produced foods.

So it's not about health. It's, I mean, there might be a little bit that's about it. You know, they're still saying eat vegetables, right? Like there's pieces that are supposed to be health promoting. But by and large, the truth of what is there scientifically has been bulldozed over those economic and financial interests. And that's pretty devastating when you think about it because I know a lot of people, myself included, like, you know, I had to do the food pyramid picture and like, you know, how many servings of grains do I eat like in like seventh grade. Let's talk about the USDA food pyramid. Yeah.

Because we all grew up with that in our textbooks at school. That was all essentially a marketing. scheme or what? It was, I would say it was like the collision of a lot of things going wrong. I wouldn't say that it started out as a marketing scheme. And I usually, I try to be careful about not going straight into like conspiracy territory, right? Because usually I'm a fan of that saying like don't ascribe to malice, what could be ascribed to idiocy or whatever that thing is. And the government's not the most like with it like organizations.

It's not even one organization, right? It's a lot of different pieces. That being said, when it comes to food, there was. a lot of pressure coming from industries, right? What's interesting is if you look at what's what the original like USDA or government promoted guidelines were, they came out many, many decades ago, like in their like mid-1900s. And initially they were designed to prevent deficiencies. And so they were like, it was like we, it wasn't a food pyramid initially. It was like a food wheel. And like there was a bunch of different things that came out. And all of it was designed

to help people actually initially avoid being kicked out of like being disqualified from war and fighting because of nutritional deficiencies because a lot of people at the time were malnourished. So the issue like in the early 1900s up through the mid-1900s was people were suffering at a much greater rate of deficiency diseases and things like heart disease hadn't kicked up yet. And things like diabetes and cancer, they weren't like grabbing people left and right like they ended up doing later on. So the government's goal at that point was just like let's make sure everyone's well-nourished. And that started changing over time.

So, you know, mid-1950, mid-1900s, next few decades, suddenly we started seeing these epidemics of heart disease, cancer, diabetes, like different things that hadn't been taking people quite as much earlier on. Why do you think that is? So I think a lot of it did have to do with changing our changing nutritional landscape. As more foods were being introduced and set like lifestyles started getting automated more and people were a little bit more sedentary, we didn't, not everyone was working on the farm all day. and, you know, things shifted. And then suddenly the things that used to be problems weren't really problems anymore, you know, like people dying of malnutrition, especially in America. And other things then had a chance to, like, start taking hold. And so we did see, like, the shift of, like, disease trends.

At the same time, there was shifts in food trends. And, you know, vegetable oil started being a thing. Right. Now, so when she's talking about this is the seed oils. This is the seed oils came on the scene. And about when was that? I think that was the 1940s or 50s. Right.

Yes, the 1940s or 50s. So before this, you know, it was like lard, tallow, butter, a lot of saturated animal fats. But it was being used really, really small because I think that McDonald's even in like the 60s, they would say things like our beef tallow fries and things like that. So it was like it started to ramp up. And that's why I feel like you look at pictures of people on the beach and stuff in the 60s, nobody is fat. Yeah. Oh, they look great. Everybody looks great.

You know what I mean? You see pictures of people at diners, having milkshakes and burgers and fries and stuff, but nobody was like significantly overweight yet because those were just getting introduced. Right. Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, I think that was a big part of it. I think that was going back to what we were talked about earlier, you know, it takes like the cumulative effect of a lot of generations and a lot of time, like,

eating certain ways and, like, becoming sedentary before you start seeing that, like, that explosion of issues. And, yeah, so, like, the USDA, you know, government in general, I don't think they set out trying to kill people. I don't think they set out trying to create guidelines that were like designed to be harmful and like, you know, this big long game, long con. I don't think that was going on, but I do think that there were, we ended up that way. I think enough corners were cut in the process of trying to analyze what the science was saying about what's best for human health. Because like if you look at the type of diet that is best supportive of human

health, our current agricultural system doesn't support it, right? Because we got like factory farms, we got mass-produced seed oils. We have a low nutrient-density diet. A lot of the foods that are cheapest are the lowest in nutrients in general. And so to change things that every person could eat something that is absolutely optimal for their bodies would require reforming almost everything we do about food. And so, you know, the— And that's very controversial with the ag people. Yeah.

You know, whenever we've gotten this conversation with other guests, that's the critique I get from people that are in the farming industries and stuff. They're like, well, you don't understand. This would take my entire family out of business. Right, right. So it's very nuanced and it's very nuanced. And it's sensitive for people, you know, if that's how they make their living. Yeah. Yeah.

So there's a lot going on with that, right? And so the food pyramid is an interesting example of trying to piece together science, science, in a way that is still able to morph and conform to the needs of our economy and our agricultural industry. And the thing that really surprised me when I was writing. this book was there was this woman named Louis Light. And she was not mentioned almost anywhere in any like history of the food guidelines or anything like that. I came across some of her writings very accidentally, actually. And I was like, I was so stoked. I was like, I'm going to interview

this woman. What was she saying? So she was somebody who was hired. So according to her, she was hired by the USDA to create the next food pyramid or like the next stage of USDA guidelines. And was that the one that was supposed to come out in like the 90s? That's what I'm able to gather from what she said. Okay. And so there's some time issues with, like, her timeline of stuff where I think she was involved in something that just wasn't really public. But she was hired basically to run through the science that was available at the time

for what's healthy for humans. And so she was hired on, did all this research, read every study available on, like, what kind of fats were best for people, like, how much carbs should we eat and how many serving grains are actually optimal? And she created a food pyramid that was almost in the invert of what we ended up with. Really? And she thought vegetables were really healthy. She thought grain should be kind of up at the top of the food pyramid, no more than like two to three servings a day.

Sugar, you know. But we were told, am I right, that it ended up saying that we should have five to six servings of grains? Six to 11. Six to 11. Which is insane if you think about it. And we don't really, no, we're not really told what a serving is. So it's not like as big as you would think it is. But when I think of six to 11 servings, I'm like, all right, 11 slices of bread.

Yeah. You know, like just pile it on. And that's no one need, very few people need that much, right? And it's just, that's not a good base of anybody's diet. So she thought, you know, she created this really cool food pyramid. And she was very confident that the science behind it was solid. She advocated like cold pressed oils instead of, you know, because when the food period came out, it was in the height of like the low fat era.

And people were very much like just don't eat fat, just eat carbs, fig Newton. like cut out everything that's oily. Yeah, remember whenever we used to think that fig Newton's were healthy? Yeah, right. That was a whole thing. That was a whole thing. Gosh, it's so funny. Yeah.

She thought that there was enough science to say that we should actually be eating a decent amount of fat, avocados, nuts. And so she submitted what she thought was a solid set of guidelines, and she submitted it to the USDA. And she said that when it came back to her, like, you know, for some revisions and they had done some stuff to it. It was mangled. Like, everything was changed.

The grain suddenly went from the top to the bottom. The, you know, the vegetable servings had been reduced. Fruit servings had been reduced. Fats were, like, way up near the top again. And she was, like, what happened? And the response she got from the USDA was we had to do this to keep the cost of our food stamp program low. Because if you think about, like, the way that that's designed is basically to get as much bang for your buck out of food. Cold-pressed oils aren't cheap.

vegetables aren't cheap. Grains are cheap. Vegetable oils are cheap. Sugar's cheap. Fine grains are cheap. So there was, and here's the, I'm going to say this about her too. I was sort of tie and low to find other people who knew her because she actually passed away right before I started my book.

And I didn't find that until like I was like, you know, already hot in the chase. Like I'm going to find this woman and find all the secrets. And like, I was like, oh, she's dead. Dang, that's staying. I was very upset. I did contact her daughter. and her daughter said that she said something like, Mom died with a lot of skeletons still in her closet about the USDA.

So my guess is that she knew a lot of things that never made it to the public. And I know, right? I'm like, should I hold a seance? Like, how do I get in touch with this woman? I need to talk to her. But, no, I didn't do that. But that was really intriguing for me to find because it was like this little piece of history that I didn't see anywhere else.

And it was, you know, there's a lot of publications about the development of the food guidelines. and most of them seem well justified. Like we did this based on this study and we had this committee, like analyze these studies, and then we came up with this and then decided this, this, this, this, this. And if you just look at that part of it, you know, it seems justified. Like it seems like, okay, we had some scientists who are working on this. But then if you just actually learn how to read the science, it's very, very, very different. And that's where, again, I think that people becoming personally empowered to understand

food and diet and nutrition in their bodies is really important because there's always going to be experts out there telling you what to believe and none of them are going to be absolutely true or accurate. I mean, this is something that Denise is very famous for is taking these super popular studies and, you know, so-called scientists and then being like, dude, you don't even know how to read your own science. And so that became a kind of a thing like, who is this blogger girl that's just destroying everybody and schooling everyone on the science of the corrupt science, you know, that the USDA

puts out and all this kind of stuff. And so, I mean, can any food industry like dairy, Department of Agriculture, wheat, I don't know, any others, can they even be trusted when it comes to food endorsements? I don't think so. Like, everybody has an agenda. Everybody is trying to make money. So they're all going to say something is healthy or something isn't or whatever because they're trying to line their own pockets, correct? I would definitely agree with that. And so part of the food pyramid, some of the science or the reasoning behind why certain people got certain boxes and sections, these industries were kind of paying for that, right? Is that correct? There was, I mean, a lot of this was kind of so behind the scenes that I don't know if I could say confidently exactly what happened.

But you can definitely see like a reflection of how big is an industry, how much money are they like generating, how much influence do they have, and like, where did they end up slotted in our food recommendations? Wow. And that's what is very terrible because it's bad enough if you're doing that to something that's not affecting human health, right? But like once you're doing that to people who are vulnerable because they don't actually know about health and they're just trusting, to me that's a very, very dark thing. Is there a link between big pharma and the food science industry? It's all linked, yeah. I mean, this is another spot where you can speculate from the outside. But, like, I've never worked within the food industry.

I've never worked within Big Pharma. I think there are, actually, we do know there's a lot of revolving doors, bringing people from, like, the FDA into, like, the food industry. And there's a lot of shuffling involved. And I would say that those industries slash organizations are very, like, similar conceptually and in terms of like their value system, which is typically to get power and money, create a lot of products that are successful, but maybe aren't the best for people. And again, that's some really dodgy territory. Instead of telling Americans verbiage like, eat less, they would say things like, just avoid too much as a way to protect like the processed and fast food industries. Does that ring a bell?

Yes, yes. Language is very sneaky, right? And it's very, very persuasive. And by tweaking words to say, don't eat too much, you're still putting the emphasis on eat. Right. So that they'll still go to McDonald's. They'll still go get processed snacks and pringles.

and whatever. Exactly, exactly. So that's creating like an internal sense of, oh, this is still okay as long as I don't go crazy with it. And psychologically, that really influences human behavior. I want to talk about the health food shopper's study. It followed nearly 11,000 extremely health conscious meat eaters and vegetarians in the UK for over 24 years. What did they find? So this one's really interesting because one of the issues with foodstores. when we study mediators versus vegetarians, is usually people who go vegetarian are following a lot of other health promoting behaviors and like lifestyle factors. Oh, yeah. So like usually they exercise more.

Usually they're more cautious about drinking and, you know, other vices and smoking. And so when you look at how healthy they are and then try to correlate that just with their diet, you're actually getting the influence of all these other things that they're doing that promote their health. So this study was really cool because it kind of equalized the playing field because it's saying, okay, everyone we're studying. shops at health food places, right? So it's not, we're not getting the meat eaters who are going to McDonald's every day. Right.

We're getting the ones who are going to like... They're getting grass-fed, organic, all that. Exactly. So lo and behold, the study shows that there's really no difference in health outcomes once you level the playing field in that way. Finally, the evidence. Vegetarians are not healthier

than people who eat red meat, and it really comes down to the quality of meat you're eating. Where it comes from? Cotton Eye Joe, is it coming from China? and filled with a bunch of weird chemicals that their own people aren't even allowed to eat? Or is it coming from a beautiful ranch in the heart of Middle America, where the cows are grass fed and grain finished and how let the moon? And the chickens are raised better than organic and not injected with the mRNA vaccine ever.

That, my friends, is why I buy all my meat from good ranchers. Pick out the box that is best for you and your family. Single girls, too. I love this. Stock your freezer and enjoy. the highest quality meat in America. For a short amount of time, you will get $240 worth of free bacon in your first year when you subscribe to Good Ranchers.

That is a pound and a half of bacon in every box. Good Ranchers will never raise your subscription cost either. They have a price lock guarantee. Listen to me. The organic chicken from the store isn't as good as most people tend to think. That organic label only refers to the feed a chicken eats in its life, but not the environment it exists in every day. Fortunately, for us, Good Ranchers only ever works with ranchers and farmers who make the whole

process better than the organic standard. And because of that, we get the absolute perfect recipe for the best chicken in America. Paster raised on organic feed with no added hormones or antibiotics. Secure that free bacon for a year and get $20 off any box at good ranchers.com slash Clark with Code Clark. Good Ranchers.com slash Clark with Code Clark. For $20 off, any box, good ranchers. American meat delivered.

Could you explain how we're not only what we eat, but we're also what our moms eat and our grandmothers eat and also what our food eats? Yes. So it doesn't start just with what's on our plate, right? And especially if you look at the state of human health right now, we're kind of like in this compression of the generations that came before us that might have done well because they were born with a lot more resiliency. They were born with, like, you know, good gut microbiomes. Like, the world was different at that point. And so they might have been able to survive on the

kinds of foods that we consider bad, right? And they didn't get sick the way that we do. But you produce a few more generations. And you're starting to see this cumulative effect, right, of things getting passed down and this convergence with our environment, which is becoming increasingly inhospitable to things like good gut health, right? Because we're antibiotics because of like a million things out there that are damaging. And gut health is a great example, too, of something that is overlooked when it comes to diet. So it's important to remember that what we're eating right now isn't just affecting us. It's also affecting all the future generations that are coming after us.

And that's when you look at it in terms of that, the choices we're making right now are very, very critical. There's been a lot of conversation about GMOs with my audience recently. Are they something to fear, in your opinion? So this is one of those, it depends. It's nuanced. It's not black and white. It's gray areas. That's in my opinion. Because genetic modification is a process, right? And you can do a lot of things with that process. You can probably produce things that are terrible for people. And you can do things like, you know, there's a type of rice that they genetically modified to have a higher vitamin A content. And then they're, you know, dispersing that in areas that are deficient in vitamin A. And it does seem to be helpful for people who are living in areas that they're, there's, naturally very deficient in certain nutrients without causing a lot of harm. And a lot of poverty-ridden countries, they talk about how this helps us feed the world and whatever. Right. Exactly.

Exactly. So I don't like to take a hard stance on it because I think that generates a lot of fear. And it also creates the sense that GMOs are just this monolith, right? It really depends on what you're doing with it. And if it makes you feel safer to avoid GMOs, like I don't think there's anything wrong with that, you know. Is it going to benefit your health in a tangible way? I don't know. I think that focusing on nutrient density and maybe some other elements of health will take you farther than just avoiding, you know, certain groups of foods.

I have a feeling my audience is really going to appreciate that, actually. I think they're going to like that answer. Now, you had cut out as a child that one doctor had told you to cut out gluten or wheat or whatever, right? Yeah. So do you think that gluten is a silent killer? I think a lot of people are sensitive to it. I think a lot, there's a lot of interplay, again, with like, your gut health. people who are true celiacs, like I'm not, I don't have celiac disease. I'm actually, actually have like a wheat allergy and it's not even a gluten allergy. It's like a very, like I've never met anyone else who has the same like weird thing that I have. Because I can eat gluten from other grains, but if I eat wheat, like I turn into like a sniffle factory like within seconds.

Oh my gosh. So it's like some upper respiratory reaction. It's like an actual allergy. As for wheat in gluten itself, I think that there's probably interplays, right? So when you have like gut health issues that cause what's called leaky gut, which is where the junctures in your gut kind of widen and allow bigger particles to enter, then you're in this realm where things like gluten entering your circulation can trigger like autoimmunity. And so it's, it's again, like it's one of those, it depends answers. I don't think everyone needs to avoid gluten. I think in general, there's a lot of foods that are better to eat than wheat-based products. And I think that alone is sufficient to maybe steer people towards different decisions.

But I'm not going to, I'm not one of those people who's like, weed is evil. Yeah. It will kill everybody. Now, what about seed oils? Do you think? that seed oils are a huge contributing factor into health problems we have today. Oh, I'm so glad you asked about this one because I did, I wrote a lot about seed oils in my book. And at the time, I was very much kind of entrenched in the paleo community, which is funny because I wasn't really paleo at the time. They just liked me. I feel like when this book came out, the seed oil stuff must have been really new. It was, I would say that the paleo community was kind of the first place that I saw the dangers promoted.

They were raising the alarms. Right, because everywhere else, especially like with the USDA, they're like, no, seed oils. are very healthy because they're low-unsaturated fat. And that was like the one criteria that would make something healthy. It's like it's polyunsaturated fat. It's going to keep your cholesterol lower. And we're just following these specific measurements and using those as a gauge for health. Now, the issue with seed oils is their molecular structure.

They're very prone to oxidizing because they are polyunsaturated, which means like they have all these places in their molecular structure that can be subjected to breakage. And then once they oxidize, that's when they cause problems. Right. So it's, that being said, the worst of the worst are like vegetable oils that are used for frying and like refriing and refriing and refrying over and over because every time you heat it, it's going to like get damaged more. So a lot of the studies that show that vegetable oils are harmful are looking at like fry oils. Yeah, I was going to say the French fries man. Yeah, it sucks because they're yummy. It totally suck. This is the thing like, it's not fun, but it's like it's important, you know? Yeah, exactly, exactly. That being said, you know, something like cold press canola oil, like just as an example, it's probably not going to hurt you. Like, I'm not going to promote that as a like processed food product necessarily, but there's not a lot of science out there that you can point to and say, like, this is really bad for you because it's a vegetable oil, especially if it's like in a salad dressing that doesn't get heated. Right? So it's like this is another situation where, context matters a lot and like preparation method matters a lot. For the most part, I don't

think that vegetable oils are doing anybody any favors. There's much healthier things you can eat. And so I don't categorically avoid them myself. Like if there's something at a restaurant that has a vegetable oil, I'm not like, hmm. Well, it's very, very hard. I mean, that's the thing too when people are like super strict on cutting out seed oils. I try to be the best that I can. But knowing that pretty much any time I go out to eat, I'm going to encounter them. That is very, very hard to avoid if you got to eat unless you're only going to eat food cooked at home. Exactly, right. And then, I mean, and then that puts you in a situation where, like, the lack of socializing. Exactly. That's the thing. You have to think about what, you know,

what benefit outweighs the cost. Is it better to avoid seed oils 100% of the time, but then never ever get to go out with friends? It's probably not very good for your mental health. It's probably great for your physical health, but your mental health is important too. Right. Do you think that Americans in particular are prone to becoming slaves? to certain food ideologies? You know, I've never thought about it in, like, national terms, but yeah, probably. It's really weird to me. Yeah, you don't see that as much elsewhere.

No. Yeah. That's actually a really good insight. I mean, because I always think about this just, like, in more abstract terms, but I think there is something culturally that we're, actually, you know, it might be part of it might be that we're very disconnected from our bodies. Like America very strong And I guess a lot of Western areas

But in particular America We really value like the intellect And we really value like these These linear ways of thinking And there's actually a big disconnect With body wisdom And with like with like tradition Like America doesn't have like a culture

And a like singular sense Because we're just a melting pot We're a melting pot And that's cool in some ways In other ways we don't have a lineage That we come from Where we can look back on it And say this is how we do things

Yeah Because like the Chinese have that, the Scandinavians have that. Yeah. Yeah. Like what's the, you know, every other culture has like some dish or some food that has been like prized and cherished in their traditions. Like what do we have? Like what, Big Mac? Yeah. Yeah. We're a hodgepodge. And you believe that there is not really a one size fits all diet or nutritional guideline. It's just that we need to be very individualistic. Yeah. With our food choices, right? Are there any absolutes things that you've discovered when it comes to food or diets that you're like, okay, now this does. work for almost everyone. I would say, so avoiding things that damage the gut is really important. Which would be like what? So, well, you know, overuse of antibiotics is a good one. For the most part, you want to focus on also eating foods that actually feed your gut bacteria. Because, you know, there's like a big thing with probiotics lately and like, you know, you take like acidophilus and like lactobesylate and like different like strains, right? And you get them in pills

and they're usually pretty expensive and they're supposed to improve your gut health. And that's only true to an extent because they don't always colonize, right? So you take them and they don't actually stay in your gut. And the way to get them to stay in your gut is to feed them with things. And that includes like prebiotic fibers. Okay. Like one source that most people don't know about are potatoes, white potatoes that have been cooked and then cooled down. And the cooling process actually changes their starch structure to become something called resistant starch. And once that starch is in that shape, it actually bypasses your digestive enzymes and goes straight into your colon to feed your gut bacteria. Okay.

And so like potato salad, you know, it's like, huh, who would have thought that might be healthy? But sushi rice is another example of a food that can be like, because it's been cooled down. The starch is created. Well, that was good news for you to find out. I know, right? I was like, hey. So she loves sushi. Body knew something.

But root vegetables in general, anything with prebiotic fibers, like of the chickory family, there's a lot. There's like, I would say like nutritional diversity is really important in general because every food out there is going to give you something. different. And like the way we eat food right now is just terrible. Like the the tiny amount of like different food items we have that like rotate through our diets is like minuscule. Like it should be like 200 right, like of different types of things. And we just don't we just don't have a lot of diversity in our diet anymore. Yeah. Something called the China study came out. And let me know if this is a fair summary of it. Because I am like a very non-smart person trying to resummarize everything. And I mean, You have pages and pages and pages of this.

You have written multiple. Like, you'll write a whole, I don't know if dissertation is the right word, but you'll write a full breakdown of how the study was bogus. And then you'll go back and you'll be like, actually, I have more to say. And I've never seen anything like this. So something, this thing called the China study comes out. It says that basically all the chronic diseases that we face in the West, like breast cancer, obesity, diabetes, heart issues, high cholesterol, all this kind of stuff was linked to people eating more animal protein. is this correct, including fish. And one of your biggest claims to fame and viral notoriety came from you destroying this study.

And so in the simplest way possible, how big of an impact did this study have on what Americans were being told about food? What was problematic with its findings? And what was the reaction to you saying that this is all a load of crap? I love it. So just as some more backstory. When I was a vegan, this book is so it. written by a man named T. Colin Campbell, who's like Professor Emeritus at Cornell University, huge list of credentials, right? Like, just has been, been everywhere, done everything, a lot of

history and a lot of, you know, prestige. So when I was a vegan, this book got cited left and right is there reason to be vegan. And because it went specifically from previous claims, which are, like, vegetarians are healthy, but you can still eat some dairy and eggs or, like, fish is healthy. this book actually made the claim that all animal protein, as you said, is harmful. And like, it'll cause cancer. It'll raise your cholesterol. It'll cause heart disease. Whatever the diseases, name it, this, you know, it'll be caused by animal protein.

So I, once I was, like, exiting veganism, I was thinking about this book. And I was like, something's not right with this. Something that's not right with this. And I was at a very unique point in my life where I had actually, like, just gotten hit by a car. And I was recovering. So you had the time. I had time, and they gave me like pain and suffering money. So I was like, oh, I have to work for a little bit.

This is nice. And I ended up getting a copy of not only the China study, the book, but also the study that it was the namesake for the book. So, like, it's called the China study. The book itself actually talks about more than just the China study itself. But I was really interested in this thing called the China study, which was this huge, huge, huge project that had been conducted over the course of decades in China, in rural China. and the study itself basically researchers went to China in these different counties and they surveyed people on what they were eating like very, very detailed reports, like how many times a year do you eat green vegetables?

Like every lifestyle and dietary factor that you could think of, they chronicled. And then they tried to see what type of disease outcomes were happening for each population. And China was a really cool place to do this because people would live and die in the same county or the same region, especially in these rural parts. and they eat the same diets, and you could very easily start distilling these trends with, like, food and then health outcomes. So Colin Campbell was one of the researchers who's on the China study team, and so he was really involved in all of this. And he, the claim that was made in his book was that the data that came out of the study unequivably pointed to the fact that animal protein is harmful. And he made a lot of statistical claims and, you know, lived with them throughout this book. And it just so happened that all of the data for this study was actually available publicly.

And there's not a lot of copies of it, but it's like this huge book that's like this thick that just has pages and pages of correlation. And you're like the only one in the world that was willing to read it. Well, I was like, you know what? I don't have a lot going on right now. I'm all broken up and my elbow was like messed up. You know, I was like, I got some time. I'm a nerd. This will be kind of fun.

So I was just mostly curious for my own, my own thought. Like I didn't plan on doing anything with this initially. I was just like, I wanted to know it was there. And so were animal proteins causing all of these ailments? So here's what happened. So I went through the data and I just like, like there was so much data. I can't overstate how much data there was. And I was just like I got like a download statistical programs to like start like

running correlations and stuff and doing my own analysis of the data. And what had happened was this, Colin Campbell, he would take something, one of the findings from this study, something like, you know, like a like animal protein. is associated with slightly higher LDL cholesterol. And then he would take another variable, something like LDL cholesterol is associated with, like, you know, higher rate of liver cancer or something, just as an example. And then he would make a claim from that that animal protein causes liver cancer. And if you actually go back and look at the direct correlations between the food and the

disease, they weren't there. So what he was doing was he was grabbing these like third variables to like insert between the two things you're actually interested in, and it created the illusion that these things are linked in a causative way. And it was just every single time I looked this up, it was like, that's what was happening. And so when it comes to, in terms of American health, how serious were people taking the China study? So since I was a vegan at the time, I was only aware of like what that community was going through, but they loved that book. That was their Bible. They just held on to that book, like, just for dear life. And it was like the whole thing was made up.

I mean, I would say that I go back and forth on whether Colin Campbell knew what he was doing or not. Like, I think he really believed that he had found something legitimate and, like, was able to mentally excuse the way that he was playing with the data. But he was interpreting his own data wrong. He was interpreting his own data wrong. And then I even, like, asked some of the other researchers on that team if they agreed with him. And none of them gave me a yes. They were like, like, one person said one of the other, like, mean people on the study team, they said something like, after 20 years, of trying and failing to interpret the data from the China study, I've given up trying to make any

sense of anything from it. Well, they also said that the younger women were when they first menstruated, the greater their chance of getting breast cancer. Was there evidence on that convincing at all? I don't recall on that one. Yeah, I'm not sure about that one. Okay. I mean, there is a, you could make the claim that, like, the longer hormonal exposures you

have is going to increase certain, like, hormone-sensitive cancer risk. But I'm not sure. about the context of that study. Okay. Yeah. What happened to you when you came out debunking the China study? Oh, that was crazy. Okay, so I was working as an after-school teacher at the time.

Like, I didn't have any online presence. Like, I had this little blog that I just posted things about raw veganism and nutrition and all the stuff that I got banned for talking about on the vegan forums. I would just like, well, I'm just going to make a blog and post it there. No one can ban me from my own blog. So I posted this. I basically wrote an analysis of what we were just talking about all. my findings. I was like, man, I wonder if anyone else would think this is interesting. And the post

ended up going viral. It even circulated back to T. Colin Campbell, the guy who wrote the China study, and we got in a little back and forth for a while. And I was like, I was like 23 at the time. I was like, this little babe. Like, I was just like, oh, I don't know what's happening. And everyone's paying attention to me. It's like, who is this girl rooting my life? I mean, he probably was floored that some 23-year-old blogger was just doing this. The first thing he wrote back was an accusation that I wasn't real, that I was like this like composite, like my, like my picture was like this composite image created by the meat industry. And this is before AI.

Yeah, no, right. No, I was like, oh, I don't know if I should be flattered. That's like, no, I'm a real girl. I am. No, it was, I mean, it was, it was amazing. I had so much adrenaline going constantly. I was like, I'm in a war with somebody. This is cool.

And so did that kind of the attention that you got? Did that encourage you like, I need to really pursue this and write a book? Yeah. I mean, that that was, I never. a million years would have planned a nutrition career for myself. That wasn't necessarily my interest at the time. I always wanted to be a writer, but I didn't. I mean, my nutrition interest was specifically like personal. Like, it was very self-interested. I was like, I just want to figure out how to be healthy. And so the fact that people were getting benefits from the things that I had been through

and then wrote about, I was like, oh, I could do a lot with this. This is really cool. And it was fun for me, too, for a long time to analyze things and kind of tear them apart. Like, I actually kind of moved out of that after a while. It's like at some point you have to stop just ripping things apart and you start to have to offer things in there to replace the, you know, the rubble that you've created. But at the time, it was, it was a very, very cool experience. How should Americans view any advice from the government when it comes to what we should or should need? Be careful. Be careful. Just know that the government is not, they don't have everyone's best interest at heart for health. And they're also.

not the most educated in terms of how to actually understand nutritional science. And that's where, again, it comes down to, in my opinion, the two most important things you can do is develop a good relationship with your body where you can tell when something's not working for you. And like, don't just make food a mental thing. Don't make it intellectualized. Like, check in with yourself. Like, do I feel good as a vegan? Like, you know, do I feel good as a carnivore? Do I feel good as, you know, eating this breakfast every morning? Like, you know, and then to get to that point, you really have to avoid the foods that do hijack, you know, your sense of hunger. Like the sugars and stuff. So those are ones that I think are worth eliminating just so that you can

have a better connection with your own body. Do you think that the government has something to gain by keeping Americans fat and unhealthy? I don't know if I would say that the government specifically does, but definitely, you know, a lot of pharmaceutical companies do. It is true that you can make more money keeping people sick and then just managing their health condition than actually providing cures. But again, I don't like to assume that everyone has bad intent, but that is my own, you know, optimism for humanity. And so tell us about, you have more than one book that you've written, right? This is it for now. Oh, this is it? Okay, so do you have another book that you're working on? Not specifically, but I definitely segued more into like mental health and like emotional resiliency and

stuff because kind of after, you know, you get your body working, there's other things in the human experience that can be very important to look at. And you have a website. Tell us what that is. So that's Deniseminger.com. And I post, you know, once every couple years. But it is filled with information. Filled with information. Like, you could spend hours easily on there. You've contributed a lot to take a break, I think. The blog posts are very long. Yeah, blog posts are very long. So you will enjoy it if you like, if you want more where, you know, if you want more than what you just heard in this conversation, unfortunately. I don't have four hours with her, but how can we balance open-mindedness with healthy skepticism when it comes to nutritional science, you think? Oh, that's a really good question.

I think it goes back to you don't want to be so open-minded that your brain falls out, right? Like, that's like my favorite thing. I think understanding the patterns that people tend to fall into when they're looking for answers is really important. So this is kind of like a meta-discuss. a lot of times when people get disillusioned with the government's advice, they'll kind of go under that saying of, you know, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. And they'll look for anyone that's attacking the government. It'll be like, ah, you have the answers. But then you can fall into the same trap where you have a community that thinks it knows everything and it's very, like, rigid and crystallized around a certain structure. And you don't want to fall into that either because

then you're just going to go through that same pattern over and over and over and it's going to be very frustrating and take the rest of your life. That's applicable advice for many facets of life, I think, not even just food. I agree completely. Yeah. Yeah. It's important to be aware that we are all vulnerable to that. So to stay skeptical, you really, again, it comes back to like your relationship with your body. It's like when you go to the doctor and you know something's wrong and they just look at your blood work or they like scan you over and like, yeah, you're fine. Like how many times do you know, like someone's done that and someone has had that experience and like, oh, actually they had cancer or actually they had like this thing that really was an issue and no one believed them.

I think about women being told that they just need to get on birth control when they're actually suffering from things like PCOS and stuff. Yes, absolutely. That's a huge one I think of. Absolutely. Like, yeah, female hormone stuff, huge. And that's another one where I feel like women. We're always gaslit.

We're absolutely. I completely agree with that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's a big one. I love your stuff, Denise. Thank you.

Thank you so much for coming on the spillover and sharing your expertise and just getting a little peek into your mind was so fun. Thank you so much. This is a blast. How long you've been listening to this podcast? Are you season one, girlie? Maybe you rolled in on season three or maybe you just got here a few weeks ago. Whatever the case, I just have one question for you. Are our periods synced up yet? Jokes, but on a serious note, I've started to change my mindset around my period. I think of it like as a week to treat myself. I stock up on expensive chocolates, canceled plans, binge a new show, get some Epsom salts, and try to make it feel like something to look forward to as best as I can. Using Garnu tampons helps with that. Getting my

hot pink package in the mail every month is just so much shaker than a plastic grocery store bag. And I love that the money I have to spend every single month, no matter what, goes to a company that shares and supports my values like Garnu. Not to mention Garnu tampons are 100,000. 100% organic, made without dyes, fragrances, or chlorine, and use BPA-free, compact applicators. You have to get tampons, so just to get Garnu. Make life easier by setting them up to automatically come to your house every month just in time and try organic ones. Trust. Go to garnu.com slash spillover.

Use code spillover for 15% off. That's Garnu, G-R-N-U-U-U-com slash spillover with code spillover for. for 15% off or click the link in the show notes. If you really enjoy going in the weeds on food and nutrition, you'll love Denise's book because it's basically the big food encyclopedia. She breaks down more studies than people probably knew even existed on what is supposedly healthy and what is not. Now, what lesson did we learn today, kids?

That you simply cannot take what the government says at face value, ever. That includes health advice. Thank God we live in America and I can say that. I do have an important announcement, but before I tell you, I do want to say that if you want more episodes like this, just scroll back to January of this year till now and you'll find multiple on this subject. I have one more food-related episode in the bank that is slated to come out likely in July. I'm not going to make any promises, but we're probably going to release it in July. And that one is going to focus specifically on what a scam the entire plant-based industry is and veganism and all of it. It is a huge guest. Be excited. And now for the announcement, starting next week, we are diving into a themed

episode month. I am calling it May is for the moms. But if you're not a mom yet, you will still love it because every episode covers femininity, etiquette, how to make friends, homemaking, and yes, parenting. That starts next week. So make sure you're subscribed to this podcast so you don't miss it and leave a five-star review for Denise and I. New episodes of The Spillover come out Thursday nights at 9 p.m. Pacific or midnight Eastern, which is technically Fridays, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or anywhere else you like to listen to podcasts. And by the way, if you subscribe to Pop Politics on YouTube, you can watch these episodes. I'm Alex Clark, and this is The Spillover. Love you, mean it. Bye.