Nina Teicholz

00:03three-two-one titles say right that's it what's up do you know how are you hey okay here thanks for doing this appreciate it it's good to be here so a big fat surprise what's the big fat surprise that better meat and cheese do not cause heart disease that saturated fat doesn't cause heart disease that fat doesn't make you fat yeah low fat diet doesn't make you healthy that's my book yeah that's very controversial pull this sucker up real close to you right there yeah okay beautiful very controversial in this day and age it was even more controversial when the book came out which was in 2014 but you know we've seen a an almost complete sea change on this subject not at the expert level but you know there's a real groundswell in a change of thinking I think I think in part really triggered by my book which really laid out all the arguments for how do we come

01:01to believe that saturated fat is bad for health why do we believe animal fats are bad why do you believe why do we believe they cause heart disease and really tells that whole story of how we started down this path believing that fat and cholesterol cause heart disease make you sick caused cancer make you fat and it's a wild story it's just an incredible story the politics the personalities it really is a story more about politics than about science did you feel vindicated when the New York Times article came out where it showed that the sugar industry had bribed the scientists to lie about data and falsified data that showed that saturated fat was the cause of heart disease instead of sugar because that was fairly recently right that was after your book that was and you know that's a small part of the story I mean I have documents in my book there's there's

01:50maybe a hundred different you know documents that you can find where companies are trying to sway the interest they're trying to pay off scientists basically there's so much money going into nutrition science we really it's amazing how little people know about how much nutrition science is funded by the food industry and that was one small example Harvard scientists had received money from the sugar industry and what the this article contended is that that's what pushed them to blame fat and not sugar for heart disease I actually don't believe that that's what happened in that particular case for those Harvard scientists in 1950s because I've studied them extensively you know for my book I read like well it took me nine years and I read like 10,000 scientific papers so I knew the work of those Harvard scientists I knew everything they had written in one of them is named Mark

02:42hagstead who is very influential and the reality for him and his his colleagues was that they truly 100% believe that fat and saturated fat and cholesterol cause heart disease and they had believed it they had believed it for more than a decade before the sugar industry came along with that proposition for them they really believed those early scientists were true they were not corrupt they were they were actually not corrupted by industry they were true believers and one of the things that my book explores is this phenomenon that happens happened then happened today where scientists they come to fall in love with their beliefs you know they fall in love with their own hypothesis so humans it's a problem with humans right so this is what we all do we all we fall in love with an idea we believe something and we only see things that confirm it and we kind of ignore everything that

03:37contradicts it well in science what scientists are supposed to do what they're taught to do is to not behave in a human way they're taught to rigorously distrust their beliefs they're taught to try to find every way to shoot down their own hypothesis that's the job of being a scientist that's why they seem so cold and dispassionate our show to us mere humans but in the case of nutrition science that didn't happen they fell in love with their idea it was like a favored child they all they did was try to find evidence to support it they cherry-pick the evidence again and again and they completely ignored or actively even suppress any information that contradicted their ideas so this scientist mark heck stood at Harvard in his favorite colleague Ancel keys was from the University of Minnesota they would actually bully and kind of stomp on scientists who came up with

04:35contradictory information they would actually suppress stuff they would they would and this is still going on today which is what makes it such an interesting story I mean today it's the same phenomenon in nutrition sign this is the way nutrition science started and it's it's the legacy that continues today which is that I any papers to the contrary you know hard to get them published hard to get them into disgust hard to get them presented at expert meetings and it's it's been driven by people who are really married to their hypothesis about what a healthy diet is so you feel like what happened was the sugar industry came along and they found these people that already had beliefs that are lined up with what they were trying to sell right so maybe they weren't even so neck or so corrupt like maybe they've said oh well the scientists know more than us just pay

05:28them to get this research out you know you can't blame industries for trying to protect their products right every industry but I mean it's just what industry does and you know if there there was another story out recently about how sugar industry didn't pursue research they had done that seemed to show that sugar cause cancer well I mean if you're the sugar industry like what is your obligation to keep going I mean I'm not saying that you know there are no angels but we shouldn't expect corporations to be angels what what you do expect is for your scientists to behave in a principled way right right that's what we should expect yeah I mean when it gets to a certain I think if you look at cigarettes for instance in the tobacco industry like there's a large market for something we know kills people I mean you don't have to lie about it you can have a warning on the label and

06:22it still makes billions of dollars a year tell everybody hey this is definitely gonna give you cancer keep smoking it and they'll go okay and they'll buy it they'll keep buying it so it's it's not really that you need to lie about things you really don't I mean people are more than willing as long as it hits the right buttons and switches in their brain and their receptors they're more than willing to put their health in danger for some temporary mouths pleasure yeah and this kind of goes to the subject that is you know debated in the food world which is you know how much to the government be telling people what to eat right right so there are people who say you know they believe sugars like tobacco if you eat it you will proud if you eat a lot of sugar you are much more likely to get diabetes and heart disease I mean I think that's even if you had a lot of refined

07:10carbohydrates or maybe even if you eat just too many carbohydrates period you're more likely to get diabetes and heart disease and become obese so you know should but people like it there's also people that are on a plant-based diet like my friend Eddie who you just met was right before you who's a vegan now he's been a vegan I always say a couple years three years and he said he's way too many carbohydrates and he's admitting it and talking about it not not exactly knowing how to fix his cravings and his urges you know if you were on a completely plant-based diet it's really hard to just go all fats and and and get the proper amount of unsaturated and saturated fats in your diet yeah I mean so people aren't vegan diets for many reasons and and that's their own personal choice the reality is that the you know there's a large body of rigorous research by that I mean

08:05randomized controlled clinical trials on thousands of people showing that a diet higher in fat and lower in carbohydrates leads to better outcomes in terms of diabetes obesity heart disease those are the biggies right and so lowering carbohydrates is the way to reverse out of those diseases if you're on a vegan diet it's just very hard to do that in a low-carb way you know what do you eat is your your source of protein in fat there's just there's there are some plant fats you can have a lot of coconut oil and picado got a lot of avocado but you know it just becomes hard like what do you what do you put on your plate for dinner every night you know like if you eat meat you have beefs meat I mean that used to be just at the center of the the dinner plate but it's it's hard on a vegan diet other thing very hard to vegan diet is staying you need to be really careful about

08:55nutritional supplements and because you cannot get a get all the nutrients that you need naturally from the foods that you're eating and also some of those nutrients are not as bio digestible meaning your body doesn't absorb them as easily like iron from spinach is not as absorbable as iron from meat so so it's hard it's hard to stay healthy on that diet yeah that is the big misconception right when you look at the total amount of iron or protein or anything in a plant-based diet there's the bioavailability of that people it's less and people don't understand that so when people do like hold up charts that show hey you can get a cup of broccoli and that has the same amount of protein as a cheeseburger ooh no it doesn't it really doesn't it might on paper but in terms of how your body absorbs it it's not equal no all right you know another example is carrots are supposed to give

09:47you vitamin A right but carrots don't get they give you a precursor to vitamin A called carotenoids can it convert into vitamin A not that efficiently most people can't convert that efficiently so they're not getting the kind of vitamin A they need and what is vitamin A come from and what food sources you know I don't know if top of my head yeah you see I think you get it pork vitamin A sorry I should know that but I but but you can get all the vitamins and minerals and nutrients that you need from animal foods and you'd have to we'd have to eat like an entire studio full of spinach to get them out of iron that you need and you can get that amount of iron in honest you know in a few ounces of meat so no no the other thing is that in order to get protein like if you can get your you can get your protein from beans say you have to have to get a complete protein that's you have beans

10:43and rice but in order to get you know let's say 100 grams of protein you need to eat like a thousand calories of beans and rice versus say a couple hundred calories of meat okay so don't hold me to those numbers but I'm just telling you eat a lot more calories right to get the same amount of protein so for a day's worth of protein you're saying obviously wouldn't want a hundred grams of protein in a single serving but days worth of protein right you're probably gonna eat an exorbitant amount of beans rice right yeah or broccoli or whatever the hell else you're trying to eat what did like iron is a big one right I know I have a few friends that are vegan or have been vegan and that was an issue with them was iron yeah I mean I was a vegetarian for over 25 years well yeah and i was always anemic and i took iron pills and that didn't work and you just you know heme iron which is the

11:32favorite kind for absorption is only available in from animal sources and principally red meat white meat is relatively poor in nutrients poor and iron too so you know the most nutrient-dense food on the planet is lower which nobody is used to eating anymore and we all think it's disgusting but oh yeah I like it too but you know no grandparents generation they had you know they had chopped liver or whatever and onions onions and that's very nutrient dense but we stopped eating it because it's high in cholesterol so so these are the consequences of having what we did was as when my book is about but it's you know we started starting in 1961 we basically the American Heart Association was the first organization to say dony saturated fat and cholesterol to avoid a heart attack and that was based on at the time really weak evidence a you know something called an

12:28observational study control an association but not causation and you know there were just enormous unintended consequences at the time so actually this Harvard scientist Mark heads head said this was you know he was one of the people behind this and he said we we imagine the benefits will be great and we cannot imagine what the you know what the if there it there could that there could be any negative consequences something like that and this is kind of the fundamental tragedy of any kind of policy especially when it becomes enshrined by an organization like powerful organization like the American Heart Association or say our government they do what they think they make kind of make a best guess and they can't imagine what would the unintended consequences be what would be the unintended consequence of say limiting foods with cholesterol in them well not eating liver not getting iron

13:23not getting all it not eliminating one of the most nutrient-dense foods on the planet from our diets and so many other things egg you know egg white omelets how many egg white omelets have you eaten yeah but they're real common as soon as I found out that there's a lot of nutrition in the yolk and that's like one of the healthiest parts of the egg I was so confused I was like what is yeah what's the egg white thing then why is everybody going with egg whites because the in the yet so the yolk is where the cholesterol is so that's why we stopped eating egg yolks and that's the yolk is also where all the nutrients are like including things like lutein and which is for eye health and brain development I mean there's all kinds of thing and things that are at choline also for brain development that you can really not easy to find you can't find them easily in plant foods or

14:16at all and they're crucial to human development so you know we eliminated these foods you know it's ironic like the cholesterol is cholesterol is essential to every cell in your body we make cholesterol we eat cholesterol it's part of what you know isn't it's a building block for all of our hormones and you know coupled with cholesterol or all the nutrients needed to sustain life so we eliminated all those foods I know this that you're saying what you're saying but most people when they hear that I don't like no cholesterol is bad it gives you a heart attack my dad is on cholesterol drugs he's on the statins to keep cholesterol out of his body yeah well you know well we've it's been like 60 years of all of us you know all of us believing that fat and cholesterol are bad for us right believing cholesterol is bad you know when I started this my whole this journey for me it was you

15:16know as I said vegetarian been a vegetarian for decades I hadn't eaten a piece of red meat hadn't eaten butter for decades like barely and cheese ideological reasons or health reasons I I wanted to be thin like all girls I was like it started when I was like a late teenager and and of course I became fat like I'm much thinner now as a you know middle-aged woman effortlessly but I was I was all through my young adult years I was like 25 pounds overweight but I just carbs good cuz I ate a high carb diet you know as a vegetarian you're like okay don't eat they don't get you go to the the mess you know the dining hall in college I don't eat the meat don't eat the cheese don't eat this and have a salad and then you're starving so then you're like okay get the bag of mm-hmm and that's what people do you know they're starving you're starving on that diet what is satiating

16:16what is satiating foods are protein and fat I mean that's actually been shown in scientific experiments where they they put stacks of didn't one experiment they put it stacks of like pork chops in front of people and they just said eat you know don't stop beating don't and and and people just could not overeat on that food you you fill up on fat and protein and they discover that those macronutrients are uniquely satiating whereas carbohydrates you know overeating on cookies crackers trips pasta pasta a whole box of cereal I mean you know in my vegetarian days I could I could eat a box of cereal no problem I'll eat a big bowl of pasta on the days that I do cheat and even though I'm stuffed I'll still keep eating I just I see there's more left it's more left no one's gonna eat that I'm eating that I'll just put it in my bowl and just keep eating just your body craves it in

17:10some weird way well or alternatively like another physiological explanation is that your body keeps eating because it's it still hasn't gotten what it needs it hasn't gotten the the nutrients that it actually needs for to to build the cells to you know you're not giving it what it needs until you eat the right foods is it possible that both things are going on that your your your body hasn't gotten what its needs what it needs so there's that craving but then there's also this incredibly intoxicating carbohydrate thing going on where as you're eating it in your just blah your sugar levels are getting jacked and you just want to keep going so what you're talking about I think is a little bit more like the the glucose rollercoaster that happens and that is part of carb addiction and what that is is you eat carbs really any kind of carbs because so I'm talking about bread

18:04pasta you know even healthy whole grain bread putting little air quotes around healthy and and and M&Ms and Snickers bars whatever's whatever you want any of those foods when you eat them they're converted in your blood into glucose cake glucose is a simple sugar in your it goes around in your blood and and and it's like a quick fuel and your body uses that up and then when it's gone you want another hit and so that's the site that's the roller coaster so like you have cereal and OJ for breakfast Oh J is another just simple sugar and then by mid-morning you're starving right whereas I think maybe your listeners I think you've talked about this on your program before but if you become what's called a fat burner which is somebody who your primary fuel is not glucose it's fat with the fat in your body that you store in your body and also the fat that you eat right so you think about

19:00like a hybrid car you can have two fuel sources as a human being you can either live on glucose or fat if you've got a healthy metabolism you can switch back and forth between them right so I'm I'm a I've trained my body to be a fat burner right so I can live off of fats like I can be the electric car but when I eat you know when I eat carbs then I can switch over to glucose but I am healthy enough to switch back but unhealthy people who are unhealthy and or we've just been living on carbs for a really long time mainly glucose they can only they can only get their fuel from glucose and if they don't have glucose they just bunk that's why like you have you know long-distance runners who are constantly sucking down those the what's called there's like glucose packs and things they they can't switch over to fat to burn their own fat even it is the amazing thing like even an obese person

19:53imagine I were like a 300-pound woman what are those waters that though all that fat on that is fuel that is like that is like the miracle of humans to be able to just that's like having granola bars strapped all over my body right I should be able to access that fuel that's my fuel source yeah why do we have fat instead that fuel stores becomes a burden it's becomes blocked and I can't access it because I don't know my body doesn't know how to burn my fat and that's what happens when you live too long living off of glucose as your only fuel source you cannot switch over and burn your own fat it's like living on top of a well and not having a bucket to get yourself a drink of water and then you you know and then you you you just you you die of thirst I mean that's a crazy way to look at that you granola bars dropped all over your body but I think that's a good

20:46analogy that's why you have fat that's like all all animals you know we're mammals have fat because you know what do you do when you're it's at night you don't you're not eating all night long you have to have fat on your body right you know that's your you need to live off of something and that's how humans and that's why you know humans became really good at at storing fat because it meant we could do other things we're not like you know chimpanzees who have to eat all day long right right or like these people who are fruitarians and and like proud of living off of fruit they have to eat all day long to have it like that's what they have to do all day but we we nutrient-dense food like we eat meat that humans evolved to eat meat so that's nutrient dense so we don't have to eat all day long so we have time in our hands we have time in our hands do podcasts build the Taj Mahal do other

21:38stuff because we don't have to eat all the time and we can live off of our fat if we are eating well well the idea that your that all that that burdens you so where you're you have this got or you have this fat all of your body and depresses you that literally the change the point of view in the perspective to look at that as fuel you literally have fuel hanging off your body you just have to figure out a way to get your body to access that and we literally eat it away did you ever see Rob wolf was talking to us about there was a study where they took a man who was severely obese and they had him fast nothing but water and some sort of vitamins for 300 plus days and he wound up losing not just all the fat but the crazy thing was his skin receded as well and he didn't have the loose skin that normally is associated with rapid weight loss so when you get someone

22:29who's incredibly obese and they shrink down to a normal sized person one of the things they have to deal with routinely as these giant flops of skin because your body's used to being so big but apparently at least in this one case this guy as he had gone through this enormous medically controlled fasting his skin shrank as well like his body ate the fat and in in recognizes that in his body was shrinking everything sort of shrank up in proportion that's amazing it's amazing and I wonder if that could be replicated or if he was just very uniquely had unique genetics or what the circumstances were you know me some people skin varies right that's why some people get stretch marks if they just gained a little bit of weight and other people don't yeah I don't know I mean I think that this is you know one of the theories behind intermittent I mean dramatic fasting

23:19like that is I just for anybody thinking about it is you know that's potentially dangerous so it has to be medically supervised but you know people there's intermittent fasting that people do where they fast for you know for like I do I never eat before noon so and and and people do it for a little bit longer periods of time it sort of induces this state what it does is it kick-starts this ability for your body to get into fat-burning mode and to stay in fat-burning mode and so you know what you want to do is you want to if you are have excess fat on your body you want to you want to live off of that fat so it'll disappear you want instead of taking in food as your fuel source you want to live off your fat until you you you you know until it's gone or the love of it is gone that you're happy so and that's what fat burners do and the way to do that is to keep carbs low because

24:16carbohydrate the moment you have glucose in your blood system your body prefers glucose it's a quick head of fuel right your body will always prefer glucose and once you have glucose circulating in your blood it's like it's like going up if it's like a being at a tellers window in a bank it's like everything shuts down like you cannot get to your fat cells for it's like we're closed now you can't get to your fat as long as you've got glucose that's what you're living off of so the long why does everybody do that because it prefers glucose glucose is your preferential fuel source just is I don't know it because it was rare you know you casually would come across honey or it was it's it was just it's a it's a quick efficient source of fuel so your body came to prefer to prefer it but once you so you want to stay away from glucose in order to access your fat

25:09that's just the reality and so fasting is partly doing that you can do it for a little while you can do it you know just if you just fast in the mornings your body is basically fasted all night long you fast through the morning and then you have you know you've your your fat burning all that time yeah most people are not aware of that you know it's this is a relatively new situation I practice it I do intermittent fasting I do a I have a 14-hour window at night where I don't eat and I think the more people do that the more they understand that like your body will burn off way more fat if you just live like that if you just force yourself to only inside of a 10 hour window yeah so the key to that is you can't be eating a lot you can't be on a high carb diet and then fast if you're used to eating a lot of carbs your body will still preferentially need

25:58those need that glucose and you'll still be on that roller coaster glucose cycle so you it's it's I don't know I think it's pretty hard to do fasting when you're on a high carb diet and you're right this is all pretty this is all new science so just to you know if you want a little bit of perspective on this really all this science started in the early 2000s and it started so so the long history is so 1961 American Heart Association tells all of America stop eating fat and cholesterol so you don't die of a heart attack right that was heart disease had risen from pretty much out of nowhere in the early 1900s become the leading leading killer in America President Eisenhower himself is out of the Oval Office for 10 days with a heart attack I mean it's just a huge public health emergency and this Ancel Keys this professor at university of minnesota he came up with this idea that he and Mark

26:57X did the one from Harvard said it was it was saturated fat and cholesterol that caused heart disease and so that's that's when that whole hypothesis was born and it became enshrined as policy the federal government gets on board in 1980 and that's the beginning of our dietary guidelines so now the whole country is not only avoiding the saturated fat and cholesterol but also at this point all of fat is suspect so we get Slyke just cut back on all fat and that was a different reason that's because fat is it's just denser it has more calories per gram and has about nine calories per gram versus protein and and fat which have I'm sorry yeah sorry protein and carbohydrate which have about four or five calories per gram so it was just thought prudent like one way to keep people thin is just to keep their calories down and we can do this just by reducing fat because fat is

27:49has more calorie dense so now we're all on the low-fat diet and we're avoiding saturated fat and cholesterol and the you know the government is enormous ly powerful and so as I think you know and so it's not just that all Americans are given this diet right all doctor everybody every every health professional on the front line every dietician every medical doctor every nutritionist is pushing this low-fat diet but all cattle across the country are bred to be leaner the whole food supply changes right foods all sorts of low-fat foods appear in the supermarkets everything goes low-fat and people dramatically change the way they eat I mean just to give you some numbers like we 34 percent less beef than we did in 1970 we about 25 percent less red meat overall we ate 79 percent less whole milk we you know we that I think about 19 percent less animal fats all together

28:47eggs are done I mean everything all animal foods came down and we dramatically increased grains we eat 30% more carbohydrates overall 40% more grains almost 90% more vegetable oils please of course if you're not eating saturated fats you're eating polyunsaturated vegetable oils so we had this huge change in the way Americans ate and 1980 is also so that's the beginning of the Dietary Guidelines for all Americans it's also the beginning of the obesity epidemic you see obesity rates of obesity kind of it's very slowly gradually going up until 1980 and then they start to just take a sharp turn upwards and they have you know barely barely stopped so in the early 2000s what happened well journalist named Gary Taubes wrote this front page New York Times magazine articles saying you know what if what if it's all been a big fat lie and basically kind of revives the

29:47idea of the Atkins diet and says you know that guns high fat low carb he'd been he had promoted his diet from the early 1970s on but he had really been vilified and everybody thought he was a quack and at that point there really was no science to support him I mean he would say but look I've you know I've healed all these people and look at all my medical files go through my drawers look at my office and everybody say you know it doesn't matter what weed there are no clinical trials there's no science behind your diet but Gary Taubes came out with this article and then he came out with a book in 2007 and a lot of people read his work I mean even though he was vilified and attacked and he but he was brave and a lot of scientists read his work and a lot of scientists who thought you know something is going wrong in America you know our obesity is up type 2 diabetes

30:40is up none of the explanations that we have are working the low-fat diets not working for it it was just rates continue to rise and so scientists typically not in the field of nutrition because in the field of nutrition it's considered heresy still to research the low carb diet still but scientists from different started to do control clinical trials on car reduction carbohydrate reduction the opposite of the low-fat diet the opposite of what the government was telling people to eat and so there started to develop this body of clinical trial research and they're now nearly a hundred randomized controlled clinical trials on this low-carb diet and they you know all kinds of different populations and they really consistently show that it not only helps people lose weight and that was always known even the days of Rob you know of Atkins right but people always thought oh yeah I'll

31:39get my waistline but you know I'll pay for it with a heart attack down the line and they'll just kill my heart because of the cholesterol but it turns out that the diet is also the best way to control your blood glucose for diabetes it's it helps people there's actually an experiment out now showing that it reverses diabetes I mean completely eliminates that supposedly incurable disease and that it improves most of the risk factors for heart disease so there's a lot of debate over you know which risk factors best predict your likelihood of getting a heart attack but you know for the ones that I think are the most reliable including your triglycerides your HDL / your triglyceride ratio which we don't have to get into that but for the for for the most reliably heart disease risk factors that best predict heart attacks the low-carb diet also best improves those

32:31risk factors so what was it that made this so taboo in the food industry or in food research so like if health researchers today wanted to research low carb diet and you're saying that it's taboo what's causing that with all this body of evidence that you discuss all these clinical trials is obviously not just Gary Taubes with so many people have talked about this Nnamdi Agostino has done a lot of research on it this it's it's very public a lot of people have talked about this so with all that data where's the resistance coming from well you know so if the low carb diet it works and is a healthier diet that means the government the government's diet the low-fat diet is making people sick and fat right so the entire establishment I'll see I'm not talking so not just the government but every university with all their professors who have been endorsing this diet and their entire careers all

33:33of the pharmaceutical companies that depend on lowering your cholesterol I mean there's a huge huge set of interests that are invested for any number of reasons for keeping this establishment diet for you know for not backing off this this diet that they have prescribed to the American people for 50 years you know it's just a huge set of interests it's it's all the companies that benefit from the diet you know vegetable oil companies all the companies that produce all the grains I mean 80 percent of things on supermarket shelves are basically made out of vegetable oils and grains of some formulation or another in salt and so you know all those companies all the universities and all their entire nutrition departments who've been publishing for 30 years about the benefits of this diet the federal government and all that met the medical professional associations who've been

34:29prescribing this diet to their patients and their you know their public's the American Heart Association I mean it's just we're in a situation where we just made a gigantic mistake wasn't there a recent very very controversial and not just controversial but very flawed piece by the American Heart Association where they were talking about the dangers of coconut oils and saturated fats and and all those researchers that have been studying this stuff over the last decade or like what are you talking about like where is this coming from well yeah I mean right now in the nutrition world you have people like me who are challenging the status quo and you have this sort of the conventional with defenders of the conventional wisdom you know doubling down to defend their positions was the position in America the American remember the American Heart Association launched this whole thing in

35:271961 right there any original authors so just last year they came out with the presidential advisory unsaturated fats where they said please ignore all those confusing you know Internet crazies I mean basically referring to people like me and Gary Taubes you know about saturated fats we just want to set the record straight on saturated fats and you know here's our latest affirmation of our our belief that saturated fats cause heart disease so I want to get too much into the weeds on Dahl but you know they had the way that the American Heart Association all these years has sustained their position that saturated fats cause heart disease is they have relied purely on this weak kind of evidence called epidemiology right and and the government knew that that was not strong enough evidence and explain what that means yeah okay so an epidemiology are these big studies where

36:29they observe people they they observe like tens of thousands of people for a really long period of time and they they ask them they just give these people a food frequency questionnaire and they ask you okay how many pairs did you eat over the last six months and how many prunes did you eat and how much of this did you eat and how much of that and you're supposed to write this all down like as if any of us can remember what we ate yesterday and you're supposed to make accurate assessments about what you've eaten on like they asked two hundred and fifty the most famous one is out of Harvard asked two hundred fifty questions about what you've eaten over the past six months now when they try to go and verify to see if those food frequency questionnaire czar accurate they they they come up they basically has very poor accuracy by their own measures but still they use that data

37:14and then they tie they follow these people over ten twenty thirty years and they figure out who has a heart attack who dies who gets cancer and then they try to make these correlations oh you know the people who died tended to eat more meat so they'll say it's meat that caused you know but they can really only say is there's a correlation there but it's not causation you can never establish causation which is to say that meat caused that death problem is also that they're eating a lot of things with that meat right so you're finding car behind well yeah I mean like who eats red meat other than and paleo people now I mean who's been eating red meat for the last 50 years the people who ignore everything their doctor tells them right so not only they're eating more red meat but they're eating a lot of other junk they're probably you know they're probably they and this has actually been

38:02shown they don't exercise as much they they tend to not eat as well they don't visit their doctors they don't take their pills I mean they're not what we would call compliers right they're people who just do not listen to the advice they're given and any number of those things may have caused the heart attack so we don't know if it's the meat we don't know if it's the non-complying we don't know if it's the lack of exercise we do know it's the fact that they you know they drink too much beer or whatever we just don't know so those kinds of studies these epidemiological studies are really just they they only establish associations and the what they were designed to suggest hypotheses that could then actually be tested and a kind of science called a clinical trial where you actually you you know you divide a group up into two parts and you get like a drug trial you give half people the

38:48drug and half people of placebo and only that kind of experiment which is called a controlled experiment can you actually establish cause and effect so the way you want if you really want to know who meat causes cancer you got to do a clinical trial give half people make them eat just red meat all day long and the other half can be on the vegan diet and see see who gets cancer see which group gets cancer then you're testing you're doing actual tests so the government just backed this idea of Sat you know unsaturated fat um and then I'll get back to that presidential advisory the government actually did do a whole bunch of really big expensive randomized controlled clinical trials on saturated fat and cholesterol they did this on tens of thousands of people and they they tested to see if giving the people who ate saturated fat and cholesterol more of that would die faster or get a heart

39:43attack faster and none of those clinical trials could actually show that the people who ate more saturated fat and cholesterol died at any higher rates of heart disease what's that music your phone ringing your phone going off with music yeah I'm sorry I was trying to figure out what I thought maybe the Sonos was kicking off in the background that was your phone it's okay it was just slightly distracting so keep going please join me to Reece say that okay sure so the government actually did a bunch of randomized controlled clinical trials on tens of thousands of people testing to see if saturated fat and cholesterol caused heart disease so it actually took groups of people and they did this in mental hospitals where they totally controlled the people eight and half the people they gave you no meat butter cheese regular high saturated fat and cholesterol diet a half the people

40:37they you know gave them soy filled cheese and margarine instead of butter and you know in soy filled meat and in those randomized those rigorous experiments on tens of thousands of people they could not show that the people eating the meat and butter and cheese died faster of from heart disease died died at higher rates from heart disease in fact they showed in one of the most famous experiments called the Minnesota coronary Service survey on on 9,000 men and women over four and a half years they found the more the men lowered their cholesterol the more likely they were to die of a heart attack so what happened to all those experiments they were not that particular experiment wasn't published for 16 years other experiments I found sat in NIH National Institute of Health basement never published ignored not included in in in literature reviews of that included just ignored or suppressed

41:37it's like out of a crime novel it's crazy it's and so what was the American Heart Association doing ignoring all those clinical trials so the American Heart Association is basically just almost protecting their incorrect statements of the past that's what they're doing so right and so this latest presidential advisory was their attempt because my book listed all the clinical trials and Gary's book did earlier - but people have now been talking about them a lot more and saying like how can you ignore that that we did all that we spent the government spent a billion dollars more than a billion dollars testing this hypothesis and could not could not show it to be true and why did you ignore these experiments for all these years so so the America so this presidential advisory was an effort to reckon with those long ignored clinical trials that had been funded by

42:36the government and they did it in a way that I think was just totally disingenuous and I wrote a response to it where I kind of rebutted it in in Medscape and I also heard a piece in the LA Times about it and you know we're at this this point where the these these these esteemed public health institutions are defending their long-standing yet erroneous positions about a healthy diet and then there's like people like me on the outside saying you know it's not just me you know there's now a whole chorus of scientists around the world who are saying the same thing you know saying these recommendations are based on flawed evidence our guidelines are not evidence-based we need to know our national guidelines are not based on good evidence so there's this growing chorus around the world and and you know I'm one of the voices I'm probably one of the more prominent voices now but you

43:33know we we just we just have national guidance that's just not based on good evidence there's that and then there's a lot of people that get really confused by ideologically based documentaries and things that are trying to push people like what the health and things on those lines they're trying to make some really unsubstantiated correlations between meat consumption and diabetes and a bunch of other like really weird ones that I've never heard before that I hear repeated by people like wait where the did you hear that and they'll tell me without doubt this one documentary what a health yeah yeah I wrote a rebuttal to that too which I'm happy to post if you want on there but and so ok so that's a perfect example like what was one of them was you know eating a eating an egg or two a day is like smoking 5 cigarettes like crazy stuff right so just all of that is based on that really weak

44:27epidemiological evidence none of it has been either it's not been tested in clinical trials or the clinical trials do not support those statements I went through every single scientific claim in that movie I did it I was in Greece on a holiday and everybody's like why aren't you at the beach I'm like because I have to go through every single scientific claim of what the health and show that it's based on this really weak unsubstantiated evidence and but you know these I think that one of the reasons that that they made that film was that you know we live we live in very confusing times for science right you you make a film you pull out some of these heart heartstrings you know it's very that's film is like it's very scary you feel like oh my god there's poison in the milk and now there's poison in my pregnant belly and it's gonna be in my child I mean it's really effective as a

45:24piece of that's a movie but isn't it not just irresponsible but dangerous well I think so I mean but I think that what you have is people pushing this diet for you know ideological reasons as you said you know they're they're the people behind that film are you know two very very well-known and animal welfare activists who just don't want animals killed and you know those are their motivations and there are other people who are have they say that they have practices or kind of empires like Dean Ornish has a whole empire based on his plant-based diet right there's just there's whole business commercial empires that are based on this diet so there's a whole combination of reasons now there's a part of the you know in the environmental movement really believes that cows cause global warming so there's like this whole confluence of interest but if you just look at the

46:20health claims there are no randomized controlled clinical trials there's no rigorous evidence to show that that diet is safe or or you know or can fight disease and they've actually you know a few of these and I doctors have actually done clinical trials and there was where they put people on a vegan diet okay so and they were overseen by the vegan diet doctor himself says John McDougall did one of these he's he's here in California so I mean the most biased possible person overseeing this experiment right he wants his diet to look good but even then he could they those those studies could not show that that the vegans were healthier at the end of a year of eating that diet so maybe it's a healthy diet but it cannot be shown to be true and so it's fine to eat it for whatever reason that you want to but but health there's no evidence to show that that diet will be a good

47:19option for health yeah that is a very hard pill for a lot of people to swallow that for good reasons don't want animals to suffer right so they want to live a life where they have a small footprint as possible and don't harm things one of the things that disturbs people to no end is when I described the process of collecting grain and a combine and how vultures will circle over fields right after the combine rolls over because those indiscriminate gigantic machines that might be a football field wide or just chewing up everything in front of them including ground nesting birds and squirrels and rodents and occasionally deer fawns and anything else that gets caught up in the middle of it yeah I mean the reality is there is no life for any creature without the death of another creature I mean there's there's life involves death of some kind or another I mean you know mono cropping

48:16agriculture is devastating to the - to all kinds of life it's also incredibly unnatural so natural to see thousands of acres that are just soybeans okay that is does very very weird it's not doesn't exist anywhere in the world other than places where people have forced that into the environment yeah and I think that there's also you know a deep discomfort with the fact that you know for many people any sentient person being human has seen that we were we evolved eating meat right were were were not herbivores and so and we can't really survive that way in fact in the early experiments that they did on omnivore animals they did that on all kinds of omnivore animals in the 1920s and 30s and they tried to see if they could get an omnivore animal to survive purely on plants grain seeds and they they found it incredibly difficult to keep those you know whether a rats or

49:21pigs alive and even when they could keep them alive they live shorter lives and their offspring live shorter lives so you know we we have I think you know we're epical beings and so we have a discomfort with killing other animals as well we should but you know that is why I think humans evolved all kinds of ways of dealing with with the need to to kill animals basically just to survive right the all the rituals the asking of forgiveness the and of course when it was your own animals we all raised our own people raised lived on farms and raised their own animals there were ways I you know that it was much more sort of a part of the holistic experience of being a farmer and living on the land and now we're also Devore we live in cities where thousands of miles away from from where animals are raised we don't really understand anything about it it seems inhumane and cruel well I

50:18think an ethical solution for this is probably going to be this sort of laboratory created meat that seems to be a flourishing industry right now they're trying to get off the ground with this stuff and it's very expensive at the moment but they foresee that in the next several years it'll be economically feasible for people to buy meat from an animal that never really existed as a living thing you know if they can do that and it per has all the same nutrients that you that you know real animals do that would be a miracle right you know it would be it's gonna be very interesting but then there's also the issue of what happens if we completely stop eating in chickens and pigs and what happens to all those animals who manages that who stops them from over breeding who who controls their population how do we do that we've put ourselves into a corner here we've put ourselves into a corner

51:16if we choose to never eat these animals again how do we sustain their populations and what financial what financial reward do people get for sustaining them if they're not going to profit from them whatsoever they're gonna have to spend an exorbitant amount of money or let them roam free which people if people don't realize that's happened in parts of the world bulls revert to a very strange form wild cows do in Australia they call them scrub bulls I mean you know they live in the scrubs and that these scrub bulls are incredibly aggressive enormous weird-looking cow things that they now hunt and they have a problem with them in certain parts of Australia because they'll break into these confined areas where they have domestic cattle and screw up the genes of these cattle with these wild cattle strains these Bulls are incredibly aggressive and they're

52:14just roaming loose and you know is that what we're gonna do you can have wild cows everywhere like okay so what happens if the wild cow populations get out of control we're gonna bring in lions like what are we doing I didn't know you know and there's you know this is something I'm not an expert in but I know people you know there's a whole school of thought you really need large animals you know they're part of a they're part of an ecosystem to have a healthy ecosystem on earth you know you need animals as part of you know they're they return manure to the earth and that's part of the cycle of life and that you know can't plants can't survive without them and you need animals actually to as part of a healthy healthy environment so you know that's not something that I'm an expert in but but I think it is you know I I guess I would say like kind of really simplistic it's

53:02just simplistic thinking to say that we should get rid of all animals or you know get rid of all domesticated animals I mean I just think that's that's a it's a kind of simplistic vision that I think about dealing with simplistic visions right we're dealing with an incredibly complicated situation we find ourselves in the 21st century you didn't ask for it I didn't ask for it this is just the place we were born and raised so then we look around the landscape and we go okay what what do I have to do for this meat vehicle we don't have to do to keep this thing optimized and then what do I have to do for my mind that I don't feel terrible how about eating some horrifying factory-farmed food where I have to watch some PETA video on how this thing was created and realized I'm a monster you know and I think that is the motivation for a lot of people to go

53:50towards veganism and I think it's a good motivation I think their their their their motivations are noble and just if that's what they are but somewhere along the way you get roped into an ideology and you get boxed into these very rigid ways of thinking and out of those rigid ways of thinking you get a documentary like what the health yeah well you know I would also also think like we're you know in the same way that were divided nation politically we are a divided nation in terms of the way we think in urban city centers and you know where I've always lived my whole life but and out in the areas of the country you know the the red states where they they take they have cattle and they you know the dairy farms are and you know this is like we don't we actually have no idea for the most part what goes on there and you know we just see like the horrifying

54:46videos shot by some undercover person or I mean it's you know one of the things that was sort of surprising and and and like a really beautiful experience for me after my book came out was that I was invited to speak all over the country and you know I'm your classic flyover person I grew up in Berkeley California and then I mean then I lived various places in the world but then I settled in New York City so you know I'm like is urban progressive liberals they come and all of a sudden I'm giving speeches in Oklahoma and and you know Illinois I mean really it was this it was really a shock to me but it was truly eye-opening like I met all the people who you know all these people and the cowboy hats were like oh I would have you know I would have been one of the ones protesting throwing kale at these guys yeah and now I'm you know standing in front of 800 of them talking

55:44about saturated fat you know the findings in my book that's what I gave here's what I found and you know I can't say that I did any kind of in-depth reporting but but really the kinds of conversations that they're having about how to best take care of their animals how to treat them humanely how to you know how to how to raise fewer cattles and then produce more and I mean they're like they were really just not the demons that I thought they were and I don't pretend to really like know what goes on in animal agriculture across the country but I just want to say like it made me realize how in the same way that we have this polarized conversation going on now in the country politically the same you know this is one issue where that plays out we have such a we have such a lack of understanding and convert real conversation understanding between those who found the coasts and

56:38the people who are actually raising the food in the middle of the country so it's very convenient and I'd do it too a lot of people demonize people that live in places that they don't frequent and it's really fun to poke fun at the middle of the country and call them bunch of dummies and yeah the reason why Trump got elected and it's okay to do that you know I've noticed in like you my my colleagues my you know liberal journalists I mean there's like the way the kind of digs that they will take at rural white people mm-hmm is a you know we if that was a that was something about a person of color or a woman I mean sure that person would be kicked out of their job and it's just amazing the level of sort of the accepted kind of stereotyping that goes on in the media towards these people who you know again I that would have been me except that I just had this experience well people love to

57:33like pick a side and then use any means necessary to attack the other side I mean you see this in an unknown unrelated way with the way they make fun of Trump's hands like you're you're mocking this man's body like he didn't do anything to have smaller or bigger hands talk about his hair talk about his ego talk about the preposterous way he behaves but you're talking about his hands like that you're just saying the gloves are off and you could do anything you want and you could just be a cruel person and body shame this guy for something he has absolutely no control over there's plenty of things he's done wrong yeah you can make fun of but what about all the other people that are reading about his tiny little hands and they look down at their own tiny little hands and they have to feel like you know I mean that's a there's a weird thing that people do it's very and you

58:19see that to tie it all together you really see that in the vegan community there are a lot of vegans who are really kind people and then there's a lot of vegans I always say that there are only reason why there are vegans because Scientology didn't find him first these would have joined the Taliban if they took the wrong flight they just they found a group and they went with it and now they are all in and yet you see that with a lot of different ideologies but with vegans especially online they're so vicious and the attacks are so ruthless and they gang up they get together and it's like part of the fun of being on this gang is attacking people that disagree and I know you've been the victim of this yeah I mean I think that you know I have I am sympathetic in the sense that people are so worried about their health and there's so much conflicting information

59:19out there and they don't know how to make sense of it and then there's a kind of and we eat you know you have to eat two or three times a day so this thing is staring you in the face you cannot avoid it right and then you find something that you think is healthy and good and pure and right and you want it and it becomes an end to be a vegan requires a lot of work right you have to I know because when I was a vegetarian I was like constantly chopping and dicing and roasting and you know it's like a lot of work it's a lot harder I realized when I started eating me you could just put a piece of meat on the stove and that was it I've become a very lazy cook but in any case it's it is people become very passionate about their choices and especially a choice that involves consuming food which is so personal and intimate and then it's very hard to you know to to acknowledge that that may not

60:17have been a good choice for you or for your kids and so you know I think it's but it's yeah it's become a kind of idea I mean one of the things that I think has happened is that you know we live in post ideological times right I mean you joke about Scientology but we live in times where people are no longer members of we're not as many people are members are religious right in any kind of traditional way and food is one thing that people become religious about they just do it's it's like a type of thing it's a food movement and the food movement I mean if you follow like Michael Pollan and Mark Bittman and they encourage you to think about it as a movement like as something you can join be a part of being a community and it provides everything that you know really didn't religions did provide for people but for the vegans what they do have on their side

61:11is that they feel that their lifestyle is not promoting animal cruelty and that gives them the justification for attacking someone like you right because right well you know I try to just stick to I mean I try to really stick to the science on what makes people healthy so you know if if if you want to be a vegan but if that diet comes with you know for most people if it comes with diabetes and obesity or ill health or the or the failure to thrive of their children or whatever I mean that's their choice but you can't what you can't say is that that diet has any evidence to show that it provides good health well I think one thing that a vegan diet does is it gets people off of this standard American diet and the standard American diet of just a bunch of french fries and like french fries it can be vegan right but the you know the processed food and things with

62:17a ton of preservatives you start eating a bunch of vegetables I mean you're gonna probably feel a lot better we start eating actual real foods you know yeah anybody who gets off of refined carbohydrates and sugar it feels better so that is definitely a step in the right direction I mean we can all agree on that yeah that's processed foods just eating nonsense and garbage and candy and just that kind of stuff if you can be conscious and proactive about the healthy foods you choose and just try to get as much healthy nutrients as you can you're gonna feel better but the question is what's the best way to optimize your health yeah and just going back to those animal experiments that was telling me about in the 1920s and 30s you know what leads to long your long life and the long life and health of your children right that's the way we used to think about survival

63:08of health fitness of an animal was how long did you survive and how long do your offspring survive right and and that was the ultimate measure of that's always been the ultimate measure evolutionarily mhm so you know if if a vegan diet were to support that that would that would be the optimal diet but that that was just not what the science showed so you know I mean there's also a whole kind of evolutionary issue here which is you have to you have to bring in evolutionary science to understand you know how did humans evolve I mean we're in a kind of ironic position where there's so many enlightened progressive thinkers who are almost like you know just deny or like denying our evolutionary history right there almost like creationists I mean our evolutionary history if you read if you read the science is about evolving with me that's just our reality so we can't you

64:07know you can't really deny that and say you know we did not spring out of you know out of the side of Athena or you know whatever we we we evolved we evolved because we ate meat there many evolutionary theorists who believe we evolved only because we ate meat yeah the doubling of the human brain size that's one of the biggest mysteries in the fossil record over a period of two million years a human brain doubled and one of the primary ideas is at cooking meat ain't figuring out a way to hunt these animals made us stimulate our brains and there's a couple of other more outlandish theories one of them involves psilocybin mushrooms it's pretty interesting but it's called the stoned ape theory if you want to look it up but the the idea that we are herbivores and you hear this tossed around a lot and you literally see like vegan memes that show our teeth versus a

65:00primates teeth or a rather a carnivores teeth and showing that we have teeth to grind up stuff but no these are teeth that have evolved for people that eat cooked food great this is where it's disingenuous like know that first of all we do have the teeth of an omnivore and second of all we have the teeth of an omnivore that has been cooking food right we don't need the same kind of teeth we used to need to tear apart raw meat like we did two hundred thousand years ago it was you know it's interesting one of the things that I explore in my book is the the way that meat has been valued through human history and it was valued as the food of warriors and that you know like the Maasai warriors who were studied by a biochemist out of the university of mineral in the late 1970s called the Maasai warriors in Kenya and they he found that they ate nothing but meat and

65:57blood and milk and that was the warrior class and that was what was considered that made men strong the women were allowed a more diverse diet but the men who had to be strong and had to hunt they had this just you know purely meat and blood diet and and there's another interesting story about how that same tribe was compared to they actually had a kind of vegetarian nearby and that when they were both called when both these tribes were called up for the Boer War the English tested their strength to see whom they could hire to fight for them and the and the vegetarian men from this one tribe that was that this neighboring tribe they they had no strength they you know they tested them to see how that that device your use your hand to clench see how strong they were where they found them completely unfit and unable to do work and they weren't strong they didn't

66:55have the same kind of muscle mass literally so they couldn't use the men from that tribe and then there's you know they're just a rich history in literature about how meat was really the food that made you strong and meat was a food that was craved always craved that it that humans craved above all else there happened vegan powerlifters and a bunch of different people that have figured out how to do it correctly today though I mean I think they may have but I don't you know they must have take a lot of supplements and other kinds of soy proteins or other you know other things there's you have to be I mean there there are there are replacements I guess in the modern food supply but you know historically based on real foods available to humans for millennia it was me that was what was used to be strong yeah and the dirty secret in the vegan bodybuilder community is steroids and

67:48steroids were allow you to get away with a lot of stuff and obviously that's the dirty secret and all the bodybuilding communities but the vegan ones they want to just pretend everything oh look on a plant-based diet look at my amazing body sorta yeah you definitely yeah I mean yeah but that other stuff yeah you know I mean this is something that gets extremely ignored where it's way more open and out in the non vegan bodybuilding community yeah because I'm deep into the body what have you out of all this research and all this analyzing this and you know the publishing your book and the way it's been received how how has this change the way you you think about the way people approach not just diet but all sort of conflicts in life oh that's a big question I mean there are a couple of major ways this profoundly this whole research changed my thinking one so one

68:58was really that I it changed my thinking about I changed my political views quite a bit I think you you're a libertarian or at least that's what I was reading about you I was always may I grew up in Berkeley and was a real liberal Democrat and still AM on most issues but you know here I found an issue where the government had started this program of telling Americans how to eat and just made this huge giant mistake and this you know spent hundreds and hundreds and billions of dollars on this program that you know we have quite a bit of evidence now I think to just make a pretty good case that the government made America started the obesity and diabetes epidemics and continued and don't back down from their recommendations even though they continued to do this and so you know this is the one government program that I have researched in great depth I haven't really looked into too

70:00many else in anything else in the kind of incredible level of detail that I have this one and it made me much more cautious about supporting big government programs not because I don't believe in government I do I mean I believe that humans need to govern themselves wisely and it shouldn't just be you know we shouldn't have government but the potential to make mistakes the power of government to that wants it once it adopts a hypothesis or an idea of some kind and then the incredible institutional entrenchment that happens when you adopt a certain of you right and then it's so hard to reverse out of that particular chosen line of thinking it becomes almost impossible you know this institutions are not built for that they're not really built for science you know science is supposed to be as I said earlier self-doubting self-questioning you have new observations so you change your course

70:58that's what science is supposed to be like you you test things and they don't work out and then you move on to another idea but an institution its own is its it's almost like institutional science is like an oxymoron because an institution is meant to not flip-flop on their publics not to change their views not to loot not to allow people to lose faith in them so it's it's there it's it's it's the wrong kind of body to to do science so it's made me much more much more cautious about how much I want our government to do because if I have just turned over this one little leaf and found this huge disastrous program you know I just wonder if I turn over any other leaf what what at what else would I find I think you'd find similar incompetence probably yeah so so it's changed my political thinking quite a bit and then I think it's also you know when I see the way that the scientific

71:58debate is played out and I and you know I know the science so intimately now you know I know I've read every single nutrition experiment that has really been done since the mid 50's and you know when I see the way the debate plays out in public you know I see that a American Heart Association presidential advisory which ice just see is a you know it's it's not honest science or our last Dietary Guidelines expert committee in their report saying you know we should we should all eat a plant-based diet and you know I can see how bad that science is and so you know I see that that I can see now so much better the the way that PR firms spin messages and the way those messages are echoed all over and the way you know it's just the way it's what's happening in our politics it's it's happening in our science and and so I think it makes me somewhat despair about our ability to

72:56have good science rise to the top because you know when you have institutions like Harvard and Tufts and you know all of our top institutions are so I invested in this wrong hypothesis yet I don't even know I don't know where people should turn to you know how how do we sort ourselves out of this mess so yeah nutrition science is in bad shape and I and it changed my it's changed my faith in expert advice maybe that's the bottom line I I really don't trust expert advice because I see the way it is manipulated by financial interests and and professional interests and intellectual conflicts of interest and and so you know even little tiny things like anything a warning label on a bottle like you know careful of this plastic or this or that I'm like I don't believe anything unless I go back to their original science and read it all myself which I could never do I just don't

73:50trust anything anymore that's not a good place to be I need to spend time in your isolation tank boy and with that if people want to find out more your book a big fat surprise what else so my book is called the big fat surprise it's available on Amazon I have my main website is is Nina titles calm which is you'll never be able to spell but if you look up the big fat surprise you'll get to Nina titles and and I also started a group called the nutrition coalition which is nutrition coalition us that is a group that is backed by scientists PhDs MDS the odd journalists like me we are basically the work of that group is to try to ensure that our nutrition policy is evidence-based right trying to unearth that suppressed science get those studies out of the NIH basement that kind of thing just to ensure that whatever they giff the government is going to tell Americans what to eat it

74:54needs to be evidence based so we're doing work in Washington and and you can read about I mean it's not just on fat and carbohydrates that I've got they've got it wrong on salt you know the advice to extra get aerobic exercise for forty five two minutes to an hour every day none of that is based on good science so we just want the goal of this group is to work towards based policy and nutrition if we could wrap this up please talk a little bit more about salt because that's one that comes up all the time with people they want to tell me that salts bad for you I'm like god damn it salt is an essential nutrient you'll die without it so the short story in salt is that they did a bunch of clinical trials only on hypertensive subjects so you're already sick that were already sick okay so if you're a normal person if your child if you're you none of this applies to you should never have been

75:47generalized to a larger population they were called the - studies none of these studies were longer than two months which is super short for clinical trial and what they showed was that for people who already had hypertension and ate a lot of salt for those people reducing their salt improved their their cardiovascular risk factors they didn't follow any of these people long enough to figure out who actually had heart attack or died there are very very short-term small experiments they never tested more than 2,000 people on them this this hold - died this reduced sodium diet none of that advice should be generalized to anybody else and there have now been four large studies where they their epidemiological studies so that they're not that's only associations but they important thing about it is that there's they contradict this salt advice they show that really

76:41if you go too low people who consume too little salt those people have higher rates higher rates of cardiovascular death so that there seems to be a sweet spot for consuming salt there's the sort of a j-shaped curve so like the in if you moderate consumption of salt for the general population is is is sort of the sweet spot for for good health and cardiovascular health so and so you know the government's advice is lower is better for all Americans and that's just not based on any good any rigorous science at all boom boom so our group is working to try to change that you know it just has to change without people like you people like me would be completely lost so thank you so much for all your research thank you for your thank you for your time here on the podcast I appreciate it and people please go out buy her book is there anything else you could recommend people

77:39check into they can they can donate to the nutrition coalition if they want the Dietary Guidelines to change and I'll just put in a little plug for that because the reason they have to change they control school lunches military rations food and hospitals food and elderly homes everything your doctor tells you your nutritionists tell you they're like that's where it all comes from so that's it thanks for letting me thank you thanks for having me bye everybody