In this episode, I talk with Nobel Prize winner and science writer Gary Sick about his new book, The Case Against Sugar, and how he became a science writer, and why he thinks sugar should be banned. We talk about how he got into science, why he started writing about it, and what it s like to be a Nobel Laureate. And we talk about why he decided to quit eating sugar. This episode was produced and edited by Annie-Rose Strasser and Alex Blumberg. Our theme song is Come Alone by Suneaters, courtesy of Lotuspool Records. Our ad music is by Build Buildings. The music for this episode was made by Micah Vellian and Haley Shaw, and our ad music was written and performed by Mark Phillips. It was edited by Matthew Boll. Music by Ian Dorsch. Additional music written and produced by Daniel Gulati. Special thanks to Mark Phillips and his band, The Electric Light Orchestra. Thanks to our sponsor, Zapsplat Records, for providing the sound design and engineering, and to my good friend, Kevin McLeod, for producing the music for the intro and outro music, and thanks to the production of the theme song, "Sugar" by the band, "Goodbye Outer Space" by Jeff Perla, and the rest of the band "Incomptech" and "I'm Too Effing Highlight" by The Weakerthans, for the beatboxing, and "Feat. and "The Case Against" by Dervish, and we're All Outtropeepers, for sending us out to you! and we hope you enjoy it. Thank you for listening to this episode of Gimlet, we really appreciate it. We really do. -- Thank you so much for tuning in, we appreciate you, we're so much, we'll see you, you're amazing, we can't do it, we love you, thank you, Thank you, We're So Good, We'll See You, Thank You, We Love You, and We'll Talkin' You, You're Great, We've Got it, We Say It, We Can't Do It, Good Luck, and You're Good, Good Relationships, Good Night, Good Blessings, Good Life, Good Morning, Good Day, Good Talk, Good Love, Good Nights, Good Dreams, and Goodbye, Goodbye, Good Rest, Good Thoughts, Good N Night, and Good Night.
00:00:21.000I've kind of consumed sugar most of my life until the last couple of years, and I slowly sort of tapered off, and about a year ago, maybe last February or so, I just pretty much cut it all out, except for the occasional dessert here or there.
00:00:40.000I have more energy and then I started really getting into it and then I came across your work and What I want to know is first of all, how did you get involved in this and how much resistance have you faced?
00:00:52.000Okay, this being the sugar case this being the whole obesity diet nutrition We can get into all of it, but the Sugar one, to me, is absolutely fascinating when you go down.
00:01:03.000I mean, have you seen that Sugar movie?
00:01:05.000Yeah, yeah, and I'm probably in it, I think.
00:01:22.000You know, it's funny, because my kids live with this all the time, right?
00:01:27.000We had just come back from spending the holidays with my grandmother, who pumps them up with sugar while we're there, and there's nothing I can do with it.
00:01:34.000And then we get back, and I'm making my boys dinner.
00:01:52.000Anyway, I got into this, you know, I Okay, I was a physics major in college.
00:01:57.000I was like hard science, and then I wasn't any good at it.
00:02:00.000I got a C- in quantum physics, and my advisor suggested I find another career.
00:02:04.000So I went into journalism, started doing science writing in the early 80s because it was the only work I could get.
00:02:10.000And then my first book, I went to live at CERN, the big particle accelerator lab outside of Geneva, and I was what we would call today embedded with the physicists.
00:02:20.000And I thought I was going to be following and making this great discovery, which is what the Nobel laureate who ran the experiment was predicting.
00:02:27.000And instead, I spent 10 months watching them figure out how they had screwed up, okay?
00:02:31.000And it was a learning experience in how to do science right, and I was obsessed with how hard it is to do good science.
00:02:37.000And I had a lot of the physicists in the world really didn't like this Nobel laureate, so they were happy to point out to me how he was screwing up, and how he had screwed up in the past, and how he had even screwed up the work that he won the Nobel Prize for.
00:02:51.000After I came back, I thought that was actually page six in the New York Post when my book came out.
00:02:57.000The headline was, Egghead Squabble Over Nobel Prize, and this Nobel laureate was quoted calling me an asshole in the newspaper, and I'm 29 years old, and I assume my career's over.
00:03:08.000What was he calling you an asshole over?
00:03:09.000Well, because I ended up writing an expose about what a bad scientist he was and about the politics of science.
00:04:09.000It's just you could discover a lot of stuff if you're not willing to do the rigorous, hard, critical, skeptical work to demonstrate that what you say you've discovered is wrong.
00:04:19.000Okay, so I wrote a book about something called Cold Fusion, which was a great scientific fiasco of the 20th century, except for the stuff I'm writing about now.
00:04:30.000And some of my friends in the physics community said, if you're interested in bad science, the book was called Bad Science, they said you should look at the stuff in public health because it's terrible.
00:04:39.000And so I moved into public health, beginning with this idea that electromagnetic fields from power lines will cause brain cancer or leukemia.
00:04:47.000And everything I had learned about how rigorous and meticulous and skeptical and thoughtful you had to do to get the right answer in physics, the public health people didn't think you had to do.
00:05:00.000They thought it was kind of a luxury because their science is harder.
00:05:25.000I was living here in Venice, California.
00:05:28.000I was freelancing for the journal Science.
00:05:30.000I was what's called a contributing correspondent and I needed a paycheck to pay my rent.
00:05:35.000So I called my editor and I said, what do you got?
00:05:37.000What kind of story could I turn over quickly?
00:05:40.000And he said there was a diet study that was coming out in the New England Journal of Medicine in two weeks, and they wanted to do an article about it.
00:05:48.000And what I didn't know was that this diet study had been leaked to science in advance.
00:05:52.000And the person who had leaked it had given him a list of sources to talk to.
00:05:59.000And this was a DASH diet, Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension, which is the most...
00:06:05.000Today, U.S. News& World Report says it's the healthiest diet in the world, based on You know, like force studies that did not demonstrate anything.
00:06:17.000The way you do those stories as a journalist is you interview the principal investigator and you ask him who to talk to, and he gives you a couple names to talk to who can talk about the study even though it's published, and then you get three interviews, which is enough to justify a page in the magazine, and you get your paycheck.
00:06:33.000So I interviewed the PI, and then I interviewed one of the people on the list of documents that had been leaked to science.
00:06:40.000And that was a former president of the American Heart Association, and she told me she couldn't talk about the study or she'd lose her funding.
00:06:48.000And I said, come on, man, this isn't Lysenko-era Soviet Union.
00:06:52.000People don't lose their funding for talking to a journalist about a diet study.
00:08:05.000Pissed off my fiancee at the time because she thought if she's going to date someone, they should have a better sort of, you know, work efficiency ratio.
00:08:17.000The conclusion was that the only way you would believe that salt causes high blood pressure from the studies that had been done to that point was if God told you so personally.
00:08:27.000So you could ignore all the evidence and all the randomized controlled trials, even the observational evidence, But that's what everyone had done.
00:08:41.000And I had read a long time ago that that was bullshit.
00:08:43.000And that salt is actually an essential mineral, and it's important for your body, and it doesn't cause high blood pressure, and there's a host of other factors that should be considered.
00:08:58.000When you consume salt, you also have to take in water.
00:09:01.000That's why they feed you pretzels and, you know, salty peanuts at bars because you want to take in liquids so that you can maintain the same sodium concentration in your blood because you're...
00:09:13.000The cells, like the chemical reactions that drive your cells, are dependent on the sodium ratio in the cells.
00:09:19.000So if you take in more salt, you're going to drink more fluid, and you're going to have more fluid in your circulation.
00:09:26.000That's going to increase your blood pressure.
00:09:28.000And it does happen in a very short term.
00:09:31.000But the question is, is this a chronic cause of high blood pressure and hypertension?
00:09:37.000And once the researchers decided it was, and these guys are terrible scientists.
00:09:41.000I mean, I hate to say this, but in my first book, Good Calories, Bad Calories, in the epilogue, I point out, I say, you know, I never use the word scientist to describe any of these people doing research, except for a few specific examples, because they don't really understand what science is and how to do it.
00:09:57.000And they weren't, to their defense, they just were never taught how to be scientists.
00:10:01.000They were like physicians and scientists.
00:10:04.000Nutritionists who, you know, had a sloppy scientific training and they thought it was easy and you get a hypothesis and you confirm the hypothesis.
00:10:11.000And when they didn't confirm it, they thought it must be true anyway.
00:10:15.000And then you find the data when people talk about cherry picking.
00:10:18.000That means you find the data that does sort of confirm and you ignore the rest.
00:10:31.000And while I was doing that, this Walter Matthau character took credit not just for getting Americans to eat less salt, putting us on this low-salt diet, he took credit for getting us on the low-fat diet that we were all eating in the 90s.
00:10:45.000And I got off the phone with them, called my editor of science, and I said, when I'm done writing about salt, I'm going to write about fat.
00:10:51.000I have no idea what the story is, but this guy's clearly one of the five worst scientists I've ever interviewed in my life.
00:10:58.000And everything I learned in my physics period was that bad scientists never get the right answer.
00:11:05.000So I spent a year doing an investigation for the journal Science on dietary fat.
00:11:19.000You've got to do that to get the right answer.
00:11:21.000And that's why so much journalism is so shallow, is because if you're going to put in the time you get paid for, all you can do is a shallow job.
00:11:31.000I actually had corporate jobs that allowed me...
00:11:34.000You know, like writing speeches and press releases for IBM that, you know, I really hated doing, but that paid well.
00:11:41.000Like, that was my corporate work, so I could do the pro bono stuff I cared about.
00:11:45.000Anyway, that story was the same, unless God told you personally.
00:11:50.000So, I end up doing this cover story for the New York Times Magazine called What If It's All Been a Big Fat Lie, which came out July 2002. It was probably...
00:12:01.000One of the top five most controversial articles they ever ran.
00:12:05.000And the idea was, I wanted to see what caused the obesity epidemic.
00:12:09.000That was what I pitched to the editor.
00:12:12.000But we had this idea that you get fat from eating dietary fat.
00:12:15.000That was actually the primary logic behind putting the country on low-fat diets.
00:12:20.000They thought it might help heart disease, but they hadn't been able to show it in trials.
00:12:24.000But they just assumed if we ate less fat, we'd lose weight, because fat's denser calories.
00:12:30.000And there was always this competing hypothesis that had been buried and swept aside and ignored and, you know, inhibited, which was that the problem is the carbohydrates, particularly sugar and refined grains.
00:12:43.000And so when I got this cover story, I got a big book advance.
00:12:47.000Finally, I could afford to do the book I wanted.
00:12:58.000And I love it, because people accused me of, like, I was just going to write anything I could find for a paycheck, and I finally got a big paycheck, and so now...
00:13:06.000One of the ideas there that emerged out of my research...
00:13:12.000So even when I wrote the 2002 piece, I thought that we got fat because we ate too much.
00:13:16.000You know, there's a line in that article, obesity, of course, is caused by consuming too many calories, more calories than we consume.
00:13:25.000By the time I was done with this book, I thought that was one of the most inane scientific ideas that had ever come along.
00:13:31.000I mean, it's almost incomprehensible to me.
00:13:33.000Even though I know exactly the history of the idea and where it came from and why we believed it, it's just crazy naive.
00:13:40.000So that's the one that I get the feedback on.
00:13:45.000Because I'm out there saying, so 99% of obesity researchers and nutritionists and all our public health policy is based fundamentally on this concept that we get fat because we eat too much or we're too sedentary.
00:13:59.000And what I was saying was not only is that naive and meaningless, it's a description, it's not an explanation, and we could go into that.
00:14:08.000Clearly obesity is a hormonal metabolic defect, and in fact the best scientists of the world prior to World War II, the best, far and away the best medical science was done in Germany and Austria, in Europe.
00:14:18.000Like the U.S. was a backwater of medical science until post-war.
00:14:22.000It was a backwater of virtually all science.
00:14:26.000And these guys had concluded that obesity had to be a metabolic hormonal defect.
00:14:31.000But the American doctors were saying, oh man, saying obesity is hormonal is an excuse for fat people to not eat in moderation and run marathons like a saline people do.
00:14:43.000And what I did is I brought that hypothesis sort of—it vanished with the war, literally evaporated with the war.
00:14:50.000The German-Austrian medical community evaporated.
00:14:52.000We wanted nothing to do with these researchers.
00:14:55.000The Ivy League universities had policies in place to keep from being overrun by Jewish academicians from Europe.
00:15:02.000So in physics, we embraced them because we had bombs to build and a Cold War to fight.
00:15:06.000But in medicine and public health, we wanted nothing to do with them.
00:15:12.000And post-war, you get this creation of basically obesity research created de novo by these young doctors who have no scientific training, who are lean, who hate the Germans.
00:15:25.000So they're not going to quote the German literature, even if they read it.
00:15:40.000By the 1960s, the field is dominated by psychologists and psychiatrists who are studying ways to get obese people to just stop eating so damn much.
00:15:50.000They didn't try to make them exercise back then.
00:15:52.000That was a kind of torture they would push later.
00:15:55.000So this was the thing I get feedback on.
00:15:57.000This is where I'm saying, you know, the entire medical, nutritional, obesity, diabetes dogma is based on just a bad idea.
00:16:11.000And, you know, who's going to accept that coming from a journalist?
00:16:15.000So the answer is either, you know, I'm an idiot or I'm self-interested and I'm only making this up to get a paycheck or, you know, I'm just wrong.
00:16:25.000When you see what's going on now where it's pretty much common knowledge that sugar is terrible for you and that added sugar is a huge factor in diabetes and hypertension and heart disease and obesity and it's pretty much across the board now.
00:16:47.000Even though there are public health organizations that are now saying, you know, got to cut back on the sugar and putting limits on sugar consumption, the logic is still that it's just empty calories.
00:17:06.000Because this is fascinating to me because I understand that there must be a guy like you who does what's kind of ridiculous and spends nine months on six weeks worth of pay and does that kind of shit because otherwise once an idea is clearly established and gets repeated like salt causes hypertension I mean,
00:17:23.000goddammit, if you ask the average person on the street, hey, does salt cause high blood pressure?
00:17:33.000They don't really look into it very far other than maybe they read something somewhere at one point in time and then they just decide it's dogma.
00:17:51.000It's sort of when you live in a community, in an institution where everybody believes exactly what you do.
00:17:56.000And so the people you respect, I mean, think about it.
00:17:59.000The people you respect are the people who think like you do, who agree with you on the important points because you think, oh, they're smart.
00:18:22.000So I'm going to look at the data and see what it says.
00:18:24.000And now you try to convince You're friends that they're wrong, and now you're the heretic, and you're the one who's saying, and you know, you're getting in arguments with people, and they make people uncomfortable because you're trying to get them to change their minds about something they all believe.
00:18:39.000And they've all been, you know, they're successful, they're promoted, they're leaders in their field because they believed this, and now you're telling them it's that.
00:18:51.000But the this just keeps going and going and going, and even to the point...
00:18:55.000I mean, just when my sugar book came out, there's a book called The Secret Life of Fat, written by a PhD, and it's...
00:19:04.000It's as though everything I've done in the past 15 years just was never done.
00:19:08.000Like somehow she managed to do an entire book on dietary fat where if anyone said to her, talk to Taubes, even if he's wrong, his ideas are worth hearing because they're provocative and interesting.
00:19:57.000So we're definitely winning the sugar battle.
00:19:59.000So in sugar, even though the official word is it's empty calories, we just have to consume less because they have this dogma that obesity is caused by consuming too many calories.
00:20:10.000So the way that a food influences your body mass is through its caloric content or how much of those calories you digest and absorb because if it's got fiber, you'll excrete some.
00:20:24.000If a calorie is a calorie, then the worst you could say about sugar is that it's empty calories.
00:20:28.000It's got no vitamins and minerals, micronutrients attached, and so we consume too much of it.
00:20:33.000People say it's the low-hanging fruit.
00:20:36.000So it's not that it's uniquely toxic, because if it's uniquely toxic, if it actually causes disease, and we could talk about clearly what I'm saying it causes, Then a calorie isn't a calorie.
00:20:47.000When you started doing this research and you started writing this book, The Case Against Sugar, when this was all unfolding in front of you, were you shocked?
00:20:58.000I mean, is this something that you were saying, how am I, a guy who got a C plus and a C minus, sorry.
00:21:13.000Okay, so I understood why, but it is weird, because again, you know, sometimes I was in Washington on my book tour, and I had dinner with the former chief science medical officer of the American Diabetes Association.
00:21:27.000It's a very, you know, influential, high-ranking, successful man.
00:21:31.000He's completely convinced that I'm wrong.
00:21:34.000And I said, but you believe this thing that obesity is caused by eating too much, and you have no idea why you believe it.
00:21:40.000So I can tell you exactly the history of that belief.
00:21:44.000Just like if we were talking about relativity, we could go back to Einstein, and you would know about Einstein.
00:21:50.000And even if we were talking quantum physics, we'd go back to Heisenberg and Schrodinger and, you know, Bohr, and you'd know about them.
00:21:56.000But this belief that you're fundamentally arguing is right, you don't understand where it comes from, and I can tell you that.
00:22:03.000And I'm going to give you the documents.
00:22:04.000I'm going to give you the papers where it out-competes the hormonal metabolic idea.
00:22:08.000And I'm going to give you the competing hypothesis that you didn't even know existed until you and I talked.
00:22:30.000Jesus, you know, I never thought of that.
00:22:31.000Let me, at least have, let me read these and get back to you, is what you want him to do.
00:22:36.000The problem, of course, is that if he agrees to this, and then he agrees that you're correct, everything that he's been saying up until now has been bullshit, and he's been misleading people.
00:22:57.000Actually, when I was growing up, the estimate was 5% of the scientific community actually does good science, and the other 95% are sort of the chaff out of which you've got to get the wheat.
00:23:11.000I used to joke, imagine the American Heart Association writing the press release to say, like, we were wrong about putting everybody on a low-fat diet, and it was a mistake, and we're sorry, and we apologize, and maybe we killed some of your relatives prematurely, maybe the reason you're fat and diabetic now is because of our advice,
00:23:34.000Public health, it's just they can't do it.
00:23:36.000It's an untenable, I mean, I'll say the same thing.
00:23:39.000If I'm wrong in my book, I used to have this argument with my co-founder of this nutrition science initiative, this not-for-profit, and I'd say, you know what I'm saying?
00:23:48.000If I'm wrong in the major arguments in this book, I mean, clearly I'm going to be wrong in some of the minor ones and, you know, Chip away here and their bad scholarship that I should have triple checked.
00:23:58.000But if I'm wrong in the major arguments, I need a new line of work because I can't trust my judgment.
00:24:03.000And everything I do as an investigative journalist is dependent on me being able to trust my judgment.
00:24:09.000And if I'm wrong about this, like if I'm wrong about energy balance, I got to go sell shoes.
00:24:27.000Well, I was asking you, first of all, what is it like to have this understanding that all of what's being told to the American people is wrong, and then you having this conversation with this guy.
00:24:53.000First of all, I'm an obsessive researcher.
00:24:56.000As you know, the 145 people I interviewed for the fat story for one magazine article, I just keep asking questions and probing and probing until every...
00:25:05.000I also don't like writing, so it's a great research.
00:25:09.000But when I started this in 2002 and I got the money to do the book, the internet had come along.
00:25:14.000And the internet made it possible to find every single primary source going back to the 19th century.
00:25:21.000Like now you can almost download them.
00:25:23.000But back then I had researchers, young students in Boston, New York, LA, whose only job was they'd get an email from me with 50 citations.
00:25:32.000And then they'd go to the library and have to find all 50 and Xerox them and then ship them back to me.
00:25:38.000Sometimes entire books from like You know, a 1917 diabetes textbook that I couldn't find or I couldn't buy.
00:25:47.000And used bookstores had put their catalogs online.
00:25:52.000So you could find all the books and, you know, some 1947 obesity conference.
00:25:59.000The library that has it doesn't see any purpose for that anymore, so they basically give it to the local bookstore and you can buy it for seven bucks.
00:26:06.000So I was able to recreate the history of obesity research from conference proceedings Where the only people doing research in the field would show up and they would present their findings and then they would do a proceedings of the findings and I could recreate all the thinking in the field and nobody had ever bothered to do it before.
00:26:25.000And it's kind of, if they were good scientists they would have.
00:26:30.000Because they would have been obsessed with where their beliefs came from, and they would have been questioning them, and one of the things they would have done is gone back to do all this to see if some assumption they believe is true is really based on fact.
00:26:43.000But again, they didn't really know what science was.
00:26:46.000They weren't all that curious, is one way to put it.
00:27:20.000Well, and you also rely on, I mean, so they read the review articles.
00:27:24.000And the reviewers, the editors of the journals want to get influential review articles.
00:27:29.000So they ask influential people in the field to do the review articles.
00:27:32.000And those people are very busy, but they're going to do it.
00:27:35.000And they're going to basically, they became influential by believing the conventional wisdom and propagating the conventional wisdom.
00:27:42.000When you have committees do investigations, so every five years you get the dietary, the USDA puts together a committee to reassess the dietary guidelines that they give out.
00:27:53.000So the way that committees are formed, the USDA picks a very influential person, the most influential they get to be the head of the committee, and that's somebody who's believed that conventional wisdom has propagated their whole life.
00:28:06.000And that person picks people they respect To be on the committee, and of course the people they respect are the people who believe what they believe, because they're the ones who seem smart.
00:28:15.000They're not the heretics, they're the believers.
00:28:19.000So you end up with a, you start out just with a natural quest.
00:28:22.000We want to know if the guidelines are correct.
00:28:24.000And through this completely natural human process, you end up staffing the guide, creating a committee that's going to recapitulate the Convention of Wisdom.
00:29:36.000So, again, one of the things I did in the case against sugar is I went back To find the very beginnings of the epidemic in the United States.
00:29:43.000Because if you've got an epidemic, like if we had a Zika epidemic, Ebola, what do you do?
00:29:47.000You don't try to figure out what's causing Ebola by looking at the patients who are getting off the airplane in Houston or showing up in the hospital in New Jersey.
00:29:55.000You go back to Africa where it's densest and where it started and you could follow it to whatever animal got bit by whatever insect in whatever cave.
00:30:04.000And that's a natural process of understanding an epidemic.
00:30:08.000So you go back here, and you go back to the 19th century, and there are hospitals in the United States that, you know, date to pre-1850 or 1864 in the case of Philadelphia Hospital in Pennsylvania, and that their records,
00:30:58.000In Boston, in Mass General Hospital, the leading hospital in the country, in Massachusetts in the 19th century, there were year after year after year where they had zero cases of diabetes.
00:31:08.000And this is a terrible disease without insulin.
00:31:11.000It's not a pleasure with it, but before insulin was discovered, I mean, you go blind, kidney failure, gangrene, amputation.
00:31:21.000Now, there are other reasons to explain the absence.
00:31:24.000I mean, You know, the only people who showed up in hospitals back in the 19th century were poor people, and poor people ate a lot less sugar than rich people.
00:31:33.000And rich people got their own private doctors, so they might not have shown up in the medical records.
00:31:39.000So you've got to always be skeptical of what you think you're learning, because that's what science is.
00:31:45.000But, you know, the point I'm making is I went through the effort to do this one way or the other.
00:31:51.000And that gives me a certain advantage that they don't have.
00:31:55.000And if they're good scientists, regardless of what they believe, they'll say to themselves, geez, you know, I never thought of this.
00:32:08.000So in the U.S. it starts again in the second half of the 18th, 19th century.
00:32:13.000And it starts coincidental with an explosion in sugar consumption, not just in how much sugar we're consuming, but who's consuming it, which is what's fascinating and scary.
00:32:25.000Go back, say, 200 years, 1810, 1815, we were probably eating about five pounds of sugar per capita.
00:33:03.000I mean, again, the wealthy would have desserts.
00:33:06.000And the wealthy were the ones who would get diabetes and obesity and gout back then.
00:33:12.000So sugar has this curve where it goes from being very rare and just sort of the luxury of royalty.
00:33:19.000To, you know, the wealthy using it and then finally with the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and late 18th century and then refining processes are improved and sugar starts to get cheaper and then during the Napoleonic Wars like 1812 when France is cut off from their sugar supply by the English blockades.
00:33:44.000Napoleon says, look, we've got to figure out how to create our own sugar.
00:33:47.000And this clever Frenchman figures out how to get sugar from sugar beets.
00:33:52.000And the beet sugar industry takes off around 1850. And then with the beet sugar industry, you can grow sugar in the northern hemisphere in the temperate climates.
00:34:01.000And you can also grow sugar cane only in tropical climates.
00:34:10.000Meanwhile, you think about all the ways we consume sugar today, so candy, soft drinks, ice cream, chocolate, low-fat milk, low-fat yogurt, none of that existed until 1840. So 1840, you see the start of the candy industry,
00:34:26.000the start of the chocolate industry, the Lindt brothers in Switzerland figure out how to make chocolate bars.
00:34:32.000You can still buy Lindt chocolate today, and it's pretty good actually.
00:34:37.000Ice cream industry starts in the 1840s.
00:34:40.000Soft drinks start in the 1870s with Dr. Pepper, then Coca-Cola, then PepsiCo.
00:35:26.000And no vending machines until the 1930s.
00:35:29.000I love this because I'm a science guy, but in doing my books, you have to become a historian, and you just don't think about this stuff.
00:35:36.000So with the vending machines and the refrigerators, suddenly Coca-Cola and PepsiCo and these start targeting, you know, you start getting six packs and cartons, cases of sodas and big bottles of soda that you could take home,
00:35:52.000put in your refrigerator and drink all day long.
00:36:09.000Because that's one that people think is totally innocuous and actually healthy.
00:36:12.000Yeah, because it's got all that vitamin C. Just explain to people right now that if you're drinking a big-ass glass of orange juice, you might as well be drinking a Pepsi.
00:36:46.000They had all these extra oranges they couldn't sell.
00:36:48.000You know, the oranges all come along in one season, so back then with that refrigeration and cars so you could keep fruits kind of alive for like a year by freezing them, you know, you had all these extra oranges you couldn't sell, so they said, let's get people to turn into orange juice.
00:37:04.000And we'll advertise that the vitamin C is good for them.
00:37:08.000The new nutrition of the 1920s and 1930s was all about vitamin deficiency diseases.
00:37:13.000And so scurvy is caused by the absence of vitamin C and berry buried by vitamin B. And that was the big news.
00:37:20.000So the orange growers started pushing orange juice on us because of its vitamin C content.
00:37:25.000So now we're drinking fruit juices for breakfast every day.
00:37:28.000And then post-World War II, concentrates are created.
00:37:31.000That was actually a defense, you know, World War II program to try and figure out how to create foods that soldiers could take into battle and get their vitamins from it.
00:38:12.000And for the next decade, you can watch the cereal industries have these internal battles where the marketing people are saying, we need a sugar sweetened cereal.
00:39:06.000To sell, so the cereal industry would hire, you know, these brilliant public relations men who would create these characters and then get, you know, Hollywood to create animated TV shows with these characters and then they would always sell the same sugar sweetened cereals.
00:39:25.000And so now we're just, you know, think what happened to kids.
00:39:29.000Okay, so the obese and diabetic people in the world are the ones who started, we all started as children, right?
00:39:37.000You know, 1805, 1810, up to 1850, maybe they see sugar once a week.
00:39:43.000You know, they steal into the country store, and when Uncle Ed is turned the wrong way, they, like, stick their hand in the sugar barrel and lick their fingers and run out.
00:39:52.000By 1960, it's like orange juice, cereal, you know, sugary cereal, sugar on the sugary cereal for breakfast, you know, a Coke for a snack, a candy bar, the same kind of foods for lunch.
00:40:06.000I mean, I bet most Americans didn't go more than three hours without a sugar dose, whereas 150 years earlier, they'd have gone a week between doses.
00:40:17.000And as this happens, you see these explosions in obesity and diabetes that, you know, they're slow to build.
00:40:24.000And I think that can be explained, too, by the fact that mothers pass this on to their kids when the kids are in the womb.
00:40:32.000Is there a difference, how much of a difference is there, if any, between dietary diabetes or diabetes that's directly attributed to diet and genetic?
00:40:42.000Well, again, first of all, there are different types of diabetes.
00:40:45.000Type 1 diabetes, type 2. Yeah, type 1 is the acute form that hits mostly in childhood.
00:41:04.000So people that think that type 1 diabetes, which is something that people I know have, and, well, it's just genetic, it's just something you were born with, that's not necessarily true?
00:41:19.000I mean, it could be, and it could be genetic, but it still has to be triggered, could be triggered by something in the environment.
00:41:25.000So if these people with type 1 diabetes didn't have a poor diet, didn't consume sugar, didn't eat the average American diet, it probably would never manifest itself?
00:41:33.000If they're mothers, maybe even more importantly.
00:42:02.000And the crime is epidemics of obesity and diabetes that happen whenever a population transitions from their traditional diet to a Western diet and lifestyle.
00:42:11.000So it doesn't matter what the population is.
00:42:13.000They could be the Inuit living on caribou and seal meat.
00:42:16.000They could be Maasai living on the blood, milk, Meat from the cattle they herd, they could be agrarian populations, they could be South Pacific Islanders living on coconuts and, you know, pigs.
00:42:30.000Aborigines in Australia, Middle Eastern populations, African populations, European populations, it does not matter.
00:43:28.000In the Natar region of South Africa, in the 18th century, they used to import Indians from India as indentured laborers, effectively slavery, but they call them indentured laborers to work in the sugar plantations.
00:43:45.000And the cane cutters in the sugar plantations, that's one of the most energy intense jobs you can imagine.
00:43:51.000One estimate was they burn 9,000 calories a day.
00:43:54.000And yet these Natal Indians had among the highest rates of diabetes ever seen.
00:44:01.000Ancestors, the population from which they were drawn in India had virtually no diabetes, and the primary difference in their diet was the sugar consumption.
00:44:10.000So you could play this game where you isolate out populations, and what I found is there's no population where you get an obesity and diabetes epidemic where sugar, recent increases in sugar consumption haven't occurred.
00:44:23.000And by recent, it could be 20 years ago, it could be 50 years ago.
00:44:27.000So it's always at the scene of the crime.
00:44:31.000Type 2 diabetes, the common form that associates with excess weight, is fundamentally a disorder of what's called insulin resistance.
00:44:40.000So type 1, your pancreas doesn't secrete enough insulin.
00:44:44.000Type 2, your body is resistant to the insulin that your pancreas secretes.
00:44:50.000So you got to pump, you got to secrete more and more to keep your blood sugar under control and the idea is eventually your pancreas gets exhausted and it can't do it anymore and then you have a deficit of insulin and it looks like the results are pretty much similar to type 1. Insulin resistance is also very closely associated to obesity,
00:45:14.000You could look at these epidemics, obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer's, dementia, basically as manifestations of insulin resistance happening all around the world.
00:45:26.000In different ways, in different people, but they're all related to insulin resistance and insulin.
00:45:32.000And then you ask yourself, what causes insulin resistance?
00:45:35.000So the best researchers in the world who study insulin resistance, the leading hypothesis is that it starts in the liver.
00:45:42.000And it starts in the liver with the conversion, with the accumulation of fats in liver cells.
00:45:49.000And in fact, we also have an epidemic of what's called non-alcoholic fatty liver disease in this country right now.
00:45:55.000It used to be 20, 30 years ago, if you got fatty liver disease and you saw your doctor and you told them you didn't drink, they would just assume you're lying.
00:46:04.000Because clearly alcoholics got fatty liver disease, but suddenly people started showing up who swore they didn't drink, and then kids started showing up with fatty liver disease who clearly didn't drink alcohol.
00:46:16.000So we got this concept, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.
00:46:20.000It's basically indistinguishable from the alcoholic kind.
00:46:23.000And the CDC estimates 40 million Americans have this.
00:46:28.000And if it progresses, it could progress to what's called NASH, which is non-alcoholic stereohepatitis, and eventually to the need for liver transplant.
00:47:24.000And if your liver gets it in a high dose, like say from an apple juice or something...
00:47:30.000It has trouble dealing with that much fructose.
00:47:33.000It never evolved to see a glass of apple juice or a can of Coke's worth of fructose be delivered over the course of 5, 10 minutes, probably even 30 minutes, so it converts it into fat.
00:47:45.000So we have a condition, insulin resistant, that's epidemic worldwide, that's The leading research in the country, I think, is caused by the accumulation of fat in liver cells.
00:47:56.000And we've got a substance, sugar, that's been exploded in use worldwide in which half of it is metabolized in the liver and is converted into fat in liver cells.
00:48:09.000So it's like it's at the scene of the crime in populations and it's at the scene of the crime in The body.
00:48:31.000And then if sugar causes insulin resistance, there are all kinds of downstream effects, including what mothers will do to their children if they are insulin resistant and have high blood sugar when they're pregnant.
00:49:13.000I wouldn't have, by the way, done this if...
00:49:15.000I'm not a fan of debates in science because I don't think they settle things.
00:49:19.000I'm a fan of people getting together and saying, look, you believe this, I believe this, what experiment can we do to find out who's right, not who's the better rhetorician.
00:50:16.000It's a burden on the healthcare system, but it's tremendous for the pharmaceutical industry, right?
00:50:22.000And the physicians and the hospitals that are getting that money.
00:50:25.000So they don't have quite as much motivation as might to stem this tide.
00:50:30.000Because they're profiting from it tremendously.
00:50:32.000Well, also, are they even aware of the causes of it?
00:50:35.000I mean, if your work is so controversial, and there's so many people out there that are disputing it, or disputing this link between sugar and all these horrible diseases, and they're calling it empty calories, is this even something that, in the medical community, where they spend a ridiculously short amount of time in school learning about nutrition?
00:50:53.000Well, thank God for that, because if they learned more, they would learn the wrong thing, right?
00:51:25.000It takes a maniac to go out there and stretch your finances and put yourself in a bad position and really be obsessively chasing this down.
00:51:58.000You know, and I'm like, okay, yeah, sure, I'll take the book, you know, and I can't wait to read it.
00:52:03.000And I'm going to go home and I'm not probably even going to throw the book out because the odds that that's a waste of time for me are enormous.
00:52:14.000When did diabetes first sort of emerge in medical records?
00:52:21.000Well, in medical records, you see it 2,000 years ago in like Hindu medical documents.
00:52:27.000Coincidentally, with the beginning of the sugar industry.
00:52:36.000And even back then, they speculated that it was caused by sugar, although I think for the wrong reasons, because the diabetic urine, you're pissing out a lot of glucose, right?
00:52:45.000Because your body can't handle it, so it's sweet and it'll attract flies.
00:52:48.000And back then, even up until the 17th century, part of classic medical practice was for the physician to have his assistant We're good to go.
00:53:49.000I mean, think about how many of those voted for the current president, for instance.
00:53:53.000I mean, it's just, it's a very, I'm glad to hear it's a lot more than that.
00:53:57.000Well, I am too, because I want to get this out, you know?
00:53:59.000I mean, even if it's just for this one particular subject, which I think is probably the most important subject today, when in terms of health and wellness and just optimizing your existence, cutting out sugar and changing your diet, I think, is one of the most important factors in living a healthier,
00:54:17.000more productive life, and also mental clarity.
00:54:45.000I would get that late afternoon crash, and it was a fucking insulin dump.
00:54:49.000Yeah, I used to say, I don't take naps, they take me.
00:54:53.000You know, like an hour after lunch, and I'd be interviewing some Nobel Prize winner, and I'd have to think of an excuse to get off, because I was falling asleep doing the interview.
00:55:03.000I mean, that doesn't happen to me anymore.
00:55:36.000Like, I would have dessert every now and then, but it wasn't more than a few times a week.
00:55:41.000I wasn't eating candy bars during the day, but I was eating the occasional protein bar that was loaded with sugar that I didn't even think it was.
00:55:49.000So once we got into this diet, to this idea, so one of the things, and this was the second article I read, so is there evidence to support this idea we should be eating a low-fat diet?
00:56:00.000And I recreated the history of that and it was fascinating because once these people got this idea that fat caused heart disease...
00:56:07.000So remember, science is determined by what you can measure.
00:56:09.000So the technology you have tells you what you can measure and what you can measure is what you can ask questions about and then that gives you the answers.
00:56:17.000And if you're a bad scientist, you forget that it's completely limited.
00:57:10.000We just, you know, again, they tested and tested, and this hypothesis kept being failed in the test, but they didn't care because they thought it had to be true.
00:57:19.000And by the 1980s, we lock it in as a dogma.
00:57:23.000And now we have this idea that the healthy way to eat is a low-fat diet, and you start making products where you take the fat out of it.
00:57:30.000And once you take the fat out of something, it doesn't taste all that good.
00:57:35.000I mean, it is fat and some, you know, modest amount of lactose.
00:57:40.000I don't even know if there's lactose in it.
00:57:41.000I should know this stuff because then people say clearly you're not a nutritionist.
00:57:46.000So the candy bars, instead of eating Snickers bars, which is a high-fat, high-sugar thing that we grew up on, you create Cliffs bars and Nature's Whey bars and all these low-fat health food bars that we think are healthy.
00:58:02.000Because they're low in fat, they're loaded with carbs, and they fill them up with sugar.
00:58:06.000And then to this day, I'm wondering, like, should I just let, you know, we have a drawer with these health food bars, and my wife, I'm not the only parent of the family, so my kids aren't tortured by my food beliefs.
00:58:19.000Would they be healthier if they just ate Snickers bars like we did when we were kids?
00:58:37.000They taste good, but they're 19 fucking grams of sugar or something crazy, and it's only like the size of your thumb.
00:58:42.000Yeah, so basically, I don't know what the sugar content is.
00:58:46.000You can probably Google it while we're talking about, you know, regular size Snickers bar.
00:58:50.000It's probably more than 19 grams, but it's also got all that fat in it, which will slow down I found the digestion of the sugar.
00:58:55.000So, a Snickers bar arguably is better for you than some of these really super sugary, what we think, air quotes, are healthy snacks, like trail bars.
00:59:04.000Yeah, and the key word there is arguably.
00:59:07.000Here we go, 20 grams of sugar, and what is that, a Snickers bar?
01:00:25.000A friend just sent me an article today on a European Journal of Clinical Nutrition where they were looking at sugar content of children's diets in Europe.
01:00:34.000And at age one, they were 30% of their calories from sugar.
01:01:21.000I actually gave up dairy, but for a different reason.
01:01:24.000Not because I, for me, it has unfortunate gastrointestinal side effects that my whole family could live without.
01:01:36.000If you go into a low-carb, high-fat diet, which I think is a, you know, certainly those of us should be eating who are predisposed to get fat or diabetic, cheese is a very valuable item of the diet.
01:01:49.000And clearly, like the French and the Swiss and even the Greeks eat enormous amounts of cheese and they live...
01:02:02.000My gut feeling, remember, I focus obsessively on one subject, and it's the carb content, and it's the sugars, and the refined grains, and what's the cause of obesity.
01:02:13.000Raw milk doesn't enter into that discussion.
01:02:16.000What I meant about it is just from the gastrointestinal issues, because a lot of people believe that raw milk with all the natural enzymes in it is easier for your body to process.
01:02:51.000Yeah, I know a lot of people who are on the ketogenic diet that will actually drink heavy cream.
01:02:58.000My friend Kyle, who actually was one of the first people that turned me on to it, Kyle Kingsbury, he carries around this little fucking pint of heavy cream, but he's a savage.
01:03:09.000My former collaborator, Peter Attia, whose internet handle at one point I think was Ketogenic Man, and he used to drink olive oil and cream.
01:03:20.000Well, because you've got to really up the fat content on those diets for a lot of people to get ketonic, not everyone.
01:03:35.000Well, a lot of avocados, a lot of coconut oil.
01:03:39.000I might eat a little bit more protein than I'm supposed to, which unfortunately does convert back to sugar in your body, glucose, but much more easily processed, obviously, than high fructose corn syrup, right?
01:03:54.000Very, very little pastas or grains or breads or anything.
01:03:57.000It's a rare thing that I eat that stuff.
01:04:39.000I'm a premier research scientist that's devoted to a ketogenic diet, and I heard about him from Tim Ferriss' podcast, and I've read some of his work online and listened to some of his lectures and talks.
01:04:51.000And I find it, first of all, as far as appetite suppressing, it's fantastic.
01:04:57.000Once your body starts burning fat, you don't get that weird hunger thing.
01:05:01.000Yeah, that's the thing, because you're just mobilizing your fat and burning it.
01:05:21.000Occasionally, I'll indulge as a rare treat now, but when I was eating it all the time, I would have this two or three hour post-eating thing where that stuff would be gone, it would all be digested, and then I'd be fucking starving in the next hour or so.
01:05:35.000I remember the old joke about You know, Chinese food, right?
01:05:38.000Like, two hours later, you're starving.
01:05:40.000Yeah, I mean, that's really what it is.
01:05:41.000Your body starts craving those carbohydrates, the simple carbs.
01:05:45.000Well, that's the thing, because you're burning the sugar, so the carbs are converted to glucose, you're burning the glucose, you're secreting insulin, and the insulin's telling your fat to hold on to fat.
01:05:55.000This is my theory, anyway, and it's backed up by the evidence.
01:05:58.000So, as the blood sugar starts coming down, Your fat tissue is supposed to release the fat and allow it to come out and be oxidized by the same cells and the mitochondria in your cells in this famous Krebs cycle that we're all supposed to learn in like 11th grade biology and can never remember.
01:06:15.000The Krebs cycle is just as happy to burn fat as carbs.
01:06:22.000It's telling your mitochondria to burn carbs, not fat, and it's telling the fat cells to hold on to fat, and now you've just got a dearth of fuel.
01:06:31.000It's actually telling your lean tissue to hold on to protein.
01:06:35.000So now your blood sugar is coming down, but the insulin is still elevated, and there's no fuels replacing the blood sugar.
01:06:56.000Well, they're constantly grazing because their cells are running out of fuel.
01:06:59.000No matter how much they're eating for breakfast of their low-fat stuff, if their insulin is elevated, their cells are going to want to burn carbs.
01:07:06.000And this is one of the observations you found in the literature in the 1830s.
01:07:09.000There was a Hungarian endocrinologist working at Northwestern University who talked about some of his obese pain.
01:07:16.000He said he had a patient who was an obese laundress who used to eat laundry starch.
01:07:52.000So then if you try a ketogenic diet or low-carb, high-fat diet, whatever you want to call it, you get rid of the carbs and you get enough fat, your insulin comes down, then you get in this natural thing where you eat, you store some of the fat, you're burning fat.
01:08:06.000When you're done burning the fat in your bloodstream, the fat comes out of your cells.
01:08:10.000There's this nice cycle that's supposed to happen.
01:08:12.000You always have enough fuel available that you're not hungry.
01:08:20.000The idea that suddenly I have breakfast, the next thing I know it's 2, 3 in the afternoon, and I'm thinking, maybe I should eat lunch just because I should eat lunch.
01:08:28.000Not because I'm hungry, not because I'm starving.
01:08:31.000And then you eat lunch, you don't fall asleep afterwards.
01:08:44.000Now, I should point out that some high-level athletes are having an issue with this.
01:08:49.000Some people that are used to burning off massive amounts of calories through the day, like mixed martial artists and things along those lines, some of them adapt to it fine and are having a great time with it and find it easier to make weight and easier to train.
01:09:01.000But other ones say that they have just a lack of that extra gear in training.
01:09:06.000Now, I don't know if they're doing it Some of the earliest studies ever done on this was by a guy named Steve Finney, who's co-author of two books,
01:09:24.000Living in the art and science of low-carb performance.
01:09:27.000And Steve, back in the late 70s, early 80s, he was at, I think it's Vermont, where there was a team of people studying, doing some interesting diet experiments.
01:09:35.000And he put professional bike racers on ketogenic diets and measured their performance versus their sort of traditional high-carb diets.
01:09:45.000And he keto-adapted them, so they were fully adapted to burning fat for fuel.
01:09:50.000And from his studies, basically, he said they're more efficient until they have to push that last sort of 5% out, like up a mountain or a marathon or getting to Heartbreak Hill in the Boston Marathon, and then they lose that extra push.
01:10:07.000See, that's what makes sense, because that extra push is all what mixed martial arts is about.
01:10:13.000I mean, in MMA, it's all about exploding when you're tired.
01:10:16.000It's all about being able to manage your endurance over the course of five minutes, but figure out these sprint times and being able to squeeze the most out of those to break your opponent.
01:10:33.000It's funny, carb loading, when it was first...
01:10:36.000Sort of perfected was developed in Scandinavia back in the 50s, I think it was, by the coaches of cross-country skiers, which is incredibly physically burdensome.
01:10:52.000And they trained all year long on low-carb diets.
01:10:56.000So they would train on low-carb diets, and the idea was they would eat the plate of pasta the day before the race, and they would maximize their glycogen stores in their liver and in their cells, and then when they needed it, it was there.
01:11:25.000And then this idea that carbs are heart-healthy came in and they just took over the world.
01:11:29.000But my area of expertise is by no means like high-performance athletes.
01:11:35.000There are people out there who could talk to you for, you know, and I'll recommend some when we get off.
01:11:43.000You know, it's interesting because even when you read the debates about this stuff, what the high-performance athletes, I see this in like Outside Magazine and Runner's World stuff, so there's this fundamental argument that, look, we don't get fat because we eat too much.
01:11:55.000We get fat because the carbohydrates in our diet cause this hormonal metabolic dysregulation that makes us store calories of fat in our fat cells.
01:12:05.000And that implies that the healthiest diet, for those of us who get fat, are diets absent easily digestible carbs and sugars.
01:12:14.000But if athletes, very high-performing athletes, eat those diets and don't perform better than before, it's not a good diet and therefore all the rest of it is wrong.
01:12:26.000You know, it's sort of what Lance Armstrong needs to win the Tour de France, whatever it is, doesn't tell me a hell of a lot about why, you know, Shirley McClintock weighs 300 pounds and can't lose that weight unless she gives up carbohydrates.
01:12:44.000You know, and all of that gets confounded in these discussions.
01:12:47.000And one of the things I'm constantly doing when I talk about this stuff is saying, you've got to keep your eye on the question.
01:12:53.000Because we were all given different answers to different questions.
01:12:56.000So what's the best diet for winning the Tour de France or MMA fight?
01:13:03.000Probably got a lot of the same themes that I'm talking about.
01:13:07.000But even then, Funny, when sugar came in, beginning around the 1890s, and it was cheap and easily available, and beet sugar was available in Germany, the German army started testing sugar as a performance enhancer, and actually doing sort of trials where they would send troops out with or without sugar for,
01:13:27.00030-day marches and then they would see when they came back which ones had more energy and the ones who ate more sugar had more energy and some mountain climbers started using it.
01:13:37.000Crew coaches started testing it on the crew.
01:13:41.000Like rowing back then was among the most popular sports in the world and so they would give their We're good to go.
01:14:24.000I mean, you must be talking about a very minor killing of the pain.
01:14:26.000Well, also, if you start with populations that never consume sugar, so babies never consume it before, you give them a little sugar, like on day three, you can circumcise them, and they're just tripping.
01:14:56.000It's that it could be a performance enhancing drug.
01:15:00.000That would enhance the performance of athletes at the highest level doesn't mean it doesn't have long-term chronic effects just like any other performance enhancing drug.
01:15:11.000So there's a big difference between people that are like say climbing K2 that needs something to push them forward versus the average person who likes to play racquetball and works a day job and you know and that kind of a diet.
01:15:24.000Yeah, and think about, I mean, the athletic trainers who have been telling you, I mean, the guys you work out with, you know, the lean, muscular guys who never had an ounce of fat in their lives, and they're saying we should all eat carbs or we should all eat sugar because look how well I process it.
01:15:41.000And my argument is like, if you think your body works the same way as your cousin who weighs 300 pounds and the only difference is you exercise more, Like, that's a serious delusion.
01:15:52.000And, you know, we're different people.
01:16:44.000You know, I put on weight relatively easily.
01:16:47.000By the time I was in high school, I weighed 195. When I was playing Division II college football, I could get up to 237. No matter how much I ate, I could not get above 237, and I was three inches shorter than he was.
01:17:12.000In fact, dinners in our family lasted like 18 minutes because it was, you know, my mother put down like, you know, enough for four, eight people and if I didn't eat it fast, my brother, yeah, exactly.
01:17:22.000Start at seven over at 718, no matter what she served.
01:17:28.000When you're looking at all this data and you're putting together this book and you realize that you're going to drop this mind blower on people that We've been essentially misled by almost every established organization when it comes to health and diet.
01:17:47.000How are you feeling when you're about to release this?
01:18:04.000Okay, so the first time this happened...
01:18:06.000So the articles in science, for whatever reason, didn't create all that much controversy.
01:18:13.000I mean, they won awards and reporting awards, and they were in books about the best science writing, but nobody really cared.
01:18:21.000I mean, there was enough controversy about whether this low-fat diet, for instance, was the right thing.
01:18:27.000Then I do this New York Times Magazine article where The idea was to go out and find out that this was pitched in 2001 and our awareness of the obesity epidemic was only about three years old.
01:18:42.000And you could pinpoint it in time, from between the late 1970s to the early 1990s, two surveys that were done.
01:18:49.000And during those two surveys, the prevalence of obesity almost doubled the United States, the percentage of Americans.
01:18:57.000So you'd ask the question, what caused it?
01:19:02.000In the 1960s, the conventional wisdom was that Carbohydrates are uniquely fattening.
01:19:09.000One line I quote in two of my books was the first sentence of a British Journal of Nutrition article in 1963, written by one of the two leading British dieticians, was, every woman knows carbohydrates are fattening.
01:19:22.000And every woman knew this car, you know, bread, pasta, potatoes, rice, beer, sweets, you know, they'd go right to your hips.
01:19:29.000And then we turned them into heart-healthy diet foods by the 1980s.
01:19:33.000And that happened between, was institutionalized between 1977 and 1984. And by 84, like the New York Times health reporters writing her best-selling Diet, you know, health cooking book called the Good Food Book,
01:19:49.000and she's saying, yeah, we used to think carbs are fattening, but now we should eat pasta and bread all the time.
01:19:56.000The other was high fructose corn syrup, which came in in 1977 and had sort of replaced sugar and Pepsi and Coke by 1984. Anyway, as I'm doing that piece, I realize I stumbled upon five studies of the Atkins diet.
01:20:10.000The Atkins diet is what scientists call the anomalous observation.
01:20:15.000What you're always looking for in science is the anomalous observation.
01:20:18.000That's the thing that doesn't fit with any of your beliefs.
01:20:23.000You've got a theory that says this and then you find that.
01:20:28.000And now you've got a way to come up with a better theory because you've got something else you have to explain that your present theory doesn't.
01:20:34.000And it's the anomalous observations that move science forward.
01:20:37.000It's the thing that just doesn't fit with your belief.
01:20:40.000So here's the diet trials where you've got the Atkins diet, high in fat, high in saturated fat, so it should give you heart disease.
01:20:47.000You know, double quarter pounder with cheese, no bun, lobster, Newberg, you know, eggs, bacon, sausage.
01:20:55.000And you're allowed to eat as much as you want.
01:20:58.000Okay, so it's not a calorie-restricted diet.
01:21:02.000As long as you don't eat carbs, you could have eight eggs for breakfast and a rash for bacon and, you know, whole chicken for lunch.
01:21:09.000So the other theory, one theory is that fat is going to cause heart disease and the other theory is that the eat as much as you want, you tell a fat person to eat as much as they want, they're going to get fatter, right?
01:21:18.000Because we think they got fat to begin with because they ate too much.
01:21:22.000And then you compare those people to people you put on an American Heart Association low-fat diet and you tell them to calorie restrict.
01:21:34.000You know, the ice cream scoop size of tuna salad on the lettuce patty thing that we all went through at some point in our life.
01:21:42.000Maybe not you if you were naturally lean.
01:21:44.000Anyway, in all five of these trials, and they'd been done but not published yet, and they'd been presented at conferences, the people on the Atkins diet not only lost more weight than the ones on the calorie-restricted American Heart Association low-fat diet that all American people were supposed to eat,
01:22:02.000so that refutes the eating too much hypothesis, because these guys on the Atkins diet can eat as much as they want, but their heart disease risk factors are better.
01:22:14.000Okay, so they're supposed to die of heart disease.
01:22:17.000You know, you eat the bacon, it clogs your arteries, you fall over dead, but they were healthier.
01:22:23.000So it refutes the heart disease thing too.
01:22:37.000I lead it with this young Harvard endocrinologist, pediatrician who's feeding low-carb diets to his patients at Boston Children's Hospital.
01:22:55.000And then I talk about the Atkins thing down below and how Atkins had gotten pilloried back in the late 60s, early 70s for telling people they could eat these high-fat diets because we thought, you know, and what these studies showed.
01:23:08.000And the editors of the New York Times Magazine said Atkins is the elephant in the living room.
01:23:25.000I read it to my wife, and it's, you know, if the American Medical Association, the American Heart Association, have a find yourself standing naked nightmare in Times Square, excuse me, find yourself standing naked in Times Square nightmare, It's that all the advice they've been giving to the American people about a healthy diet for the last 50 years is wrong,
01:23:45.000and maybe Atkins was right all along, and maybe both.
01:23:49.000And I read it to my wife and I say, they will never run this in a million years.
01:23:53.000And I email it to the editors and they don't change a word.
01:23:58.000And that's the lead of the magazine article.
01:24:00.000And then they put this picture on the cover of the magazine, which is this kind of cheap-looking porterhouse steak.
01:24:06.000They didn't go to, you know, the photographer to make a delicious, you know, and it's got a pat of butter.
01:24:13.000And the headline is, What If It's All Been a Big Fat Lie?
01:24:21.000I knew it was going to be controversial.
01:24:23.000Getting back to your question, I tend to answer long-winded.
01:24:27.000I knew it was going to be controversial.
01:24:30.000I knew it was going to be the most controversial article they'd run since a friend of mine ten years earlier had written an article about how recycling is a complete waste of time and money.
01:24:40.000I had no idea what was going to happen.
01:24:59.000And then he taught me how to box, and we used to, you know, box in the gym, and I would do this sort of Muhammad Ali imitation, because that's what I thought boxing was in 1977. Then he actually had an amateur fight in Lomas in March 1977, and got killed in the fight.
01:25:17.000And of course, me being young and stupid, it's not enough to prevent me from Continuing, so when I moved to New York...
01:26:39.000And some really, like, Ryan O'Neal's buddies with Norman would show up once every three months, and there was a guy who ran, I forget, it was a porn magazine that was sold in a brown paper bag.
01:26:51.000He would show up, and then, you know, a half dozen other people, I had this friend, Steve Chow, went on to I'd become Barry Diller's right-hand man, and yeah, Hollywood, who had actually been the valedictorian of our class at Harvard.
01:27:06.000And we would spar, and I enjoyed it, and I got into it, and it was getting the crap beat out of me first.
01:27:15.000But eventually, I kept doing it, and then I decided to fight in the New York Golden Gloves and write about it for Playboy.
01:27:21.000So the piece was called Life is a Standing Eight Count.
01:27:26.000I'm sorry, but this is after your friend died.
01:27:42.000I won the first one because the Irish cop I was fighting got tired of punching me, and I finally thought if I hit him back, maybe that'll slow him down.
01:28:57.000Like, Norman's sitting there watching me get the crap beat out of me.
01:29:00.000And my friend, who was a photographer, didn't have time to get her lens cap off, basically.
01:29:07.000So I have a photo that ran in Playboy with the article, which was, you know, you could see ring level and you see these two big feet sticking up and this body prone on the ring, you know.
01:29:40.000A little bit of, like, these roundhouses whizzing by my head.
01:29:45.000And I had this tendency I would, like, pull my head back, so I'm pulling my hands down instead of...
01:29:50.000Terrible instinct, but natural for some strange reason.
01:29:52.000It's very difficult to teach people to not do the worst thing.
01:29:56.000Yeah, and you know, if my career had lasted past that fight, my very good coach would have broken it out and he would have said, don't ever do that again.
01:30:04.000Anyway, my memory is I'm sitting outside the ring and a doctor is saying to me, do you know what your name is?
01:30:12.000So there's a period in my life where I was clearly conscious, but I have no memory of it.
01:30:17.000Um, then they, they make you go to the hospital afterwards to make sure you're not going to die overnight.
01:30:22.000And I was in the emergency room and there was a guy next to me who had had a motorcycle accident and a cab had cut him off.
01:30:30.000And he had the same, we were talking, he was about my age, Hispanic.
01:30:34.000And he, um, you know, this thing where there's You know, the way you say the next thing I remember.
01:31:47.000So, you know, friends are writing articles about me.
01:31:52.000You know, one woman journalist in Boston who used to be a good friend who thought I was one of the five best...
01:32:00.000Writers in the country, science journalists in the country, until I wrote a piece that came to a different conclusion than a book she had written on obesity.
01:32:08.000And the headline in Newsweek was, it's not the carbs, stupid.
01:32:13.000The Center for Science and the Public Interest did a piece called Big Fat Lies, cover of their newspaper, basically explaining how I had screwed up on everything I had screwed up.
01:32:24.000A journalist who had written a book on obesity did a piece for Reason magazine about all the ways I had screwed up.
01:32:31.000Luckily, I hadn't screwed up in any of them, so I could get back at them and take them down.
01:32:35.000But when you did get back at them and take them down, you're talking about a time where, I mean, what year was this?
01:33:04.000They didn't care because they put it online.
01:33:07.000So if Albus is going to write for him for free, let him write for him for free.
01:33:10.000And more controversy brings more readers.
01:33:13.000So I... I spent the weekend, I remember I wrote like a 9,000 word response and there's still some great stuff in there where, you know, even the very end of this thing, I was pointing out every way this guy had screwed up, like taken down my article by saying I made mistakes when he was the one making mistakes and the last line was something like,
01:33:32.000he had called my editor and Who had now bought this book for a lot of money.
01:33:37.000He had called my editor, I think he used the last name, he called him Richard Siegel or something.
01:33:42.000So the last line of the book was in just the final word.
01:33:46.000My editor's name is not Richard Siegel, it's John, period.
01:34:25.000Think about the hundreds of thousands or maybe even millions of people that have read articles from these people that gave them poor advice, and that advice adversely affected their health directly.
01:36:05.000Afterwards, I start doing this book, and now I'm going to interview hundreds more people, and you would expect that a lot of the scientists aren't going to talk to me, because they're going to be so mad at me about this article, but most of them actually were good.
01:36:17.000There was one scientist I wanted to talk to specifically, because a guy I was talking to said he hated your article.
01:36:25.000So I sent him an email, and I said, you know, I'd like to interview you.
01:36:29.000He thought the article was total crap, and I'd like to know why, because if it was, I want to make sure I don't make those mistakes again.
01:36:36.000And he said, sure, as long as you make sure you check on my quotes, because I don't trust you to get my quotes right, because that was another story that was going around at the time.
01:36:45.000And two weeks later, we get on the phone, and he says, you know, I've got to apologize.
01:36:54.000When I read your article, I was so pissed off by the title, what if it's all been a big fat lie and you're holier than thou, smarter than we are attitude, that I never actually thought deeply about what you were saying.
01:37:11.000Now that I've read it again, and context is everything in these things.
01:37:16.000And I notice that when I lecture, so I give a lot of lectures.
01:37:19.000I talk grand rounds in medical schools.
01:37:21.000If somebody introduces me to a room full of doctors, as this is a very well-respected journalist, he's won all these awards, including these influential public health awards, he's written this incredibly thoughtful, provoking book.
01:37:34.000And we managed to get them here to give you the arguments.
01:37:39.000Doctors will be completely receptive to everything I say.
01:37:42.000I've also had people introduce me as, yeah, here's this guy Taubes.
01:37:46.000He says everything we say is wrong and he's going to give a lecture.
01:37:50.000And now it's like they're tuned out from day one.
01:37:53.000From the moment I open my mouth, they're looking for reasons not to believe a word I said.
01:38:07.000By making this article as controversial as it could, with putting Atkins in the lead, and Porterhouse steak on the cover, and what if it's all been a big, fat lie?
01:38:16.000And I actually wasn't calling it a lie.
01:38:18.000There's a lot of mistaken assumptions, a lot of bad science, but nobody lied.
01:38:33.000It made it exceedingly controversial, but it turned a lot of people off because they were being accused of things they didn't want to think of themselves, especially the lie.
01:38:44.000Well, perhaps them initially, but over the course of time, it's got a lot of support behind it now by so many people.
01:38:52.000You've been recommended to me by at least a half a dozen people that I deeply respect.
01:39:06.000Two things that, you know, when I talk to my colleagues about this, I say it's like you're playing in a poker game with a thousand people in the establishment, and they cheat because they all talk to each other, and they share cards, and they show each other what they get,
01:39:22.000and they tell them what they're going to bet.
01:39:31.000And the best hand is you shift your diet, you get rid of the carbs and you replace them with fat and it does remarkable things to most people, not all.
01:40:08.000Diet book author, I think one of the smartest doctors out there.
01:40:11.000Whatever he says, it's always worth listening to.
01:40:14.000He believes that when people fail on the diet, it doesn't matter what age they are, what sex they are, when the diet doesn't return them to a relatively healthy weight, he believes it's because they're not conforming to the diet.
01:40:35.000So, you know, maybe they're eating too many nuts and there's carbs in nuts, or maybe they're lying to him about what they're doing, or they're still having the occasional sweet, and clearly there are people...
01:40:47.000By compromise, I mean, you've been hearing so long that fat is bad for you.
01:40:51.000I'm sure I'm going to restrict sugar and grain and starches, but I'm also going to restrict fat.
01:40:57.000Now you're eating skinless chicken breasts with green vegetables, and you're not even putting butter on it, and it tastes awful, and nobody's going to stick to that diet anyway.
01:41:07.000And in order to give the skinless chicken breasts some flavor, you've got to marinate it in some sugar marinade.
01:41:14.000So, and the protein, you don't want to eat a high protein diet because you're going to convert the protein to glucose, some of those amino acids, and that's going to raise blood sugar and that could be a problem.
01:41:24.000So, maybe they're just doing it wrong.
01:41:29.000But there are a lot of hormones that influence fat accumulation.
01:41:32.000So this is, remember I said the Germans and Austrians had concluded, maybe I didn't say this, I can't even remember what I, you know, I've been doing this book tour.
01:41:56.000It's like somebody accumulates energy in their fat tissue, they're accumulating energy in their body, which means they're taking in energy more than they expend.
01:42:04.000That's just a description of what happens.
01:43:04.000So estrogen and testosterone both inhibit an enzyme called lipoprotein lipase that, when it's on your fat cells, basically pulls fat out of the circulation and into the cell.
01:43:29.000You secrete less that these Hormones, women go through menopause, they secrete less estrogen, the lipoprotein lipase is upregulated on their fat cells, so you get more of it, so it just starts accumulating fat, no matter how much the woman wants to eat or exercise.
01:43:46.000And this is why they put on fat when they get older.
01:43:49.000I think women are programmed to put on fat when they're pregnant.
01:43:52.000Men are never really programmed to put on fat, but women have a fat accumulation program when they're pregnant, and it sort of kicks in a little bit.
01:44:03.000And so I think historically, when you look at the anecdotal evidence, you know, older women have a much harder time losing excess body fat, even on very calorie, carbohydrate-restricted ketogenic diets.
01:44:16.000And it would be completely understandable.
01:44:19.000And the argument I make is that this would still be the best diet, still be the leanest they could be.
01:44:28.000You know, for all intents and purposes by getting rid of carbs, but it does not mean that it's going to work or it's going to work as much as they want it to because of these other sex hormones and the influence on, you know, body fat as well.
01:44:41.000And perhaps the only way to adjust that would be extreme exercise, right?
01:44:45.000Like they don't have to go crazy CrossFit or start running up hills with weights on or something.
01:45:49.000You can starve an endomorph, you don't turn them into an ectomorph, you turn them into an emaciated endomorph.
01:45:56.000I don't know if it was his metaphor or mine, I forget now, you can't starve a basset hound and turn it into a greyhound, you just end up with an emaciated basset hound.
01:46:06.000So are these genetic factors determined by the environment where their ancestors developed?
01:46:10.000And the environment in the mother's womb and the, you know, and it's not necessarily, like I said, genetic.
01:46:49.000And you couldn't even get anywhere near him.
01:46:51.000I'm like 6'2", and I'll starve to death at 175. But it was in his hands, it was in the shape of his face, he was very narrow, his feet, everything.
01:47:01.000So part of this alternative hypothesis, which I find...
01:47:04.000So, you know, we believe today is, you know, the conventional thinking is...
01:47:10.000How much you eat and exercise drives how much fat you accumulate.
01:47:14.000And the alternative hypothesis is that how much fat you accumulate is very well regulated by the human body, although you can change that regulation by changing the macronutrients.
01:47:24.000So, people who fat tissue doesn't want to accumulate fat, who are constitutionally lean, like your buddy, When they eat a meal, they can't store it as fat temporarily.
01:47:34.000They've got to burn all those calories.
01:47:36.000The way they'd burn it, prior to the 1950s, a clinician studying obesity used to talk about the impulse to physical activity.
01:47:44.000Lance Armstrong eats 1,000 calories of pasta, and his body doesn't want to store it as fat.
01:47:52.000It wants to burn it, so he goes for a three-hour bike ride after lunch.
01:47:56.000Because his body's trying desperately to get rid of those calories and it doesn't want to store him as fat.
01:48:02.000I have the thousand calories of pasta.
01:48:04.000My body's happy storing it as fat and I'm asleep an hour later.
01:48:07.000But I'm not thicker and fatter than Armstrong because I'm asleep.
01:48:12.000I'm asleep because that's the way my body processes the carbs by storing calories.
01:48:17.000But is that a case of nature or nurture?
01:48:23.000No, it's not because the nurture part is how the diet influences.
01:48:28.000So if I have exclusively fat and protein, if I'm eating a ketogenic diet, then I'm minimizing fat accumulation and my body wants to burn more of those calories.
01:48:38.000So I am closer to being a Lance Armstrong.
01:48:42.000So Lance Armstrong can be lean on his high-carb diet.
01:48:46.000I am closer to being Lance Armstrong-like, closest on a diet to absent all carbohydrates.
01:48:53.000But I'm still, you know, now I'm just a bigger individual.
01:49:13.000You know, guys who couldn't make it in Division I. We had kids who went to Harvard because they didn't get scholarships at Holy Cross, so they went, okay, I'll play football for Harvard.
01:50:11.000Maybe they were 6'7", and they only weighed 230 because they weren't being bulked up, so they were playing basketball instead of football.
01:50:18.000I mean, I could imagine ways that that's confusing, but from our perception, if you look just what happened, when I was a kid, In the early 1960s, as far as I know, there was one 300-pounder in the NFL and AFL,
01:50:36.000two different leagues back then, Bob D. I remember his name.
01:50:38.000He played for the Boston Patriots, and his head was small compared to his body, and he was a big, fat guy.
01:55:22.000Okay, so one of the things that happens when you increase insulin, so sugar, the idea is sugar causes insulin resistance, that results in chronic increases in insulin levels.
01:55:30.000So insulin stimulates fat accumulation, but it also stimulates secretion of what's called insulin-like growth hormone, which is similar to growth hormone.
01:55:38.000So the reason we grow is not because growth hormone drives tissues and skeletal muscle to grow, but it drives insulin-like growth factor, which then works on a local level.
01:55:48.000So if you have more insulin in your system, you're going to have more insulin-like growth factor, and it's going to be more bioavailable.
01:55:54.000There's these proteins called binding proteins that float around the bloodstream, and they'll bind to IGF, insulin-like growth factor, and make it so it can't get into cells or can't bind to the receptors.
01:56:10.000As populations become more insulin resistant, you would expect them to grow, to be taller as well as thicker and fatter and more diabetic.
01:56:18.000One of the classic observations, as populations become westernized, they get taller.
01:56:24.000You look at medical records or army records from the Civil War and all the men were like 5'6".
01:56:33.000You know, now clearly the average height has gone up and it's kind of leveled off a bit in the United States, but there's still countries in Europe where it's gotten higher.
01:56:41.000And one of the things that freaks me out is when I go to Europe nowadays and walk around a lot of Scandinavians and I feel petite.
01:56:58.000And now it's just like everyone seems 6'4", 6'5".
01:57:02.000The conventional thinking is they get more calories, they get more protein, you need the protein for the growth and the calories, and that's kind of the explanation.
01:57:12.000But it could be that they get more sugar, and that drives vertical growth as well as horizontal growth.
01:57:19.000Well, that makes sense because don't bodybuilders, like in extreme situations, don't they take insulin in order to gain muscle?
01:57:25.000Yeah, because it'll drive muscle development as well.
01:57:29.000I mean, again, it works as a growth hormone.
01:57:41.000You know, now you're getting out of my area of expertise again.
01:57:44.000But it's funny, when Arnold came over in the 60s, one of the advantages he had, other than massive amounts of steroid consumption, was...
01:57:55.000I forget who his mentor was back then, but they put him on a very low-carb diet because that definitely cuts the fat.
01:58:01.000Again, this is far out of my area of expertise, but you get a bodybuilder and they'll tell you how they oscillate between high-carbs for...
01:58:13.000Development high fat to cut the fat and get down to...
01:58:40.000It's just all about calories, and you get people to exercise enough, you'll turn an obese person, lean, and, you know, I mean, the implication...
01:58:46.000Well, that can happen, but, you know, who the fuck is going to do it the way you would have to do it?
01:58:51.000You would essentially have to starve your body.
01:59:34.000It was about that obesity was a hormonal metabolic disorder.
01:59:38.000He had to deny that a journalist knows something that he doesn't and that the advice he's been giving and what he's been voicing over the years is right.
01:59:55.000He's no more doctor or nutritionist than I am.
02:00:00.000The point is I was looking for ways to debate him, so I found a clip on the internet, one of his lectures, where he was talking about how there was one particular athlete he was training, a bodybuilder, he had to get, you know, maximum cut for the competition,
02:00:19.000And if you cut the carbs preferentially, you do that because you're going to reduce insulin and you're going to mobilize maximum amount of fat and you're going to get the most possible fat out of the fat tissue by doing it.
02:00:30.000It clearly meant he believes what I believe.
02:00:33.000But some people just, you know, you've got to establish that.
02:00:59.000I've been in communication with him at one point in time, and I didn't realize how strongly against this proposition he is, or this concept he is.
02:01:07.000Well, you should get him to do the show.
02:01:10.000I mean, he's a very chatty, talkative guy, and he'll explain it to you, and then you could argue, and we could argue.
02:01:15.000But what does he say about the impact of sugar?
02:01:19.000Does he deny all these things that you're talking about in terms of diabetes?
02:01:23.000We did not say this in the debate, and I would hate to get Alan's position wrong, but if he's implying that obesity is an energy balance problem, it's calories in, calories out, that seemed to be the argument he was defending vociferously when we debated.
02:01:40.000That, in turn, means that the only way that foods can influence your body weight is through their Caloric content.
02:01:48.000And that means sugar is, you know, an empty calorie.
02:01:55.000But that's clearly not true if sugar actually does affect your hormonal state and that affects the way your body processes fat and insulin.
02:02:04.000If he were to believe that, then he would have been conceding that I won the debate.
02:02:43.000I may have blocked it out of my head, but we were debating.
02:02:47.000Again, my argument, obesity, what I thought we were supposed to be debating.
02:02:54.000Was whether or not obesity is caused by consuming too many calories or the macronutrient contents influencing this sort of hormonal metabolic regulation of fat accumulation.
02:03:05.000What we ended up debating was whether or not the people in the audience would rather be trained by Alan Aragon, the physical trainer, exercise physiologist, or Gary Taubes, the journalist.
02:03:20.000It is kind of ridiculous, and it was a bizarre experience, and it was an interesting trip, and you learned your lesson.
02:03:28.000I've had those conversations with people before, and the problem with those conversations is you're taking a very simplistic approach to a very complex scenario.
02:03:37.000If you did work out more and if you did do all these different things, you're going to affect your body and your hormone levels.
02:03:43.000If you start doing deep squats with heavy weights, you start doing deadlifts, you start putting a weight vest on and hiking up hills, you're going to massively affect the way your body produces hormones.
02:05:08.000This is in Novato, north of San Francisco.
02:05:11.000And I got one of the guys in the email afterwards said, and I was explaining that I thought all the benefits of calorie restriction come from carbohydrate restriction because there's a lot of evidence suggesting that what makes it, if it is beneficial, it's because these guys minimize insulin and IGF secretion.
02:05:28.000And you can minimize insulin and IGF by just not eating the carbs, and then you get to fuel the rest of your body, so you get the calories you need, you get the protein you need, you get the fat you need, you just don't eat the thing that stimulates insulin and IGF. And after the lecture, I got an email from a guy in the audience who was part of this society who said,
02:05:55.000And I'm going to experiment to see if maybe there's something to what you say.
02:05:59.000And I'm going to shift over from eating 1,800 calories of like 50% carbs to 1,800 or maybe 2,500 or who knows how many of protein and fat.
02:06:10.000I had Dr. Rhonda Patrick on the other day, and she was discussing some pretty compelling evidence about the amount of time that you eat during a day, and intermittent fasting, and the importance of only eating within a 10-hour period, from the morning you wake up to the time you stop eating,
02:06:26.000no more than 10 hours, and then the rest of your day, the remaining 14 hours, no food.
02:06:31.000Well, and it's interesting because even...
02:06:34.000But she was talking about the massive benefits of that in terms of gaining and lean muscle mass just from doing that, losing body fat just from doing that.
02:06:43.000Yeah, you know, I'm skeptical of everything.
02:06:46.000I try to be as skeptical of my ideas as others, although people say I fail.
02:06:51.000But I haven't read those studies closely.
02:06:55.000I'll get them to you after we get out of here.
02:06:57.000I'll send them to you and send you the actual podcast itself.
02:07:00.000I think you'll find them pretty fascinating.
02:07:01.000Yeah, and the issue is I don't doubt it works.
02:07:05.000I know people who had trouble losing significant weight on low-carb diets and then switched intermittent fasting and broke through their plateaus.
02:07:16.000There's some people I know in the field who I like who think that you might get excessive stress hormone stimulation from the fasting so that the long-term effects may not be as beneficial as a ketogenic diet where you're not...
02:08:49.000So I don't want to make you miss your flight.
02:08:51.000But this is another thing that people can look into once they're done listening to this.
02:08:56.000So anyway, the interesting thing, even the intermittent fasting, the interesting thing is there's two ways to think of it.
02:09:01.000One is, okay, you're eating fewer calories, and that's why it works, right?
02:09:05.000And the other is you're maximizing the amount of time during the day when insulin and IGF are low.
02:09:10.000But not necessarily when you're saying eating fewer calories because that's not necessarily what they're talking about.
02:09:15.000What they're talking about is taking time, allowing your body to process all those nutrients and not using the resources that could be developing muscle and building your body up.
02:09:25.000So that would account for the increase in lean muscle mass simply by following this intermittent fasting program.
02:09:32.000I don't know if you had this experience when you went on the ketogenic diet.
02:09:37.000Because you often read, people say, well, you lose.
02:09:38.000I was looking at a study today that was done, a one-week study done in like 1967, where they lost more protein on the ketogenic diet than a calorie-restricted diet.
02:09:51.000But when I went on this diet, it was interesting.
02:09:53.000My waist size went down and my jacket size went up.
02:09:57.000And I'm probably, my upper body, I mean, my lower body doesn't work because of, you know, cartilage and the knees and You know, the other wonderful things football left me with.
02:10:08.000But, you know, I'm stronger now than I was when I was in college.
02:10:33.000It's a how does your body respond to having more time at low insulin levels, basically, and more time at low IGF levels.
02:10:42.000And I could imagine, even in the low-carb diets when people were prescribing them, 50 years ago, 60 years ago, they used to prescribe a walk before breakfast, which is interesting because that's the time when your insulin levels are lower, so that's the time when you're really mobilizing the most fat from your fat tissue.
02:11:00.000So, in that sense, skipping breakfast, prolonging the amount of time before your first meal in the day, Would actually maximize his time when you're mobilizing fat.
02:11:10.000A lot of people prefer fasting cardio.
02:12:03.000My youngest is not hungry in the morning, and my oldest is, and my youngest at night, like if you put pasta in front of him, he would just keep eating it and eating it and eating it until you finally just say no more, you're going to blow up.
02:12:17.000My oldest in the evening doesn't care.
02:12:24.000Like entirely, not just body types, but timing of their hunger, which has got to be related to insulin secretion, other hormones, you know, biorhythms.
02:12:38.000Yeah, biodiversity is a very important consideration when you're talking about any kind of diet, whether it's a vegan diet, a vegetarian diet, ketogenic diet.
02:12:46.000Everybody's body responds differently to different things.
02:12:49.000But what I'm saying about getting back to the case against sugar is we got obese and diabetic because of the sugar and the processed grains.
02:12:58.000The people who became obese and diabetic...
02:13:02.000Did so because of the sugar and the processed grains.
02:13:05.000In that sense, their bodies all responded the same regardless of what their genotype was.
02:13:13.000And now when you want to get them back from the edge, That's where individual variation plays a role.
02:13:20.000I mean, that guy McDougall who pushes the starch diet, he's got people on his website who swear that they lost 100 pounds eating only potatoes.
02:13:27.000Don't you think though that a lot of people, when you start concentrating on losing weight and concentrating on being healthy and concentrating on your diet, you make a concerted effort sort of across the board.
02:13:38.000So if you just go, I'm only going to eat sweet potatoes and, you know, I'm going to...
02:13:42.000Like, just the very act of considering your diet and being conscientious has an effect.
02:13:51.000One of them is you do consistent things that you don't do.
02:13:56.000So, like, McDougall puts people on a starch diet, and Atkins puts them on a ketogenic diet, and Ornish puts them on a 10% fat, mostly vegetarian diet, and Esaltine is, you know, a low-carb diet, and none of them All of them say don't eat sugar,
02:14:13.000don't drink sodas, don't drink fruit juices, don't eat white bread.
02:14:17.000And they all do it for the same reason because it's going to stimulate insulin.
02:14:20.000And then when they benefit, you don't know if they benefited because they didn't eat meat or they didn't eat...
02:14:28.000You know, gluten or they didn't eat sugar and white bread and, you know.
02:14:33.000So the question then would become, and even if the ones who benefited, like on the McDougal diet, the thing that makes me suspicious is the people always say, I tried Atkins and it didn't work for me.
02:14:47.000Did they try it, lost 60 pounds, and then went back to eating carbs and gained it back and said the diet failed?
02:14:54.000Did they just find it too hard to live without their pastries?
02:14:58.000But once McDougall came along and put them on a potato diet, or did he just tell them to say that because he wants to point out that this works for people that low-carb doesn't?
02:15:24.000And one of the great flaws, I mean, there's tons, if we could talk about the flaws in nutrition research for, you know, another three hours.
02:15:40.000I think, I wouldn't want to get in the ring with you.
02:15:42.000I could see it happening, that exact thing that we discussed earlier about that, you know, you're needing that, like, five minutes of energy to overwhelm your opponent.
02:16:30.000This is a really important subject, and let's just wrap this up here because I just want to thank you very much for writing that book and taking the time To put in that research against probably a lot of people's advice.
02:17:38.000And we got distracted and some people, I don't know, maybe some people just have bad reactions to cutting out all the carbs.
02:17:43.000But for most people, some significant proportion, they give up the carbs, they're healthier.
02:17:48.000And then they can talk about it on the internet and they can share with people and they don't have to live in the same town or go to the same school.
02:17:54.000And so the word gets out and then other people want to be And, you know, even with physicians, it's like I got these doctors saying, you made medicine fun for me again because I can help people.
02:18:05.000And that, too, gets spread around the Internet.
02:18:08.000And, you know, you create clusters and Facebook groups.
02:18:31.000And so you get this kind of revolution.
02:18:33.000It's slow, and it takes time, and there's a lot of resistance.
02:18:39.000And the vegetarian community, they resist it because the implication is That a lot of people will be healthier if they eat animals.
02:18:47.000It's micropollens, you know, eat food, not too much, mostly plants.
02:18:50.000And for the obese, diabetic individuals in the country, which represent virtually 50% of Americans, maybe mostly animals.
02:19:00.000Well, I'm hoping, though, that with...
02:19:01.000I mean, there's been some really significant breakthroughs over the last few years with factory-produced meat that does not involve any animals dying.
02:19:09.000I mean, they can take initial meat from a dead animal and reproduce it in factories.
02:19:13.000And I think we're probably just a couple of years away from mass production or something like that.
02:19:22.000I mean, maybe with what's going on right now and the understanding that people have today versus what they had only five or six years ago, I mean, I think there's probably going to be a market for high-fat meat.
02:20:27.000Some of them just add eggs back to their diet and get rid of the sugar and the crap and find that they're healthier and happier and they feel better.
02:20:35.000That, to me, when you see somebody say, hey, I get it.
02:20:44.000Well, I feel like for people, eggs are the best compromise because you can easily digest them.
02:20:50.000There's very few issues whatsoever with that.
02:20:53.000And again, if you have a yard, you could have your own chickens.
02:20:56.000Well, not only that, you can make it quick.
02:20:59.000I mean, you could scramble four eggs in the morning in almost as much time as it takes to pour cereal into a bowl and get the milk out of the refrigerator.