In this episode, Nina Teicholz talks with me about her new book, "Big Fat Surprise: Why saturated fat doesn't cause heart disease" and why you should not be eating a low-fat diet if you want to live a healthy life. We talk about how the food industry funded the research of the 1950s and 60s, and how they influenced the scientific community to believe that saturated fat and cholesterol were the cause of heart disease. We also talk about the influence of the sugar industry, and why we should be worried about what we think we know about heart disease and how we know it's not caused by saturated fat. And we talk about why we need to be concerned about saturated fat in the first place and why it's a bad idea to have saturated fat as a health care provider. The Big Fat Surprise is out now and is available for purchase on Amazon and Audible. Thanks for listening and share this episode with your friends and family! Tweet me if you liked it! Timestamps: 1:30 - What is saturated fat? 2:00 - Is saturated fat bad for heart disease? 3:15 - Is a low fat diet bad for your health? 4:20 - How much saturated fat is bad for you? 5:40 - Why do you need a healthy diet? 6:00 7:00- Why we should eat more saturated fat ? 8:30- What are you going to eat? 9: Does saturated fat make you sick? 11: What is the best thing you should you put in your body? 12:30 13: What s your favorite type of food? 15:00 What is your favorite protein? 16:00 Can you eat for your body type? 17:40- How much fat you like? 18:00 Do you like your cholesterol? 19:00 Should you have a healthy meal? 21:00 How do you feel like you need to have a balanced life? 22:00 Does fat in your diet be healthy? 25: Is fat enough? 26:00 Is fat a good thing? 27: What do you like it s better than carbs? 29:00 Are you getting enough calories? 30:30 What s a healthy enough for your blood glucose? 35:00 Why is fat better than your cholesterol is better than you should eat enough carbs
00:00:36.000Very controversial in this day and age.
00:00:39.000It was even more controversial when the book came out, which was in 2014. But, you know, we've seen an almost complete sea change on this subject, not at the expert level, but, you know, there's a real groundswell in a change of thinking.
00:00:54.000I think, in part, really triggered by my book, which really laid out all the arguments for how do we come to believe that saturated fat is bad for health?
00:01:03.000Why do we believe animal fats are bad?
00:01:04.000Why do we believe they cause heart disease?
00:01:07.000And really tells that whole story of how we started down this path, believing that fat and cholesterol cause heart disease, make you sick, cause cancer, make you fat.
00:01:23.000The politics, the personalities, it really is a story more about politics than about science.
00:01:28.000Did you feel vindicated when that New York Times article came out where it showed that the sugar industry had bribed These scientists to lie about data and falsified data that showed that saturated fat was the cause of heart disease instead of sugar?
00:01:41.000Because that was fairly recently, right?
00:01:49.000There's maybe a hundred different, you know, documents that you can find where...
00:01:59.000It's amazing how little people know about how much nutrition science is funded by the food industry.
00:02:09.000And that was one small example where Harvard scientists had received money from the sugar industry.
00:02:15.000And what this article contended is that that's what I pushed them to blame fat and not sugar for heart disease.
00:02:23.000I actually don't believe that that's what happened in that particular case for those Harvard scientists in 1950s because I studied them extensively.
00:02:31.000You know, for my book, I read like, well, it took me nine years and I read like 10,000 scientific papers.
00:02:37.000So I knew the work of those Harvard scientists.
00:02:41.000One of them is named Mark Hegstead, who is very influential.
00:02:44.000And the reality for him and his colleagues was that they truly 100% believe that fat and saturated fat and cholesterol cause heart disease.
00:02:55.000And they had believed it for more than a decade before the sugar industry came along with that proposition for them.
00:03:13.000And one of the things that my book explores is this phenomenon that happened then, happened today, where scientists, they come to fall in love with their beliefs.
00:03:24.000You know, they fall in love with their own hypothesis.
00:03:40.000What scientists are supposed to do, what they're taught to do is to not behave in a human way.
00:03:46.000They're taught to rigorously distrust their beliefs.
00:03:50.000They're taught to try to find every way to shoot down their own hypothesis.
00:04:25.000He and his favorite colleague Ansel Keys, who is from the University of Minnesota, they would actually bully and kind of stomp on scientists who came up with contradictory information.
00:04:45.000Today, it's the same phenomenon in nutrition science.
00:04:48.000This is the way nutrition science started, and it's the legacy that continues today, which is that any papers to the contrary, you know, hard to get them published, hard to get them into discussed, hard to get them presented at expert meetings.
00:05:03.000And it's been driven by people who are really married to their hypothesis about what a healthy diet is.
00:05:12.000So you feel like what happened was the sugar industry came along and they found these people that already had beliefs that aligned up with what they were trying to sell.
00:05:39.000And, you know, there was another story out recently about how sugar industry didn't pursue research they had done that seemed to show that sugar caused cancer.
00:05:48.000Well, I mean, if you're the sugar industry, like, what is your obligation to...
00:06:35.000I mean, people are more than willing, as long as it hits the right buttons and switches in their brain and their receptors, they're more than willing to put their health in danger for some temporary mouth pleasure.
00:06:47.000Yeah, and this kind of goes to the subject that is, you know, debated in the food world, which is, you know, how much should the government be telling people what to eat?
00:06:56.000So there are people who say, you know, they believe sugar is like tobacco.
00:07:00.000If you eat it, you will probably, if you eat a lot of sugar, you are much more likely to get diabetes and heart disease.
00:07:07.000I mean, I think that's, if you had a lot of refined carbohydrates, or maybe even if you eat just too many carbohydrates, period, you're more likely to get diabetes and heart disease and become obese.
00:07:21.000They do like it, and then there's also people that are on a plant-based diet, like my friend Eddie, who you just met right before you, who's a vegan now.
00:07:29.000He's been a vegan, did we say a couple years?
00:07:32.000He has way too many carbohydrates, and he's admitting it and talking about it, not exactly knowing how to fix his cravings and his urges.
00:07:41.000If you're on a completely plant-based diet, it's really hard.
00:07:45.000To just go all fats and get the proper amount of unsaturated and unsaturated fats in your diet.
00:07:52.000Yeah, I mean, so people are on vegan diets for many reasons, and that's their own personal choice.
00:07:57.000The reality is that There's a large body of rigorous research, by that I mean randomized controlled clinical trials on thousands of people showing that a diet higher in fat and lower in carbohydrates leads to better outcomes in terms of diabetes,
00:08:32.000You can have a lot of coconut oil and avocado, a lot of avocado, but it just becomes hard.
00:08:39.000What do you put on your plate for dinner every night?
00:08:42.000If you eat meat, you have a piece of meat.
00:08:46.000I mean, that used to be just at the center of the dinner plate, but it's hard on a vegan diet.
00:08:51.000The other thing that's very hard on a vegan diet is staying, you need to be really careful about nutritional supplements, because you cannot get all the nutrients that you need naturally from the foods that you're eating, and also some of those nutrients are not as biodigestible.
00:09:07.000I mean, your body doesn't absorb them as easily, like iron from spinach is not as absorbable as iron from meat.
00:09:29.000So 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.
00:10:34.000No, the other thing is that in order to get protein, like if you can get your protein from beans, say, you have to get a complete protein, let's say you have beans and rice.
00:10:43.000But in order to get, you know, let's say 100 grams of protein, you need to eat like 1,000 calories of beans and rice versus, say, a couple hundred calories of meat.
00:10:53.000Okay, so don't hold me to those numbers, but I'm just telling you, you eat a lot more calories to get the same amount of protein.
00:11:00.000So for a day's worth of protein, you're saying, obviously you wouldn't want 100 grams of protein in a single serving, but for a day's worth of protein, you're probably going to eat an exorbitant amount of beans and rice.
00:11:27.000And I took iron pills, and that didn't work.
00:11:30.000And you just, you know, heme iron, which is the favored kind for absorption, is only available from animal sources, and principally red meat.
00:11:39.000White meat, like chicken, is relatively poor in nutrients, poor in iron, too.
00:11:45.000So, you know, the most nutrient-dense food on the planet is liver, which nobody is used to eating anymore, and we all think it's disgusting.
00:12:04.000But we stopped eating it because it's high in cholesterol.
00:12:08.000So these are the consequences of having, what we did was, this is what my book is about, but it's, you know, we started, starting in 1961, we basically, the American Heart Association was the first organization to say, don't eat saturated fat and cholesterol to avoid a heart attack.
00:12:23.000And that was based on, at the time, really weak evidence.
00:12:27.000You know, something called an observational study can show an association, but not causation.
00:12:32.000And, you know, there were just enormous unintended consequences at the time.
00:12:39.000So actually, this Harvard scientist, Mark Hegstead, this was, you know, he was one of the people behind this.
00:12:44.000And he said, We imagine the benefits will be great, and we cannot imagine that there could be any negative consequences, something like that.
00:12:57.000And this is kind of the fundamental tragedy of any kind of policy, especially when it becomes enshrined by a powerful organization like the American Heart Association or, say, our government.
00:13:38.000As 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.
00:13:45.000I was like, what's the egg white thing then?
00:13:48.000Why is everybody going with egg whites?
00:13:49.000Because the yolk is where the cholesterol is, so that's why we stopped eating egg yolks.
00:13:57.000And that's the yolk is also where all the nutrients are, like including things like lutein, which is for eye health and brain development.
00:14:08.000I mean, there's all kinds of things and things that are choline, also for brain development that you can really not easy to find.
00:14:14.000You can't find them easily in plant foods or at all.
00:14:17.000And they're crucial to human development.
00:14:20.000So, you know, we eliminated these foods.
00:14:24.000You know, it's ironic, like the cholesterol, cholesterol is essential to every cell in your body.
00:14:30.000We make cholesterol, we eat cholesterol, it's part of what, you know, it's a building block for all of our hormones.
00:14:37.000And, you know, coupled with cholesterol are all the nutrients needed to sustain life.
00:16:19.000I mean, that's actually been shown in scientific experiments where they put stacks of, in one experiment, they put stacks of like pork chops in front of people and they just said, eat, you know, don't stop eating, don't.
00:16:31.000And people just could not overeat on that food.
00:17:04.000I'll just put it in my bowl and just keep eating.
00:17:08.000Just your body craves it in some weird way.
00:17:11.000Well, or alternatively, another physiological explanation is that your body keeps eating because it still hasn't gotten what it needs.
00:17:20.000It hasn't gotten the nutrients that it actually needs to build the cells.
00:17:28.000You're not giving it what it needs until you eat the right foods.
00:17:32.000Is it possible that both things are going on?
00:17:34.000That your body hasn't gotten what it needs, so there's that craving, but then there's also this incredibly intoxicating carbohydrate thing going on, where as you're eating it in, your sugar levels are getting jacked and you just want to keep going.
00:17:50.000So what you're talking about, I think, is a little bit more like the glucose roller coaster that happens.
00:19:20.000But when I eat, you know, when I eat Carbs, then I can switch over to glucose, but I'm healthy enough to switch back.
00:19:27.000But people who are unhealthy or just been living on carbs for a really long time, mainly glucose, they can only get their fuel from glucose.
00:19:36.000And if they don't have glucose, they just bonk.
00:19:38.000That's why you have long-distance runners who are constantly sucking down those glucose packs and things.
00:19:46.000They can't switch over to fat to burn their own fat.
00:21:34.000We have time in our hands to do podcasts, build the Taj Mahal, do other stuff, because we don't have to eat all the time.
00:21:39.000And we can live off of our fat if we are eating well.
00:21:42.000Well, the idea that all that burdens you so, where you have this gut or you have this fat all over your body and it depresses you, that literally changed the point of view and the perspective.
00:22:16.000And 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.
00:22:28.000So when you get someone who's incredibly obese and they shrink down to a normal sized person, one of the things they have to deal with routinely is these giant flops of skin because your body's used to being so big.
00:22:39.000But apparently, at least in this one case, this guy, as he had gone through this enormous medically controlled fasting, his skin shrank as well.
00:22:49.000Like his body ate the fat and recognizes that his body was shrinking.
00:22:55.000Everything sort of shrank up in proportion.
00:22:59.000It is amazing, and I wonder if that could be replicated or if he was just very uniquely, had unique genetics or what the circumstances were.
00:23:14.000I mean, I think that this is, you know, one of the theories behind intermittent, I mean, dramatic fasting like that is, just for anybody thinking about it is, you know, that's potentially dangerous.
00:23:25.000And so it has to be medically supervised.
00:23:27.000But, you know, people, there's intermittent fasting that people do where they fast for, you know, like I do.
00:24:13.000And the way to do that is to keep carbs low because carbohydrate, the moment you have glucose in your blood system, your body prefers glucose.
00:25:35.000I have a 14-hour window at night where I don't eat.
00:25:38.000And I think the more people do that, the more they'll understand that your body will burn off way more fat if you just live like that, if you just force yourself to only eat inside of a 10-hour window.
00:25:49.000So the key to that is you can't be on a high-carb diet and then fast.
00:25:54.000If you're used to eating a lot of carbs, your body will still preferentially need that glucose, and you'll still be on that rollercoaster glucose cycle.
00:26:13.000So if you want a little bit of perspective on this, Really, all this science started in the early 2000s.
00:26:23.000And it started, so the long history is, so 1961, American Heart Association tells all of America, stop eating fat and cholesterol so you don't die of a heart attack, right?
00:26:35.000That was, heart disease had risen from pretty much out of nowhere in the early 1900s to become the leading Leading killer in America.
00:26:43.000President Eisenhower himself is out of the Oval Office for 10 days with a heart attack.
00:26:47.000I mean, it's just a huge public health emergency.
00:26:50.000And this Ansel Keys, this professor at University of Minnesota, he came up with this idea that he and Mark Hex did, the one from Harvard, said it was saturated fat and cholesterol that caused heart disease.
00:27:01.000And so that's when that whole hypothesis was born and it became enshrined as policy.
00:27:08.000The federal government gets on board in 1980, and that's the beginning of our dietary guidelines.
00:27:13.000So now the whole country is not only avoiding saturated fat and cholesterol, but also at this point, all of fat is suspect.
00:27:21.000So it's like just cut back on all fat.
00:28:52.000We eat 30% more carbohydrates overall, 40% more grains, almost 90% more vegetable oils.
00:28:58.000Because, of course, if you're not eating saturated fats, you're eating polyunsaturated vegetable oils.
00:29:02.000So we had this huge change in the way Americans ate.
00:29:08.000And 1980 is also, so that's the beginning of the dietary guidelines for all Americans, it's also the beginning of the obesity epidemic.
00:29:15.000You see obesity, rates of obesity kind of, it's very slowly, gradually going up until 1980 and then they start, they just take a sharp turn upwards.
00:29:25.000And they have, you know, barely stopped.
00:29:34.000Well, a journalist named Gary Taubes wrote this front page New York Times magazine article saying, you know, what if it's all been a big fat lie?
00:29:45.000And basically kind of revives the idea of the Atkins diet.
00:29:49.000And says, you know, Atkins, high fat, low carb.
00:29:53.000He had promoted his diet from the early 1970s on, but he had really been vilified.
00:30:01.000And at that point, there really was no science to support him.
00:30:04.000I mean, he would say, but look, I've healed all these people, and look at all my medical files, go through my drawers, look at my office, and everybody would say, you know, that doesn't matter.
00:30:48.000And 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 But scientists from different disciplines started to do controlled clinical trials on carb reduction,
00:31:09.000carbohydrate reduction, the opposite of the low-fat diet, the opposite of what the government was telling people to eat.
00:31:14.000And so they started to develop this body of clinical trial research.
00:31:18.000And there are now nearly 100 randomized controlled clinical trials on this low-carb diet.
00:31:47.000The diet is also the best way to control your blood glucose for diabetes.
00:31:52.000There'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.
00:32:07.000So there's a lot of debate over which risk factors best predict your likelihood of getting a heart attack.
00:32:12.000But for the ones that I think are the most reliable, including your triglycerides, your HDL over your triglyceride ratio, which we don't have to get into that, but for the most reliable heart disease risk factors that best predict heart attacks, the low-carb diet also best improves those risk factors.
00:32:32.000So what was it that made this so taboo in the food industry or in food research?
00:32:41.000So like if health researchers today wanted to research low carb diet and you're saying that it's taboo, what's causing that?
00:32:48.000With all this body of evidence that you discussed, all these clinical trials, obviously not just Gary Taubes, but so many people have talked about this.
00:32:55.000Dom D'Agostino has done a lot of research on it.
00:32:58.000A lot of people have talked about this.
00:33:00.000So with all that data, where's the resistance coming from?
00:33:04.000Well, you know, So if the low-carb diet works and is a healthier diet, that means the government's diet, the low-fat diet, is making people sick and fat, right?
00:33:19.000So the entire establishment—I'm not just the government— Every university with all their professors who have been endorsing this diet and their entire careers.
00:33:33.000All of the pharmaceutical companies that depend on lowering your cholesterol.
00:33:38.000I mean, there's a huge set of interests that are invested for any number of reasons.
00:34:07.00080% of things on supermarket shelves are basically made out of vegetable oils and grains of some formulation or another and salt.
00:34:14.000And so, you know, all those companies, all the universities and their entire nutrition departments who've been publishing for 30 years about the benefits of this diet, the federal government and all the medical professional associations who've been prescribing this diet to their patients and their,
00:34:35.000I mean, it's just, we're in a situation where we just made a gigantic mistake.
00:34:40.000Wasn't there a recent, very, very controversial and Not just controversial, but very flawed piece by the American Heart Association where they were talking about the dangers of coconut oils and saturated fats and all those researchers that have been studying this stuff over the last decade are like,
00:35:04.000Well, yeah, I mean, right now in the nutrition world, you have people like me who are challenging the status quo, and you have the sort of the conventional wisdom, the defenders of the conventional wisdom, you know, doubling down to defend their position.
00:35:21.000What was the position of the American Heart Association?
00:35:24.000Remember, the American Heart Association launched this whole thing in 1961, right?
00:35:30.000So just last year, they came out with the Presidential Advisory on Saturated Fats, where they said, please ignore all those confusing, you know, internet crazies.
00:35:43.000I mean, basically referring to people like me and Gary Taubes, you know, about saturated fats.
00:35:47.000We just want to set the record straight on saturated fats.
00:35:51.000And, you know, here's our latest affirmation of our belief that saturated fats cause heart disease.
00:36:01.000So, I won't get too much into the weeds on it all, but you know, they had, the way that the American Heart Association all these years has sustained their position that saturated fats cause heart disease is they have relied purely on this weak kind of evidence called epidemiology,
00:36:45.000And then you're supposed to write this all down, like as if any of us can remember what we ate yesterday.
00:36:50.000And you're supposed to make accurate assessments about what you've eaten on, like they asked 250, the most famous one is out of Harvard, asked 250 questions about what you've eaten over the past six months.
00:37:01.000Now, when they try to go and verify to see if those food frequency questionnaires are accurate, they come up basically as very poor accuracy by their own measures.
00:37:12.000But still, they use that data, and then they follow these people over 10, 20, 30 years, and they figure out who has a heart attack, who dies, who gets cancer.
00:37:22.000And then they try to make these correlations.
00:38:27.000So those kinds of studies, these epidemiological studies, are really just, they only establish associations and they were designed to suggest hypotheses that could then actually be tested in a kind of science called a clinical trial where you actually,
00:38:43.000you know, you divide a group up into two parts and you get like a drug trial.
00:38:47.000You give half people the drug and half people placebo.
00:38:50.000And only that kind of experiment, which is called a controlled experiment, can you actually establish cause and effect.
00:38:56.000So if you really want to know if meat causes cancer, you've got to do a clinical trial.
00:39:02.000Give half people, make them just red meat all day long, and the other half can be on the vegan diet and see who gets cancer.
00:39:14.000So the government, just back to this idea of saturated fat, and then I'll get back to that presidential advisory.
00:39:22.000The government actually did do a whole bunch of really big, expensive, randomized controlled clinical trials on saturated fat and cholesterol.
00:39:32.000They did this on tens of thousands of people.
00:39:35.000And they tested to see if giving the people who ate saturated fat and cholesterol more of that would die faster or get a heart attack faster.
00:39:44.000And 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.
00:40:15.000So 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.
00:40:25.000They actually took groups of people and they did this in mental hospitals where they totally controlled what people ate.
00:40:30.000And half the people they gave, you know, meat, butter, cheese, regular high saturated fat and cholesterol diet, and half the people they, you know, gave them soy-filled cheese and margarine instead of butter and, you know, and soy-filled meat.
00:40:43.000And in those randomized, those rigorous experiments on tens of thousands of people, They could not show that the people eating the meat and the butter and the cheese died faster from heart disease, died at higher rates from heart disease.
00:40:58.000In fact, they showed in one of the most famous experiments called the Minnesota Coronary Survey on 9,000 men and women over four and a half years, they found the more the men lowered their cholesterol, the more likely they were to die of a heart attack.
00:41:16.000So what happened to all those experiments?
00:41:20.000That particular experiment wasn't published for 16 years.
00:41:24.000Other experiments I found sat in NIH, National Institute of Health basement, never published, ignored, not included in literature reviews, not included, just ignored or suppressed.
00:42:12.000But people have now been talking about them a lot more and saying, like, how can you ignore that?
00:42:16.000The government spent a billion dollars, more than a billion dollars, testing this hypothesis and could not show it to be true.
00:42:23.000And why did you ignore these experiments for all these years?
00:42:29.000So this presidential advisory was an effort to reckon with those long-ignored clinical trials that had been funded by the government.
00:42:37.000And they did it in a way that I think was just totally disingenuous.
00:42:41.000And I wrote a response to it where I kind of rebutted it in Medscape.
00:42:47.000And I also wrote a piece in the LA Times about it.
00:42:49.000And, you know, we're at this point where...
00:42:55.000These esteemed public health institutions are defending their long-standing yet erroneous positions about a healthy diet.
00:43:05.000And then there's people like me on the outside saying, and not just me, there's now a whole chorus of scientists around the world who are saying the same thing, saying these recommendations are based on flawed evidence, our guidelines are not evidence-based,
00:43:21.000our national guidelines are not based on good evidence.
00:43:24.000So there's this growing chorus around the world and I'm one of the voices, I'm probably one of the more prominent voices now, but we just have national guidance that's just not based on good evidence.
00:43:38.000There's that and then there's a lot of people that get really confused by ideologically based documentaries and things that are trying to push people like What the Health and things along those lines.
00:43:48.000They're trying to make some really unsubstantiated correlations between meat consumption and diabetes and a bunch of other really weird ones that I've never heard before that I hear repeated by people.
00:44:02.000I'm like, wait, where the fuck did you hear that?
00:44:03.000And they'll tell me without doubt this one documentary.
00:44:24.000So all of that is based on that really weak epidemiological evidence.
00:44:30.000None of it has been, either it's not been tested in clinical trials or the clinical trials do not support those statements.
00:44:38.000I went through every single scientific claim in that movie.
00:44:43.000I was in Greece on holiday and everybody's like, why aren't you at the beach?
00:44:47.000I'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.
00:44:57.000I think that one of the reasons that they made that film was that We live in very confusing times for science, right?
00:45:09.000You make a film, you pull at somebody's heartstrings.
00:46:56.000But even then, those studies could not show that the vegans were healthier at the end of a year of eating that diet.
00:47:05.000So maybe it's a healthy diet, but it cannot be shown to be true.
00:47:09.000And so it's fine to eat it for whatever reason that you want to, but health, there's no evidence to show that that diet will be a good option for health.
00:47:21.000Yeah, that is a very hard pill for a lot of people to swallow that, for good reasons, don't want animals to suffer.
00:47:29.000So they want to live a life where they have as small footprint as possible and don't harm things.
00:47:35.000One of the things that disturbs people to no end is when I describe the process of collecting green in a combine.
00:47:41.000And how vultures will circle over fields right after the combine rolls over because those indiscriminate gigantic machines that might be a football field wide are just chewing up everything in front of them, including ground nesting birds and squirrels and rodents and occasionally deer fawns and anything else that gets caught up in the middle of it.
00:48:03.000Yeah, I mean, the reality is there is no life for any creature without the death of another creature.
00:48:10.000I mean, life involves death of some kind or another.
00:48:15.000I mean, monocropping agriculture is devastating to all kinds of life.
00:48:39.000And I think that there's also, you know, a deep discomfort with the fact that, you know, for many people, any sentient person that being human has, you know, that we evolved eating meat, right?
00:48:56.000And so, and we can't really survive that way.
00:48:59.000In fact, in the early experiments that they did on omnivore animals, they did that on All kinds of omnivore animals in the 19s, 20s, and 30s.
00:49:09.000And they tried to see if they could get an omnivore animal to survive purely on plants, grains, seeds.
00:49:16.000And they found it incredibly difficult to keep those, you know, whether rats or pigs, alive.
00:49:22.000And even when they could keep them alive, they live shorter lives and their offspring live shorter lives.
00:49:29.000You know, we have, I think, you know, we're ethical beings and so we have a discomfort with killing other animals as well as we should.
00:49:39.000But, you know, that is why I think humans evolved all kinds of ways of dealing with the need to kill animals, basically just to survive, right?
00:49:51.000All the rituals, the asking of forgiveness, And of course, when it was your own animals, we all raised, our own people raised, lived on farms and raised their own animals.
00:50:01.000There were ways, you know, that it was much more sort of a part of the holistic experience of being a farmer and living on the land.
00:50:18.000I think an ethical solution for this is probably going to be this sort of laboratory created meat that seems to be a flourishing industry right now.
00:50:27.000They'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.
00:50:44.000You know, if they can do that and it has all the same nutrients that real animals do, that would be a miracle, right?
00:50:54.000But then there's also the issue of what happens if we completely stop eating cows and chickens and pigs and what happens to all those animals?
00:51:13.000We've put ourselves into a corner here.
00:51:15.000We've put ourselves into a corner if we choose to never eat these animals again.
00:51:20.000How do we sustain their populations and what financial reward do people get for sustaining them?
00:51:31.000If they're not going to profit from them whatsoever, they're going to have to spend an exorbitant amount of money or let them roam free, which people, if people don't realize, that's happened in parts of the world.
00:51:47.000In Australia, they call them scrub bulls, meaning, you know, they live in the scrubs, and that these scrub bulls are incredibly aggressive, enormous, weird-looking cow things that they now hunt.
00:52:00.000And 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.
00:52:11.000These bulls are incredibly aggressive and they're just roaming loose.
00:52:15.000And, you know, is that what we're going to do?
00:52:17.000We're going to have wild cows everywhere?
00:52:19.000Like, okay, so what happens if the wild cow populations get out of control?
00:52:33.000You know, they're part of an ecosystem to have a healthy ecosystem on Earth.
00:52:39.000You know, you need animals as part of, you know, they return manure to the Earth, and that's part of the cycle of life, and that, you know, plants can't survive without them, and you need animals actually as part of a healthy ecosystem.
00:52:54.000So, you know, that's not something that I'm an expert in, but I think it is, you know, I guess I would say like the kind of really simplistic, it's just simplistic thinking to say that we should get rid of all animals or, you know, get rid of all domesticated animals.
00:53:09.000I mean, I just think that's a kind of simplistic vision.
00:53:13.000I think a lot of we're dealing with simplistic visions, right?
00:53:16.000We're dealing with An incredibly complicated situation that we find ourselves in in the 21st century.
00:53:22.000This is just the place we were born and raised.
00:53:24.000So then we look around at the landscape and we go, okay, what do I have to do for this meat vehicle?
00:53:32.000What do I have to do to keep this thing optimized?
00:53:34.000And then what do I have to do for my mind that I don't feel terrible about eating some horrifying factory-farmed food where I have to watch some PETA video on how this thing was created and realize I'm a monster?
00:53:47.000And I think that is the motivation for a lot of people to go towards veganism.
00:54:14.000Well, I also think in the same way that we're a divided nation politically, we are a divided nation in terms of the way we think in urban cities, centers, and where I've always lived my whole life, and out in the areas of the country,
00:54:32.000the red states where they have cattle and the dairy farms are.
00:54:40.000We actually have no idea For the most part, what goes on there.
00:54:45.000We just see the horrifying videos shot by some undercover person.
00:54:50.000One of the things that was surprising and a really beautiful experience for me after my book came out was that I was invited to speak all over the country.
00:55:07.000And then, I mean, I lived various places in the world, but then I settled in New York City.
00:55:11.000So, you know, I'm like, as urban, progressive, liberal as they come, and all of a sudden, I'm giving speeches in Oklahoma and Texas and, you know, Illinois.
00:55:22.000I mean, really, it was, it was really...
00:55:30.000Like, I met all the people who, you know, all these people in the cowboy hats were like, oh, I would have, you know, I would have been one of the ones protesting throwing kale at these guys, you know, in my previous life.
00:55:41.000And now I'm, you know, standing in front of 800 of them talking about saturated fat, you know, the findings in my book.
00:55:47.000That's what I, you know, here's what I found.
00:55:49.000And You know, I can't say that I did any kind of in-depth reporting, 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 raise fewer cattle and then produce more.
00:56:08.000I mean, they were really just not the demons that I thought they were.
00:56:13.000And I don't pretend to really know what goes on in animal agriculture across the country, but I just want to say it made me realize In the same way that we have this polarized conversation going on now in the country politically, this is one issue where that plays out.
00:56:30.000We have such a lack of understanding and real conversation and understanding between those of us on the coast and the people who are actually raising the food in the middle of the country.
00:56:42.000Yeah, it's very convenient, and I do it too.
00:56:44.000A lot of people demonize people that live in places that they don't frequent.
00:56:48.000And it's really fun to poke fun at the middle of the country and call them a bunch of dummies.
00:56:52.000You know the reason why Trump got elected?
00:56:59.000My colleagues, my, you know, liberal journalists, I mean, there's like the way, the kind of digs that they will take at rural white people is like, you know, we, if that was something about a person of color or a woman,
00:57:15.000I mean, that person would be kicked out of their jaw.
00:57:19.000I mean, it's just amazing the level of sort of the accepted kind of stereotyping that goes on in the media towards these people who...
00:57:27.000You know, again, that would have been me, except that I just had this experience.
00:57:32.000Well, people love to, like, pick a side and then use any means necessary to attack the other side.
00:57:39.000I mean, you see this in not an unrelated way with the way they make fun of Trump's hands.
00:57:55.000You're just saying the gloves are off and you can do anything you want.
00:57:58.000And you can just be a cruel person and body shame this guy for something he has absolutely no control over.
00:58:03.000There's plenty of things he's done wrong that you can make fun of.
00:58:07.000But what about all the other people that are reading about his tiny little hands and they look down at their own tiny little hands and they have to feel like shit?
00:59:09.000You know, I have, I am sympathetic in the sense that people are so worried about their health, and there's so much conflicting information out there, and they don't know how to make sense of it.
00:59:21.000And then there's a kind of, and we eat, you know, you have to eat two or three times a day.
00:59:26.000So this thing is staring you in the face.
01:00:25.000But it's, yeah, it's become a kind of, I mean, one of the things that I think has happened is that, you know, we live in post-ideological times, right?
01:00:31.000I mean, you joke about Scientology, but we live in times where people are no longer members of, not as many people are members of, are religious, right, in any kind of traditional way.
01:00:42.000And food is one thing that people become religious about.
01:00:50.000And the food movement, I mean, if you follow Michael Pollan and Mark Bittman, they encourage you to think about it as a movement, as something you can join, be a part of, be in a community.
01:01:02.000Well, that's exactly how the vegans will get it, though.
01:01:04.000It provides everything that religions did provide for people.
01:01:09.000But for the vegans, what they do have on their side is that they feel that their lifestyle is not promoting animal cruelty.
01:01:16.000And that gives them the justification for attacking someone like you.
01:01:23.000Well, you know, I try to just stick to...
01:01:27.000I try to really stick to the science on what makes people healthy.
01:01:33.000So if you want to be a vegan, but if that diet comes with, for most people, If it comes with diabetes and obesity or ill health or the failure to thrive of their children or whatever,
01:02:33.000Yeah, processed food, preservatives, just eating nonsense and garbage and candy and just that kind of stuff.
01:02:40.000If you can be conscious and proactive about the healthy foods you choose and just try to get as much healthy nutrients as you can, you're going to feel better.
01:02:51.000But the question is, what's the best way to optimize your health?
01:02:55.000Yeah, and just going back to those animal experiments that I was telling you about in the 1920s and 30s, you know, what leads to your long life and the long life and health of your children, right?
01:03:04.000That's the way we used to think about survival of health, fitness of an animal, was how long did you survive and how long do your offspring survive, right?
01:03:16.000That's always been the ultimate measure, evolutionarily.
01:03:19.000So, you know, if a vegan diet were to support that, that would be the optimal diet.
01:03:26.000But that was just not what the science showed.
01:03:30.000So, you know, I mean, there's also a whole kind of evolutionary issue here, which is you have to bring in evolutionary science to understand, you know, how did humans evolve?
01:03:40.000I mean, we're in a kind of ironic position where there's so many enlightened, progressive thinkers who are almost like...
01:03:50.000Who are denying our evolutionary history, right?
01:04:45.000But it's called the stoned ape theory, if you want to look it up.
01:04:48.000But the idea that we are herbivores, And you hear this tossed around a lot and you'll literally see like vegan memes that show our teeth versus a primates teeth or a rather a Carnivores teeth and showing that we have teeth to grind up stuff But these are teeth that have evolved for people that eat cooked food,
01:05:12.000I mean, this is where it's disingenuous like know that first of all we do have the teeth of an omnivore and And second of all, we have the teeth of an omnivore that has been cooking food.
01:05:21.000We don't need the same kind of teeth we used to need to tear apart raw meat like we did 200,000 years ago or whatever it was.
01:05:31.000One of the things that I explore in my book is the way that meat has been valued through human history and it was valued as the food of warriors and that, you know, like the Maasai warriors who were studied by a biochemist out of the University of Vanderbilt in the late 1970s called the Maasai warriors in Kenya.
01:05:53.000And he found that they ate nothing but meat and blood and milk.
01:05:58.000And that was the warrior class, and that was what was considered that made men strong.
01:06:03.000The women were allowed a more diverse diet, but the men who had to be strong and had to hunt, they had this just purely meat and blood diet.
01:06:16.000And there's another interesting story about how that same tribe was compared to, they actually had a kind of vegetarian tribe nearby, and that when they were both called, when both these tribes were called up for the Boer War, the English tested their strength to see whom they could hire to fight for them.
01:06:38.000And the vegetarian men from this one tribe, this neighboring tribe, they had no strength.
01:06:45.000They tested them to see how that device, use your hand to clench, see how strong they were.
01:06:51.000They found them completely unfit and unable to do work, and they weren't strong.
01:06:55.000They didn't have the same kind of muscle mass, literally.
01:07:20.000I think they may have, but they must take a lot of supplements and other kinds of soy proteins or other things.
01:07:29.000I mean, there are replacements, I guess, in the modern food supply.
01:07:34.000But historically, based on real foods available to humans for millennia, it was meat that was what was used to be strong.
01:07:43.000Yeah, and the dirty secret in the vegan bodybuilder community is steroids.
01:07:48.000And steroids will allow you to get away with a lot of stuff.
01:07:51.000And obviously that's the dirty secret in all the bodybuilding communities, but the vegan ones, they want to just pretend everything, oh look, on a plant-based diet, look at my amazing body.
01:08:23.000What have you, out of all this research and all this analyzing this and, you know, the publishing of your book and the way it's been received, how has this changed the way you think about the way people approach not just diet but all sort of conflicts in life?
01:08:50.000Major ways this profoundly, this whole research changed my thinking.
01:08:55.000One, so one was really that I, it changed my thinking about, changed my political views quite a bit.
01:09:06.000I think you're a libertarian or at least that's what I was reading about you.
01:09:09.000I was always, I mean I grew up in Berkeley and was a real I'm a liberal Democrat and still am on most issues.
01:09:18.000But 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.
01:09:31.000And 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 make a pretty good case that the government made America, started the obesity and diabetes epidemics,
01:09:47.000and continue, and don't back down from their recommendations, even though they continue to do this.
01:09:52.000And so, you know, this is the one government program that I have researched in great depth.
01:09:58.000I haven't really looked into anything else in the kind of incredible level of detail that I have this one.
01:10:04.000And it made me much more I'm cautious about supporting big government programs.
01:10:13.000Not because I don't believe in government.
01:10:16.000I mean, I believe that humans need to govern themselves wisely, and it shouldn't just be, you know, we shouldn't have government.
01:10:23.000The potential to make mistakes, the power of government once it adopts a hypothesis or an idea of some kind, and then the incredible institutional entrenchment that happens when you adopt a certain view,
01:10:52.000Science is supposed to be, as I said earlier, self-doubting, self-questioning.
01:10:56.000You have new observations, so you change your course.
01:10:59.000That's what science is supposed to be.
01:11:00.000You test things and they don't work out, and then you move on to another idea.
01:11:04.000But an institution, 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 allow people to lose faith in them.
01:11:18.000So it's the wrong kind of body to do science.
01:11:27.000So it's made me much more cautious about how much I want our government to do.
01:11:34.000Because if I've just turned over this one little leaf and found this huge disastrous program, you know, I just wonder if I turn over any other leaf, what else would I find?
01:11:45.000I think you'd find similar incompetence.
01:11:48.000So it's changed my political thinking quite a bit.
01:11:53.000And then I think it's also, you know, when I see the way that the scientific debate is played out, and I know the science so intimately now, you know, I know I've read every single nutrition experiment that has really been done since the mid-50s.
01:12:12.000And, you know, when I see the way the debate plays out in public, you know, I see that American Heart Association presidential advisory, which I just see as a, you know, it's not honest science.
01:12:22.000Or our last Dietary Guidelines Expert Committee in their report saying, you know, we should all eat a plant-based diet.
01:12:30.000And, you know, I can see how bad that science is.
01:12:33.000And so, you know, I see that I can see now so much better the way that PR firms spin messages and the way those messages are echoed all over.
01:12:44.000You know, it's just the way it's what's happening in our politics.
01:12:52.000It makes me somewhat despair about our ability to have good science rise to the top.
01:12:59.000Because when you have institutions like Harvard and Tufts and all of our top institutions are so deeply invested in this wrong hypothesis, I don't know where people should turn to how do we sort ourselves out of this mess.
01:13:15.000So yeah, nutrition science is in bad shape and it's changed my faith in expert advice.
01:13:24.000I really don't trust expert advice because I see the way it is manipulated by financial interests and professional interests and intellectual conflicts of interest.
01:13:37.000And 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.
01:13:44.000I'm like, I don't believe anything unless I go back to the original science and read it all myself, which I can never do.
01:13:55.000I need to spend time in your isolation tank, I think.
01:13:58.000Boy, and with that, if people want to find out more, your book, A Big Fat Surprise, what else?
01:14:05.000So, my book is called The Big Fat Surprise, and it's available on Amazon.
01:14:09.000I have, my main website is ninateischels.com, which is, you'll never be able to spell, but if you look up The Big Fat Surprise, you'll get to Nina Teischels.
01:14:19.000And I also started a group called the Nutrition Coalition, which is nutritioncoalition.us.
01:14:28.000That is a group that is backed by scientists, PhDs, MDs, The odd journalists like me.
01:14:37.000We are basically, the work of that group is to try to ensure that our nutrition policy is evidence-based, right?
01:14:44.000Trying to unearth that suppressed science, get those studies out of the NIH basement, that kind of thing, just to ensure that if the government is going to tell Americans what to eat, It needs to be evidence-based.
01:15:40.000Okay, so if you're a normal person, if you're a child, none of this applies to you, should never have been generalized to a larger population.
01:15:50.000None of these studies were longer than two months, which is super short for a clinical trial.
01:15:56.000And what they showed was that for people who already had hypertension, And ate a lot of salt.
01:16:03.000For those people, reducing their salt improved their cardiovascular risk factors.
01:16:10.000They didn't follow any of these people long enough to figure out who actually had a heart attack or died.
01:16:15.000They're very, very short-term, small experiments.
01:16:18.000They never tested more than 2,000 people on them, this whole DASH diet, this reduced sodium diet.
01:16:23.000None of that advice should be generalized to anybody else.
01:16:27.000And there have now been four large studies where they, they're epidemiological studies so that they're not, it's only associations.
01:16:36.000But the important thing about it is that they contradict this salt advice.
01:16:40.000They show that really, if you go too low, people who consume too little salt, those people have higher rates, higher rates of cardiovascular death.
01:16:52.000So that there seems to be a sweet spot for consuming salt.
01:16:59.000So if you have moderate consumption of salt for the general population is sort of the sweet spot for good health and cardiovascular health.
01:17:11.000So the government's advice is lower is better for all Americans.
01:17:16.000And that's just not based on any rigorous science at all.