The Joe Rogan Experience - #904 - Gary Taubes

Episode Date: January 24, 2017

Gary Taubes is the author of The Case Against Sugar, Why We Get Fat, Good Calories, Bad Calories, Bad Science, and Nobel Dreams.

three two one boom and we're live hello gary hi joe thanks for coming man appreciate it my pleasure the case against sugar yeah this is uh for me this is a i don't know how to put this any other way i've i've kind of consumed sugar most of my life until the last couple of years. And I slowly sort of tapered off. And about a year ago, maybe last February or so, I just pretty much cut it all out. Except for the occasional dessert here or there. Infinitely better quality of life. I feel much better.

I have more energy. And then I started really getting into it. And then I came across your work. And what I want to know is, first of all, how did you get involved in this? And how much resistance have you faced? Okay, this being the sugar case? Yes. This being the whole obesity, diet, nutrition? We can get into all of it. But the sugar one to me is absolutely fascinating when you go down. I mean, um, if you've seen that sugar movie. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm probably in it. I think, I think you are. I think I'm one of the talking cereal boxes. Oh, okay. Right. You know, um, I watched it with my kids. I made my kids watch it

and it's amazing when, you know, a six year old watches something like that. And then they go, why is sugar in everything? You know, you're, it's funny cause my kids live with this all the time. Right. So I, we had just come back from spending the holidays with my, uh, our grandmother who, you know, pumps them up with sugar while we're there and there's nothing I can do with it. And then we get back and I'm having, I'm making my boys dinner. They're eight and 11 and, uh, my wife's out. And after the dinner, my eight year old says, are we getting dessert? And my 11 yearyear-old goes nick it's dad man are you crazy

wake up son um anyway i got into this you know i okay i was a physics major in college i was like hard science and then i wasn't any good at it got a c minus in quantum physics and my advisor suggested i find another career so i went journalism, started doing science writing in the early 80s because it was the only work I could get. And then my first book, I went to live at CERN, the big particle accelerator lab outside of Geneva, and I was what we would call today embedded with the physicists. And I thought I was going to be following and making this great discovery, which is what the Nobel laureate who ran the experiment was predicting. And instead I spent 10 months watching them figure out how they had screwed up.

And it was a learning experience in how to do science right. And I was obsessed with how hard it is to do good science. And I had a lot of the physicists in the world really didn't like this Nobel laureate, so they were happy to point out to me how he was screwing up and how he had screwed up in the past and how he had even screwed up the work that he won the Nobel prize for. Um, after I came back, I thought that was actually page six in the New York post. When my book came out, the headline was egghead squabble over Nobel prize. And this Nobel laureate was quoted calling me an asshole in the newspaper. And I'm 29 years

old. And I assume my career's over. What was he calling you an asshole over? Well, because I ended up writing an expose about what a bad scientist he was and about the politics of science. I went to Stockholm with this guy when he won the Nobel Prize. I mean, we got our talks fitted together. I was his guest at the Nobel dinner and the Nobel banquet and the party that follows, which is the most fun I've ever had in my life. Students of Stockholm throw a party for the laureates. And it's back then it was crazy. Anyway, so he was justifiably pissed off that I just wrote what I saw instead of what a great man he thought he was. And I thought my career was going to be over, right? You're called an asshole in the papers when you're

a 29-year-old journalist by a Nobel laureate. But instead, everybody I would interview in science would say, oh, you think that guy was bad. You should write about this guy. And I just started covering different aspects. And it turns out you could get a long way in science if you're willing to sort of cut corners. And, you know, it's not actually cheating. It's just you could discover a lot of stuff if you're not willing to do the rigorous, hard, critical, skeptical work to demonstrate that what you say you've discovered is wrong. Okay, so I wrote a book about something called Cold Fusion, which was a great scientific fiasco of the 20th century, except for the stuff I'm writing about now. And some of my friends in the physics community said, if you're interested in bad science, the book was called Bad Science.

They said you should look at the stuff in public health because it's terrible. And so I moved into public health, beginning with this idea that electromagnetic fields from power lines will cause brain cancer or leukemia. And everything I had learned about what you, how rigorous and meticulous and skeptical and thoughtful you had to do to get the right answer in physics, the public health people didn't think you had to do. They thought it was kind of a luxury because their science is harder. And it is kind of harder. to do. They thought it was kind of a luxury because their science is harder. And it is kind of harder. You're dealing with like chronic diseases that happen over decades and people and messy systems and you can't measure anything. And everything I had learned was that if you don't do this stuff, you get the wrong answer. So by the late 90s, I had stumbled into nutrition research.

And this is maybe a longer story than you wanted. No, go on. I was living here in Venice, California. I was freelancing for the journal Science. I was what's called a contributing correspondent and I needed a paycheck, okay, to pay my rent. So I called my editor and I said, what do you got? What kind of story could I turn over quickly? And he said there was a diet study that was coming out in the New England Journal of Medicine in two weeks, and they wanted to do an article about it. And what I didn't know was that this diet study had been leaked to science in advance, and the person who had leaked it had given them a list of sources to talk to.

And who leaks a diet study, right? And this was a DASH diet, Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension, which is the most— today today U.S. News & World Report says it's the healthiest diet in the world based on, you know, like four studies that do not demonstrate anything. The way you do those stories as a journalist is you interview the principal investigator and you ask him who to talk to. And he gives you a couple names to talk to who can talk about the study, even though it's published. And then you get three interviews, which is enough to justify a page in the magazine, and you get your paycheck. So I interviewed the PI, and then I interviewed one of the people on the list of documents

that had been leaked to science. And that was a former president of the American Heart Association, and she told me she couldn't talk about the study or she'd lose her funding and I said come on man this isn't Lysenko era Soviet Union people don't lose their funding for talking to a journalist about a diet study and she refused to talk to me I said let's go off the record complete confidentiality if I'm going to miss the story that you're not telling me, that's bad. Couldn't get her to talk. And then I call one of the people that the PI told me to talk to, and he sounded exactly like Walter Matthau on the other side of the telephone. It was very weird.

And Walter starts yelling at me that there's no controversy over salt and high blood pressure. And I'm going, but Walter, I'm not calling about salt and high blood pressure. I'm calling about this DASH diet coming out. And he keeps going on. There's no controversy. There's no evidence that salt doesn't cause high blood pressure. So I get off the phone. I call up my editor. I said, I'm going to finish the story. But I had this former AHA president say she couldn't talk to me and she'd lose her funding. And then I had Walter Matthau yelling at me that there's no controversy over salt and high blood pressure. There must be a controversy over whether salt causes high blood pressure, right? So I'm going to turn this story in, pay my rent. And then I spent the next nine months doing an investigation for science. I interviewed, I think, 85 sources for one magazine article. Got paid for like six weeks.

Pissed off my fiancee at the time because she thought if she's going to date someone, they should have a better sort of, you know, work efficiency ratio. The conclusion was that the only way you would believe that salt causes high blood pressure from the studies that had been done to that point was if God told you so personally. So you could ignore all the evidence and all the randomized controlled trials, even the observational evidence. But that's what everyone had done. Well, how did this start? Because I had heard that before as well. Everybody's heard that before. And I had read a long time ago that that was bullshit. And that salt is actually an essential mineral and it's important for your body and it doesn't cause high blood pressure. And there's a host of other factors that should be considered. So it was, yeah, that's the thing.

It was kind of intuitively, it was an interesting idea. It made biological sense. When you consume salt, you also have to take in water. That's why they feed you pretzels and salty peanuts at bars, because you want to take in liquids so that you can maintain the same sodium concentration in your blood, because your cells, like the chemical reactions that drive your cells, are dependent on the sodium ratio in the cells. So if you take in more salt, you're going to drink more fluid, and you're going to have more fluid in your circulation. That's going to increase your blood pressure.

And it does happen in a very short term. But the question is, is this a chronic cause of high blood pressure and hypertension? And once the researchers decided it was, and these guys are terrible scientists. I mean, I hate to say this, but in my first book, Good Calories, Bad Calories, in the epilogue, I point out, I say, you know, I never use the word scientist to describe any of these people doing research except for a few specific examples because they don't really understand what science is and how to do it. And they weren't, to their defense, they just were never taught how to be scientists. never taught how to be scientists. They were like physicians and nutritionists who, you know, had a sloppy scientific training and they thought it was easy and you get a hypothesis and you confirm the hypothesis. And when they didn't confirm it, they thought it must be true anyway. And then you find the data when people talk about cherry picking. That means you find the data that does sort of

confirm and you ignore the rest. So anyway, that was it. I wrote this article. It's called The Political Science of Salt. You know, won some awards. And while I was doing that, this Walter Matthau character took credit not just for getting Americans to eat less salt, putting us on this low-salt diet, he took credit for getting us on the low-fat diet that we were all eating in the 90s. And I got off the phone with him, called my editor of science, and I said, when I'm done writing about salt, I'm going to write about fat. I have no idea what the story is, but this guy's clearly one of the five worst scientists I've ever interviewed in my life. And, you know, everything I learned in my physics period was that bad scientists never get the right answer. So I

spent a year doing an investigation for the journal science on dietary fat that paid for about two months. And again, it'd be a trend here. Yeah. Yeah. No, it was bad. Um, no, it's good. I mean, it just, it's good. You got to do that to get the right answer. That's it. And that's why so much journalism is so shallow is because if you're going to put in the time you get paid for, all you can do is a shallow job. Right. Nobody can afford to do that. I actually had corporate jobs that allowed me,

like writing speeches and press releases for IBM that I really hated doing, but that paid well. And that was my corporate work, so I could do the pro bono stuff I cared about. Anyway, this fat story was the same unless God told you personally. So I ended up doing this cover story for the New York Times Magazine called What If It's All Been a Big Flat Lie, which came out July 2002. It was probably the most one of the top five most controversial articles ever ran. And the idea was, I wanted to see what caused the obesity epidemic. That was what I pitched to the editor.

But we had this idea that you get fat from eating dietary fat. That was actually the primary logic behind putting the country on low-fat diets. They thought it might help heart disease, but they hadn't been able to show it in trials. But they just assumed if we ate less fat, we'd lose weight because fat's denser calories. And there was always this competing hypothesis that had been buried and swept aside and ignored and inhibited, which was that the problem is the carbohydrates, particularly sugar and refined grains. And so when I got this cover story, I got a big book advance. Finally, I could afford to do the book I wanted. It paid for four years of my life. The book took five. Same financial issues. And I love it because people

accused me of like, I was just going to write anything I could find for a paycheck, and I finally got a big paycheck. And so now, one of the ideas there that emerged out of my research, so even when I wrote the 2002 piece, I thought that we got fat because we ate too much. You know, there's a line in that article, obesity, of course, is caused by consuming too many calories, and we consume more calories than we consume. By the time I was done with this book, I thought that was one of the most inane scientific ideas that had ever come along. I mean, it's almost incomprehensible to me, even though I know exactly the history of the idea and where it came from and why we believe that. It's just crazy naive. So that's the one that I get the feedback on. Because I'm out there saying, so 99% of obesity researchers and nutritionists and all our public health policy is based fundamentally on this

concept that we get fat because we eat too much or we're too sedentary. And what I was saying was not only is that naive and meaningless, it's a description. It's not an explanation. And we could go into that. Clearly, obesity is a hormonal metabolic defect. And in fact, the best scientists of the world prior to World War II, the best, far and away the best medical science was done in Germany and Austria and Europe. Like the U.S. was a backwater of medical science until post-war. Just it was a backwater of virtually all science.

And these guys had concluded that obesity had to be a metabolic hormonal defect. But the American doctors were saying, oh, man, hormonal, saying obesity is hormonal is an excuse for fat people to not eat in moderation and run marathons like a saline people do. And what I did is I brought that hypothesis sort of, it vanished with the war, literally evaporated with the war. The German-Austrian medical community evaporated. We wanted nothing to do with these researchers.

The Ivy League universities had policies in place to keep from being overrun by Jewish academicians from Europe. So in physics, we embraced them because we had bombs to build and a Cold War to fight. But in medicine and public health, we wanted nothing to do with them. So this hypothesis evaporates. And post-war, you get this creation of basically obesity research created de novo by these young doctors who have no scientific training, who are lean, who hate the Germans, so they're not going to quote the German literature, even if they read it. And nutritionists

who do animal research and never even study obese people. And you get this idea that it's an eating, you know, it's a calorie overconsumption problem. By the 1960s, the field is dominated by psychologists and psychiatrists who are studying ways to get obese people to just stop eating so damn much. They didn't try to make them exercise back then. That was a kind of torture they would push later. So this was the thing I get feedback on. This is where I'm saying, you know, the entire medical, nutritional, obesity, diabetes dogma is based on just a bad idea, you know, a failed paradigm. And, you know, who's going to accept that coming from a journalist? So the answer is either, you know, I'm an idiot or I'm self-interested and I'm only making this up to get a paycheck or, you know, I'm just wrong.

making this up to get a paycheck or, you know, I'm just wrong. Do you feel vindicated? Or like when you see what's going on now, where it's pretty much common knowledge that sugar is terrible for you and that added sugar is a huge factor in diabetes and hypertension and heart disease and obesity. And it's pretty much across the board now. Do you feel vindicated? and it's pretty much across the board now. Do you feel vindicated?

Well, here's the thing. Even though there are public health organizations that are now saying, you know, got to cut back on the sugar and putting limits on sugar consumption, the logic is still that it's just empty calories. The logic by who, though? The public health authorities, the researchers, the nutritionists. Why do they lag so far behind because this is fascinating to me because i understand that there must be a guy like you who does what's kind of ridiculous and spends nine months on six weeks worth of pay and it does that

kind of shit because otherwise once an idea is clearly established and gets repeated like salt causes hypertension yeah i mean god damn it if you ask the average person on the street hey does salt cause high blood pressure oh yeah they just say it because it's like sort of this peripheral idea they hear it in the distance they don't research it they don't really look into it very far other than maybe they read something somewhere at one point in time and then they just decide it's dogma right and they repeat it it's so it's incredibly difficult once an idea like that gets established in our society to to eradicate it. Right. people who think like you do, who agree with you on the important points because you think,

oh, they're smart. They get it just like I get it. So institutions sort of collect groupthink. It's just a natural emergent phenomenon from institutions. And now if you look at the data, you're somebody like me and you come along and you say, I don't really buy this idea. It's just empty calories. So I'm going to look at the data and see what it says. And now you try to convince your friends that they're wrong. And now you're the heretic and you're the one who's saying, and you know, you get in arguments with people and they make people uncomfortable because you're trying to get them to change their minds about something they all believe. And they've all been, you know, they're successful. They're promoted. They're leaders in their field because they believed this. And now you're telling them it's that. And people do it.

But the this just keeps going and going and going. And even to the point, I mean, just when my sugar book came out, there's a book called The Secret Life of Fat written by a PhD. And it's as though everything I've done in the past 15 years just was never done. Like somehow she managed to do an entire book on dietary fat where if anyone said to her, talk to Tobbs, even if he's wrong, his ideas are worth hearing because they're provocative and interesting. I'm not so sure he's wrong. She decided not to do it. So it's sort of, do you have the, to what was her conclusion? Effectively, it's all, you know, again, it all comes back effectively to

energy balance. You could talk about the two, you know, overconsumption. It's just, this is what dogmas do. They just, they reproduce themselves. They continue to grow. They're like tumors for that fact. And they basically fight off all challenges. They absorb around them. So somebody starts saying it's something else. Eventually, ideally, everything changes. So we're definitely winning the sugar battle. So in sugar, even though the official word is it's empty calories, we just have to consume less because they have this dogma that obesity is caused by consuming too many calories. So the way that a food influences your body mass is through its caloric content or how much of those calories you digest and absorb because if it's got fiber, you'll excrete some. And that's the wisdom.

If a calorie is a calorie, then the worst you could say about sugar is that it's empty calories. It's got no vitamins and minerals, micronutrients attached, and so we consume too much of it. And people say it's the low-hanging fruit. So it's not that it's uniquely toxic, because if it's uniquely toxic, if it actually causes disease, and we could talk about clearly what I'm saying it causes, then a calorie isn't a calorie. When you started doing this research and you started writing this book, The Case Against Sugar, when this was all unfolding in front of you,

were you shocked? I mean, is this something that you were saying, how am I, a guy who got a C plus in physics? C minus, sorry. Quantum physics. I'm trying to pump you up. I mean, how am I the guy who's figuring this out? How is this? Okay, so I understood why, but it is weird.

Because again, sometimes I was in Washington on my book tour, and I had dinner with the former chief science medical officer of the American Diabetes Association. It's a very influential, high-ranking, successful man. He's completely convinced that I'm wrong. And I said, but you believe this thing that obesity is caused by eating too much and you have no idea why you believe it. So I can tell you exactly the history of that belief. Just like if we were talking about relativity, we could go back to Einstein, and you would know about Einstein. And even if we were talking quantum physics, we'd go back to Heisenberg and Schrodinger and,

you know, Bohr, and you'd know about them. But this belief that you're fundamentally arguing is right, you don't understand where it comes from. And I can tell you that. And I'm going to give you the documents, I'm going to give you the papers where it out-competes the hormonal metabolic idea. And I'm going to give you the competing hypothesis that you didn't even know existed until you and I talked. You started reading my stuff and it has zero influence on how this guy thinks. He's just, he's so convinced he's right. So that's terrifying. That's terrifying when someone has that kind of influence over the American people. Well, and this is the thing.

You want somebody to at least say, Jesus, you know, I never thought of that. Let me at least have him. Let me read these and get back to you is what you want him to do. The problem, of course, is that if he agrees to this and then he agrees that you're correct, everything that he's been saying up until now has been bullshit and he's been misleading people. He has to apologize. He has to reason. Well, then once you do that, everything that he's been saying up until now has been bullshit and he's been misleading people. He has to apologize. He has to reason. Well, then once you do that, you don't, you lose your crazy, like ideally in science,

you're, you know, the best scientists are the ones who say, you know, I was just wrong. Right. And then, but. How rare are they? Rare. Actually, when I was growing up, the estimate was 5% of the scientific community actually does good science and the other 95% are sort of the chaff out of which you've got to get the wheat. But, yeah, I mean, it's a problem.

I used to joke, imagine the American Heart Association writing the press release to say, like, we were wrong about putting everybody on a low-fat diet, and it was a mistake, and we're sorry, and we apologize, and maybe we killed some of your relatives prematurely. Maybe the reason you're fat and diabetic now is because of our advice. But we got it right now. They won't do it. You can't do it. That's fucking crazy. Public health records. It's just they can't do it.

It's untenable. I mean, I'll say the same thing. If I'm wrong in my book, I used to have this argument with my co-founder of this nutrition science initiative, this not-for-profit. And I'd say, you know, Sam, if I'm wrong in the major arguments in this book, I mean, clearly I'm going to be wrong in some of the minor ones and, you know, chip away here and their bad scholarship that I should have triple checked. But if I'm wrong in the major arguments, I need a new line of work because I can't trust my judgment. And everything I do as an investigative journalist is dependent on me being able to trust my judgment. And if I'm wrong about this, like if I'm wrong about energy balance, I got to go sell shoes.

You know, there's no way around it. But this is. I lost track. What were we saying? What was the question? I talk too much. Well, I was asking you, first of all, what is it like to have this understanding

that all of what's being told to the American people is wrong, and then you having this conversation with this guy. How do I do it? How do I get in this? So let me tell you why I was able to do it. And again, I was the first person who ever did it. It's just, it's that simple. No one had ever done before what I'd done. It was the timing. First of all, I'm an obsessive researcher. There's, you know, the 145 people I interviewed for the fat story for one magazine article. I just keep asking questions and probing and probing until every, I also like writing, so it's a great research. It's a procrastination tool. But when I started this in 2002 and I got the money to do the book, the internet had come along. And the internet made it possible to find every single primary source going back to the 19th century. Like now you could almost download them. But back then I had researchers,

young students in Boston, New York, LA, whose only job was they'd get an email from me with 50 citations. And then they'd go to the library and have to find all 50 and Xerox them and then ship them back to me. Sometimes entire books from like, you know, a 1917 diabetes textbook that I couldn't find or I couldn't buy. And bookstores had put their catalogs online. So you could find all the books in some 1947 obesity conference. The library that has it doesn't see any purpose for that anymore, so they basically give it to the local bookstore and you can buy it for seven bucks. So I was able to recreate the history of obesity research from conference proceedings where the only people doing research in the field would

show up and they would present their findings and then they would do a proceedings of the findings and I could recreate all the thinking in the field and nobody had ever bothered to do it before. And it's kind of, if they were good scientists, they would have, because they would have been obsessed with where their beliefs came from, and they would have been questioning them. And one of the things they would have done is gone back to do all this to see if some assumption they believe is true is really based on fact. But again, they didn't really know what science was. They weren't all that curious is one way to put it. That's so terrifying. It is.

It's so terrifying when, you know, you think of what people, most people are busy. They work all day. They have families. They have jobs. They have obligations. They don't have the time to do the research that you did about diet and come to these shocking conclusions themselves it's not going to happen well then that's it yeah they rely on the people like this guy from the diabetes association that's supposed to be telling you the truth and looking at the truth and he doesn't want

to do it because it makes him look like an asshole well and you also rely on i mean these are so they read the review articles right and the reviewers the editors of the journals want to get influential review articles. So they ask influential people in the field to do the review articles. And those people are very busy, but they're going to do it. And they're going to basically, they became influential by believing the conventional wisdom and propagating the conventional wisdom. When you have committees do investigations, so every five years you get the USDA puts together a committee to reassess the dietary guidelines that they give out. So the way the committees are formed,

USDA picks a very influential person. The most influential they get to be the head of the committee, and that's somebody who's believed the conventional wisdom has propagated their whole life. That's how they became influential. And that person picks people they respect to be on the committee. And of course, the people they respect are the people who believe what they believe, because they're the ones who seem smart. They're not the heretics. They're the believers. So you end up with, you start out just with the natural quest. We want to know if the guidelines are correct. And through this completely natural human process, you end up staffing the guy and creating a

committee that's going to recapitulate the convention of wisdom, almost 100%. And it's just the way things happen. So you need people like me to come across every once in a while, assuming I'm right. Better when the people like me are right than when they're wrong, but you're going to get both types, and we've got to come along. We have to have the persistence to basically just keep doing what we do. I was lucky that I also had this podium. The New York Times Magazine editors trusted me and liked my work. The science editors trusted me and thought I was really good,

so I could get in influential publications. I didn't have to publish, do a blog, and try to win people over. But from their perspective, I mean, it's just, what do you do with someone like me? And I've argued, look, I've done this research. You haven't. I mean, another way to think about it, I once, I said, look, you know, we've got these obesity and diabetes epidemics worldwide. I mean, they're, it should be horrifying to people. Okay. And fairly recent. Well, in terms of human history,

in terms of human history. So one of the, again, one of the things I did in the case against sugar is I went back to find the very beginnings of the epidemic in the United States. Cause if you got an epidemic, like if we had a Zika epidemic, Ebola, what do you do? You don't try to figure out what's causing Ebola by looking at the patients who are getting off the airplane in Houston or showing up in the hospital in New Jersey. You go back to Africa where it's densest and where it started, and you could follow it to whatever animal got bit by whatever insect in whatever cave. And that's a natural process of understanding an epidemic.

So you go back here, and you go back to the 19th century, and there are hospitals in the United States that date to pre-1850 or 1864 in the case of Philadelphia Hospital in Pennsylvania, and their records, anyway. And you can ask the archivists to go back. They still have their case records from the 19th century. And you can have the archivists pull up the case records, and they will tell you how many cases of diabetes were diagnosed in the hospitals in, you know, any year for me, Like in Mass General Hospital in Boston,

the records start in 1824. Today, one in 11 Americans are diabetic. And there are some populations, like Native American populations, where one in two adults are diabetic. Jesus Christ. In Boston, in Mass General Hospital, the leading hospital in the country, in Massachusetts

in the 19th century, there were year after year after year after year where they had zero cases of diabetes. And this was a terrible disease without insulin. It's not a pleasure with it, but before insulin was discovered, I mean, you go blind, kidney failure, gangrene, amputations. It's not a difficult diagnosis. Now, there are other reasons to explain the absence. I mean, you know, the only people who showed up in hospitals back in the 19th century were poor people, and poor people ate a lot less sugar than rich people. Wow. So, and rich people got their own private doctors, so they might not

have shown up in the diabetes, in the medical record. So, you could, you've got to always be skeptical of what you think you're learning because that's what science is. But the point I'm making is I went through the effort to do this one way or the other. And that gives me a certain advantage that they don't have. And if they're good scientists, regardless of what they believe, they'll say to themselves, geez, you know, I never thought of this. I never did that. I can think of Ray's Taubes as wrong, but maybe I should look into it. So where did it all start?

So in the U.S., it starts again in the second half of the 18th, 19th century. And it starts coincidental with an explosion in sugar consumption, not just in how much sugar we're consuming, but who's consuming it, which is what's fascinating and scary. So prior, go back, say, 200 years, you know, 1810, 1815, we were probably eating about five pounds of sugar per capita in the United States. So that's about- Five pounds over a period of- Of a year. Five pounds in a year. Per person per year. So that's the equivalent of about the sugar of one Coca-Cola, 12-ounce Cokes worth of sugar every six days. And it was the head of the house. That's hilarious.

It's frightening because it's expensive back then. Right. And what would they add it to back then? You know, they would bake it. They would, well, dessert courses hadn't really been invented yet. Really? No. I mean, again, the wealthy would have dessert.

So the wealthy, and the wealthy were the ones who would get diabetes and obesity and gout back then. So sugar has this curve where it goes from being very rare and just sort of the luxury of royalty to, you know, the wealthy using it. And then finally, with the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and late 18th century, and then refining processes are improved and sugar starts to get cheaper. And then during the Napoleonic Wars, like 1812, when France is cut off from their sugar supply by the English blockades, Napoleon says, look, we got to figure out how to create our own sugar. And this clever Frenchman figures out how to get sugar from sugar beets. And the beet sugar industry takes off around 1850. And then with the beet sugar industry,

you can grow sugar in the northern hemisphere in the temperate climates. And you could also grow sugar cane and it's only in tropical climates. So now sugar prices start to plummet. Meanwhile, you think about all the ways we consume sugar today. So candy, soft drinks, ice cream, chocolate, desserts, low-fat milk, low-fat yogurt, none of that existed until 1840. So 1840, you see the start of the candy industry, the start of the chocolate industry. The Lindt brothers in Switzerland figure out how to make chocolate bars. You can still buy Lindt chocolate today, and it's pretty good, actually. Ice cream industry starts in the 1840s. Soft drinks start in the 1870s with Dr. Pepper,

then Coca-Cola, then PepsiCo. Dr. Pepper was first? Yeah, Dr. Pepper was first. How weird. Yeah. You would have thought that's like an afterthought. Yeah, yeah, I know. Well, I just didn't have the marketing brilliance of the Coca-Cola people.

So sugar starts becoming, like women are targeted, because it's now cheap enough. So the men get their alcohol and their cigarettes, and the women get sugar, and the kids get sugar. So the first time in history suddenly we have all these industries created to basically target children as customers. If you think about it, nobody's drinking cold drinks at home. No refrigeration. No refrigeration until the 1930s. And no vending machines until the 1930s. I love this because I'm a science guy. But in doing my books, you have to become a historian and you just don't think about this stuff. So with the vending machines and the refrigerators,

suddenly Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola and these start targeting, you know, you start getting six-packs and cartons, cases of sodas and big bottles of soda that you could take home, put in your refrigerator, and drink all day long. Couldn't do it before that. Couldn't get ice cubes easily before that. You couldn't even, you know, cool it down in the summer. Fruit juices come in in the 1930s. California orange growers. That's a big one, right? Because that's one that people think is totally innocuous and actually healthy. Yeah, because it's got all that vitamin C.

Just explain to people right now that if you're drinking a big-ass glass of orange juice, you might as well be drinking a Pepsi. Effectively. That's what I believe. Those are the two. You've got these competing nutritional paradigms. One says if it's got vitamins and minerals in it, it's healthy. It's a Pepsi with vitamins and minerals. It's a Pepsi with vitamins and minerals. So take a vitamin pill and then drink a Pepsi and it's the same goddamn thing. Effectively, yeah.

That's so crazy. Effectively, yeah. We always thought, like, it's fresh squeezed. Look, it's got pulp in it. So the California orange growers formed Sunkiss. That was a consortium of California. They had all these extra oranges they couldn't sell. You know, the oranges all come in season, you know, come along in one season. So back then without refrigeration and cars, so you could keep fruits kind of alive for like a year by freezing them,

you know, you had all these extra oranges you couldn't sell. So they said, let's get people to turn into orange juice and we'll advertise that the vitamin C is good for them. The new nutrition of the 1920s and 1930s was all about vitamin deficiency diseases. And so scurvy is caused by the absence of vitamin C and berry buried by vitamin B. And that was the big news. So that orange growers started pushing orange juice on us because of its vitamin C content. So now we're drinking fruit juices for breakfast every day. And then post-World War II, concentrates are created. That was actually a defense, you know, World War II program to try and figure out how to create foods that soldiers could take into battle and get their vitamins from

it. So that comes along. And then the last one is sugary cereals. So the cereal industry was created by Post and Kellogg, who were health nuts. They ran sanatoriums in Minnesota, right? And they knew their health nutritionists didn't want to put sugar in anything. They had some huge fights over this. But 1948, Post releases sugar crisps, and it's, you know, 30% sugar by calories or something. It's the first sugar-coated cereal. And for the next decade, you can watch the cereal industries have these internal battles where the marketing people are saying, we need a sugar-sweetened

cereal. We've got to compete. We're going to be run out of the business. And the health people are saying, no, no sugar is bad for you. And in every case, the marketers won. By the 1960s, not only do you have like all these, some of these cereals were 50% sugar by calories, still are. But you've got all these iconic TV shows that were created just to sell sugar, free cereals to, I mean, Rocky and Bullwinkle, which was my favorite. This was heartbreaking. I mean, those guys were created to sell cereal to us. Wait a minute. The comic? The comic. The TV show, Rocky and Bullwinkle. That was created?

That was created as a vehicle to market. I forget which cereal it was, which company, but all of these things, you know. So the cartoon was an afterthought? The cartoon was a method to sell. So the cereal industry would hire, you know, these brilliant public relations men who would create these characters and then get, you know, Hollywood to create animated TV shows with these characters. And then they would always sell the same sugar sweetened cereals.

Wow. And so now we're just, you know, think what happened to kids. Okay, the obese and diabetic people in the world are the ones who started, we all started as children, right? So, you know, 1805, 1810 up to 1850, maybe they see sugar once a week. You know, they steal into the country store, and when Uncle Ed has turned the wrong way, they like stick their hand in the sugar barrel and lick their fingers and run out. By 1960, it's like orange juice, cereal, you know, sugary cereal,

sugar on the sugary cereal for breakfast, you know, a Coke for a snack, a candy bar, the same kind of foods for lunch. I mean, I bet most Americans didn't go more than three hours without a sugar dose, whereas 150 years earlier, they'd have gone a week between doses. And as this happens, you see these explosions in obesity and diabetes that, you know, they're slow to build. And I think I could, that can be explained too, by the fact that mothers pass this on to their kids when the kids are in the womb. Is there a difference? How much of a difference is there, if any, between dietary diabetes or diabetes as directly attributed to diet and genetic factors? Again, there are different, first of all, there are different types.

Type one diabetes, type 2. Yeah. Type 1 is the acute form that hits mostly in childhood and has a strong genetic component. It's an autoimmune disease, but that doesn't mean it's not fundamentally caused by sugar. And by that, I mean if we never got around to eating sugar, we wouldn't have type 1 diabetes. Really? we wouldn't have type 1 diabetes. Really?

So people that think that type 1 diabetes, which is something that people I know have, and, well, it's just genetic, it's just something you were born with, that's not necessarily true? Well, they could be born with it. I mean, it could be, and it could be genetic, but it still has to be triggered, could be triggered by something in the environment. So if these people with type 1 diabetes didn't have a poor diet, didn't consume

sugar, didn't eat the average American diet, it probably would never manifest itself? If they're mothers, maybe even more importantly. In the womb? In the womb, yeah. Jesus Christ. The third to last chapter of my book, two of the last three chapters before the epilogue are called the if-then problems. So let me lay out what I'm proposing here. The case against sugar. So there's a crime. Think of it as we're in a courtroom. And there's a crime that's committed.

Courtroom. A courtroom. And there's a crime that's committed. And the crime is epidemics of obesity and diabetes that happen whenever a population transitions from their traditional diet to a Western diet and lifestyle. So it doesn't matter what the population is. They could be the Inuit living on, like, caribou and, you know, seal meat. They could be Maasai living on the blood, milk, meat from the cattle they herd. They could be agrarian populations. They could be South Pacific Islanders living on coconuts and pigs, Aborigines in Australia, Middle Eastern

populations, African populations, European populations. It does not matter. Eventually, they transition. You see these epidemics of recent diabetes. That's the crime. So the argument I'm making is that sugar is always at the scene of the crime on a population-wide level. So there's a lot of things that happen when you transition to Western diets. For instance, a lot of populations eat more meat. But some populations, like the Inuit, they don't eat more meat because they're eating, or the Native Americans of the Plains Indians, they don't eat more meat because they were living on meat to begin with. But they also get obesity and diabetes epidemic. So I'm willing to rule out meat on that level. And other people did as well. You know, they become more sedentary when you're westernized. You get more labor-saving devices. You drive

places instead of walking places. So maybe it's sedentary behavior. But you can find populations that are incredibly physically active. Cane-cutter, in the Natar region of South Africa in the 18th century, they used to import Indians from India as indentured laborers, effectively slavery, but they call them indentured laborers, to work in the sugar plantations. laborers, effectively slavery, but they call them indentured laborers, to work in the sugar plantations. And the cane cutters in the sugar plantations, that's one of the most energy-intense jobs you could imagine. One estimate was they burned 9,000 calories a day. And yet these Natal Indians had among the highest rates of diabetes ever seen. And their ancestors, the population from which they were drawn in India, had virtually no diabetes.

And the primary difference in their diet was their sugar consumption. So you could play this game where you isolate out populations. And what you find, what I found, is there's no population where you get an obesity and diabetes epidemic where recent increases in sugar consumption haven't occurred. And by recent, it could be 20 years ago, it could be 50 years ago. So it's always at the scene of the crime. Now, type 2 diabetes, the common form that associates with excess weight, is fundamentally a disorder of what's called insulin resistance. So type 1, your pancreas doesn't secrete enough insulin.

Type 2, your body is resistant to the insulin that your pancreas doesn't secrete enough insulin. Type 2, your body is resistant to the insulin that your pancreas secretes. So you got to pump, you got to secrete more and more to keep your blood sugar under control. And the idea is eventually your pancreas gets exhausted and it can't do it anymore. And then you have a deficit of insulin, and the results are pretty much similar to type 1. So insulin resistance is also very closely associated to obesity, and we could discuss that as well. You could look at these epidemics, obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer's, dementia, basically as manifestations of insulin resistance happening all around the world in different ways and different people, but they're all related to insulin resistance and

insulin. And then you ask yourself, what causes insulin resistance? So the best researchers in the world who study insulin resistance, the leading hypothesis is that it starts in the liver. And it starts in the liver with the conversion, with the accumulation of fats and liver cells. And in fact, we also have an epidemic of what's called non-alcoholic fatty liver disease in this country right now. Used to be 20, 30 years ago, if you got fatty liver disease and you saw your doctor and you told him you didn't drink, they would just assume you're lying. Because clearly alcoholics got fatty liver disease, but suddenly people started showing up who swore they didn't drink. And then kids started showing up with fatty liver disease who clearly

didn't drink alcohol. So we got this concept, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. It's basically indistinguishable from the alcoholic kind. And the CDC estimates 40 million Americans have this. And if it progresses, it could progress to what's called NASH, which is non-alcoholic stereo hepatitis, and eventually to the need for liver transplant. So sugar. Jesus Christ. Yeah, I know. What are we we talking about we're talking about sugar so sugar cane sugar beet sugar are technically sucrose that's a molecule of glucose bonded to a molecule of fructose fructose makes it sweet

high fructose corn syrup is 45 glucose glucose, 55% fructose, same chemical constituents. They're not bonded together. I don't think that makes a damn bit of difference. Some people do. The fructose is metabolized in your liver. So the glucose gets into your bloodstream, just like any other glucose from any other carbohydrate. The fructose goes to your liver. And if your liver gets it in a high dose, like say from an apple juice or something, it has trouble dealing with that much fructose. It never evolved to see a glass of apple juice or a can of Coke's worth of fructose be delivered over the course of 5, 10 minutes, probably even 30 minutes. So it converts it into fat.

the course of 5, 10 minutes, probably even 30 minutes, so it converts it into fat. So we have a condition, insulin-resistant, that's epidemic worldwide, that's, you know, the leading research in the country think is caused by the accumulation of fat in liver cells, and we've got a substance, sugar, that's been exploded in use worldwide in which half of it is metabolized in the liver and is converted into fat in liver cells. So it's like it's at the scene of the crime in populations and it's at the scene of the crime in the body. And it's got a mechanism. It's got the gun necessary. You know, you can match the bullets almost, but we don't have a smoking gun. It's got the gun. Necessary. You know, you can match the bullets almost, but we don't have a smoking gun. That's where the research falls short. And so this is the case I'm making. And then if sugar causes insulin resistance, there are all kinds of downstream effects,

including what mothers will do to their children if they are insulin resistant and have high blood sugar when they're pregnant. Jesus Christ. Yeah. And that's why my argument is, you know, it's almost too much. It would be easier if I just said it's empty calories because, you know, what, what pushback against your book and against your research have you experienced? Well, I mean, there are people who just object to my existence. Have you debated these people? I'm in the process of debating two of them online now. Cato Unbound, it's called. I wouldn't have, by the way, done this if...

I'm not a fan of debates in science because I don't think they settle things. I'm a fan of people getting together and saying, look, you believe this, I believe this. What experiment can we do to find out who's right? Not who's the better rhetorician. Yeah, I know what you're saying. Who's more charismatic? Who can get the point across more?

It's just that the obesity society and the nutrition societies, once a year, they'll have their annual conference. They'll have a debate over this. And everybody will go, yeah, I thought you did better. But nobody walks out of the debate saying, what experiment can we do to settle this? And I think it's, you know, again, we have these epidemics. They're tragic. The cost of obesity and diabetes in the U.S., direct cost to the medical system is estimated as a billion dollars a year. I mean, excuse me, a billion dollars a day.

What? Slight direct cost to the health care system 365 billion dollars a year just because of obesity and diabetes jesus and if you think about it so that's 365 billion dollars it is a direct cost that's a burden on the health care system but it's a tremendous for the pharmaceutical industry right and the physicians and the hospitals that are getting that money. So they don't have quite as much motivation as you might to stem this tide because they're profiting from it tremendously. Well, also, are they even aware of the causes of it? I mean, if your work is so controversial and there's so many people out there that are disputing it or disputing this link between sugar and all these horrible diseases,

and they're calling it empty calories. Is this even something that in the medical community where they spend a ridiculously short amount of time in school learning about nutrition? Well, thank God for that because if they learned more, they would learn the wrong thing, right? Then they'd be even more dogmatic. Right. Good point. Now, well, these people, they don't really have the information. You can go ahead and blow your nose, man.

Don't worry about it. You've been struggling with it for a while. Gary's sick because he hasn't had enough sugar, ladies and gentlemen. Yes, exactly. It's a low-carb diet I ate. But, I mean, it seems to me like they don't have the time. I mean, I don't have the time to do the research that you did. Very few people do.

It really takes someone like you. It takes a maniac to go out there and stretch your finances and put yourself in a bad position and really be obsessively chasing this down. Yeah, no, it's true. But again, that doesn't mean you're supposed to believe somebody like me. And again, you can't, you know, I'm a journalist. I used to think, how would I, you know, imagine some plumber came up to me one day and he said,

you know, I just spent like the last 10 years of my life studying how to do journalism. And I've written this book and you're doing it all wrong. That's a good point. You know, and I'm like, okay, yeah, sure. I'll take the book, you know, and I can't wait to read it. And I'm going to go home and I'm not probably even going to throw the book out, because the odds that that's a waste of time for me are enormous. When was the first, when did diabetes first sort of emerge in medical records?

Well, in medical records, you see it 2,000 years ago in like Hindu medical documents. Coincidentally, with the beginning of the sugar industry in northern India. Yeah, I mean, just give or take 200 years. Holy shit.

And even back then, they speculated that it was caused by sugar, although I think for the wrong reasons because the diabetic urine, you're pissing out a lot of glucose, right,

because your body can't handle it. So it's sweet and it'll attract flies. And back then, even up until the 17th century, part of classic medical practice was for the physician to have his assistant taste the urine. Oh, God. He didn't have to do it himself. And that could be, by the way, one reason why a lot of diabetes went undiagnosed. Because people wouldn't drink the piss? Because people wouldn't drink the piss? Because people wouldn't drink the piss, yeah. And you've got to keep all this stuff in mind.

What a ridiculous way. It's all they had. Science is determined by the technology available. That was one of the lessons when we get into this. Because all my books are about good science and bad science. And I hope I understand what I'm doing. Like I said, if I don't, it's really gonna bad.

It's embarrassing. I wake up at three, four in the morning. I'm thinking, why do I so obsessed about this calorie issue? Nobody else seems to care. But people do now. Don't you feel like that? No, we're making, well,

but we live in a very small world. You know, it's hard to understand. I mean, even with your whatever, 20 million downloads a month and all your followers. It's a lot more than that. Yeah. I mean, think about how many of those voted for the current president, for instance. I mean, it's just, it's a very, I'm glad to hear it's a lot more. Well, I am too, because I want to get this out. You know, I mean, even if it's just for this one particular subject, which I think is probably the most important subject today, when in terms of health and wellness and just optimizing your existence,

cutting out sugar and changing your diet, I think, is one of the most important factors in living a healthier, more productive life. And also mental clarity. Well, now let me ask you a question. When you cut out sugar, so you said you cut it out slowly. Yeah. What were you eating at the time? Because I gather- I never ate bad.

Yeah. But I ate pastas and I ate bread. I always supplemented with vitamins. I always worked out hard and I was always lean because I worked out so much. So I never thought I had an issue with fat. I never thought I had an issue with any of those things. But I would get that crash. I would get that late afternoon crash and it was fucking insulin dump. Yeah. I used to

say, I used to say, I don't take naps. They take me, you know, like an hour after lunch and I'd be interviewing some Nobel prize winner on the, I'd have to think of an excuse to get off because I was falling asleep doing the interview. I mean, that doesn't happen to me anymore. No, it's fascinating. It's unbelievably fascinating. I would never have guessed. I would have thought you needed some sort of a stimulant to keep you going like that. Although, in honesty, we're both drinking bulletproof coffees right now.

Yes. So we are getting some sort of a stimulant. We are, but I didn't have to have that. I did, but that's the book tour. Well, you're sick. Yeah. But here's the thing. When you cut out the grains, the bread, the pasta, that's still, that's glucose.

So were you eating sugar? Were you drinking Gatorades? No, very rarely. Very rarely. I was still eating pretty clean. Like I would have dessert every now and then, but it wasn't more than a few times a week. I wasn't eating candy bars during the day, but I was eating the occasional protein bar that was loaded with sugar that I didn't even think it was. I thought I was eating healthy.

That's what gets me. So once we got into this diet, to this idea, so one of the things, and this was a second article I read. So is there evidence to support this idea we should be eating a low-fat diet? I mean, the second article I wrote, and I recreated the history of that, and it was fascinating because once these people got this idea that fat caused heart disease. So remember, science is determined by what you can measure. So the technology you have tells you what you can measure, and what you can measure is what you can ask questions about, and then that gives you the answers. And if you're a bad scientist, you forget that it's completely limited to the technology. So there's this old joke in science called the drunk in the street

light problem. Do you ever hear about it? No. So guy's walking down the street and he comes upon a drunk who's crawling around on his knees under a street light. And he says to the guy, what are you doing? And the guy says, I'm looking for my keys. And the guy says, so is this where you lost them? And the drunk goes, I don't know where I lost them, but this is where the light is. Okay. So in science, it's like what, but this is where the light is. Okay? So in science, it's like what you could measure is where the light is. And you've got to remember that there's a universe out there that you can't see yet. But most scientists don't realize that.

They're just not good scientists. So in heart disease, the light was on cholesterol. That was at 1950s, 60s, that's what they could measure. And they got this idea that it's caused by dietary fat. And because of that, we just, you know, again, they tested and tested and this hypothesis kept being failed in the test, but they didn't care because they thought it had to be true. And by the 1980s, we lock it in as a dogma. And now we have this idea that the healthy way to eat is a low-fat diet.

And you start making products where you take the fat out of it. And once you take the fat out of something, it doesn't taste all that good. Like yogurt's a classic example. I mean, it is fat and some modest amount of lactose. I don't even know if there's lactose in it. I should know this stuff because then people say clearly you're not a nutritionist. So they eat candy bars instead of eating Snickers bars, which is a high-fat, high-sugar thing that we grew up on. You create Cliffs bars and Nature's Way bars and all these low-fat health food bars that we think are healthy because they're low in fat.

They're loaded with carbs, and they fill them up with sugar. And to this day, I'm wondering, like, should I just let, you know, we have a drawer with these health food bars, and my wife, I'm not the only parent in the family, so my kids aren't tortured by my food beliefs. Would they be healthier if they just ate Snickers bars like we did when we were kids? And I don't know what the answer is. I literally, I could argue it either way. How could you argue that they would be

healthier if they had all that sugar? Well, they both have the sugar. What do you mean both? Like Laura bars versus, you ever seen one of those Laura bars? I really love those. They taste good, but they're 19 fucking grams of sugar or something crazy. And it's only like the size of your thumb. Yeah. So basically, I don't know what the sugar content is you could probably google it while we're talking about you know regular size snickers bar it's probably more than 19 grams but it's also got all that fat in it which will slow down the digestion of the sugar so a snickers bar arguably is better for you than some of these really super sugary what we think air quotes are healthy snacks like trail bars and yeah and the key

word there is arguably here we go 20 grams of sugar and what is that a snickers bar yeah that's a lot okay jesus christ yeah but it's a bigger it's gonna be a big way more so what about the it's gonna weigh more well it's uh 44 grams right okay okay Okay. Okay. Yeah, those things, Larabars. Find out what the fuck is in those bad boys. Because I had one. I bought one once. This is before I had gone on my crusade against sugar. Wait, there's no added sugar, it says, in the Larabars.

Wait a minute. But they're fruit nut bars. So the question is how much sugar are in the fruit. Maybe you're looking at the, maybe it's a different one. Which one are you looking at here? Yeah, that's it. What does it say here? How many grams?

20 grams. 20 grams. So it's the same as a snicker. So why the fuck are they lying? No added sugar. Well, it could be because it comes from fruit. That's one of the arguments. It's still fucking sugar.

Yeah. Your body doesn't know that. You're playing a goddamn game. Yes, you're playing a game. Exactly. That's crazy. Wait, so how does this this let's see i'm just curious using natural fruits and nuts in their bars the world health organization's

recommended daily sugar intake for adults five percent of daily caloric intake for a normal weight adult eating 2 000 calories a day that's 25 grams so now is that added sugar per day i mean when you're talking about lactose when you're're talking about fruits. Oh, it's funny. A friend just sent me an article today on the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition, where they were looking at sugar content of children's diets in Europe. And age one, they were 30% of their calories from sugar. Jesus Christ. But I was trying to make sense of it. I'm pretty sure that included lactose from milk, which was a primary source.

He said the primary source of the sugar were dairy products. It could also be from, you know, artificial formulas. People never take that into consideration, right? If you eat a piece of cheese, you're getting some sugar. Yeah, although, again, cheese, once you process it, you lose the lactose. Cheese, once you process it into cheese, you lose the lactose. But, yeah, it's sort of – but even the lactose is metabolized differently than the fructose. So I would argue that we evolved to consume lactose at least until we were, you know, out of – you know, weaning.

Right. A few – three, four years old. Do you drink milk? No. I actually gave up dairy, but for a different reason. Not because I – for me, it has unfortunate gastrointestinal side effects that my whole family could live without. If you go into a low-carb, high-fat diet, which I think is a – certainly those of us should be eating who are predisposed to get fat or diabetic um yeah cheese is a very valuable item of the diet and clearly like the french and the swiss and even the greeks eat enormous amounts of cheese and they live quite a long time there

do you believe in raw milk have you attempted to try that or raw cheese i don't think it's my gut feeling remember i'm a i'm a i focus obsessively on one subject and it's the don't think it's my gut feeling. Remember, I focus obsessively on one subject and it's the carb content and it's the sugars and the refined grains and what's the cause of obesity. I don't, raw milk doesn't enter into that discussion. What I meant about it is just from the gastrointestinal issues

because a lot of people believe that raw milk with all the natural enzymes in it is easier for your body to process. Yeah, that's quite possible. But again, if you gain weight easily, then I wouldn't be recommending liquid carbs of any kind, including the lactose in milk. So you look at the low-carb diets traditionally and historically, they never allowed for milk. I mean, you might go for heavy cream or cream, you know, the sort of Atkins thing or the bulletproof coffee thing. Yeah, I know a lot of people who are on the ketogenic diet that will actually drink heavy cream.

My friend Kyle, who actually was one of the first people to turn me on to it, Kyle Kingsbury, he carries around this little fucking pint of heavy cream, but he's a savage. Yeah, no, my former collaborator, Peter Attia, who's his internet handle at one point I think was Ketogenic Man, and he used to drink olive oil and cream. Well, because you've got to really up the fat content on those diets for a lot of people to get ketotic not everyone but um it's interesting i thought i heard you were trying it yeah i did

i'm on it yeah essentially so tell me your diet well um a lot of avocados a lot of coconut oil um i might eat a little bit more protein than I'm supposed to, which unfortunately does convert back to sugar in your body. Glucose. But much more easily processed, obviously, than high fructose corn syrup, right? Very, very little pastas or grains or breads or anything. It's a rare thing that I eat that stuff. Do you actually measure ketones? I've done it before, but I have a problem with those things. When you jab your finger,

it's too hard for me to get blood out. I do a lot of kettlebell stuff and so I have calluses on my fingers and my hands. So I have to actually go into the side of my hand to get the blood. I have to go above the fingerprints into the upper skin area and squeeze out the blood. It's fucking annoying.

So I know when I'm in it. And also I take ketogenic supplements. I'll take exogenous ketones. It's fucking annoying. So I know when I'm in it. And also I take, um, ketogenic supplements. I'll take like, uh, exogenous ketones. Like there's a stuff called ketogenics. Is there anything that tastes decent? Yeah. Ketogenics tastes really good. It's good. It's a good drink. It's, uh, it's made by Dom D'Agostino. Do you know who he is? Yeah. So he's one of the premier research scientists that's devoted to a ketogenic diet. And I heard about him from Tim Ferriss's podcast and I've read some of his work online and listened to some of his lectures and you know and talks and um i find it uh first of all as far as like appetite suppressing it's fantastic once your body starts burning fat you don't get that weird hunger thing well that's yeah

that's the thing because you're not uh you're just mobilizing your fat and burning it. It's all coming out. It's not being, your body isn't trying to hold on to it. You're not freaking out. That's the thing. It's like when I was on a heavy carb diet, because I love pasta. God, I love like lasagna and linguine with clams. And it's just like, I just love it.

It's fantastic. And occasionally I'll indulge as a rare treat now. But when I was eating it all the time, I would have this two or three hour post eating thing where that stuff would be gone it would all be digested and then I'd be fucking starving in the next hour I remember the old joke about you know Chinese right right like you know hours later you're starving yeah I mean that's really what it is your body starts craving those carbohydrates, the simple carbs. starts coming down, your fat tissue is supposed to release the fat and allow it to come out and be oxidized by the same cells. And the mitochondria in your cells in this famous Krebs cycle that

we're all supposed to learn in like 11th grade biology and can never remember, the Krebs cycle is just as happy to burn fat as carbs. But if the insulin's high, it's telling your mitochondria to burn carbs, not fat, and it's telling the fat cells to hold on to fat. And now you've just got a dearth of fuel. It's actually telling your lean tissue to hold on to protein. So now your blood sugar is coming down, but the insulin's still elevated, and there's no fuels replacing the blood sugar. And now you bonk. You bonk, or you start to panic or you, you know, and this is why, you know, I mean, once we instituted this low fat thing and people said,

well, Americans get fat because they snack all the time. They're constantly grazing. Well, they're constantly grazing because their cells are running out of fuel. No matter how much they're eating for breakfast of their low fat stuff, if their insulin is elevated, their cells are going to want to burn carbs. And this is one of the observations you found in the literature in the 1830s. There was a Hungarian endocrinologist working at Northwestern University who talked about some of his obese pain. He said he had a patient who was an obese laundress who used to eat laundry starch. Oh, Jesus Christ. What the fuck is laundry starch? It's starch. It's a carbohydrate, man.

I had no idea. But the point is, if your insulin is elevated, carbohydrates are your fuel. It's singling your cells to burn glucose and not to burn fat and not to burn protein. So carbs are your fuel. That's what you need. So when you start to get hungry, you crave that because that's the only thing your cells are going to burn. So then if you do like you try a ketogenic diet or low carb, high fat diet, whatever you want to

call it, and you get rid of the carbs and you get enough fat, your insulin comes down. Then you get in this natural thing where you eat, you store some of the fat, you're burning fat. When you're done burning the fat in your bloodstream, the fat comes out of your cells. There's this nice cycle that's supposed to happen. You always have enough fuel available that, you know, you're not hungry. And that's one of the common phenomenons is the idea that suddenly I have breakfast. The next thing I know it's two, three in the afternoon and I'm thinking maybe I should eat lunch just because I should eat lunch. Not because I'm hungry, not because I'm starving. You know, and then you eat lunch, you don't fall asleep afterwards.

Because your body has a fuel supply. Because your body has a constant fuel supply. Your cells are being fueled whether you're eating or not. You've got enough fat in your body to live for like a month even if you're relatively lean. Now I should point out that some high level athletes are having an issue with this some people that are used to burning off massive amounts of calories during the day like mixed martial artists and things along those lines some of them adapt to it fine right and are having a great time with it and find it easier to make

weight and easier to train but other ones say that they have just a lack of that extra gear in training. I don't know if they're doing it fully disciplined, like if they're monitoring their ketones, if they're really sure about their diet, they've got it 75, 25. Some of the earliest studies ever done on this was by a guy named Steve Finney, who's co-author of two books, Arden Science of Low-Carb Living and Arden Science of Low-Carb Performance. And Steve, back in the late 70s, early 80s, he was at, I think it was Vermont, where there was a team of people studying, doing some interesting diet experiments. And he put professional bike racers on ketogenic diets and measured their performance versus their sort of traditional high-carb diets.

And he keto-adapted them, so they were fully adapted to burning fat for fuel. And from his studies, basically, he said they're more efficient until they have to push that last sort of 5% out, like up a mountain or a marathon or getting to Heartbreak Hill on the Boston Marathon, and then they lose that extra push. See, that's what makes sense because that extra push is all what mixed martial arts is about. Yeah. That extra push is all about, I mean, in MMA it's all about exploding when you're tired. It's all about being able to manage your endurance over the course of five minutes

but figure out these sprint times and being able to squeeze the most out of those to break your opponent. Yeah, yeah. A lot of times it's based on how much you have in the tank. Yeah, well, that's the thing. And, I mean, a lot of it you should still, you can still, even the, it's funny, carb loading, when it was first sort of perfected, was developed in Scandinavia by, and back in the 50s, I think it was, by the coaches of cross-country skiers,

which is an incredibly, like, physically burdensome. Brutal. Brutal. So, and they trained all year long on low-carb diets. So, they would train on low-carb diets, and the idea was they would eat the plate of pasta, you know, the day before the race, and they would maximize their glycogen stores in their liver and in their cells. And then when they needed it, it was there. And has that been proven efficient?

I mean, it was a great way for them. But then it was, but again, the point is they were eating the low carb diets the rest of the year. And then once marathoners started doing it, everyone thought, well, if marathoners should eat carbs the night before a marathon. We should all eat carbs. And then this idea that carbs are heart healthy came in and they just took over the world. But my area of expertise is by no means like high performance athletes. There are people out there who could talk to you for, you know, and I'll recommend some when we get off.

But, you know, it's interesting because even when you read the debates about this stuff, what the high-performance athletes, I see this in like outside magazine and runner's world stuff. So there's this fundamental argument that, look, we don't get fat because we eat too much. We get fat because the carbohydrates in our diet causes hormonal metabolic dysregulation that makes us store calories of fat in our fat cells. And that implies that the healthiest diet, for those of us who get fat, are diets absent, you know, easily digestible carbs and sugars. But if athletes, very high performing athletes eat those diets and don't perform better than before, it's not a good diet and therefore all the rest of it is wrong.

than before, it's not a good diet, and therefore all the rest of it is wrong. And that's just crazy. You know, it's sort of what Lance Armstrong needs to win the Tour de France, whatever it is, doesn't tell me a hell of a lot about why, you know, Shirley McClintock weighs 300 pounds and can't lose that weight unless she gives up carbohydrates. And all of that gets confounded in these discussions. And one of the things I'm constantly doing when I talk about this stuff is saying, you've got to keep your eye on the question. Because we were all given different answers to different questions. So what's the best diet for winning the Tour de France or MMA fight? Probably got a lot of the same themes that I'm talking about.

But even then, funny when sugar came in beginning around the 1890s and it was cheap and easily available and beet sugar was available in Germany, the German army started testing sugar as a performance enhancer and actually doing sort of trials where they would send troops out with or without sugar for you know 30 day marches and then they would see when they came back which ones had more energy and the ones who ate more sugar had more energy and they some mountain climbers started using it um crew coaches started testing it on the crew like rowing back then was among the most popular sports in the world. And so they

would give their rowers sugar and see if they perform better, which they inevitably did. It's a great performance enhancing drug. It's a psychoactive drug. It kills pain. It is, you know, the joke, it's quick energy. Sugar kills pain? Yeah, that's why we give it to kids. You know, if your baby, was he circumcised? I have girls. Okay, not an issue. Boys, circumcise them, give them a little bit of sugar. Jesus Christ, I've never heard of that, though. But sugar kills pain?

Yeah, it's a distraction. It's a painkiller. I mean, it's wonderful psychoactive properties. No short-term side effects. I mean, you must be talking about a very minor killing of a very minor well if you also if you start with populations that never consume sugar so babies never consume it before you give them a little sugar like on day three you can circumcise them and then they're just tripping they're fine hey cool take it off i don't need to live with that what what am i gonna use that for? I mean, when you're three days old, you've got no imagination.

Wow. We could talk about... Yeah, so anyway, that's the thing. It's that it could be a performance-enhancing drug that would enhance the performance of athletes at the highest level. It doesn't mean it doesn't have long-term chronic effects, just like any other performance-enhancing drug. So there's a big difference between people that are, like, say, climbing K2, that need something to push them forward,

versus the average person who likes to play racquetball and works a day job and, you know, and that kind of a diet. Yeah, and think about, I mean the athletic trainers who have been telling you, I mean, the guys you work out with, you know, the lean, muscular guys who never had an ounce of fat in their lives. And they're saying we should all eat carbs or we should all eat sugar because look how well I process it. And my argument is like, if you think your body works the same way as your cousin who weighs 300 pounds and the only difference is you exercise more, like that's a serious delusion. And, you know, we're different people.

I don't know. Do you have siblings? Yes. Are you all built alike? I have a sister. Okay. Yeah. I mean, she's lean.

I mean, she works out a little bit. Not like I do. But, you know, we have good genes in that regard. I mean, when I was a kid, my older brother, mathematician, brilliant guy, but he was always taller, leaner, like you could see the veins on his arms and the ripples on his stomach. Just genetic. When he was seven years old. It wasn't genetic because I clearly had the same genes and a different body type. But they vary.

Yeah. So when he got to college, he was a rower. He couldn't get over 195 no matter how much he ate. And he used to say, I'll never forget this. I never get stuffed or just get bored of eating after a few hours. And I was shorter, thicker. You know, I put on weight relatively easily. By the time I was in high you know I put on weight relatively easily by the time I was in high school I weighed 195 when I was playing you know division two college football I could get up to

237 and no matter how much I ate I could not get above 237 and I was three inches shorter than he was we just had different body types we I built muscle easier than he did, and I put on fat easier than he did. It had nothing to do with how much. We both ate as much as we could. In fact, dinners in our family lasted like 18 minutes because it was, you know, my mother put down like, you know, enough for four or eight people. And if I didn't eat it fast, my brother, yeah, exactly. Started at 7, over at 7.18. Right. No matter what she served.

When you're looking at all this data and you're putting together this book and you realize that you're going to drop this mind blower on people that we've been essentially misled by almost every established organization when it comes to health and diet. How are you feeling when you're about to release this? Are you hesitant? Is this like one thing where you're like, Jesus Christ, am I just, I mean, did you have this like incredible desire to like double check, triple check, quadruple check? No, but I should have.

Okay, so the first time this happened. So the articles in Science, for whatever reason, didn't create all that much controversy. I mean, they won awards and reporting awards, and they were in books about the best science writing, but nobody really cared. I mean, there was enough controversy about whether this low-fat diet, for instance, was the right thing. Then I do this New York Times Magazine article where, you know, the idea was to go out and find out that this was pitched in 2001, and our awareness of the obesity epidemic was only about three years old. was only about three years old. And you could pinpoint it in time from between the late 1970s to the early 1990s,

two surveys that were done. And during those two surveys, the prevalence of obesity almost doubled in the United States, the percentage of Americans. So you'd ask the question, what caused it? And I had two hypotheses. One was we had shifted. In the 1960s, the conventional wisdom was that

carbohydrates are uniquely fattening. One line I quote in two of my books was the first sentence of a British Journal of Nutrition article in 1963, written by one of the two leading British dieticians, was every woman knows carbohydrates are fattening. And every woman knew this. Bread, pasta, potatoes, rice, beer, sweets, they'd go right to your hips. That was a lie. And then we turned them into heart-healthy diet foods by the 1980s. And that happened between, was institutionalized between 1977 and 1984. And by 84, like the New York Times health reporters writing her best-selling diet, you know, health cooking book called The Good Food Book, and she's saying, yeah, we used to think carbs are fattening, but

now we should eat pasta and bread all the time. So that was one hypothesis. The other was high fructose corn syrup, which came in in 1977 and had sort of replaced sugar and Pepsi and Coke by 1984. Anyway, as I'm doing that piece, I realize I stumbled upon five studies of the Atkins diet. So the Atkins diet is what scientists call the anomalous observation. So what you're always looking for in science is the anomalous observation. That's the thing that doesn't fit with any of your beliefs. You know, you've got a theory that says this,

and then you find that. And now you've got a way to come up with a better theory because you've got something else you have to explain that your present theory doesn't. And it's the anomalous observations that move science forward. It's the thing that just doesn't fit with your belief. So here's the diet trials where you've got the Atkins diet, high in fat, high in saturated fat, so it should give you heart disease, you know, double quarter pounded with cheese, no bun, lobster, Newberg, you know, eggs, bacon, sausage, and you're allowed to eat as much as you want. Okay, so it's not a calorie-restricted diet.

It's ad libitum. As long as you don't eat carbs, you could have eight eggs for breakfast and a rash for bacon and, you know, whole chicken for lunch. So the other theory, one theory is that fat is going to cause heart disease. And the other theory is that the eat as much as you want, you tell a fat person to eat as much as you want, they're going to get fatter, right? Because we think they got fat to begin with because they ate too much. And then you compare those people to people you put on an American Heart Association low-fat diet and you tell them to calorie restrict. Am I repeating myself? No, go ahead. You know, the ice cream scoop size of tuna salad on the lettuce patty

thing that we all went through at some point in our life. Maybe not you if you were naturally lean. Anyway, in all five of these trials, and they'd been done but not published yet, and they'd been presented at conferences, the people on the Atkins diet not only lost more weight than the ones on the calorie-restricted American Heart Association low-fat diet that all American people were supposed to be eating. So that refutes the eating too much hypothesis because these guys on the Atkins diet can eat as much as they want, but their heart disease risk factors are better.

Okay, so they're supposed to die of heart disease. You know, you eat the bacon, it clogs your arteries, you fall over dead, but they were healthier. So it refutes the heart disease thing too. So there's the anomalous observation. How do you explain that? If dietary fat causes heart disease and eating too much causes obesity. So I write this article. I lead it with this young Harvard endocrinologist, pediatrician who's feeding low-carb diets to his patients at Boston Children's Hospital. He's like politically acceptable. He's sincere. He's at Harvard.

I want to ease people into it. And then I talk about the Atkins thing down below and how Atkins had gotten pilloried back in the late 60s, early 70s for telling people they could eat these high-fat diets because we thought, you know, and what these studies showed. And the editors of the New York Times Magazine said, Atkins is the elephant in the living room. Like, get rid of this Harvard guy. Put him down below. Lead with Atkins, okay?

I mean, they know how to get people to read an article. So I write this lead. I read it to my wife, and it's, you know, to get people to read an article. So I write this lead. I read it to my wife. And it's, you know, if the American Medical Association, the American Heart Association, have a find-yourself-standing-naked-nightmare-in-time-square, excuse me, find-yourself-standing-naked-in-time-square nightmare, it's that all the advice they've been giving to the American people about a healthy diet for the last 50 years is wrong. And maybe Atkins was right all along, and maybe both. And I read it to my wife, and I say, they will never run this in a million years. And I email it to the editors, and they don't

change a word. And that's the lead of the magazine article. And then they put this picture on the cover of the magazine, which is this kind of cheap looking porterhouse steak. They didn't go to, you know, the photographer to make it delicious, you know, and it's got a pat of butter. And the headline is, what if it's all been a big fat lie? And I didn't stop them from doing it, but I didn't know what to expect. I knew it was going to be controversial. Getting back to your question, I tend to answer long-winded. I knew it was going to be controversial. I knew it was going to be the most controversial article they'd run since a friend of mine 10 years earlier had written an article about how recycling is a complete waste of time and money. I had no idea what was going to happen. No idea. And I compare it to my boxing career.

Okay. When I was younger, I, when I was at Harvard, I, my best friend was a boxer. He was a street fighter from Manhattan, a Puerto Rican kid and a wonderful guy. I mean, everyone in school loved him. And then he taught me how to box and we used to, you know to box in the gym, and I would do this sort of Muhammad Ali imitation because that's what I thought boxing was in 1977. Then he actually had an amateur fight in low mass in March 1977 and got killed in the fight. Oh, Jesus. And, of course, me being young and stupid,

it's not enough to prevent me from continuing. So when I moved to New York... Did you watch the fight? Yeah, we were there. You were there? We didn't know. What happened to him? He danced into a right hook and went over backwards like it was frozen, like it was a plank of wood.

And his head bounced off the mat. That's how I remember it. God knows if my memory is right. It's one of the scariest things is when the head bounces. Yeah. It's one of the worst ways to get knocked head bounces. Yeah. It's one of the worst ways to get knocked out. Yeah. And we knew it was bad, but we didn't know. It's not, he didn't die. He went into, he was in a coma. They took him to the hospital. We went all home, you know, we,

and then, you know, a week later, there's just no brain activity. And they, this is how I remember it. I hope I'm doing them justice by getting the memory right. Of course, nowadays you can Google it and read about the article on the Boston Globe, and it was an article. Anyway, I moved to New York. I go to journalism school. I have a friend who is Norman Mailer's nephew. And Norman Mailer had a group of people who used to get together at the Gramercy Gym on Saturday mornings in New York. This is another long-winded answer to your question. Don't worry about that.

I mean, talk about shaggy dog story. So every Saturday morning, we'd meet at the Gramercy Gym, which is 14th and around Lexington. Back then, it was a very seedy neighborhood, and it was, you know... Classic gym. Yeah, classic old gym. And some really, like, Ryan O'Neill's buddies with Norman would show up once every three months.

And there was a guy who ran, I forget, it was a porn magazine that was sold in a brown paper bag. He would show up. And then, you know, a half dozen other people. I had this friend, Steve Chow, went on to become Barry Diller's right-hand man. And, yeah, Hollywood would actually be the valedictorian of our class at Harvard and we would spar and I enjoyed it and I got into

it and I was getting the crap beat out of me first but eventually I kept doing it and then I decided to fight in the New York Golden Gloves and write about it for Playboy so the piece was called Life is a Standing Eight Count I I'm sorry, but this is after your friend died. This is after my friend died. Wow. So anyway, the point is kind of like

going from sparring to your first match. Now you had a much more successful career than I did. I had two fights and I won the first one because the Irish cop I was fighting got tired of punching me. And I finally thought if I hit him back, maybe that'll slow him down. It worked. But that transition from sparring to being in the ring, having someone to beat the crap out of you is like you just can't. You cannot conceive of what it's going to be like until you do it right right i mean if you can remember back to your first fight and you might have been more of a natural animal than i am i'm kind of a cerebral guy i think too much but that's what it was like getting this article

published like i knew it was going to be controversial you want me to tell you the end of the boxing story sure i won my first fight you know knocked out this cop from staten island and i was done i didn't want to do it again i didn't enjoy winning i did not enjoy knocking him out i didn't like anything about it this nose was not built for getting pummeled and i was not a very good defensive fighter and then the second fight i went up against the guy who won it. You know, this was the, not the open category, the 10 fights or less category. And he knocked me out in a minute and 37 seconds. I had a friend who, a photographer for life who came, Norman Mailer was at the fight too. Like Norman sitting there watching me get the crap beat out of me. And my friend, uh, who was a photographer, didn't have time to get her lens cap off basically

she you know so i have a photo that ran in playboy with the article which was you know you could see ring level and you see these two big feet sticking up and this body prone on the ring you know did you get knocked unconscious yeah when you woke up um how terrified were you were you thinking at all about your friend who died? No, that's a funny thing, not at all. But I thought about it afterwards. So it's interesting. Apparently, you know, I woke up in the ring.

I mean, I stood up. They raised the other guy's hand. I don't remember any of that. Do you remember the fight at all? A little bit. A little bit of, like, these roundhouses whizzing by my head and i had this tendency i would like pull my head back so i'm pulling my hands down instead of terrible instinct yeah natural for some strange reason yeah yeah it's very difficult to teach people to not do the

worst thing yeah and you know if my career had lasted past that fight my very good coach would have broken it out and he would have said don't't ever do that again. Anyway, my memory is I'm sitting outside the ring and a doctor is saying to me, do you know what your name is? Do you know what, you know, so there's a period of my life where I was clearly conscious, but I have no memory of it. Then they make you go to the hospital afterwards to make sure you're not going to die overnight. And I was in an emergency room and there was a guy next to me who had had a motorcycle accident and a cab had cut him off. And he had the same, we were talking, he was about my age, Hispanic. And he, you know, this thing where there's, you know, the way you say the next thing I remember. Right. And then there's this awareness that there could very well have never been a next thing I remember. And then there's this awareness that there could very well have never

been a next thing I remember. The moment could have just ended there. And that's when I started thinking about my friend. But I was too busy getting mad at the hospital attendant who kept telling me that my nose was broken. And I kept saying, my nose isn't broken, asshole. This is the nose I was born with. Oh, man, that's a broken nose. I know a broken nose when I see one. But anyway, that was a little bit. So I published this article. I've got no idea what's going to happen.

And, you know, it was like just the universe. I mean, first of all, there's an enormous amount of media attention. So I'm doing TV shows and radio shows and people are writing about me. But people are attacking me because the implication is not just did the nutrition obesity community screw up. But my journalist friends who have been covering this field screwed up. They got the wrong story. They missed the story that I found. And nobody wants to think like that. You don't want to think you're

bad at what you do, right? So, you know, friends are writing articles about me. You know, one, you know, woman journalist in Boston who used to be a good friend who thought I was one of the five best writers in the country, science journalists in the country, until I wrote a piece that came to a different conclusion than a book she had written on obesity. And the headline in Newsweek was, it's not the carbs, stupid. The Center for Science and the Public Interest did a piece called Big Fat Lies, cover of their newspaper, basically explaining how I had screwed up on everything I had screwed up. Another basically explaining how I had screwed up on everything I had screwed up. Another journalist who had written a book on obesity did a piece for Reason magazine about all the ways I had screwed up.

Luckily, I hadn't screwed up in any of them, so I could get back at them and take them down. But when you did get back at them and take them down, you're talking about a time where, I mean, what year was this? This was 2002. So you had a blog? How did you get back at them? No, none of that. Oh, well. Did you had a blog did you how did you get back oh well did you publish a the center for science and the public interest piece they wouldn't even let me respond reason magazine was interesting i called up the editors and i said look this is just complete bullshit

and you've got to let me respond and they said okay they didn't care because they put it online so with albis is going to write for him for free let him write for him for free you know and more controversy brings more readers so i spent the weekend i remember i wrote like a 9 000 word response and there's still some great stuff in there where you know even the very end of this thing i was pointing out every way this guy had screwed up, like taking down my article by saying I made mistakes when he was the one making mistakes. And the last line was something like,

he had called my editor, who had now bought this book for a lot of money, he had called my editor, I think he used the last name, he called him Richard Siegel or something. So the last line of the book wasn't just the final word, my editor's name is not Richard Siegel or something. So the last line of the book wasn't just the final word. My editor's name is not Richard Siegel. It's John, period, you know, 9,000 word takedown. And this guy ended up never writing for Reason magazine again.

Congratulations. Yeah. He got rid of an asshole. And also just it's the human ego is shocking and horrifying because that's the only reason why someone would look at what you wrote and step back and look at what they wrote and decide to attack. Instead of deciding to go, wow, this guy went deep with this research. I need to really look at this and I need to really find out whether or not I've been incorrect. And I need to really reevaluate what kind of advice I've been giving to humans. Think about the hundreds of thousands or maybe even millions of people that have read articles from these people that gave them poor advice and that advice adversely affected their health directly.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But again, which instead they cover their ass. We're not programmed to do that. They are we. We need mushrooms. We've got to remembering, you know. Dietary mushrooms. Yeah. Remember of my, well, this is a low-dose acid thing.

Sounds like I could really transform my personality. I could become a different person. Have you tried it before? No, no. I'm a little scared that I'll become a, I'm going to try it now. Is that what's going to happen? I have to. Let me know after the show.

I have to be able to get to Burbank and catch a flight. Oh, you can get to Burbank on acid. It's the best way. Yeah, there we go. Thank you, Joe. You'll instinctively know where Jay Leno's garage is. It'll be like a beacon. You'll see it above. You know how you have a 3D map and it's got that little balloon where your location is? Yeah, okay. We're there.

You know, hey, I live in Oakland. We don't need help with psychoactives up there. We're good. Anyway, what was I saying? So, yeah, it's just it's a natural human tendency. The ego is... But you wish somebody would say,

Jesus, I never thought of this. That's all they need to say. They have to say, we never thought of this. This is an interesting take. Clearly, the editors at the New York Times Magazine are really smart people. Thought this was interesting. The fact checkers fact checked it. There's no mistakes. That's why at least I was safe there because they're really good fact checkers. It didn't rely on me. Why don't we? And it just doesn't happen. I mean, it was funny, even

afterwards, I start doing this book. And now I'm going to interview hundreds more people. And you would expect that a lot of the scientists aren't going to talk to me because they're going to be so mad at me about this article. But most of them actually were good. There was one scientist I wanted to talk to specifically because a guy I was talking to said he hated your article, thought it was total crap.

So I sent him an email and I said, you know, I'd like to interview you. He thought the article was total crap and I'd like to know why because if it was, I want to make sure I don't make those mistakes again. And he said, sure, as long as you make sure you check all my quotes because I don't trust you to get my quotes right because that was another story that was going around at the time. And two weeks later we get on the phone and he says you know I got to apologize when I read your article I was so pissed off by the title what if it's all been a big fat lie and you're holier than thou smarter than-are attitude that I never actually thought deeply about what you were saying.

And I pretty much agree with you. Wow. Now that I've read it again, and context is everything in these things. And I notice that when I lecture, so I give a lot of lectures. I talk grand rounds in medical schools. If somebody introduces me to a room full of doctors, this is a very well-respected journalist, he's won all these awards, including these influential public health awards. He's written this incredibly thoughtful, provoking book.

And we managed to get him here to give you the arguments. The doctors will be completely receptive to everything I say. I've also had people introduce me as, yeah, here's this guy Taubes. He wrote this big book. He says everything we say is wrong, and he's going to give a lecture. And now it's like they're tuned out from day one. From the moment I opened my mouth, they're looking for reasons not to believe a word I say. Arms crossed pose. Yeah, exactly. And then they're looking at the phones five minutes later and checking their email. It's sort of, so context is everything. And by making this article as controversial as it could with putting Atkins in the lead and Porterhouse steak on the cover and what if it's all been a big, fat lie.

And I actually wasn't calling it a lie. It was a lot of mistaken assumptions, a lot of bad science, but nobody lied. Did you create the title? No, but I did. That's always the title? No, but I didn't. That's always what happens, right? I didn't reject it either. So I gave it a title. Well, that's the thing.

So it got me a big book advance. It made it exceedingly controversial, but it turned a lot of people off because they were being accused of things they didn't want to think of themselves, especially the lie. Well, perhaps them, but initially. But over the course of time, it's got a lot of support behind it now by so many people.

You've been recommended to me by at least a half a dozen people that I deeply respect. Yeah. Well, this is the thing. It's an extraordinarily powerful intervention. What you experienced, and you weren't even overweight. You know, this is... Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah. Two things that, you know, when I talk to my colleagues about this, I say, it's like

you're playing in a poker game with a thousand people in the establishment, and they cheat because they all talk to each other, and they share cards, and they show each other what they get, and they tell them what they're going to bet. But God keeps dealing you four aces. You've got the best hand, you know? And the best hand is you shift your diet, you get rid of the carbs, and you replace them with fat, and it does remarkable things to most people, not all. But I want to talk to the people that it doesn't work on. I really do. I want to talk to the people that it doesn't work on. I really do.

I want to know what they're actually doing. The problem with people when they, you know, it's so subjective. It's also you don't exactly know how they're doing it, what their diet is like in terms of like how are they cutting out carbs? What kind of nutrients are they taking in? What's their rest like? How much sleep are they getting? That's the thing. I mean, I have a friend, a diet book author, I think one of the smartest doctors out there.

Whatever he says, it's always worth listening to. He believes that when people fail on the diet, it doesn't matter what age they are, what sex they are, when the diet doesn't return them to a relatively healthy weight, he believes it's because they're not conforming to the diet. I disagree with him, actually. But again, he has actually more... He's talking about any diet, period? No, the low-carb, high-fat diet.

So maybe they're eating too many nuts and there's carbs in nuts, or maybe they're lying to him about what they're doing, or they're still having the occasional sweet. And clearly there are people who try to compromise on these diets. So by compromise, I mean, you've been hearing so long that fat is bad for you. So you can, I mean, sure I'm going to restrict, you know, sugar and grain and starches, but I'm also going to restrict fat. Now you're eating skinless chicken breasts with green vegetables and you're not even putting butter on it, and it tastes awful, and nobody's going to stick to that diet anyway. And in order to give the skinless chicken breast some flavor, you got to marinate it in some sugar marinade. So, and the protein, and you don't want

to eat a high protein diet because you're going to convert the protein to glucose, some of those amino acids, and that's going to raise blood sugar, and that could be a problem. So maybe they're just doing it wrong. But there are a lot of hormones that influence fat accumulation. So this is, remember I said the Germans and Austrians had concluded, maybe I didn't say this, I can't even remember what I, you know, I've been doing this book tour. I got it. Germans and Austrian research said, look, this has got to be a hormonal metabolic issue. The whole idea that it's just calories in, calories out, it's an explanation.

It's like somebody gets heavier, they take in more calories than they expend. We know that. It's like somebody accumulates energy in their fat tissue, they're accumulating energy in their body, which means they're taking in energy more than they expend. That's just a description of what happens. It says nothing about why. You know, they're clearly hormones play a huge role in fat accumulation or men and women would look identical. Okay. So boys go through puberty, they lose fat and gain muscle. Girls go through puberty, they gain fat in very specific places, like not everywhere,

you know, places designed to drive the boys crazy and get some procreation going. And that's all hormonal. It's all estrogen in the girls, testosterone in the boys, you know, little mix going on. It doesn't matter how many calories they're consuming. So these Germans and Austrians would say it's, you know, it's clearly a hormonal thing. I mean, the only way you could explain obesity is a hormonal dysregulation. And then in the 60s, we learned that insulin controls fat accumulation, dominant hormone. But these other hormones play a role as well. So stress hormones play a role and sex hormones play a role. So estrogen and testosterone both inhibit an enzyme called lipoprotein lipase that, when it's on your fat cells,

basically pulls fat out of the circulation and into the cell. That's a simplistic way to put it. So when you're pumping out estrogen and testosterone, you're inhibiting this enzyme, which inhibits fat accumulation. Then you get older. You secrete less. These hormones, women go through menopause. They secrete less estrogen. The lipoprotein lipase is upregulated on their fat cells. So you get more of it. So it just starts accumulating fat, no matter how much the woman wants to eat or exercise. And this is why they put on fat when they get older. I think women are programmed to put on fat when they're pregnant. Men are never really programmed to put on fat. But women have a fat accumulation program when they're pregnant. And it sort of kicks in a little bit as they go through menopause. And so I think historically, when you look at the anecdotal evidence,

older women have a much harder time losing excess body fat, even on very calorie, carbohydrate-restricted ketogenic diets, and it would be completely understandable. And the argument I make is that this would still be the best diet, I make is that the um this would still be the best diet still be the leanest they could be you know for all intents and purposes by getting rid of carbs but it does not mean that it's going to work or it's going to work as much as they want it to because of these other sex hormones and the influence on you know body fat as well and perhaps the only way to adjust that would be extreme exercise,

right? Like they'd have to go crazy CrossFit or start running up hills with weights on them, something, you know, and that's a question I don't know. And that wouldn't address it. That would be sort of a temporary fix, you know, so you might be able to a stimulate some more, even testosterone production. I mean, but— Temporary fix unless you continue that activity. Yeah, but the problem is if it may be virtually, you know, again, here's my issue with Crohn's. I don't know. There was a Harvard psychologist in the 40s and 50s named William Sheldon who came up with this idea. I'm going to need some Googling here, by the way, of three different fundamental body types. So there's an

ectomorph, some mesomorph, and what was the third? Endomorph. Endomorph. Which is the obese one? Endomorph. Endomorph. And he said, and which is the thin one? Ectomorph. Ecto. So he said which is a thin one ectomorph so he said you can no more you could starve an ectomorph and you don't turn him into an you can starve an endomorph

you don't turn him into an ectomorph you turn him into an emaciated endomorph okay it's like you cannot I don't know

if it was his metaphor or mine I forget now you can't starve a basset hound and turn it into a greyhound you just end up

with an emaciated basset hound and turn it into a greyhound. You just end up with a maceated basset hound. So are these genetic factors determined by the environment with their ancestors developed? And the environment in the mother's womb and the, you know, and it's not necessarily, like I said, genetic. It's certainly biological factors. Who knows? Maybe the gut biome is involved. I doubt it. But there's also the shapes of the bodies are radically different, too.

Well, that's the thing. Like I said, my— The width of the shoulders for the mesomorph radically different too. Well, that's the thing. Like I said, my- Width of the shoulders for the esomorphs. Yeah, yeah, yeah. My brother was an ecto- I mean, he was always tall and thin. And he got, you know, at 195, he was buff, but he wasn't- I could put on muscle much easier than him.

I could put on fat. I had a friend who was a taekwondo champion in the 80s, and he was 6'2", 6'3", and he fought at 147 pounds. Jesus, yeah. And you couldn't even get anywhere near him. I'm like 6'2", and I'll starve to death at 175. But it was in his hands. It was in the shape of his face. He was very narrow.

His feet, everything. And that's how his body—so part of this alternative hypothesis, which I find so— And that's how his body, so part of this alternative hypothesis, which I find so, you know, we believe today is, you know, the conventional thinking is how much you eat and exercise drives how much fat you accumulate. And the alternative hypothesis is that how much fat you accumulate is very well regulated by the human body, although you could change that regulation by changing the macronutrients. So people who, fat tissue doesn't want to accumulate fat, who are constitutionally lean like your buddy, when they eat a meal, they can't store it as fat temporarily. They got to burn all those calories. So the way they'd burn it, and prior to the 1950s, a clinician studying obesity used to talk about the impulse to physical activity. So you eat, you know, Lance

Armstrong eats a thousand calories of pasta and his body doesn't want to store it as fat. It wants to burn it. So he goes for a three hour bike ride after lunch because his body's trying desperately to get rid of those calories and it doesn't want to store them as fat. I have the thousand calories of pasta. My body's happy storing it as fat, and I'm asleep an hour later. Right. But I'm not thicker and fatter than Armstrong because I'm asleep. I'm asleep because that's the way my body processes the carbs by storing calories. But is that a case of nature or nurture?

That's nature. 100%. No, it's not because the nurture part is how the diet influences. So if I have exclusively fat and protein, if I'm eating a ketogenic diet, then I'm minimizing fat accumulation and my body wants to burn more of those calories. So I am closer to being Lance Armstrong. So Lance Armstrong can be lean on his high carb diet. I am closer to being Lance Armstrong like closest on a diet absent all carbohydrates. But I'm still, you know, now I'm just a bigger individual. I mean, it's interesting. We were talking about,

you know, I was talking to a friend of mine who was the freshman manager of my college football team. So this was Harvard. Okay, it was Division II football. It was a lot of smart, you know, guys who couldn't make it in Division I. We had kids who went to Harvard because they didn't get scholarships at Holy Cross. So they went, okay, I'll play football for Harvard. They were local. 1976, my senior year, the biggest kid on our team,

Danny Jiggets, weighed 265 pounds, six foot five. From our standards, he was enormous. He went off to play for the Chicago Bears for five or six years. I think we had one other offensive lineman who was 265, also 64, 65, maybe two. This year, Harvard football team, smart kids, same socioeconomic status. The entire offensive, they got, I think, 12 players over 300 pounds. Jesus Christ. And these guys are enormous. I mean, they're six, seven, 300 pounds. They didn't grow people that big when I was growing up. I mean, I could say maybe I didn't see them. Maybe they weren't around. Maybe they were six, seven and they only weighed 230 because they weren't being bulked up. So they were playing basketball instead of football. I mean, I could imagine ways that that confusing, but from our perception, if you look just what happened, when I was a kid, in the early 1960s, as far as I know, there was one 300-pounder in the NFL and AFL,

two different leagues back then. Bob D, I remember his name. He played for the Boston Patriots, and his head was like small compared to his body and he was a big fat guy you know what is there now 20 30 per team well here's a good example big George Foreman from 1970 whatever it was when he fought Joe Frazier he only weighed 217 pounds is that yeah George only weighed 270 yeah I mean when he came back he got really fat. When he came back, when he took a long time off, he ate himself to be well over 300 pounds, but he was extremely obese. That's because he was draining all the fat from the George Foreman grill. It's making low-fat and high-protein.

That was even after that. But back in those days when he was a terror, before he fought Muhammad Ali, he was relatively small by today's standards. If you look at UFC heavyweight champion Stipe Miocic, I believe Stipe walks around at about 240 pounds, and he's small compared to Brock Lesnar, who's 285 pounds. Like, here's a good example that Jamie just pulled up from 1927. Go ahead, blow your nose, man. You're freaking me out.

Don't be scared. You're the only one who can hear it. Everybody can hear it, trust it. Everybody can hear it. Trust me. They can hear it. And then 190 pounds, Morris Red Badgro. How do you say that name? B-A-D-G-R-O.

Badgro. Badgro. He's growing bad. That's why he's only 190. Exactly. He's six foot tall, 190. And this is 1927. He played offense and defense for the New York Giants.

So that guy's 10 pounds lighter than me, and I'm 5'8". He's six foot tall, and he's a pro football player, which is fucking terrifying to me. And then you go to 1967, and you got Alan Page. He's six foot four, 245 forty five pounds a relative giant in comparison then you go to 2006 and you have boy say that name halloween a god a lot in otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta otta He is 6'4", 335 pounds. He's got a big old gut on him. He could lose some weight. Look at his 40 time, under five seconds. Wow, that's insane.

So he's a giant. I mean, people are just much larger. Can you pull up the starting left tackle for the Dallas Cowboys right now? I forget his name. Just Google left tackle Dallas Cowboys. Well, even heavyweight boxers today. Tyrone Smith, that's him. Get a picture of Tyrone. 3'12", That's him. Get a picture of Tyrone. 3'12", 6'5".

Get a picture of him. Whoa! That's a big fella. Okay. Get the one with the shirt off. Yeah, without the shirt off. Let's go pornographic. Okay, so they're not, I mean, people didn't exist like that when I was growing up.

Yeah. There's this new heavyweight that's fighting for the UFC. His name is Francis Ngannou, and he's one of the most exciting prospects in the UFC right now. He's a heavyweight that's fighting for the UFC. His name is Francis Ngannou. And he's one of the most exciting prospects in the UFC right now. He's a heavyweight, he's undefeated, and he is fucking enormous. And he's probably, yeah, go to that picture right there, the far left, far left, Jamie, upper left. Yeah. He's, I mean, that is a giant man. Ridiculous, brutal knockout artist, too. And go see if there's a Wikipedia on his size. But I'm pretty sure he's super lean at around 245, something like that.

What does it say there? It says 6'4". It doesn't say his weight right there. Does it say his weight anywhere there? 257. 257. Jesus. Okay, so he's 40 pounds heavier than Big George Foreman. Yeah. May or may not be correct as far as the weight, but it's close.

And I wouldn't be shocked. He's one of those guys where he walks into the octagon and when I do commentary, I sit at a desk that's touching the octagon. So I'm sitting here, there's a desk, my notes are on it. He's in front of me. When he walks in the octagon, I can feel his footsteps on my hands. He's like he's made out of stone. And then when he hits people, just Jesus Christ, you see the look on their face when he hits them. See if you can find just a quick highlight reel of this guy.

Now, what's interesting is some of that, I mean, training has changed dramatically. Oh, for sure. Like, even when George, I mean, you know, boxers didn't lift. They didn't do resistance training. They didn't do any of the back things because he didn't want to slow them down. Yeah, that's what they thought back then. Yeah, look at this. Boom! He's a giant dude.

French, too. Yes, French, but I believe originally from Nigeria, I believe. And, um, really, giant dude french too yes french but i believe originally from nigeria i believe and um really look at that boom big powerful guy terrifying guy so here's the thing one of my pet theories i don't talk about this is why i let my kids have sugar by the way um ouch the uh okay so what one of the things that happens when you increase insulin, so sugar, the idea that sugar causes insulin resistance, that results in chronic increases in insulin levels.

So insulin stimulates fat accumulation, but it also stimulates secretion of what's called insulin-like growth hormone, which is similar to growth hormone. So the reason we grow is not because growth hormone drives tissues and skeletal muscle to grow, but it drives insulin-like growth factor, which then works on a local level. So if you have more insulin in your system, you're going to have more insulin-like growth factor, and it's going to be more bioavailable. There's these proteins called binding proteins that float around the bloodstream,

and they'll bind to IGF, insulin-like growth factor, and make it so it can't get into cells or can't bind to the receptors. So you would expect as populations become more insulin resistant, you would expect them to grow, to be taller as well as thicker and fatter and more diabetic. And one of the classic observations as populations become westernized, they get taller. And this, you know, you look at medical records or army records from, you know, the Civil War and everybody, all the men were like five foot six. And, you know, now clearly the average height has gone up and it's kind of leveled off a bit in the United States, but there's still countries in Europe where it's gotten higher. And one of the things that freaks me out is when I go to Europe nowadays and you're walking around a lot of Scandinavians and I feel petite.

Oh, in Holland. Yeah. The average man in Holland is over six foot tall. Yeah, when I was growing up, I was definitively tall. And now I haven't shrunk, I don't think. I might be getting there. And now it's just like everyone seems 6'4", 6'5". So the conventional thinking is they get more calories they get

more protein you need the protein for the growth and the calories and that's kind of the explanation but it could be that they get more sugar and that that drives vertical growth as well as horizontal growth and well that makes sense because don't bodybuilders like on their extreme situations don't they take insulin in order to gain muscle yeah yeah because it'll it'll drive muscle development as well i mean again it works as a growth hormone an igf is a growth hormone so could there be an argument for bodybuilders to consume a diet that's high in sugar in order to to spike up that insulin to you know now you're getting out of my area of expertise again. But it's funny, when Arnold came over in the 60s, one of the advantages he had,

other than, you know, massive amounts of steroid consumption, was that it is... I forget who his mentor was back then, but they put him on a very low-carb diet because that definitely cuts the fat. So, again, this is far out of my area of expertise. You can get a bodybuilder, and they'll tell you how they, you know, oscillate between high carbs for development, high fat,

to cut the fat and get down to. I had this debate. Do you know Alan Aragon? Yeah, I know who that guy is. So, Alan, we had a debate. Yeah, he's very skeptical. Oh, it's a kind way to put it. And I think it's a bit of a, I don who that guy is. So Alan, we had a debate. Yeah, he's very skeptical. Oh, it's a kind way to put it. And I think it's a bit of a, I don't get it.

I always wanted to ask him, like, Alan, you know that this isn't, you know, I'm arguing that. Well, define his position because he doesn't think there's any issue with sugar. His position is all about calories. It's just all about calories. And you get people to exercise enough, you'll turn an obese person lean. And, you know, I mean, the implication. Well, that can happen, but who the fuck is going to do it the way you would have to do it? You would essentially have to starve your body.

Well, but this is the point. It's like I could— It can be done that way. I know, but it doesn't say anything about why they got fat to begin with. Right, and it doesn't say anything about the damaging effects of sugar. Yeah, and I could inhibit your kid's growth by starving them. Right. You know, and they're going to be stunted.

But that doesn't mean they're growing because they get to eat as much as they want. They're growing because their brains are secreting growth hormones, stimulating IGF, and that makes them hungry. So what is he denying about the... I don't know. So what is he denying about the... I don't know. We were in a debate in England that it was about... I don't quite understand what he was denying.

That was the interesting thing. He basically was denying that it was about that obesity was a hormonal metabolic disorder. He had to deny that a journalist knows something that he doesn't. And that the advice he's been giving and what he's been voicing over the years is right. What is his medical background? He's got no medical background. He's a physical trainer.

Maybe he's an exercise physiologist. He's no more a doctor or nutritionist than I am. The point is I was looking for ways to debate him, so I found a clip on the internet, one of his lectures, where he was talking about how there was one particular athlete he was training, a bodybuilder. He had to get maximum cut for the competition, so he cut his carbs down. And if he cut the carbs preferentially, you do that because you're going to reduce insulin and you're going to mobilize maximum amount of fat. And you're going to get the most possible fat out of the fat tissue by doing it. And it clearly meant he believes what I believe. But some people just, you know, you've got to establish that.

How did he respond to that? He laughed. Everybody laughed. He got kind of embarrassed. But it was an interesting debate. It was a fitness expo in, I forget what, red brick town in England. The reason why I keep bringing him up is because I've been contacted by fans of his. I've been in communication with him at one point in time. And I didn't realize how strongly against this proposition he is or this concept he is.

Well, you should get him to do the show. I mean, he's a very chatty, talkative guy. And he'll explain it to you. And then you could argue and we could argue. But what does he say about the impact of sugar? Like, does he deny all these things that you're talking about in terms of diabetes? We did not say this in the debate, and I would hate to get Alan's position wrong, but if he's implying that obesity is an energy balance problem, it's calories in, calories out, that seemed to be the argument he was defending vociferously when we debated.

That in turn means that the only way that foods can influence your body weight is through their caloric content. And that means sugar is, you know, an empty calorie, the worst you could say about it. But that's clearly not true. If sugar actually does affect your hormonal state, and that affects the way your body processes fat and insulin. If he were to believe that, then he would have been conceding that I won the debate, so I'm going to say, which he clearly doesn't think I did. And frankly, I didn't because the crowd was 100% with him when we started and it was like 95% with him when we left. Well, that's still pretty good.

That's what I would argue. And I learned my lesson that you can't win a debate when you're going in and everyone sides with your... Now, why did they all side with him? Because they love sugar? No, what was on them, we remember, wasn't about sugar. It was about the cause of obesity. We were actually debating different things. It was a weird situation think I may have blocked it out of my head, but we were debating. You know, again, my argument, obesity, what I thought we were supposed to be debating was whether or not obesity is caused by consuming too many calories or the macronutrient contents influencing the sort of hormonal metabolic regulation of fat accumulation.

contents, influent this sort of hormonal metabolic regulation of fat accumulation. What we ended up debating was whether or not the people in the audience would rather be trained by Alan Aragon, the physical trainer, exercise physiologist, or Gary Taubes, the journalist. Well, that's kind of ridiculous. It is kind of ridiculous, and it was a bizarre experience, and it was an interesting trip, and you learned your lesson. I've had those conversations with people before, and the problem with those conversations is you're taking a very simplistic approach to a very complex scenario. If you did work out more and if you did do all these different things, you're going to affect your body and your hormone levels. did do all these different things you're gonna affect your body and your hormone levels if you start doing deep squats with heavy weights you start doing

deadlifts you start you know putting a weight vest on and hiking up hills you're gonna massively affect the way your body produces hormones yeah your body's gonna ramp up it's gonna deal with these new demands gonna change the way you partition fuels you know things are gonna happen see it's not as simple as a lot of people like to point it out. And the people, they seem to want to do it as a math problem. You know, calories in, calories out. I just had, I was in Altadena on Sunday talking at a skeptic society meeting.

Why don't they all go to Altadena? Is it Michael Shermer? Michael Shermer. Everybody's in fucking Altadena. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it was during the torrential rainstorms. It was touch and go getting there because the roads were flooded. But there's one guy sitting in the audience in the front row who's a calorie restrictor.

You know, one of these guys who eats like, he lives on 1,800 calories a day because he thinks he's going to live longer. Ask him if he wants to spar. Yeah. I'll get tired in about 20 seconds. Yeah. There's not a lot of, well, the other thing with those guys is not a lot of muscle tone, right? Because they don't have enough calories.

They're dead men walking. I'm going to live forever as a skeleton. Yeah. This is, I did give a talk to the calorie restriction society i'm digressing again this is in novato north of san francisco and i got one of the guys in the email afterwards said and i was explaining that i thought all the benefits of calorie restriction come from carbohydrate restriction because there's a lot of evidence suggesting that what makes it if it is beneficial it's because these these guys minimize insulin and IGF secretion.

You can minimize insulin and IGF by just not eating the carbs. Then you get to fuel the rest of your body, so you get the calories you need. You get the protein you need. You get the fat you need. You just don't eat the thing that stimulates insulin and IGF. After the lecture, I got an email from a guy in the audience who was part of this society who said, you know, I'm going to experiment. I should get back with him to see what happens. It was like four years ago.

He said, you look so much healthier than all of us. And your argument was compelling. And I'm going to experiment to see if maybe there's something to what you say. to shift over from eating 1,800 calories of 50% carbs to 1,800 or maybe 2,500 or who knows how many of protein and fat. Well, I had Dr. Rhonda Patrick on the other day, and she was discussing some pretty compelling evidence about the amount of time that you eat during a day and intermittent fasting and the importance of only eating within a 10-hour period from the morning you wake up to the time you stop

eating no more than 10 hours. And then the rest of your day, the remaining 14 hours, no food. Well, and it's interesting because even, um, but she was talking about the massive benefits of that in terms of gaining and lean muscle mass just from doing that, losing body fat just from doing that. Yeah. You know, I'm, I'm skeptical of everything. I try to be as skeptical of my ideas as others, although people say I fail. But I haven't read those studies closely. Well, I'll get them to you. I'll get them to you after we get out of here. I'll send them to you and send you the actual podcast itself. I think you'll find it pretty fascinating. Yeah. And, you know, the issue is I don't doubt it works.

I know people who had trouble losing significant weight on low-carb diets and then switched to intermittent fasting and broke through their plateaus. There are some people I know in the field who I like who think that you might get excessive stress hormone stimulation from the fasting so that the long-term effects may not be as beneficial as a ketogenic diet where you're not- Is there evidence of that? They think so.

Increased stress hormones mean cortisol? That would be, yeah, my understanding. I haven't paid a lot of attention to- But is this based on people with a carbohydrate-rich diet or people who are on a fat-rich diet? Let's Google Steve Finney, P-H-I-N-N-E-Y, and fasting. I love this, by the way. It's like having— Pretty awesome, right? I don't need a memory.

All those concussions, you know, it doesn't matter anymore. How many concussions did you have, buddy? I think between football and— As soon as you say between football, I start thinking about— Between football and boxing, I'd say five or six. That's it? You got off light. I did get off light.

Steve and Jay Finney on making a low-carb diet sustainable. But we want to do Steve Finney intermittent, try intermittent fasting. Let's see if we pull up low-carb preservatives. Well, that's obvious. Cutting-edge fat-burning... This doesn't make for very good podcasting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, we're done.

There you go. The truth between... Hold on. The truth between the world's most cutting-edge fat-burning performance meal plan, the keto diet. Okay. Well, folks can get into that we you

don't have much time left because you're going to have to bail soon to catch your flight um so i don't want to i don't want to make you miss your flight but this is um you know another thing that people can look into once they're uh done so anyway the interesting thing even the intermittent fasting the interesting thing is there's two ways to think of it one is okay you're eating fewer calories and that's why it works, right? And the other is you're maximizing the amount of time during the day when insulin and IGF are low. Okay, but not necessarily when you're saying eating fewer calories because that's not necessarily what they're talking about. Exactly.

What they're talking about is taking time, allowing your body to process all those nutrients and not using the resources that could be developing muscle and building your body up. So that would account for the increase in lean muscle mass simply by following this intermittent fasting program. Although it's interesting. I don't know if you had this experience when you went on the ketogenic diet. Because you often read people say, well, you lose. I was looking at a study today that was done, a one-week study done in like 1967 where they lost more protein on the ketogenic diet than a calorie-restricted diet.

They were all calorie-restricted. But when I went on this diet, it was interesting. My waist size went down and my jacket size went up. And I'm probably, my upper body, I mean, my lower body doesn't work because of cartilage in the knees and all the other wonderful things football left me with. But I'm stronger now than I was when I was in college.

I was working out three hours a day. And how old are you now? 60. You look great. Thank you. You're welcome. You look good too, Joe. Thank you.

But anyway, so what's the point? The point is, you know, by changing the time of what you're eating and i i believe you could probably eat just many calories maybe you could eat more calories by doing it it's not a calorie thing it's how does your body respond to having more time and low insulin levels basically and low more time at low igF levels. And I could imagine even in the low-carb diets when people were prescribing them 50 years ago, 60 years ago they used to prescribe a walk before breakfast, which is interesting because that's a time when your insulin levels are lowest. That's a time when you're really mobilizing the most fat from your fat tissue.

So in that sense, skipping breakfast, prolonging the amount of time before your first meal in the day would actually maximize this time when you're mobilizing fat. A lot of people prefer fasting cardio. They enjoy that, waking up in the morning and having hard cardio or some sort of a hard workout first thing in the morning. Well, and it's interesting because that's the point of the day when they're most likely to be burning fat rather than glucose. If they're not drinking a juice or a soda beforehand i could never do it i always wanted to be able to do cardio first you certainly could you just don't want to no i end up i'm just enervated the whole day it's like i'm dragging my ass although i cannot wake up afterwards it's just my body doesn't do it but it's even i got you know i got two kids. I got two boys, 11 and 8.

And I feed them breakfast in the morning and I cook them dinner maybe three times a week. My wife's kind of a vegetarian, so I got to cook the meat if I want them to eat animals. They have, their body clocks are entirely different. They have very different body types. My youngest is not hungry in the morning, and my oldest is. And my youngest at night, like if you put pasta in front of him, he would just keep eating it and eating it and eating it until you finally just say, no more, you're going to blow up.

My oldest in the evening doesn't care. He's not interested. He'll eat a little bit. He could skip dinner even. Like entirely different, not just body types, but timing of their hunger, which has got to be related to insulin secretion, other hormones, you know, biorhythms. So, everyone's different in that way. Yeah, biodiversity is a very important consideration when you're talking about any kind of diet, whether it's a vegan diet, a vegetarian diet, ketogenic diet.

Everybody's body responds differently to different things. But what I'm saying about getting back to the case against sugar is we got obese and diabetic because of the sugar and the processed grains. The people who became obese and diabetic did so because of the sugar and the processed grains. In that sense, their bodies all responded the same regardless of what their, you know, genotype was. And now when you want to

get them back from the edge, that's where individual variation plays a role. I mean, that's Guy McDougall who pushes the starch diet. He's got people on his website who swear that they lost 100 pounds eating only potatoes don't you think though that a lot of people when you start concentrating on losing weight and concentrating on being healthy and concentrating on your diet you make a concerted effort sort of across the board so if you just go i'm only going to eat sweet potatoes and you know and you I'm going to go on like just the very act of considering your diet and being conscientious has an effect. Well, it has an effect in many ways. One of them is you do consistent things that you, there are consistent things that you don't do.

So like McDougal puts people on a starch diet and, and Atkins puts them on a ketogenic diet and Ornish puts them on a 10% fat, mostly vegetarian diet. And Esselstyn is, you know, a low-carb diet. And none of them, all of them say don't eat sugar, don't drink sodas, don't drink fruit juices, don't eat white bread. And they all do it for the same reason, because it's going to stimulate insulin. You know, so, and then when they benefit, you don't know if they benefited because they didn't eat meat or they didn't eat you know gluten or they didn't eat sugar and white bread and you know so the question then would become and even if the ones who benefited like on the mcdougall diet

the thing that makes me suspicious is the people always say i tried Atkins and it didn't work for me. And is that, did they really try it? Did they try it, lost 60 pounds and then went back to eating carbs and gained it back and said the diet failed? Did they just find it too hard to live without their pastries? But once they, McDougal came along and put them on a potato diet, or did he just tell them to say that because he wants to point out that this works for people that low carb doesn't? You just never know. I mean, it's a crazy, crazy world. Yeah. It's very hard to tell when you're dealing with anecdotal evidence, right? It's very, very hard to tell when dealing with personal experiences about what someone says they did versus what they actually did. Yeah. Well, that's what nobody knows. And one of the great flaws, I mean, there's tons of,

we could talk about the flaws in nutrition research for, you know, another three hours. That'll be our next podcast. No, it's interesting because I'm doing this talk with you. I've never done a like two, three hour podcast before. And you're like still laser focused. And I could imagine, I think I might want to get in the ring with you. I could see it happening. That exact thing that we discussed earlier about the, you know, you're needing that like five minutes

of energy to overwhelm your opponent. And I could see it happening here. And I'm thinking, okay, if I didn't have a cold and I could breathe through my nose, I could take Joe, we could go for seven hours. I can wear him out. And if it gets bad, we'll take out the drugs and the tequila and we'll see, you know, although he's probably's probably got you know i gotta get back in shape there but anyway it's interesting so get back in drug shape yeah it's been a long time you know well i got a certain you know establishment veneer that i gotta present to the world i understand i'm responsible i gotta get people who wear jackets and ties and you know button down shirts from brooks brothers to take me seriously believe me as weird as it sounds a lot of those fuckers are listening right now that's good and have been for a while this is a really important subject and let's just wrap this up here because i'm i

just want to thank you very much for writing that book and and taking the time to put in that research uh against you know probably a lot of people's advice. Just my wife. Well, it worked out. And my in-laws. Overall, I mean, you've made a substantial impact. And like I said, at least half a dozen people that I deeply respect have recommended your work. And I'm really glad we got a chance to sit down and talk about this. And I think a lot of people are going to benefit from this podcast. And this is one thing that's just sort of piling on top of a massive

amount of data that's now available to people that lets them make better better food choices well that's the one thing i was going to say is what's really been the the trump can't use that he fucked up trump card yes he's out what's really pushed you know what allows us to win okay which we couldn't win 50 years ago as the internet yes and that and people can try these diets remember i said you know we're dealt four aces the fact is you go on these diets it helps people and it helps them a lot not everyone and we got distracted and some people i don't know maybe some people just have bad reactions to cutting out all the carbs. But for most people, some significant proportion, they give up the carbs, they're healthier. And then they can talk about it on the internet and they could share with people and they don't have

to live in the same town or go to the same school. And so the word gets out and then other people want to be helped. And even with physicians, it's like I got these doctors saying, you made medicine fun for me again because I can help people and that too gets spread around the internet and they you know you create clusters and Facebook groups and it just you create momentum and you break out of the gatekeepers it's no longer and that you know it's no longer just did I or did I not get into the medical journal was I influenced enough to write this review? It's like, wait a minute, you said this, but look at what happened to my neighbor.

I want that to happen to me. And so you get this kind of revolution. It's slow, and it takes time, and there's a lot of resistance. And the vegetarian community, they resist it because the implication is that a lot of people will be healthier if they eat animals. It's mycopollins, you know, eat food, not too much, mostly plants.

And for the obese diabetic individuals in the country, which represent virtually 50% of Americans, maybe mostly animals. Well, I'm hoping though that with the, I mean, there's been some really significant breakthroughs over the last few years with factory-produced meat that does not involve any animals dying. I mean, they can take initial meat from a dead animal and reproduce it in factories. And I think we're probably just a couple of years away from mass production or something like that. You know, it's interesting. One of the things that worries me is they're going to make low-fat meat, right?

I don't know. I mean, maybe with what's going on right now and the understanding that people have today versus what they had only five or six years ago. I mean, I think there's probably going to be a market for high-fat meat. Yeah, I hope so. Well, I'm going to wait for you to try it and tell me. Come on, nutshits.

I have the benefit of being a hunter, so I kill my own meat, and it's as healthy as it gets. But I sympathize i i completely understand where the vegetarians and the vegans yeah i get it i i and i admire them more than vegetarians because i really feel like anybody could eat like naturally sourced eggs like i have chickens and they don't they don't get harmed by me eating their eggs at all yeah they live a natural life and everything's fine. There's no cruelty involved whatsoever. And those eggs are extremely healthy and beneficial.

Well, that's some of the best emails I ever got were from vegetarians who said, you know, I read your stuff. I didn't want to like it. I thought I'm intellectually open. I'll read a couple of chapters, decide it's full of shit, and then I'll be able to close it. Much to my dismay, I found your argument compelling. And some of them start eating meat again.

Some of them just add eggs back to their diet. Eggs are great. And get rid of the sugar and the crap and find that they're healthier and happier and they feel better. And that to me, when you see somebody say, you know, hey, I get it. I do see your point. I was, I get it. I do see your point. I was, I can change. Well, I feel like for people, eggs are the best compromise because you can easily digest them. It's very few issues whatsoever with that. And again, if you have a yard, you could have your own chickens.

Well, that's not only that. You can make, it's there like quick. I mean, you could scramble four eggs in the morning and almost as much time as it takes to pour cereal into a bowl and get the milk out of the refrigerator. So it's not like I don't have time to eat. They don't take a lot of work to be good. Some people, I mean, my oldest son, I can't get him to eat an egg unless it's got matzo mixed in and maple syrup poured on it. But I don't know what it is. Again, it's one of these things that's like it's poison to him. But listen, Gary, thanks so much for being here. Really, really appreciate it. And I urge anyone listening to this to check out gary's book the case against sugar and anything else uh no that's it thank you joe thank you really

appreciate it it's cool all right folks we'll be back tomorrow with shane smith from vice holla Fala!