The Joe Rogan Experience - #1058 - Nina Teicholz

Episode Date: December 28, 2017

Nina Teicholz is an investigative journalist and author of "The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat, & Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet"

Three, two, one. Taishols. Did I say it right? That's it. What's up, Nina? How are you? Hi. Good to be here.

Thank you. Thanks for doing this. Appreciate it. It's good to be here. Thanks. So a big fat surprise. What's the big fat surprise? That butter, meat, and cheese do not cause heart disease.

That saturated fat doesn't cause heart disease. That fat doesn't make you fat. Yeah. That the heart disease that fat doesn't make you fat that the low fat diet doesn't make you healthy that's my book yeah that's very controversial pull this sucker up real close to you all right there we go right there yeah perfect beautiful um very controversial in this day and age it was even more controversial when the book came out which is in 2014 but you know know, we've seen an almost complete sea change on this subject, not at the expert level, but you know, there's a real groundswell in a change of thinking. I think, I think, in part really triggered by my book,

which really laid out all the arguments for how do we come to believe that saturated fat is bad for health? Why do we believe animal fats are bad? Why do we believe they cause heart disease? And really tells that whole story of how we started down this path, believing that fat and cholesterol cause heart disease, make you sick, cause cancer, make you fat. And it's a wild story. It's just an incredible story, the politics, the personalities. It really is a story more about politics than about science. Did you feel vindicated when that New York Times article came out where it showed that the sugar industry had bribed these scientists to lie about data and falsify data that showed that saturated fat was the cause of heart disease instead of sugar? Because that was fairly recently, right?

That was after your book. That was. And, you know, that's a small part of the story. I mean, I have documents in my book. There's maybe a hundred different, you know, documents that you can find where companies are trying to sway the interests. They're trying to pay off scientists, basically. There's so much money going into nutrition science. We really, it's amazing how little people know about how much nutrition science is funded by the food industry. And that was one small example, where Harvard scientists had received money from the sugar industry. And what the this article contended is that that's what pushed them to blame fat and not sugar for heart disease. I actually don't believe that that's what

happened in that particular case for those Harvard scientists in 1950s, because I studied them extensively. You know, for my book, I read like, well, it took me nine years, and I read like 10,000 scientific papers. So I knew the work of those Harvard scientists. I knew everything they had written. One of them is named Mark Hegstead, who is very influential. And the reality for him and his colleagues was that they truly 100 percent believe that fat and saturated fat and cholesterol cause heart disease. industry came along with that proposition for them. They really believed those early scientists were true. They were not corrupt. They were actually not corrupted by industry. They were true believers. And one of the things that my book explores is this phenomenon that happens, happened then, happened today, where scientists, they come to fall in love with their beliefs. You know, they fall in love with their own hypothesis.

Humans. It's a problem with humans, not just scientists. Exactly, right? So this is what we all do. We all, we fall in love with an idea, we believe something, and we only see things that confirm it, and we kind of ignore everything that contradicts it. Well, in science, what scientists are supposed to do, what they're taught to do, is to not behave in a human way. They're taught to rigorously distrust their beliefs. They're taught to try to find every

way to shoot down their own hypothesis. That's the job of being a scientist. That's why they seem so cold and dispassionate to us mere humans. But in the case of nutrition science, that didn't happen. They fell in love with their idea. It was like a favored child. All they did was try to find evidence to support it. They cherry-picked the evidence again and again. And they completely ignored or actively even suppressed any information that contradicted their ideas.

So this scientist, Mark Hegstead at Harvard, he and his favorite colleague, Ansel Keys, who is from the University of Minnesota, they would actually bully and kind of stomp on scientists who came up with contradictory information. They would actually suppress stuff. And this is still going on today, which is what makes it such an interesting story. I mean, today it's the same phenomenon in nutrition science. This is the way nutrition science started, and it's the legacy that continues today, which is that any papers to the contrary, you know, hard to get them published, hard to get them discussed, hard to get them presented at expert meetings. hard to get them presented at expert meetings. And it's been driven by people who are really married to their hypothesis about what a healthy diet is.

So you feel like what happened was the sugar industry came along and they found these people that already had beliefs that aligned up with what they were trying to sell. Right. So maybe they weren't even so corrupt. Like maybe they've said, oh, well, these scientists know more than us. Just pay them to get this research out. You know, you can't blame industries for trying to protect their products. Right. Every industry does it.

I mean, it's just what industry does. And, you know, there was another story out recently about how sugar industry didn't pursue research they had done that seemed to show that sugar caused cancer. Well, I mean, if you're the sugar industry, like, what is your obligation to keep going? I mean, I'm not saying that, you know, there are no angels, but we shouldn't expect corporations to be angels. What you do expect is for your scientists to behave in a principled way, right? That's what we should expect. Yeah. I mean, when it gets to a certain, I think if you look at cigarettes, for instance, in the tobacco industry, like there's a large market for something we know kills people. I mean, you don't have to lie about it. You can have a warning on the label and it still makes

billions of dollars a year. Tell everybody, hey, this is definitely going to give you cancer. Keep smoking it. And they'll go, okay. And they'll buy it. They'll keep buying it. So it's not really that you need to lie about things. You really don't. I mean, people are more than willing.

As long as it hits the right buttons and switches in their brain and their receptors, they're more than willing to put their health in danger for some temporary mouth pleasure. Yeah. And this kind of goes to the subject that is, you know, debated in the food world, which is, you know, how much should the government be telling people what to eat? Right. Right. So there are people who say, you know, they believe sugar is like tobacco. If you eat it, you will probably, if you eat a lot of sugar, you are much more likely to get diabetes and heart disease. I mean, I think that's, if you eat a lot of sugar, you are much more likely to get diabetes and heart disease. I mean, I think that's – if you eat a lot of refined carbohydrates or maybe even if you eat just too many carbohydrates, period, you're more likely to get diabetes and heart disease and become obese. So, you know, should – but people like it.

They do like it. They do like it. And then there's also people that are on a plant-based diet, like my friend Eddie, who you just met, was right before you, who's a vegan now. He's been a vegan, let me say, a couple years, three years, I think he said. He has way too many carbohydrates. And he's admitting it and talking about it, not exactly knowing how to fix his cravings and his urges. his urges. You know, if you're on a completely plant-based diet, it's really hard to just go all fats and, and, and get the proper amount of unsaturated and saturated fats in your diet. Yeah. I mean, so people are on vegan diets for many reasons. Um, and, and that's their own personal choice. The reality is that, um, the, you know, there's a large body of rigorous research by that. I mean mean randomized controlled clinical trials on thousands of people showing that a diet higher in fat and lower in carbohydrates leads to better outcomes in terms of diabetes, obesity, heart disease.

Those are the biggies, right? And so lowering carbohydrates is the way to reverse out of those diseases. If you're on a vegan diet, it's just very hard to do that in a low-carb way. You know, what do you eat as your source of protein and fat? There are some plant fats. You can have a lot of coconut oil. Avocado. Avocado, a lot of avocado.

But, you know, it just becomes hard. Like, what do you put on your plate for dinner every night? You know, like if you eat meat, you have a piece of meat. Right. I mean, that used to be just at the center of the dinner plate. But it's hard on a vegan diet. The other thing that's very hard on a vegan diet is staying, you need to be really careful about nutritional supplements. And because you cannot get all the nutrients that you need naturally from the foods that you're eating.

And also some of those nutrients are not as biodigestible. I mean, your body doesn't absorb them as easily, like iron from spinach is not as absorbable as iron from meat. So it's hard. It's hard to stay healthy on that diet. Yeah, that is the big misconception, right? When you look at the total amount of iron or protein or anything in a plant-based diet, there's the bioavailability of that. It's less. And people don't understand that. So when people do like hold up charts that show, hey, you can get a cup of broccoli and that has the same amount of protein as a cheeseburger. Oh, no, it doesn't. It really doesn't. It might on paper, but in terms of how your body absorbs it, it's not equal. No.

Or, you know, another example is carrots are supposed to give you vitamin A, right? But carrots don't give, they give you a precursor to vitamin A called carotenoids. Can it convert into vitamin A? Not that efficiently. Most people can't convert that efficiently. So they're not getting the kind of vitamin A they need. And what does vitamin A come from? What food sources?

I don't know. You know, I don't know off the top of my head a good source of vitamin a source yeah it's animal you let's see i think you get pork vitamin a um sorry i should know that but i but but you can get all the vitamins and minerals and nutrients that you need from animal foods um and you'd have to we'd to eat, like, this entire studio full of spinach to get the amount of iron that you need, and you can get that amount of iron in a few ounces of meat. So is that one of the—I'm sorry.

No, the other thing is that in order to get protein, like if you can get your protein from beans, say, you have to get a complete protein, let's say you have beans and rice. But in order to get, you know, let's say 100 grams of protein, you need to eat like 1,000 calories of beans and rice versus, say, a couple hundred calories of meat. Okay, so don't hold me to those numbers, but I'm just telling you, you eat a lot more calories to get the same amount of protein. So for a day's worth of protein, you're saying, obviously you wouldn't want 100 grams of protein in a single serving, but for a day's worth of protein, you're saying, obviously you wouldn't want 100 grams of protein in a single serving.

But for a day's worth of protein, you're probably going to eat an exorbitant amount of beans and rice. Right. Yeah. Or broccoli or whatever the hell else you're trying to eat. Like iron is a big one, right? I know. I have a few friends that are vegan or have been vegan, and that was an issue with them was iron. Yeah.

I mean, I was a vegetarian for over 25 years. Were you? And I was always anemic. And I took iron pills, and that didn't work. And you just, you know, heme iron, which is the favored kind for absorption, is only available from animal sources, and principally red meat. White meat is, like chicken, is relatively poor in nutrients, poor in iron, too. So, you know, the most nutrient-dense food on the planet is liver, which nobody is used to eating anymore, and we all think it's disgusting. I like it. Yeah, I like it, too.

But, you know, in a grandparent's generation, they had chopped liver or whatever. Liver and onions. Liver and onions. And that's very nutrient-dense. But we stopped eating it because it's high in cholesterol. So these are the consequences of having, what we did was, this is what my book is about, but it's, you know, we started, starting in 1961, we basically, the American Heart Association was the first organization to say, don't eat saturated fat and cholesterol to avoid a heart attack.

And that was based on, at the time, really weak evidence. You know, something called an observational study can show an association but not causation. And, you know, there were just enormous unintended consequences. So actually this Harvard scientist, Mark Hegstead, this was, you know, he was one of the people behind this. Actually, this Harvard scientist, Mark Hedgstead, this was, you know, he was one of the people behind this. And he said, we imagine the benefits will be great. And we cannot imagine what the, you know, that there could be any negative consequences, something like that. fundamental tragedy of any kind of policy, especially when it becomes enshrined by an organization like, a powerful organization like the American Heart Association or, say,

our government. They do what they think. They kind of make a best guess. And they can't imagine what would the unintended consequences be. What would be the unintended consequences of, say, limiting foods with cholesterol in them? Well, not eating liver, not getting iron, not getting all, eliminating one of the most nutrient dense foods on the planet from our diets. And so many other things, egg, you know, egg white omelets. How many egg white omelets have you eaten? Yeah, I'm not into those, but they're real common. As soon as I found out that there's a lot of nutrition in the yolk, and that's like one of the healthiest parts of the egg. I was so confused. I was like, what's the egg white thing then? Why is everybody going with egg whites?

Because the yolk is where the cholesterol is, so that's why we stopped eating egg yolks. And the yolk is also where all the nutrients are, including things like lutein, which is for eye health and brain development. I mean, there's all kinds of things and things that are choline, also for brain development that you can really not easy to find, you can't find them easily in plant foods or at all. And they're crucial to human development. So, you know, we eliminated these foods. You know, it's ironic. Like the cholesterol is essential to every cell in your body.

We make cholesterol. We eat cholesterol. It's part of what, you know, it's a building block for all of our hormones. And, you know, coupled with cholesterol are all the nutrients needed to sustain life. So we eliminated all those foods. I know this, what you're saying, but most people, when they hear that, they're like, well, no, cholesterol is bad. It gives you a heart attack. My dad is on cholesterol drugs. He's on statins to keep cholesterol out of his body. Yeah. Well, you know, it's been like 60 years of all of us, you know, all of us believing that fat and cholesterol are bad for us. Right. Believing cholesterol is bad. You know, when I started this, my whole this journey for me, it was, you know, as I said, vegetarian, been a vegetarian for decades, hadn't eaten a piece of red meat,n't eaten butter for decades. Barely eaten cheese.

Did you do it for ideological reasons or health reasons? I wanted to be thin. Like all girls. I started when I was a late teenager. And of course I became fat. I'm much thinner now as a middle-aged woman effortlessly than i was i was all through my young adult years i was like 25 pounds overweight but i just carbs good because i ate a high carb diet you know as a vegetarian you're like okay don't eat them don't get you go

to the the mess you know the dining hall in college like don't eat the meat. Don't eat the cheese. Don't eat this. And you have a salad. And then you're starving. So then you're like, okay, get the bag of M&Ms. And that's what people do. You know, they're starving. You're starving on that diet.

What is satiating? What is satiating foods are protein and fat. I mean, that's actually been shown in scientific experiments where they put stacks of, in one experiment, they put stacks of like pork chops in front of people and they just said, eat, you know, don't stop eating, don't. And people just could not overeat on that food. You fill up on fat and protein and they discover that those macronutrients are uniquely satiating. Whereas carbohydrates, you know, overeating on cookies, crackers, trips.

Pasta. Pasta. So easy. A whole box of cereal. I mean, you know, in my vegetarian days, I could eat a box of cereal, no problem. I'll eat a big bowl of pasta on the days that I do cheat. And even though I'm stuffed, I'll still keep eating. I'll just, I see there's more left. There's more left. No one's going to eat that. I'm eating that. I'll just put it in my bowl and just keep eating just your body

craves it in some weird way well or alternatively like another physiological explanation is that your body keeps eating because it's it still hasn't gotten what it needs it hasn't gotten the the nutrients that it actually needs for to build the cells. You're not giving it what it needs until you eat the right foods. Is it possible that both things are going on? That your body hasn't gotten what it needs, so there's that craving, but then there's also this incredibly intoxicating carbohydrate thing going on, where as you're eating it in,

you're just blah, your sugar levels are getting jacked and you just want to keep going. So what you're talking about, I think, is a little bit more like the glucose rollercoaster that happens. And that is part of carb addiction. And then what that is, is you eat carbs, really any kind of carbs. So I'm talking about bread, pasta, you know, even healthy whole grain bread, putting little air quotes around healthy, and M&Ms and Snickers bars, whatever. Any of those foods, when you eat them, they're converted in your blood into glucose. Okay, glucose is a simple sugar. It goes around in your blood. And and, and it's like a quick fuel, and your body uses that up. And then when it's gone, you want another hit.

And so that's the site, that's the roller coaster. So like you have cereal and OJ for breakfast, OJ is another just simple sugar. And then by mid morning, you're starving, right? Whereas, I think maybe your listeners think you've talked about this on your program before, but if you become what's called a fat burner, which is somebody who your primary fuel is not glucose. It's fat with the fat in your body that you store in your body and also the fat that you eat, right? So you think about like a hybrid car. You can have two fuel sources as a human being. You can either live on glucose or fat. If you've got a healthy metabolism, you can switch back and forth between them, right?

So I've trained my body to be a fat burner, right? So I can live off of fat. It's like I can be the electric car. But when I eat carbs, then I can switch over to glucose but I'm healthy enough to switch back but unhealthy people who are unhealthy and or just been living on carbs for a really long time mainly glucose they can only they can only get their fuel from glucose and if they don't have glucose they just bonk that's why like you have you know long distance runners who are like constantly stucking down those, what are those called? Those like glucose packs

and things. They can't switch over to fat to burn their own fat. This is the amazing thing. Like even an obese person, imagine I were like a 300 pound woman. What are those, what is that, all that fat on me? That is fuel. That is like, that is like the miracle of humans to be able to – it's like having granola bars strapped all over my body, right? I should be able to access that fuel. That's my fuel source. Why do we have fat? Instead, that fuel source becomes a burden. It becomes blocked, and I can't access it because I don't know – my body doesn't know how to burn my fat.

And that's what happens when you live too long living off of glucose as your only fuel source. You cannot switch over and burn your own fat. It's like living on top of a well and not having a bucket to get yourself a drink of water. And then you, you know, and then you just, you die of thirst. I mean. That's a crazy way to look at it, that your granola bar is trapped all over your body. But I think that's a good analogy. That's why you have fat.

That's why all animals or mammals have fat. Because what do you do when it's at night? You're not eating all night long. You have to have fat on your body, right? You have to live off of something. And that's why humans became really good at storing fat because it meant we could do other things. We're not like, you know, chimpanzees who have to eat all day long. Right.

Right. Or like these people who are fruitarians and like proud of living off of fruit. They have to eat all day long to have it. Like that's what they have to do all day. But we we eat nutrient dense food like we eat meat. That's humans evolved to eat all day long to have it. Like that's what they have to do all day. But we, we eat nutrient dense food. Like we eat meat. That's humans evolved to eat meat. So that's nutrient dense. So we don't have to eat all day long. So we have time on our hands. We have time in our hands to do podcasts, build the Taj Mahal, do other stuff because we don't have to eat all the time. And we can live off of our fat if we are eating well.

Well, the idea that you're, that all that, that burdens you so, where you have this gut or you have this fat all over your body and it depresses you, that literally changed the point of view and the perspective. Look at that as fuel. You literally have fuel hanging off your body. You just have to figure out a way to get your body to access that and literally eat it away. Did you ever see, Rob Wolf was talking to us about, there was a study where they took a man who was severely obese and they had him fast, nothing but water and some sort of vitamins for 300 plus days. And he wound up losing not just all the fat, but the crazy thing was his skin receded as well. And he didn't have the loose skin

that normally is associated with rapid weight loss so when you get someone who's incredibly obese and they shrink down to a normal size person one of the things they have to deal with routinely is these giant flops of skin because your body's used to being so big but apparently at least in this one case this guy as he had gone through this enormous medically controlled fasting, his skin shrank as well. Like his body ate the fat and recognizes that his body was shrinking. Everything sort of shrank up in proportion. Well, that's amazing.

It is amazing. And I wonder if that could be replicated or if he was just very uniquely, had unique genetics or what the circumstances were. I mean, skin varies, right? That's why some people get stretch marks if they just gain a little bit of weight and other people don't. Yeah. I don't know. I mean, I think that this is one of the theories behind intermittent. I mean, dramatic fasting like that is, just for anybody thinking about it, is, you know, that's potentially dangerous.

You've got to be medically supervised. And so it has to be medically supervised. But, you know, people, there's intermittent fasting that people do where they fast for, you know, like I do. I never eat before noon. So, and people do it for a little bit longer periods of time and it sort of induces this state. What it does is it kickstarts this ability for your body to get into fat burning

mode and to stay in fat burning mode. And so, you know, what you want to do is you want to, if you have excess fat on your body, you want to live off of that fat so it'll disappear. You want, instead of taking in food as your fuel source, you want to live off your fat until you, you know, until it's gone or enough of it is gone that you're happy. So, and that's what fat burners do. And the way to do that is to keep carbs low because carbohydrate, the moment you have glucose in your blood system, your body prefers glucose. It's a quick hit of fuel, right?

Your body will always prefers glucose. It's a quick hit of fuel, right? Your body will always prefer glucose. And once you have glucose circulating in your blood, it's like going up. It's like being at a teller's window in a bank. It's like everything shuts down. You cannot get to your fat cells. It's like we're closed now. You can't get to your fat. As long as you've got glucose, that's what you're living off of.

Why does your body do that? Because it prefers glucose. Glucose is your preferential fuel source. Just is. I don't know. Because it was rare, you know, you occasionally would come across honey or it was, it's, it was just, it's a, it's a quick, efficient source of fuel. So your body came to prefer, to prefer it. fuel. So your body came to prefer it. So you want to stay away from glucose in order to access your fat. That's just the reality. And so fasting is partly doing that. You can do it for a little while. If you just fast in the morning, so your body is basically fasted all night long. You fast through the morning and then you're fat burning all've your your fat burning all that time yeah most people are not aware of that you know it's this is a relatively new situation I practice it I do intermittent fasting I do I have a

14 hour window at night where I don't eat and I think the more people do that the more they'll understand that like your body will burn off way more fat if you just live like that. If you just force yourself to only eat inside of a 10 hour window. Yeah. So the key to that is you can't be eating a lot. You can't be on a high carb diet and then fast. If you're used to eating a lot of carbs, your body will still preferentially need those need that glucose and you'll still be on that roller coaster glucose cycle.

So it's I don't know I think it's pretty hard to do fasting when you're on a high-carb diet and you're right this is all pretty this is all new science so just to you know if you want a little bit of perspective on this really all this science started in the early 2000s and it started, so the long history is, so 1961, American Heart Association tells all of America, stop eating fat and cholesterol so you don't die of a heart attack, right? That was, heart disease had risen from pretty much out of nowhere in the early 1900s to become the leading killer in America. President Eisenhower himself is out of the Oval Office for 10 days with a heart attack. I mean, it's just a huge public health emergency.

And this Ansel Keys, this professor at University of Minnesota, he came up with this idea that he and Mark Hex did, the one from Harvard, said it was saturated fat and cholesterol that caused heart disease. And so that's when that whole hypothesis was born, and it became enshrined as policy. The federal government gets on board in 1980, and that's the beginning of our dietary guidelines. So now the whole country is not only avoiding saturated fat and cholesterol, but also at this point, all of fat is suspect. So it's like just cut back on all fat. And that was a different reason. That's because fat is just denser. It has more calories per gram. It has about nine calories

per gram versus protein and fat, which have, I'm sorry. Yes. Protein and carbohydrate, which have about four or five calories per gram. So it was just thought prudent. Look, one way to keep people thin is just to keep their calories down. And we can do this just by reducing fat because fat has more calorie dense. So now we're all on the low fat diet and we're avoiding saturated fat and cholesterol. And the government is enormously powerful. And so, as I think you know, and so it's not just that all Americans are given this diet, right? All doctor, everybody, every health professional on the front line, every dietician, every medical doctor, every

nutritionist is pushing this low fat diet. But all cattle across the country are bred to be leaner. The whole food supply changes, right? Foods, all sorts of low fat foods appear in the supermarkets. right? Foods, all sorts of low fat foods appear in the supermarkets. Everything goes low fat. And people dramatically change the way they eat. I mean, just to give you some numbers, like we eat 34% less beef than we did in 1970. We eat about 25% less red meat overall. We eat 79% less whole milk. We eat, you know, we eat, I think about 19% less animal fats all together. Eggs are down. I mean, everything, all animal foods came down and we dramatically increased grains. We eat 30% more carbohydrates overall, 40% more grains, almost 90% more vegetable oils. Because of course, if you're not eating saturated fats, you're eating polyunsaturated vegetable oils. So we had this huge change in

the way Americans ate. And 1980 is also so that's the beginning of the dietary guidelines for all Americans. It's also the beginning of the obesity epidemic, you see obesity, rates of obesity kind of very slowly, gradually going up until 1980. And then they start to just take a sharp turn upwards. gradually going up until 1980, and then they start to just take a sharp turn upwards. And they have, you know, barely stopped. So in the early 2000s, what happened? Well, a journalist named Gary Taubes wrote this front page New York Times magazine article saying, you know, what if it's all been a big fat lie? magazine article saying, you know, what if what if it's all been a big fat lie, and basically kind of revives the idea of the Atkins diet, and says, you know, Atkins high fat,

low carb, he had been he had promoted his diet from the early 1970s on, but he had really been vilified. And everybody thought he was a quack. And at that point, there really was no science to support him. I mean, he would say, but look, I've healed all these people and look at all my medical files, go through my drawers, look at my office. And everybody would say, you know, it doesn't matter. There are no clinical trials. There's no science behind your diet. But Gary Taubes came out with this article and then he came out with a book in 2007. And a lot of people read his work. I mean, even though he was vilified

and attacked, but he was brave. And a lot of scientists read his work. And a lot of scientists who thought, you know, something is going wrong in America. You know, our obesity is up. Type 2 diabetes is up. None of the explanations that we have are working. The low-fat diet's not working for it. Rates continue to rise. And so scientists, typically not in the field of nutrition, because in the field of nutrition, it's considered heresy still to research the low-carb diet still. But scientists from different disciplines started to do controlled clinical trials on carb reduction, carbohydrate reduction, the opposite of the low-fat diet, the opposite of what the government was telling people to eat. And so they started to develop this body of clinical trial research. And there are now nearly 100 randomized controlled clinical trials on this low-carb diet.

And they, you know, all kinds of different populations. And they really consistently show that it not only helps people lose weight, and that was always known even in the days of, you know, of Atkins, right? But people always thought, oh, yeah, I'll get my waistline, but, you know, I'll pay for it with a heart attack down the line and it'll just kill my heart because of the cholesterol. But it turns out that the diet is also the best way to control your blood glucose for diabetes. It helps people.

There's actually an experiment out now showing that it reverses diabetes. I mean, completely eliminates that supposedly incurable disease and that it improves most of the risk factors for heart disease. So there's a lot of debate over, you know, which risk factors best predict your likelihood of getting a heart attack. But, you know, for the ones that I think are the most reliable, including your triglycerides, your HDL over your triglyceride ratio, which we don't have to get into that, but for the most reliable heart disease risk factors that best predict heart attacks, the low-carb diet also best improves those risk factors. So what was it that made this so taboo in the food industry or in food research? So like if health researchers today wanted to research low-carb diet

and you're saying that it's taboo, what's causing that? With all this body of evidence that you discussed, all these clinical trials, it's obviously not just Gary Taubes, but so many people have talked about this. Dom D'Agostino has done a lot of research on it. It's very public. A lot of people have talked about this.

So with all that data, where's the resistance coming from? Well, you know, so if the low-carb diet works and is a healthier diet, that means the government's diet every university with all their professors who have been endorsing this diet and their entire careers, all of the pharmaceutical companies that depend on lowering your cholesterol. a huge set of interests that are invested for any number of reasons for keeping this establishment diet, for not backing off this diet that they have prescribed to the American people for 50 years. It's just a huge set of interests. It's all the companies that benefit from the diet, vegetable oil companies, all the companies that produce all the grains. I mean, 80 percent of things on supermarket shelves are basically made out of vegetable oils and grains of some formulation or another and salt. nutrition departments who've been publishing for 30 years about the benefits of this diet, the federal government and all the medical professional associations who've been prescribing this diet to their patients and their, you know, their publics, the American Heart Association.

I mean, it's just, we're in a situation where we just made a gigantic mistake. Wasn't there a recent, very, very controversial and not just controversial but very flawed piece by the American Heart Association where they were talking about the dangers of coconut oils and saturated fats and all those researchers that have been studying this stuff over the last decade are like, what are you talking about? Like where is this coming from? Well, yeah, I mean, right now in the nutrition world, you have people like me who are challenging the status quo and you have the sort of the conventional with the defenders of the conventional wisdom, uh, you know, doubling down to defend their position. What was the position of the American Heart Association? Remember, the American Heart Association launched this whole thing in 1961, right? They're the original authors.

So just last year, they came out with the Presidential Advisory on Saturated Fats, where they said, please ignore all those confusing, you know, internet crazies. I mean, basically referring to people like me and Gary Taubes, you know, internet crazies. I mean, basically referring to people like me and Gary Taubes, you know, about saturated fats. We just want to set the record straight on saturated fats.

And, you know, here's our latest affirmation of our belief that saturated fats cause heart disease. So, I won't get too much into the weeds on it all, but, you know, they had the way that the American Heart Association all these years has sustained their position that saturated fats cause heart disease is they have relied purely on this weak kind of evidence called epidemiology, right? And the government knew that that was not strong enough evidence. Can you explain what that means? Yeah. Okay. So epidemiology are these big studies where they observe people. They observe like tens of thousands of people for a really long period of time.

And they ask them, they just give these people a food frequency questionnaire and they ask you, okay, how many pears did you eat over the last six months? And how many prunes did you eat? And how much of this did you eat? And how much of that? And then you're supposed to write this all down, like as if any of us can remember what we ate yesterday. And you're supposed to make accurate assessments about what you've eaten on, like they asked 250, the most famous one is that of Harvard asked 250 questions about what you've eaten over the past six months. Now, when they try to go and verify to see if

those food frequency questionnaires are accurate, they come up, they basically, it's very poor accuracy by their own measures. But still, they use that data. And then they tie, they follow these people over 10, 20, 30 years, and they figure out who has a heart attack, who dies, who gets cancer. And then they try to make these correlations. Oh, you know, the people who died tended to eat more meat. So they'll say it's meat that caused, you know, what they can really only say is there's a correlation there, but it's not causation. You can never establish causation, which is to say that meat caused that death.

The problem is also that they're eating a lot of things with that meat. Right. So like refined carbohydrates. Well, yeah, I mean, like who eats red meat other than paleo people now? I mean, who's been eating red meat for the last 50 years? The people who ignore everything their doctor tells them, right? So not only are they eating more red meat, but they're eating a lot of other junk. They're probably, you know, they're probably, and this has actually been shown, they don't exercise as much. They tend to not eat as well. They don't visit their doctors. They don't take their pills.

I mean, they're not what we would call compliers, right? They're people who just do not listen to the advice they're given. And any number of those things may have caused the heart attacks. We don't know if it's the meat. We don't know if it's the non-complying. We don't know if it's the lack of exercise. We don't know if it's the fact that they, you know, they drink too much beer or whatever. We just don't know. So those kinds of studies, these epidemiological studies are really just, they only establish

associations and they were designed to suggest hypotheses that could then actually be tested in a kind of science called a clinical trial where you actually, you know, you divide a group up into two parts and you get like a drug trial. You give half people the drug and half people the placebo. And only that kind of experiment, which is called a controlled experiment, can you actually establish cause and effect. So the way you want to, if you really want to know meat causes cancer, you got to do a clinical trial. Give half people, make them eat just red meat all day long. And the other half can be on the vegan diet and see who gets cancer. See which group gets cancer.

Then you're testing. You're doing an actual test. So the government, just back to this idea of unsaturated fat, and then I'll get back to that presidential advisory. And then I'll get back to that presidential advisory. The government actually did do a whole bunch of really big, expensive, randomized controlled clinical trials on saturated fat and cholesterol. They did this on tens of thousands of people. And they tested to see if giving the people who ate saturated fat and cholesterol more of that would die faster or get a heart attack faster. And none of those clinical trials could actually show that the people who ate more saturated fat and cholesterol died at any higher rates of heart disease. What is that music? Is your phone ringing? Your phone going off with music?

I'm sorry. I was trying to figure out what, I thought maybe the Sonos was kicking off in the background. That's your phone. You have a musical ringer? It's sorry. I was trying to figure out what, I thought maybe the Sonos was kicking off in the background. That's your phone. God, I'm so sorry. You have a musical ringer? It's okay. It was just slightly distracting. So keep going, please.

Do you want me to re-say that? Okay, go ahead. Sure. So the government actually did a bunch of randomized controlled clinical trials on tens of thousands of people testing to see if saturated fat and cholesterol caused heart disease. They actually took groups of people, and they did this in mental hospitals, where they totally controlled what people ate. And half the people they gave, you know, meat, butter, cheese,

regular high saturated fat and cholesterol diet, and half the people they, you know, gave them soy-filled cheese and margarine instead of butter, and, you know, and soy-filled meat. And in those randomized, those rigorous experiments on tens of thousands of people, they could not show that the people eating the meat and the butter and cheese died faster of, from heart disease, died at higher rates from heart disease. In fact, they showed in one of the most famous experiments called the Minnesota Coronary Survey on 9,000 men and women over four and a half years, they found the more the men lowered their cholesterol, the more likely they were to die of a heart attack. So what happened to all those experiments? They were not that particular experiment.

It wasn't published for 16 years. Other experiments I found sat in NIH National Institute of Health basement, never published, ignored, not included in literature reviews, not included, just ignored or suppressed. It's like out of a crime novel. It's crazy. And so what was the American Heart Association doing? Ignoring all those clinical trials. So the American Heart Association is basically just almost protecting their incorrect statements of the past. That's what they're doing. Right. And so this latest

presidential advisory was their attempt, because my book listed all these clinical trials and Gary's book did earlier, too. But people have now been talking about them a lot more and saying, like, how can you ignore that? We did all that we spent. The government spent a billion dollars, more than a billion dollars testing this hypothesis and could not could not show it to be true. And why did you ignore these experiments for all these years? So so the so this presidential advisory was an effort to reckon with those long ignored clinical trials that had been funded by the government. And they did it in a way that I think was just totally disingenuous. And I wrote a response to it where I kind of rebutted it in Medscape. And I also wrote a piece in the LA Times about it. And, you know, we're at this point where these esteemed public health institutions are defending their longstanding yet erroneous

positions about a healthy diet. And then there's like, people like me on the outside saying, you know, and not just me, you know, there's now a whole chorus of scientists around the world who are saying the same thing, you know, saying, these recommendations are based on flawed evidence. Our guidelines are not evidence based, we need to, you know, our national guidelines are not based on good evidence. So there's this growing chorus around the world. And, you know, I'm one of the voices, I'm probably one of the more prominent voices now. But, you know, we just have national guidance that's just not based on good evidence. There's that. And then there's a lot of people that get really confused by ideologically based documentaries and things that are trying to push people like what the health and things along those lines. They're

trying to make some really unsubstantiated correlations between meat consumption and diabetes and a bunch of other like really weird ones that I've never heard before that I hear repeated by people. I'm like, wait, where the fuck did you hear that? And they'll tell me without doubt this one documentary. What the health. Yeah. Yeah, I wrote a rebuttal to that too, which I'm happy to post if you want on your website. Sure. And so, okay, so that's a perfect example.

Like one of them was, you know, eating an egg or two a day is like smoking five cigarettes. Right. Like crazy stuff, right? Just not true. All of that is based on that really weak epidemiological evidence. egg or two a day is like smoking five cigarettes. Right. Like crazy stuff, right? Just not true. So all of that is based on that really weak epidemiological evidence. None of it has been, either it's not been tested in clinical trials or the clinical trials do not support those statements. I went through every single scientific claim in that movie.

I did. I was in Greece on holiday. And everybody's like, why aren't you at the beach? I'm like, because I have to go through every single scientific claim of what the health and show that it's based on this really weak, unsubstantiated evidence. And but you know, these, I think that one of the reasons that that they made that film was that, reasons that they made that film was that, you know, we live in very confusing times for science, right? You make a film, you pull at somebody's heartstrings, you know, that film is like, it's very scary. You feel like, oh my God, there's poison in the milk. And now there's poison in my pregnant belly and it's going to be in my child. I mean, it's really effective as a piece of, as a movie. But isn't it not just irresponsible, but dangerous?

Well, I think so. I mean, but I think that what you have is people pushing this diet for, you know, ideological reasons, as you said, you know, they're, they're, the people behind that film are, you know, two very, very well-known animal welfare activists who just don't want animals killed. And, you know, those are their motivations. There are other people who are, have, they have practices or kind of empires, like Dean Ornish has a whole empire based on his plant-based diet, right? There's just, there's whole business commercial empires that are based on this diet. So, you right? There's whole business commercial empires that are based on this diet. So there's a whole combination of reasons.

Now there's a part of the, you know, in the environmental movement really believes that cows cause global warming. So there's like this whole confluence of interests. But if you just look at the health claims, there are no randomized controlled clinical trials. There's no rigorous evidence to show that that diet is safe or can fight disease. And they've actually, you know, a few of these vegan diet doctors have actually done clinical trials where they put people on a vegan diet.

And they were overseen by the vegan diet doctor himself. So John McDougall did one of these. He's here in California. So, I mean, the most biased possible person overseeing this experiment, right? He wants his diet to look good. But even then, he could, those studies could not show

that the vegans were healthier at the end of a year of eating that diet. So maybe it's a healthy diet, but it cannot be shown to be true. And so it's fine to eat it for whatever reason that you want to, but health, there's no evidence to show that that diet will be a good option for health. Yeah, that is a very hard pill for a lot of people to swallow that, for good reasons, don't want animals to suffer. Right. So they want to live a life where they have as small footprint as possible and don't harm things. One of the things that disturbs people to no end is when

I describe the process of collecting grain in a combine and how vultures will circle over fields right after the combine rolls over because those indiscriminate gigantic machines that might be a football field wide are just chewing up everything in front of them, including ground nesting birds and squirrels and rodents and occasionally deer fawns and anything else that gets caught up in the middle of it. Yeah, I mean, the reality is there is no life for any creature without the death of another creature. I mean, there's, there's, um, life involves death of some kind or another. I mean, you know, monocropping agriculture is devastating to the, to, to all kinds of

life. It's also incredibly unnatural. It's unnatural to see thousands of acres that are just soybeans. That is very, very weird. It doesn't exist anywhere in the world other than places where people have forced that into the environment.

Yeah, and I think that there's also a deep discomfort with the fact that for many people, any sentient person that being human has, you know, that we were, we evolved eating meat, right? We're not herbivores. And so, and we can't really survive that way. In fact, in the early experiments that they did on omnivore animals. They did them on all kinds of omnivore animals in the 1920s and 30s. And they tried to see if they could get an omnivore animal to survive purely on plants, grains, seeds. And they found it incredibly difficult to keep those, you know, whether rats or pigs alive. And even when they could keep them alive,

they live shorter lives and their offspring live shorter lives. So, you know, we have, I think, you know, we're ethical beings. And so we have a discomfort with killing other animals as well we should. But, you know, that is why I think humans evolved all kinds of ways of dealing with the need to kill animals, basically, just to survive, right? All the rituals, the asking of forgiveness. And, of course, when it was your own animals, we all raised our own people, lived on farms and raised their own animals. There were ways, you know, that it was much more sort of a part of the holistic experience of being a farmer and living on the land. And now we're all so divorced. We live in cities.

We're thousands of miles away from where animals are raised. We don't really understand anything about it. It seems inhumane and cruel. I think an ethical solution for this is probably going to be this sort of laboratory-created meat that seems to be a flourishing industry right now. They're trying to get off the ground with this stuff. And it's very expensive at the moment, but they foresee that in the next several years, it'll be economically feasible for people to buy meat from an animal that never really existed as a living thing.

eat from an animal that never really existed as a living thing. You know, if they can do that and it has all the same nutrients that real animals do, that would be a miracle, right? Yeah, it would be. It's going to be very interesting. But then there's also the issue of what happens if we completely stop eating cows and chickens and pigs and what happens to all those animals? Who manages that? Who stops them from overbreeding? Who controls their population? How do we do that? We've put ourselves into a corner here. We've put ourselves into a corner. If we choose to never eat these animals How do we sustain their populations and what financial reward do people get for sustaining them if they're not going to profit from them whatsoever? They're going to have to spend an exorbitant amount of money or let them roam free, which people, if people don't realize that's happened in parts of the world. Bulls revert to a very strange form.

Wild cows do. In Australia, they call them scrub bulls. I mean, you know, they live in the scrubs. And that these scrub bulls are incredibly aggressive, enormous, weird-looking cow things that they now hunt. And they have a problem with them in certain parts of Australia because they'll break into these confined areas where they have domestic cattle and screw up the genes of these cattle with these wild cattle strains. These bulls are incredibly aggressive and they're just roaming loose.

And, you know, is that what we're going to do? We're going to have wild cows everywhere? Like, OK, so what happens if the wild cow populations get out of control? Are we going to bring in lions? Like, what are we doing? I don't know. This is something I'm not an expert in, but I know people, there's a whole school of thought. You really need large animals.

They're part of an ecosystem. To have a healthy ecosystem on Earth, you need animals as part of their, they return manure to the Earth, and that's part of the cycle of life, and, you know, plants can't survive without them and you need animals actually as part of a healthy environment. So, you know, that's not something that I'm an expert in, but I think it is, you know, I guess I would say like the kind of really simplistic, it's just simplistic thinking to say that we should get rid of all animals or, you know, get rid of all domesticated animals. I mean, I just think that's, that's a, it's a kind of simplistic vision that I think a lot of dealing with simplistic visions, right? We're dealing with an incredibly complicated situation that we find ourselves in the 21st century. You didn't ask for it. I didn't ask for it. This is

just the place we were born and raised. So then we look around at the landscape and we go, okay, what do I have to do for this meat vehicle? What do I have to do to keep this thing optimized? And then what do I have to do for my mind that I don't feel terrible about eating some horrifying factory farmed food, where I have to watch some PETA video on how this thing was created and realize I'm a monster. And I think that is the motivation for a lot of people to go towards veganism. And I think it's a good motivation. I think their motivations are noble and just, if that's what they are. But somewhere along the way, you get roped into an ideology and you get boxed into these very rigid ways of thinking.

And out of those rigid ways of thinking, you get a documentary like What the Health. Yeah. Well, you know, I would also I also think we're in the same way that we're a divided nation politically. We are a divided nation in terms of the way we think in urban cities, centers, and, you know, where I've always lived my whole life. But, and out in the areas of the country, you know, the red states where they take, they have cattle and they, you know, the dairy farms are, and, you know, this is like, we actually have no idea, for the most part, what goes on there. And, you know, we just see like the have no idea for the most part what goes on there. And, you know, we just see like the horrifying videos shot by some undercover person or I mean, it's, you know, one of the things that was sort of surprising and like a really beautiful experience for me after my book came out was that I was invited to speak all over the country. And, you know, I'm your classic flyover person.

I grew up in Berkeley, California. And then I mean, I lived various places in the world, but then I settled in New York City. So, you know, I'm like, as urban progressive liberals, they come and all of a sudden, I'm giving speeches in Oklahoma and Texas and, you know, Illinois. I mean, really, it was, it was really a shock to me, but it was truly eyeopening. Like I met all the people who, you know, all these people in the cowboy hats were like, oh, I would have, you know, I would have been one of the ones protesting throwing kale at these guys, you know, in my previous life. And now I'm, you know, standing in front of 800 of them talking about saturated fat, you know, the findings in my book. That now I'm, you know, standing in front of 800 of them talking about saturated fat,

you know, the findings in my book, that's what I, you know, here's what I found. And, you know, I can't say that I did any kind of in-depth reporting, but, but really the kinds of conversations that they're having about how to best take care of their animals, how to treat them humanely, how to, you know, how to, how to raise fewer cattle and then produce more. And I mean, they're like, they were really just not the demons that I thought they were. And I don't pretend to really like know what goes on in animal agriculture across the country. But I just want to say like, it made me realize how, in the same way that we have this polarized conversation going on now in the country politically, this is one issue where that plays out. We have such a lack of understanding and real conversation and understanding between those on the coast and the people who are actually raising the food in the middle of the country.

Yeah, it's very convenient, and I do it too. A lot of people demonize people that live in places that they don't frequent. And it's really fun to poke fun at the middle of the country and call them a bunch of dummies. And you know the reason why Trump got elected? And it's okay to do that. You know, I've noticed in like, you know, my colleagues, my, you know, liberal journalists, I mean, there's like the way, the kind of digs that they will take at rural white people is like, you know, we if that was if that was something about a person of color or a woman, I mean. Sure.

That person would be kicked out of their job. I mean, it's just amazing the level of sort of the accepted kind of stereotyping that goes on in the media towards these people who, you know, again, that would have been me, except that I just had this experience. Well, people love to like pick a side and then use any means necessary to attack the other side. I mean, you see this in not an unrelated way with the way they make fun of Trump's hands. Like you're mocking this man's body. Like he didn't do anything to have smaller or bigger hands. Talk about his hair.

Talk about his ego. Talk about the preposterous way he behaves. But you're talking about his hands? You're just saying the gloves are off and you can do anything you want and you can just be a cruel person and body shame this guy for something he has absolutely no control over. There's plenty of things he's done wrong that you can make fun of. But what about all the other people that are reading about his tiny little hands and they

look down at their own tiny little hands and they have to feel like shit? You know? I mean, that's a, there's a weird thing that people do. It's very, and you see that, to tie it all together, you really see that in the vegan community. There are a lot of vegans who are really kind people and then there's a lot of vegans i always say that their only reason why they're vegans because scientology didn't find them first these motherfuckers would have joined the taliban if they took the wrong flight they just they found a group and they went with it

and now they are all in and you see that with a lot of different ideologies, but with vegans, especially online, they're so vicious, and the attacks are so ruthless, and they gang up. They get together, and it's like part of the fun of being on this gang is attacking people that disagree. And I know you've been the victim of this. is attacking people that disagree. And I know you've been the victim of this. Yeah. I mean, I think that, you know, I have, I am sympathetic in the sense that people are so worried about their health and there's so much conflicting information out there

and they don't know how to make sense of it. And then there's a kind of, and we eat, you know, you have to eat two or three times a day. So this thing is staring you in the face. You cannot avoid it. Right. And then you find something that you think is healthy and good and pure and right. And you want, and it becomes, and to be a vegan requires a lot of work, right? You have to, I know, because when I was a vegetarian,

I was like constantly chopping and dicing and roasting. And, you know, it's like a lot of work, right? You have to, I know, because when I was a vegetarian, I was like constantly chopping and dicing and roasting. And, you know, it's like a lot of work. It's a lot harder. I realized when I started eating meat, you could just put a piece of meat on the stove, and that was it. I've become a very lazy cook. But in any case, it is people become very passionate about their choices, and especially a choice that involves consuming food, which is so personal and intimate. And then it's very hard to, you know, to acknowledge that that may not have been a good choice for you or for your kids.

And so, you know, I think it's, but it's, yeah, it's become a kind of idea. I mean, one of the things that I think has happened is that, you know, we live in post ideological times, right? I mean, you joke about Scientology, but we live in times where people are no longer, um, members of, not as many people are members are religious, right? In any kind of traditional way. And food is one thing that people become religious about. They just do.

It's like a food. It's a type of thinking. It's a food movement. And the food movement, I mean, if you follow like Michael Pollan and Mark Bittman, and they encourage you to think about it as a movement, like as something you can join, be a part of, be in a community. Well, that's exactly how the vegans will get it, though. It provides everything that, you know that religions did provide for people.

But for the vegans, what they do have on their side is that they feel that their lifestyle is not promoting animal cruelty. And that gives them the justification for attacking someone like you. Right. Because, right, well, you know, I try to just stick to, I mean, I try to really stick to the science on what makes people healthy. So, you know, if, if, if you want to be a vegan, but if that diet comes with, you know, for most people, if it comes with diabetes and obesity or ill health or the failure to thrive of their children or whatever, I mean, that's their choice. But, you know, you can't what you can't say is that that diet has any evidence to show that it provides good health. Well, I think one thing that a vegan diet does is it gets people off of the standard American diet and the standard American diet of just a bunch of bullshit, French fries and French fries can be vegan, right? But

the, you know, the processed food and things with a ton of preservatives, you start eating a bunch of vegetables. I mean, you're going to probably feel a lot better. We started eating actual real foods. You know, yeah. Anybody who gets off of refined carbohydrates and sugar feels better. So that is definitely a step in the right direction. I mean, we can all agree on that. Yeah, processed food with preservatives, just eating nonsense and garbage and candy and just that kind of stuff. kind of stuff, if you can be conscious and proactive about the healthy foods you choose and just try to get as much healthy nutrients as you can, you're going to feel better. But the question is, what's the best way to optimize your health?

Yeah. And just going back to those animal experiments that I was telling you about in the 1920s and 30s, you know, what leads to long, your long life and the long life and health of your children, right? That's the way we used to think about survival of health, fitness of an animal, was how long did you survive and how long do your offspring survive, right? And that was the ultimate measure of, that's always been the ultimate measure evolutionarily. So, you know, if a vegan diet were to support that, that would be the optimal diet. But that was just not what the science showed. So, you know, I mean, there's also a whole kind of evolutionary issue here, which is you enlightened, progressive thinkers who are almost like, you know, just deny who are like denying our evolutionary history.

Right. They're almost like creationists. I mean, our evolutionary history, if you read if you read the science is about evolving with me. That's just our reality. So we can't, you know, you can't really deny that and say, you know, we did not spring out of, you know, out of the side of Athena or, you know, whatever we, we, we evolved, we evolved because we ate meat. There are many evolutionary theorists who believe we evolved only because we ate meat. Yeah, the doubling of the human brain size, which is one of the biggest mysteries in the fossil record. Over a period of two million years, the human brain doubled. And one of the primary ideas is that cooking meat and figuring out a way to hunt these animals made us stimulate our brains. And there's a couple other more outlandish theories, one of them involving psilocybin

mushrooms. It's pretty interesting. But it's called the stoned ape theory if you want to look it up but the the idea that we are herbivores and you hear this tossed around a lot and you'll literally see like vegan memes that show our teeth versus a primates teeth or a rather a carnivore's teeth and showing that we have teeth to grind up stuff. But these are teeth that have evolved for people that eat cooked food. Right. I mean, this is where it's disingenuous.

Like, no, first of all, we do have the teeth of an omnivore. And second of all, we have the teeth of an omnivore that has been cooking food. Right. We don't need the same kind of teeth we used to need to tear apart raw meat like we did 200,000 years ago, whatever it was. You know, it's interesting. One of the things that I explore in my book

is the way that meat has been valued through human history. And it was valued as the food of warriors and that, you know, like the Maasai warriors who were studied by a biochemist out of the University of Vanderbilt in the late 1970s called the Maasai warriors in Kenya. And they, he found that they ate nothing but meat and blood and milk. And that was the warrior class. And that was what was considered that made men strong. The women were allowed a more diverse diet, but the men who had to be strong and had to hunt, they had this just,

you know, purely meat and blood diet. And, and there's another interesting story about how that same tribe was compared to, they actually had a kind of vegetarian tribe nearby. And that when they were both called, when both these tribes were called up for the Boer War, the English tested their strength to see whom they could hire to fight for them. And the vegetarian men from this one tribe that was, this neighboring tribe, they they had no strength. They, you know, they tested them to see how that device you use your hand to clench, see how strong they were. They found them completely unfit and unable to do work.

And they weren't strong. They didn't have the same kind of muscle mass, literally. So they couldn't use the men from that tribe. And then there's, you know, there's just a rich history in literature about how meat was really the food that made you strong. And meat was a food that was craved, always craved, that humans craved above all else. Well, there have been vegan powerlifters and a bunch of different people that have figured out how to do it correctly today, though. I mean, I think they may have, but I, you know, they must have taken a lot of supplements and other kinds of soy proteins or other things.

You have to be – I mean there are replacements, I guess, in the modern food supply. But historically, based on real foods available to humans for millennia, it was meat that was what was used to be strong. Yeah, and the dirty secret in the vegan bodybuilder community is steroids. And steroids will allow you to get away with a lot of stuff. And obviously that's the dirty secret in all the bodybuilding communities. But the vegan ones, they want to just pretend everything. Oh, look, on a plant-based diet, look at my amazing body. Sort of.

Yeah. You definitely. Yeah. I mean, yeah, but that other stuff. Yeah. You know, I mean, this is something that gets extremely ignored where it's way more open and out in the non-vegan bodybuilding community. Yeah. Cause I'm deep into the body. I know you are. That's why I brought it up. I know it's your thing. I know it's your thing. What, what have you, out of all this research and all this analyzing this and, you know, the publishing of your book and the way it's been received, how has this changed the way you think about the way people approach not just diet but all sort of conflicts in life?

Oh, that's a big question. I mean, um, there are a couple of major ways this profoundly, this whole research changed my thinking. One, um, so one was, um, really that I, it changed my thinking about, uh, changed my political views quite a bit. I think you're a libertarian, or at least that's what I was reading about you. I was always, I mean, I grew up in Berkeley and was a real liberal Democrat and still am on most issues. I found an issue where the government made America, started the obesity and diabetes epidemics, and continue, and don't back down from their recommendations, even though they continue to do this. And so, you know, this is the one government program that I have researched in great depth. I haven't really looked into too many else,

in anything else, in the kind of incredible level of detail that I have this one. And it made me much more cautious about supporting big government programs. Not because I don't believe in government. I do. I mean, I believe that humans need to govern themselves wisely, and it shouldn't just be, you know, we shouldn't have government, but the potential to make mistakes, the power of government to that once it once it adopts a hypothesis or an idea of some kind, and then the incredible institutional entrenchment that happens when you adopt a certain view, right? And then it's so hard to reverse out of that particular chosen line of thinking. It becomes almost impossible. You know, these institutions are not built for that. They're not really built for science. You know, science is supposed to be, as I said earlier, self-doubting, self-questioning. You have new observations, so you change your course.

That's what science is supposed to be. Like you test things and they don't work out and then you move on to another idea. to be like you you test things and they don't work out and then you move on to another idea but an institution is oh is it's it's almost like institutional science is like an oxymoron because an institution is meant to not flip-flop on their publics not to change their views not to loot not to allow people to lose faith in them so it's it's there it's it's it's the wrong kind of body to do science. So it's made me much more cautious about how much I want our government to do. Because if I've just turned over this one little leaf and found this huge disastrous program, you know, I just wonder if I turn over any other leaf, what else would I find? I think you'd find similar incompetence.

Probably. Yeah. So it's changed my political thinking quite a bit. And then I think it's also, you know, when I see the way that the scientific debate is played out and I, you know, I know the science so intimately now. And, you know, I know the science so intimately now. You know, I know I've read every single nutrition experiment that has really been done since the mid 50s. And, you know, when I see the way the debate plays out in public, you know, I see that a American Heart Association presidential advisory, which I just see as a you know, it's not honest science or our last dietary guidelines expert committee in their report saying, you know, we should we should all eat a plant based diet. And, you know, I can see how bad that science is.

And so, you know, I see that I can see now so much better the the way that PR firms spin messages and the way those messages are echoed all over. And the way you know, it's just the way it's are echoed all over and the way, you know, it's just the way it's what's happening in our politics. It's happening in our science. And so I think it makes me somewhat despair about our ability to have good science rise to the top. Because, you know, when you have institutions like Harvard and Tufts and, you know, all of our top institutions are so deeply invested in this wrong hypothesis. I don't even know, I you have institutions like Harvard and Tufts and, you know, all of our top institutions are so deeply invested in this wrong hypothesis. I don't even know. I don't know where people should turn to to, you know, how how do we sort ourselves out of this mess? So, yeah, nutrition science is in bad shape and I and it changed my it's changed my faith in expert advice.

Maybe that's the bottom line. I really don't trust expert advice because I see the way it is manipulated by financial interests and professional interests and intellectual conflicts of interest. And so, you know, even little tiny things like anything, a warning label on a bottle like, you know, careful of this plastic or this or that. a warning label on a bottle, like, you know, careful of this plastic or this or that. I'm like, I don't believe anything unless I go back to the original science and read it all myself, which I can never do. I just won't trust anything anymore. That's not a good place to be. It isn't. I need to spend time in your isolation tank, I think.

Boy. And with that, if people want to find out more, your book, A Big Fat Surprise, what else? So my book is called The Big Fat Surprise. It's available on Amazon. I have my main website is ninatyshills.com, which is you'll never be able to spell. But if you look up The Big Fat Surprise, you'll get to Nina Tyshills. And I also started a group called The Nutrition Coalition, which is nutritioncoalition.us. That is a group that is backed by scientists, PhDs, MDs, the odd journalists like me.

We are basically, the work of that group is to try to ensure that our nutrition policy is evidence-based, right? Trying to unearth that suppressed science, get those studies out of the NIH basement, that kind of thing, just to ensure that whatever the, if the government is going to tell Americans what to eat, it needs to be evidence-based. So we're doing work in Washington, and you can read about, I mean, it's not just on fat and carbohydrates that they've got,

they've got it wrong on salt. You know, the advice to get aerobic exercise for 45 minutes to an hour every day. None of that is based on good science. So we just want, the goal of this group is to work towards evidence-based policy in nutrition. If we could wrap this up, please talk a little bit more about salt. Because that's one that comes up all the time with people. They want to tell me that salt's bad for you. I'm like, God damn it, salt is an essential nutrient. You'll die without it. So the short story in salt is that they did a bunch of clinical trials only on hypertensive

subjects. They were already sick. They were already sick. Okay, so if you're a normal person, if you're a child, none of this applies to you, should never have been generalized to a larger population. They were called the DASH studies. None of these studies were longer than two months, which is super short for a clinical trial. And what they showed was that for people who already had hypertension and ate a lot of salt, for those people reducing their salt improved their cardiovascular risk factors. They didn't follow any of these people long enough to figure out who actually had a heart attack or died.

They're very, very short-term, small experiments. They never tested more than 2,000 people on them, this whole DASH diet, this reduced sodium diet. None of that advice should be generalized to anybody else. And there have now been four large studies where they, they're epidemiological studies so that they're not, it's only associations. But the important thing about it is that they contradict this salt advice. They show that really, if you go too low, people who consume too little salt, those people have higher rates, higher rates of cardiovascular death. So that there seems to be a sweet spot for consuming salt.

It's sort of a sweet spot for good health and cardiovascular health. So, you know, the government's advice is lower is better for all Americans. And that's just not based on any rigorous science at all. Boom. Boom. So our group is working to try to change that. You know, it just has to change. Without people like you, people like me would be completely lost.

So thank you so much for all your research. Thank you for your book. Thank you for your time here on the podcast. I appreciate it. And people, please go out, buy her book. Is there anything else you could recommend people check into? They can donate to the Nutrition Coalition if they want the dietary guidelines to change. And I'll just put in a little plug for that.

The reason they have to change, they control school lunches, military rations, food in hospitals, food in elderly homes. Everything your doctor tells you, your nutritionist tells you, they're like, that's where it all comes from. So that's it. Thanks for letting me in. Thank you. Thanks for being here. Thanks for having me. Bye, everybody.