The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #1058 - Nina Teicholz

00:00:02.000 Three, two, one.

00:00:05.000 Teicholz. 0.91

00:00:06.000 I say it right?

00:00:07.000 That's it.

00:00:07.000 What's up, Nina?

00:00:08.000 How are you?

00:00:08.000 Hi.

00:00:09.000 Good to be here.

00:00:09.000 Thank you.

00:00:10.000 Thanks for doing this.

00:00:10.000 Appreciate it.

00:00:11.000 It's good to be here.

00:00:12.000 Thanks.

00:00:12.000 So, a big fat surprise.

00:00:15.000 What's the big fat surprise?

00:00:17.000 That butter, meat, and cheese do not cause heart disease.

00:00:20.000 That saturated fat doesn't cause heart disease.

00:00:23.000 That fat doesn't make you fat.

00:00:25.000 Yeah.

00:00:25.000 That the low-fat diet doesn't make you healthy.

00:00:28.000 That's my book.

00:00:29.000 Yeah, that's very controversial. 0.99

00:00:31.000 Pull this sucker up real close to you. 1.00

00:00:33.000 Alright, right there? 0.99

00:00:34.000 Yeah, perfect.

00:00:34.000 Beautiful.

00:00:36.000 Very controversial in this day and age.

00:00:39.000 It was even more controversial when the book came out, which was in 2014. But, you know, we've seen an almost complete sea change on this subject, not at the expert level, but, you know, there's a real groundswell in a change of thinking.

00:00:54.000 I think, in part, really triggered by my book, which really laid out all the arguments for how do we come to believe that saturated fat is bad for health?

00:01:03.000 Why do we believe animal fats are bad?

00:01:04.000 Why do we believe they cause heart disease?

00:01:07.000 And really tells that whole story of how we started down this path, believing that fat and cholesterol cause heart disease, make you sick, cause cancer, make you fat.

00:01:19.000 And it's a wild story.

00:01:22.000 It's just an incredible story.

00:01:23.000 The politics, the personalities, it really is a story more about politics than about science.

00:01:28.000 Did you feel vindicated when that New York Times article came out where it showed that the sugar industry had bribed These scientists to lie about data and falsified data that showed that saturated fat was the cause of heart disease instead of sugar?

00:01:41.000 Because that was fairly recently, right?

00:01:43.000 It was after your book.

00:01:44.000 That was.

00:01:44.000 And, you know, that's a small part of the story.

00:01:47.000 I mean, I have documents in my book.

00:01:49.000 There's maybe a hundred different, you know, documents that you can find where...

00:01:59.000 It's amazing how little people know about how much nutrition science is funded by the food industry.

00:02:09.000 And that was one small example where Harvard scientists had received money from the sugar industry.

00:02:15.000 And what this article contended is that that's what I pushed them to blame fat and not sugar for heart disease.

00:02:23.000 I actually don't believe that that's what happened in that particular case for those Harvard scientists in 1950s because I studied them extensively.

00:02:31.000 You know, for my book, I read like, well, it took me nine years and I read like 10,000 scientific papers.

00:02:37.000 So I knew the work of those Harvard scientists.

00:02:40.000 I knew everything they had written.

00:02:41.000 One of them is named Mark Hegstead, who is very influential.

00:02:44.000 And the reality for him and his colleagues was that they truly 100% believe that fat and saturated fat and cholesterol cause heart disease.

00:02:55.000 And they had believed it for more than a decade before the sugar industry came along with that proposition for them.

00:03:02.000 They really believed.

00:03:04.000 Those early scientists were true.

00:03:07.000 They were not corrupt.

00:03:09.000 They were actually not corrupted by industry.

00:03:11.000 They were true believers.

00:03:13.000 And one of the things that my book explores is this phenomenon that happened then, happened today, where scientists, they come to fall in love with their beliefs.

00:03:24.000 You know, they fall in love with their own hypothesis.

00:03:40.000 What scientists are supposed to do, what they're taught to do is to not behave in a human way.

00:03:46.000 They're taught to rigorously distrust their beliefs.

00:03:50.000 They're taught to try to find every way to shoot down their own hypothesis.

00:03:54.000 That's the job of being a scientist.

00:03:56.000 That's why they seem so cold and dispassionate to us mere humans.

00:04:01.000 I think?

00:04:25.000 He and his favorite colleague Ansel Keys, who is from the University of Minnesota, they would actually bully and kind of stomp on scientists who came up with contradictory information.

00:04:37.000 They would actually suppress stuff.

00:04:40.000 And this is still going on today, which is what makes it such an interesting story.

00:04:44.000 I mean...

00:04:45.000 Today, it's the same phenomenon in nutrition science.

00:04:48.000 This is the way nutrition science started, and it's the legacy that continues today, which is that any papers to the contrary, you know, hard to get them published, hard to get them into discussed, hard to get them presented at expert meetings.

00:05:03.000 And it's been driven by people who are really married to their hypothesis about what a healthy diet is.

00:05:12.000 So you feel like what happened was the sugar industry came along and they found these people that already had beliefs that aligned up with what they were trying to sell.

00:05:20.000 Right.

00:05:20.000 So maybe they weren't even so corrupt.

00:05:24.000 Maybe they've said, oh, well, these scientists know more than us.

00:05:27.000 Just pay them to get this research out.

00:05:30.000 You know, you can't blame industries for trying to protect their products.

00:05:34.000 Right.

00:05:35.000 Every industry does it.

00:05:36.000 Well, you can, but...

00:05:37.000 I mean, it's just what industry does.

00:05:39.000 And, you know, there was another story out recently about how sugar industry didn't pursue research they had done that seemed to show that sugar caused cancer.

00:05:48.000 Well, I mean, if you're the sugar industry, like, what is your obligation to...

00:05:53.000 Keep going.

00:05:53.000 I mean, I'm not saying that, you know, they're no angels, but we shouldn't expect corporations to be angels.

00:05:59.000 What you do expect is for your scientists to behave in a principled way, right?

00:06:05.000 That's what we should expect.

00:06:06.000 Yeah, I mean, when it gets to a certain...

00:06:09.000 I think if you look at cigarettes, for instance, in the tobacco industry, there's a large market for something we know kills people.

00:06:18.000 I mean, you don't have to lie about it.

00:06:20.000 You can have a warning on the label, and it still makes billions of dollars a year.

00:06:24.000 Tell everybody, hey, this is definitely going to give you cancer.

00:06:26.000 Keep smoking it.

00:06:27.000 And they'll go, okay.

00:06:28.000 And they'll buy it.

00:06:29.000 They'll keep buying it.

00:06:30.000 So it's not really that...

00:06:33.000 You need to lie about things.

00:06:34.000 You really don't.

00:06:35.000 I mean, people are more than willing, as long as it hits the right buttons and switches in their brain and their receptors, they're more than willing to put their health in danger for some temporary mouth pleasure.

00:06:47.000 Yeah, and this kind of goes to the subject that is, you know, debated in the food world, which is, you know, how much should the government be telling people what to eat?

00:06:55.000 Right.

00:06:55.000 Right?

00:06:56.000 So there are people who say, you know, they believe sugar is like tobacco.

00:07:00.000 If you eat it, you will probably, if you eat a lot of sugar, you are much more likely to get diabetes and heart disease.

00:07:07.000 I mean, I think that's, if you had a lot of refined carbohydrates, or maybe even if you eat just too many carbohydrates, period, you're more likely to get diabetes and heart disease and become obese.

00:07:19.000 But people like it.

00:07:21.000 They do like it, and then there's also people that are on a plant-based diet, like my friend Eddie, who you just met right before you, who's a vegan now.

00:07:29.000 He's been a vegan, did we say a couple years?

00:07:31.000 Three years, I think you said?

00:07:32.000 He has way too many carbohydrates, and he's admitting it and talking about it, not exactly knowing how to fix his cravings and his urges.

00:07:41.000 If you're on a completely plant-based diet, it's really hard.

00:07:45.000 To just go all fats and get the proper amount of unsaturated and unsaturated fats in your diet.

00:07:52.000 Yeah, I mean, so people are on vegan diets for many reasons, and that's their own personal choice.

00:07:57.000 The reality is that There's a large body of rigorous research, by that I mean randomized controlled clinical trials on thousands of people showing that a diet higher in fat and lower in carbohydrates leads to better outcomes in terms of diabetes,

00:08:15.000 obesity, heart disease.

00:08:16.000 Those are the biggies, right?

00:08:18.000 And so lowering carbohydrates is the way to reverse out of those diseases.

00:08:23.000 If you're on a vegan diet, it's just very hard to do that in a low-carb way.

00:08:27.000 What do you eat as your source of protein and fat?

00:08:31.000 There are some plant fats.

00:08:32.000 You can have a lot of coconut oil and avocado, a lot of avocado, but it just becomes hard.

00:08:39.000 What do you put on your plate for dinner every night?

00:08:42.000 If you eat meat, you have a piece of meat.

00:08:46.000 I mean, that used to be just at the center of the dinner plate, but it's hard on a vegan diet.

00:08:51.000 The other thing that's very hard on a vegan diet is staying, you need to be really careful about nutritional supplements, because you cannot get all the nutrients that you need naturally from the foods that you're eating, and also some of those nutrients are not as biodigestible.

00:09:07.000 I mean, your body doesn't absorb them as easily, like iron from spinach is not as absorbable as iron from meat.

00:09:14.000 So it's hard.

00:09:15.000 It's hard to stay healthy on that diet.

00:09:16.000 Yeah, that is the big misconception, right?

00:09:19.000 When you look at the total amount of iron or protein or anything in a plant-based diet, there's the bioavailability of that.

00:09:26.000 Is less.

00:09:27.000 It's less.

00:09:28.000 And people don't understand that.

00:09:29.000 So when people do, like, hold up charts that show, hey, you can get a cup of broccoli, and that has the same amount of protein as a cheeseburger, ooh, no, it doesn't.

00:09:38.000 It really doesn't.

00:09:39.000 It might on paper.

00:09:42.000 But in terms of how your body absorbs it, it's not equal.

00:09:44.000 No.

00:09:45.000 Another example is carrots.

00:09:46.000 They're supposed to give you vitamin A, right?

00:09:48.000 But carrots, they give you a precursor to vitamin A called carotenoids.

00:09:51.000 Can it convert into vitamin A? Not that efficiently.

00:09:54.000 Most people can't convert that efficiently, so they're not getting the kind of vitamin A they need.

00:09:58.000 And what does vitamin A come from?

00:10:01.000 What food sources?

00:10:03.000 You know, I don't know off the top of my head a good source of vitamin A. But it's some sort of animal source?

00:10:08.000 Yeah, it's animal.

00:10:09.000 Let's see.

00:10:09.000 I think you can get pork, vitamin A. Sorry, I should know that.

00:10:14.000 But you can get all the vitamins and minerals and nutrients that you need from animal foods.

00:10:22.000 And we'd have to eat this entire studio full of spinach to get the amount of iron that you need. 0.98

00:10:27.000 And you can get that amount of iron in a...

00:10:32.000 So is that one of the...

00:10:33.000 I'm sorry, keep going.

00:10:34.000 No, the other thing is that in order to get protein, like if you can get your protein from beans, say, you have to get a complete protein, let's say you have beans and rice.

00:10:43.000 But in order to get, you know, let's say 100 grams of protein, you need to eat like 1,000 calories of beans and rice versus, say, a couple hundred calories of meat.

00:10:53.000 Okay, so don't hold me to those numbers, but I'm just telling you, you eat a lot more calories to get the same amount of protein.

00:11:00.000 So for a day's worth of protein, you're saying, obviously you wouldn't want 100 grams of protein in a single serving, but for a day's worth of protein, you're probably going to eat an exorbitant amount of beans and rice.

00:11:10.000 Right.

00:11:11.000 Or broccoli or whatever the hell else you're trying to eat.

00:11:14.000 Iron is a big one, right?

00:11:16.000 I know.

00:11:16.000 I have a few friends that are vegan or have been vegan, and that was an issue with them, was iron.

00:11:22.000 Yeah, I mean, I was a vegetarian for over 25 years.

00:11:25.000 Were you?

00:11:26.000 And I was always anemic.

00:11:27.000 And I took iron pills, and that didn't work.

00:11:30.000 And you just, you know, heme iron, which is the favored kind for absorption, is only available from animal sources, and principally red meat.

00:11:39.000 White meat, like chicken, is relatively poor in nutrients, poor in iron, too.

00:11:45.000 So, you know, the most nutrient-dense food on the planet is liver, which nobody is used to eating anymore, and we all think it's disgusting.

00:11:54.000 I like it.

00:11:55.000 Yeah, I like it too.

00:11:56.000 But, you know, in a grandparent's generation, they had chopped liver or whatever.

00:12:01.000 Liver and onions.

00:12:02.000 And that's very nutrient dense.

00:12:04.000 But we stopped eating it because it's high in cholesterol.

00:12:08.000 So these are the consequences of having, what we did was, this is what my book is about, but it's, you know, we started, starting in 1961, we basically, the American Heart Association was the first organization to say, don't eat saturated fat and cholesterol to avoid a heart attack.

00:12:23.000 And that was based on, at the time, really weak evidence.

00:12:27.000 You know, something called an observational study can show an association, but not causation.

00:12:32.000 And, you know, there were just enormous unintended consequences at the time.

00:12:39.000 So actually, this Harvard scientist, Mark Hegstead, this was, you know, he was one of the people behind this.

00:12:44.000 And he said, We imagine the benefits will be great, and we cannot imagine that there could be any negative consequences, something like that.

00:12:57.000 And this is kind of the fundamental tragedy of any kind of policy, especially when it becomes enshrined by a powerful organization like the American Heart Association or, say, our government.

00:13:11.000 They do what they think.

00:13:12.000 They kind of make a best guess.

00:13:13.000 And they can't imagine what would the unintended consequences be.

00:13:16.000 What would be the unintended consequences of, say, limiting foods with cholesterol in them?

00:13:21.000 Well, not eating liver, not getting iron, eliminating one of the most nutrient-dense foods on the planet from our diets.

00:13:30.000 And so many other things.

00:13:32.000 Egg white omelets.

00:13:33.000 How many egg white omelets have you eaten?

00:13:36.000 Yeah, I'm not into those.

00:13:37.000 But they're real common.

00:13:38.000 As soon as I found out that there's a lot of nutrition in the yolk, and that's like one of the healthiest parts of the egg, I was so confused.

00:13:45.000 I was like, what's the egg white thing then?

00:13:48.000 Why is everybody going with egg whites?

00:13:49.000 Because the yolk is where the cholesterol is, so that's why we stopped eating egg yolks.

00:13:57.000 And that's the yolk is also where all the nutrients are, like including things like lutein, which is for eye health and brain development.

00:14:08.000 I mean, there's all kinds of things and things that are choline, also for brain development that you can really not easy to find.

00:14:14.000 You can't find them easily in plant foods or at all.

00:14:17.000 And they're crucial to human development.

00:14:20.000 So, you know, we eliminated these foods.

00:14:24.000 You know, it's ironic, like the cholesterol, cholesterol is essential to every cell in your body.

00:14:30.000 We make cholesterol, we eat cholesterol, it's part of what, you know, it's a building block for all of our hormones.

00:14:37.000 And, you know, coupled with cholesterol are all the nutrients needed to sustain life.

00:14:41.000 So we eliminated all those foods.

00:14:45.000 I know this, what you're saying, but most people, when they hear that, they're like, no, cholesterol's bad.

00:14:52.000 It gives you a heart attack.

00:14:53.000 My dad is on cholesterol drugs.

00:14:55.000 He's on statins to keep cholesterol out of his body.

00:15:00.000 Yeah, well, you know, it's been like 60 years of all of us, you know, all of us believing that fat and cholesterol are bad for us, right?

00:15:09.000 Believing cholesterol is bad.

00:15:11.000 You know, when I started this, my whole, this journey for me, it was, you know, as I said, vegetarian, been a vegetarian for decades.

00:15:20.000 Hadn't eaten a piece of red meat, hadn't eaten butter for decades, like barely eaten cheese.

00:15:25.000 And did you do it for ideological reasons or health reasons?

00:15:28.000 I wanted to be thin, like all girls. 1.00

00:15:33.000 It started when I was a late teenager, and of course I became fat.

00:15:41.000 I'm much thinner now as a middle-aged woman effortlessly than I was.

00:15:48.000 All through my young adult years, I was like 25 pounds overweight.

00:15:54.000 Because of carbs.

00:15:55.000 Good, because I ate a high-carb diet.

00:15:57.000 As a vegetarian, you're like, okay, you go to the dining hall in college.

00:16:03.000 Don't eat the meat.

00:16:04.000 Don't eat the cheese.

00:16:05.000 Don't eat this.

00:16:06.000 Have a salad.

00:16:07.000 And then you're starving.

00:16:08.000 So then you're like, okay, get the bag of M&M's.

00:16:12.000 And that's what people do.

00:16:13.000 You know, they're starving.

00:16:14.000 You're starving on that diet.

00:16:15.000 What is satiating?

00:16:16.000 What is satiating?

00:16:17.000 Foods are protein and fat.

00:16:19.000 I mean, that's actually been shown in scientific experiments where they put stacks of, in one experiment, they put stacks of like pork chops in front of people and they just said, eat, you know, don't stop eating, don't.

00:16:31.000 And people just could not overeat on that food.

00:16:34.000 You fill up on fat and protein.

00:16:36.000 And they discovered that those macronutrients are uniquely satiating.

00:16:41.000 Whereas carbohydrates, you know, overeating on cookies, crackers, chips.

00:16:46.000 Pasta.

00:16:47.000 Pasta.

00:16:47.000 So easy.

00:16:48.000 A whole box of cereal.

00:16:50.000 I mean, you know, in my vegetarian days, I could eat a box of cereal, no problem.

00:16:54.000 I'll eat a big bowl of pasta on the days that I do cheat, and even though I'm stuffed, I'll still keep eating.

00:17:00.000 I see there's more left.

00:17:02.000 There's more left.

00:17:03.000 No one's going to eat that?

00:17:03.000 I'm eating that.

00:17:04.000 I'll just put it in my bowl and just keep eating.

00:17:08.000 Just your body craves it in some weird way.

00:17:11.000 Well, or alternatively, another physiological explanation is that your body keeps eating because it still hasn't gotten what it needs.

00:17:20.000 It hasn't gotten the nutrients that it actually needs to build the cells.

00:17:28.000 You're not giving it what it needs until you eat the right foods.

00:17:32.000 Is it possible that both things are going on?

00:17:34.000 That your body hasn't gotten what it needs, so there's that craving, but then there's also this incredibly intoxicating carbohydrate thing going on, where as you're eating it in, your sugar levels are getting jacked and you just want to keep going.

00:17:50.000 So what you're talking about, I think, is a little bit more like the glucose roller coaster that happens.

00:17:56.000 And that is part of carb addiction.

00:17:58.000 And what that is, is you eat carbs, really any kind of carbs.

00:18:02.000 So I'm talking about bread, pasta, you know, even healthy whole grain bread, putting little air quotes around healthy.

00:18:11.000 And M&Ms and Snickers bars, whatever.

00:18:15.000 Any of those foods, when you eat them, they're converted in your blood into glucose.

00:18:20.000 Glucose is a simple sugar.

00:18:22.000 It goes around in your blood.

00:18:24.000 And it's like a quick fuel.

00:18:27.000 And your body uses that up.

00:18:28.000 And then when it's gone, you want another hit.

00:18:35.000 Yeah.

00:18:54.000 It's fat.

00:18:55.000 With the fat in your body that you store in your body and also the fat that you eat, right?

00:19:00.000 So you think about like a hybrid car.

00:19:01.000 You can have two fuel sources as a human being.

00:19:04.000 You can either live on glucose or fat.

00:19:08.000 If you've got a healthy metabolism, you can switch back and forth between them, right?

00:19:12.000 So I've trained my body to be a fat burner, right?

00:19:17.000 So I can live off of fat.

00:19:18.000 It's like I can be the electric car.

00:19:20.000 But when I eat, you know, when I eat Carbs, then I can switch over to glucose, but I'm healthy enough to switch back.

00:19:27.000 But people who are unhealthy or just been living on carbs for a really long time, mainly glucose, they can only get their fuel from glucose.

00:19:36.000 And if they don't have glucose, they just bonk.

00:19:38.000 That's why you have long-distance runners who are constantly sucking down those glucose packs and things.

00:19:46.000 They can't switch over to fat to burn their own fat.

00:19:50.000 This is the amazing thing.

00:19:52.000 Like, even an obese person, imagine I were like a 300-pound woman. 1.00

00:19:56.000 What is that?

00:19:58.000 All that fat on me, that is fuel.

00:20:01.000 That is like the miracle of humans to be able to say, it's like having granola bars strapped all over my body, right?

00:20:09.000 I should be able to access that fuel.

00:20:11.000 That's my fuel source.

00:20:12.000 Why do we have fat?

00:20:14.000 Instead, that fuel source becomes a burden.

00:20:16.000 It becomes blocked, and I can't access it because my body doesn't know how to burn my fat.

00:20:22.000 And that's what happens when you live too long, living off of glucose as your only fuel source.

00:20:28.000 You cannot switch over and burn your own fat.

00:20:31.000 It's like living on top of a well and not having a bucket to get yourself a drink of water, and then you die of thirst.

00:20:42.000 That's a crazy way to look at it, that you have granola bars strapped all over your body.

00:20:45.000 But I think that's a good analogy.

00:20:47.000 That's why you have fat.

00:20:49.000 That's why all animals, you know, or mammals have fat because, you know, what do you do when it's at night?

00:20:55.000 You're not eating all night long.

00:20:57.000 You have to have fat on your body, right?

00:20:59.000 You have to live off of something.

00:21:01.000 And that's why humans became really good at storing fat because it meant we could do other things.

00:21:11.000 We're not like chimpanzees who have to eat all day long, right?

00:21:15.000 Or like these people who are fruitarians and proud of living off of fruit.

00:21:19.000 They have to eat all day long.

00:21:23.000 Like, that's what they have to do all day.

00:21:25.000 But we eat nutrient-dense food.

00:21:27.000 Like, we eat meat.

00:21:28.000 That's humans evolved to eat meat.

00:21:30.000 So that's nutrient-dense.

00:21:31.000 So we don't have to eat all day long.

00:21:32.000 So we have time in our hands.

00:21:34.000 We have time in our hands to do podcasts, build the Taj Mahal, do other stuff, because we don't have to eat all the time.

00:21:39.000 And we can live off of our fat if we are eating well.

00:21:42.000 Well, the idea that all that burdens you so, where you have this gut or you have this fat all over your body and it depresses you, that literally changed the point of view and the perspective.

00:21:54.000 Look at that as fuel.

00:21:55.000 You literally have fuel hanging off your body.

00:21:58.000 We're good to go.

00:22:16.000 And he wound up losing not just all the fat, but the crazy thing was his skin receded as well and he didn't have the loose skin that normally is associated with rapid weight loss.

00:22:28.000 So when you get someone who's incredibly obese and they shrink down to a normal sized person, one of the things they have to deal with routinely is these giant flops of skin because your body's used to being so big.

00:22:39.000 But apparently, at least in this one case, this guy, as he had gone through this enormous medically controlled fasting, his skin shrank as well.

00:22:49.000 Like his body ate the fat and recognizes that his body was shrinking.

00:22:55.000 Everything sort of shrank up in proportion.

00:22:58.000 Well, that's amazing.

00:22:59.000 It is amazing, and I wonder if that could be replicated or if he was just very uniquely, had unique genetics or what the circumstances were.

00:23:06.000 Skin varies, right?

00:23:08.000 That's why some people get stretch marks if they just gain a little bit of weight and other people don't.

00:23:12.000 Yeah.

00:23:13.000 I don't know.

00:23:14.000 I mean, I think that this is, you know, one of the theories behind intermittent, I mean, dramatic fasting like that is, just for anybody thinking about it is, you know, that's potentially dangerous.

00:23:25.000 And so it has to be medically supervised.

00:23:27.000 But, you know, people, there's intermittent fasting that people do where they fast for, you know, like I do.

00:23:33.000 I never eat before noon.

00:23:35.000 So, and people do it for a little bit longer periods of time and it sort of induces this state.

00:23:41.000 What it does is it kickstarts this ability for your body to get into fat burning mode and to stay in fat burning mode.

00:23:51.000 And so, you know, what you want to do is you want to, if you have excess fat on your body, you want to live off of that fat.

00:23:59.000 So it'll disappear.

00:24:01.000 Instead of taking in food as your fuel source, you want to live off your fat until it's gone or enough of it is gone that you're happy.

00:24:11.000 And that's what fat burners do. 1.00

00:24:13.000 And the way to do that is to keep carbs low because carbohydrate, the moment you have glucose in your blood system, your body prefers glucose.

00:24:21.000 It's a quick hit of fuel, right?

00:24:23.000 Your body will always prefer glucose.

00:24:25.000 And once you have glucose circulating in your blood, It's like being at a teller's window in a bank.

00:24:33.000 It's like everything shuts down.

00:24:35.000 You cannot get to your fat cells.

00:24:38.000 We're closed now.

00:24:39.000 You can't get to your fat.

00:24:40.000 As long as you've got glucose, that's what you're living off of.

00:24:43.000 Why does your body do that?

00:24:45.000 Because it prefers glucose.

00:24:46.000 Glucose is your preferential fuel source.

00:24:49.000 Just is.

00:24:50.000 I don't know.

00:24:50.000 Because it was rare, you know, you occasionally would come across honey.

00:24:56.000 It's a quick, efficient source of fuel.

00:25:01.000 So your body came to prefer it.

00:25:05.000 So you want to stay away from glucose in order to access your fat.

00:25:10.000 That's just the reality.

00:25:11.000 And so fasting is partly doing that.

00:25:13.000 You can do it for a little while.

00:25:15.000 If you just fast in the mornings, your body has basically fasted all night long.

00:25:19.000 You fast through the morning, and then you're fat burning all that time.

00:25:26.000 Yeah, most people are not aware of that.

00:25:28.000 This is a relatively new situation.

00:25:33.000 I practice it.

00:25:34.000 I do intermittent fasting.

00:25:35.000 I have a 14-hour window at night where I don't eat.

00:25:38.000 And I think the more people do that, the more they'll understand that your body will burn off way more fat if you just live like that, if you just force yourself to only eat inside of a 10-hour window.

00:25:48.000 Yeah.

00:25:49.000 So the key to that is you can't be on a high-carb diet and then fast.

00:25:54.000 If you're used to eating a lot of carbs, your body will still preferentially need that glucose, and you'll still be on that rollercoaster glucose cycle.

00:26:05.000 I don't know.

00:26:06.000 I think it's pretty hard to do fasting when you're on a high-carb diet.

00:26:10.000 And you're right.

00:26:11.000 This is all new science.

00:26:13.000 So if you want a little bit of perspective on this, Really, all this science started in the early 2000s.

00:26:23.000 And it started, so the long history is, so 1961, American Heart Association tells all of America, stop eating fat and cholesterol so you don't die of a heart attack, right?

00:26:35.000 That was, heart disease had risen from pretty much out of nowhere in the early 1900s to become the leading Leading killer in America.

00:26:43.000 President Eisenhower himself is out of the Oval Office for 10 days with a heart attack.

00:26:47.000 I mean, it's just a huge public health emergency.

00:26:50.000 And this Ansel Keys, this professor at University of Minnesota, he came up with this idea that he and Mark Hex did, the one from Harvard, said it was saturated fat and cholesterol that caused heart disease.

00:27:01.000 And so that's when that whole hypothesis was born and it became enshrined as policy.

00:27:08.000 The federal government gets on board in 1980, and that's the beginning of our dietary guidelines.

00:27:13.000 So now the whole country is not only avoiding saturated fat and cholesterol, but also at this point, all of fat is suspect.

00:27:21.000 So it's like just cut back on all fat.

00:27:24.000 And that was a different reason.

00:27:25.000 That's because fat is just denser.

00:27:28.000 It has more calories per gram.

00:27:31.000 It has about nine calories per gram versus protein and carbohydrate, which have about four or five calories per gram.

00:27:41.000 So it was just thought prudent.

00:27:44.000 One way to keep people thin is just to keep their calories down. 1.00

00:27:47.000 And we can do this just by reducing fat, because fat has more calorie-dense.

00:27:50.000 So now we're all on the low-fat diet, and we're avoiding saturated fat and cholesterol.

00:27:55.000 And the government is enormously powerful, as I think you know.

00:28:00.000 And so it's not just that all Americans are given this diet, right?

00:28:04.000 All doctors, everybody, every health professional on the front line, every dietician, every medical doctor, every nutritionist is...

00:28:13.000 Pushing this low-fat diet.

00:28:15.000 But all cattle across the country are bred to be leaner.

00:28:18.000 The whole food supply changes, right?

00:28:20.000 All sorts of low-fat foods appear in the supermarkets.

00:28:24.000 Everything goes low-fat.

00:28:25.000 And people dramatically change the way they eat.

00:28:29.000 I mean, just to give you some numbers, we eat 34% less beef than we did in 1970. We eat about 25% less red meat overall.

00:28:39.000 We eat 79% less whole milk.

00:28:42.000 We eat, you know, I think about 19% less animal fats all together.

00:28:47.000 Eggs are down.

00:28:48.000 I mean, everything, all animal foods came down.

00:28:50.000 And we dramatically increased grains.

00:28:52.000 We eat 30% more carbohydrates overall, 40% more grains, almost 90% more vegetable oils.

00:28:58.000 Because, of course, if you're not eating saturated fats, you're eating polyunsaturated vegetable oils.

00:29:02.000 So we had this huge change in the way Americans ate.

00:29:08.000 And 1980 is also, so that's the beginning of the dietary guidelines for all Americans, it's also the beginning of the obesity epidemic.

00:29:15.000 You see obesity, rates of obesity kind of, it's very slowly, gradually going up until 1980 and then they start, they just take a sharp turn upwards.

00:29:25.000 And they have, you know, barely stopped.

00:29:30.000 So in the early 2000s, what happened?

00:29:34.000 Well, a journalist named Gary Taubes wrote this front page New York Times magazine article saying, you know, what if it's all been a big fat lie?

00:29:45.000 And basically kind of revives the idea of the Atkins diet.

00:29:49.000 And says, you know, Atkins, high fat, low carb.

00:29:53.000 He had promoted his diet from the early 1970s on, but he had really been vilified.

00:29:58.000 And everybody thought he was a quack.

00:30:01.000 And at that point, there really was no science to support him.

00:30:04.000 I mean, he would say, but look, I've healed all these people, and look at all my medical files, go through my drawers, look at my office, and everybody would say, you know, that doesn't matter.

00:30:11.000 There are no clinical trials.

00:30:12.000 There's no science behind your diet.

00:30:15.000 Yeah.

00:30:17.000 But Gary Taubes came out with this article, and then he came out with a book in 2007, and a lot of people read his work.

00:30:26.000 I mean, even though he was vilified and attacked, but he was brave.

00:30:32.000 And a lot of scientists read his work, and a lot of scientists who thought, you know, something is going wrong in America.

00:30:38.000 You know, our obesity is up, type 2 diabetes is up, none of the explanations that we have are working.

00:30:43.000 The low-fat diet's not working for it.

00:30:45.000 Rates continue to rise.

00:30:48.000 And so scientists, typically not in the field of nutrition, because in the field of nutrition, it's considered heresy still to research the low-carb diet still, but But scientists from different disciplines started to do controlled clinical trials on carb reduction,

00:31:09.000 carbohydrate reduction, the opposite of the low-fat diet, the opposite of what the government was telling people to eat.

00:31:14.000 And so they started to develop this body of clinical trial research.

00:31:18.000 And there are now nearly 100 randomized controlled clinical trials on this low-carb diet.

00:31:32.000 Yeah.

00:31:47.000 The diet is also the best way to control your blood glucose for diabetes.

00:31:52.000 There's actually an experiment out now showing that it reverses diabetes, I mean completely eliminates that supposedly incurable disease, and that it improves most of the risk factors for heart disease.

00:32:07.000 So there's a lot of debate over which risk factors best predict your likelihood of getting a heart attack.

00:32:12.000 But for the ones that I think are the most reliable, including your triglycerides, your HDL over your triglyceride ratio, which we don't have to get into that, but for the most reliable heart disease risk factors that best predict heart attacks, the low-carb diet also best improves those risk factors.

00:32:32.000 So what was it that made this so taboo in the food industry or in food research?

00:32:41.000 So like if health researchers today wanted to research low carb diet and you're saying that it's taboo, what's causing that?

00:32:48.000 With all this body of evidence that you discussed, all these clinical trials, obviously not just Gary Taubes, but so many people have talked about this.

00:32:55.000 Dom D'Agostino has done a lot of research on it.

00:32:58.000 It's very public.

00:32:58.000 A lot of people have talked about this.

00:33:00.000 So with all that data, where's the resistance coming from?

00:33:04.000 Well, you know, So if the low-carb diet works and is a healthier diet, that means the government's diet, the low-fat diet, is making people sick and fat, right?

00:33:19.000 So the entire establishment—I'm not just the government— Every university with all their professors who have been endorsing this diet and their entire careers.

00:33:33.000 All of the pharmaceutical companies that depend on lowering your cholesterol.

00:33:38.000 I mean, there's a huge set of interests that are invested for any number of reasons.

00:33:55.000 I think?

00:34:07.000 80% of things on supermarket shelves are basically made out of vegetable oils and grains of some formulation or another and salt.

00:34:14.000 And so, you know, all those companies, all the universities and their entire nutrition departments who've been publishing for 30 years about the benefits of this diet, the federal government and all the medical professional associations who've been prescribing this diet to their patients and their,

00:34:32.000 you know, their publics.

00:34:34.000 The American Heart Association.

00:34:35.000 I mean, it's just, we're in a situation where we just made a gigantic mistake.

00:34:40.000 Wasn't there a recent, very, very controversial and Not just controversial, but very flawed piece by the American Heart Association where they were talking about the dangers of coconut oils and saturated fats and all those researchers that have been studying this stuff over the last decade are like,

00:35:02.000 what are you talking about?

00:35:03.000 Like, where is this coming from?

00:35:04.000 Well, yeah, I mean, right now in the nutrition world, you have people like me who are challenging the status quo, and you have the sort of the conventional wisdom, the defenders of the conventional wisdom, you know, doubling down to defend their position.

00:35:21.000 What was the position of the American Heart Association?

00:35:24.000 Remember, the American Heart Association launched this whole thing in 1961, right?

00:35:28.000 They're the original authors.

00:35:30.000 So just last year, they came out with the Presidential Advisory on Saturated Fats, where they said, please ignore all those confusing, you know, internet crazies.

00:35:43.000 I mean, basically referring to people like me and Gary Taubes, you know, about saturated fats.

00:35:47.000 We just want to set the record straight on saturated fats.

00:35:51.000 And, you know, here's our latest affirmation of our belief that saturated fats cause heart disease.

00:36:01.000 So, I won't get too much into the weeds on it all, but you know, they had, the way that the American Heart Association all these years has sustained their position that saturated fats cause heart disease is they have relied purely on this weak kind of evidence called epidemiology,

00:36:19.000 right?

00:36:21.000 And the government knew that that was not strong enough evidence.

00:36:24.000 Can you explain what that means?

00:36:25.000 Yeah.

00:36:26.000 Okay.

00:36:26.000 So in epidemiology are these big studies where they observe people.

00:36:30.000 They observe like tens of thousands of people for a really long period of time.

00:36:36.000 They just give these people a food frequency questionnaire and they ask you, okay, how many pears did you eat over the last six months?

00:36:42.000 And how many prunes did you eat?

00:36:43.000 And how much of this did you eat?

00:36:44.000 And how much of that?

00:36:45.000 And then you're supposed to write this all down, like as if any of us can remember what we ate yesterday.

00:36:50.000 And you're supposed to make accurate assessments about what you've eaten on, like they asked 250, the most famous one is out of Harvard, asked 250 questions about what you've eaten over the past six months.

00:37:01.000 Now, when they try to go and verify to see if those food frequency questionnaires are accurate, they come up basically as very poor accuracy by their own measures.

00:37:12.000 But still, they use that data, and then they follow these people over 10, 20, 30 years, and they figure out who has a heart attack, who dies, who gets cancer.

00:37:22.000 And then they try to make these correlations.

00:37:24.000 Oh, you know...

00:37:25.000 The people who died tended to eat more meat.

00:37:28.000 So they'll say it's meat that caused...

00:37:31.000 What they can really only say is there's a correlation there.

00:37:34.000 But it's not causation.

00:37:35.000 You can never establish causation, which is to say that meat caused that death.

00:37:40.000 The problem is also that they're eating a lot of things with that meat, like refined carbohydrates.

00:37:45.000 Well, yeah, I mean, like, who eats red meat other than paleo people now?

00:37:50.000 I mean, who's been eating red meat for the last 50 years?

00:37:52.000 The people who ignore everything their doctor tells them, right?

00:37:56.000 So not only are they eating more red meat, but they're eating a lot of other junk.

00:37:59.000 They're probably, you know, they're probably...

00:38:01.000 And this has actually been shown.

00:38:02.000 They don't exercise as much.

00:38:04.000 They tend to not eat as well.

00:38:07.000 They don't visit their doctors.

00:38:08.000 They don't take their pills.

00:38:09.000 I mean, they're not what we would call compliers, right?

00:38:11.000 They're people who just do not listen to the advice they're given.

00:38:15.000 And any number of those things may have caused the heart attacks.

00:38:18.000 We don't know if it's the meat.

00:38:19.000 We don't know if it's the non-complying.

00:38:21.000 We don't know if it's the lack of exercise.

00:38:22.000 We don't know if it's the fact that they, you know, they drink too much beer or whatever.

00:38:26.000 We just don't know.

00:38:27.000 So those kinds of studies, these epidemiological studies, are really just, they only establish associations and they were designed to suggest hypotheses that could then actually be tested in a kind of science called a clinical trial where you actually,

00:38:43.000 you know, you divide a group up into two parts and you get like a drug trial.

00:38:47.000 You give half people the drug and half people placebo.

00:38:50.000 And only that kind of experiment, which is called a controlled experiment, can you actually establish cause and effect.

00:38:56.000 So if you really want to know if meat causes cancer, you've got to do a clinical trial.

00:39:02.000 Give half people, make them just red meat all day long, and the other half can be on the vegan diet and see who gets cancer.

00:39:09.000 See which group gets cancer.

00:39:10.000 Then you're testing.

00:39:11.000 You're doing an actual test.

00:39:14.000 So the government, just back to this idea of saturated fat, and then I'll get back to that presidential advisory.

00:39:22.000 The government actually did do a whole bunch of really big, expensive, randomized controlled clinical trials on saturated fat and cholesterol.

00:39:32.000 They did this on tens of thousands of people.

00:39:35.000 And they tested to see if giving the people who ate saturated fat and cholesterol more of that would die faster or get a heart attack faster.

00:39:44.000 And none of those clinical trials could actually show that the people who ate more saturated fat and cholesterol died at any higher rates of heart disease.

00:39:53.000 What is that music?

00:39:55.000 Is your phone ringing?

00:39:57.000 Your phone going off with music?

00:39:59.000 Yeah, I'm sorry.

00:40:01.000 I was trying to figure out what...

00:40:02.000 I thought maybe the Sonos was kicking off in the background.

00:40:05.000 That's your phone.

00:40:06.000 God, I'm so sorry.

00:40:07.000 You have a musical ringer?

00:40:08.000 It's okay.

00:40:08.000 It was just slightly distracting.

00:40:11.000 So keep going, please.

00:40:12.000 Do you want me to re-say that?

00:40:14.000 Okay, go ahead.

00:40:14.000 Sure.

00:40:15.000 So the government actually did a bunch of randomized controlled clinical trials on tens of thousands of people testing to see if saturated fat and cholesterol caused heart disease.

00:40:25.000 They actually took groups of people and they did this in mental hospitals where they totally controlled what people ate.

00:40:30.000 And half the people they gave, you know, meat, butter, cheese, regular high saturated fat and cholesterol diet, and half the people they, you know, gave them soy-filled cheese and margarine instead of butter and, you know, and soy-filled meat.

00:40:43.000 And in those randomized, those rigorous experiments on tens of thousands of people, They could not show that the people eating the meat and the butter and the cheese died faster from heart disease, died at higher rates from heart disease.

00:40:58.000 In fact, they showed in one of the most famous experiments called the Minnesota Coronary Survey on 9,000 men and women over four and a half years, they found the more the men lowered their cholesterol, the more likely they were to die of a heart attack.

00:41:16.000 So what happened to all those experiments?

00:41:20.000 That particular experiment wasn't published for 16 years.

00:41:24.000 Other experiments I found sat in NIH, National Institute of Health basement, never published, ignored, not included in literature reviews, not included, just ignored or suppressed.

00:41:38.000 It's like out of a crime novel.

00:41:40.000 It's crazy.

00:41:41.000 And so what was the American Heart Association doing?

00:41:45.000 Ignoring all those clinical trials.

00:41:47.000 So the American Heart Association is basically just almost protecting their incorrect statements of the past.

00:41:57.000 That's what they're doing.

00:41:58.000 Right.

00:41:59.000 And so this latest presidential advisory was their attempt, because my book We've listed all these clinical trials.

00:42:10.000 And Gary's book did earlier, too.

00:42:12.000 But people have now been talking about them a lot more and saying, like, how can you ignore that?

00:42:16.000 The government spent a billion dollars, more than a billion dollars, testing this hypothesis and could not show it to be true.

00:42:23.000 And why did you ignore these experiments for all these years?

00:42:29.000 So this presidential advisory was an effort to reckon with those long-ignored clinical trials that had been funded by the government.

00:42:37.000 And they did it in a way that I think was just totally disingenuous.

00:42:41.000 And I wrote a response to it where I kind of rebutted it in Medscape.

00:42:47.000 And I also wrote a piece in the LA Times about it.

00:42:49.000 And, you know, we're at this point where...

00:42:55.000 These esteemed public health institutions are defending their long-standing yet erroneous positions about a healthy diet.

00:43:05.000 And then there's people like me on the outside saying, and not just me, there's now a whole chorus of scientists around the world who are saying the same thing, saying these recommendations are based on flawed evidence, our guidelines are not evidence-based,

00:43:21.000 our national guidelines are not based on good evidence.

00:43:24.000 So there's this growing chorus around the world and I'm one of the voices, I'm probably one of the more prominent voices now, but we just have national guidance that's just not based on good evidence.

00:43:38.000 There's that and then there's a lot of people that get really confused by ideologically based documentaries and things that are trying to push people like What the Health and things along those lines.

00:43:48.000 They're trying to make some really unsubstantiated correlations between meat consumption and diabetes and a bunch of other really weird ones that I've never heard before that I hear repeated by people. 0.99

00:44:02.000 I'm like, wait, where the fuck did you hear that?

00:44:03.000 And they'll tell me without doubt this one documentary. 0.99

00:44:07.000 What the Health.

00:44:08.000 Yeah.

00:44:08.000 Yeah, I wrote a rebuttal to that too, which I'm happy to post if you want on your website.

00:44:13.000 And so, okay, so that's a perfect example.

00:44:16.000 Like, one of them was, you know, eating an egg or two a day is like smoking five cigarettes.

00:44:22.000 Like, crazy stuff, right?

00:44:24.000 So all of that is based on that really weak epidemiological evidence.

00:44:30.000 None of it has been, either it's not been tested in clinical trials or the clinical trials do not support those statements.

00:44:38.000 I went through every single scientific claim in that movie.

00:44:43.000 I was in Greece on holiday and everybody's like, why aren't you at the beach?

00:44:47.000 I'm like, because I have to go through every single scientific claim of what the health and show that it's based on this really weak, unsubstantiated evidence.

00:44:57.000 I think that one of the reasons that they made that film was that We live in very confusing times for science, right?

00:45:09.000 You make a film, you pull at somebody's heartstrings.

00:45:13.000 That film is very scary.

00:45:15.000 You feel like, oh my god, there's poison in the milk, and now there's poison in my pregnant belly, and it's going to be in my child.

00:45:22.000 I mean, it's really effective as a piece of a movie.

00:45:26.000 But isn't it not just irresponsible, but dangerous?

00:45:31.000 Well, I think so.

00:45:32.000 But I think that what you have is people pushing this diet for ideological reasons, as you said.

00:45:39.000 The people behind that film are two very, very well-known animal welfare activists who just don't want animals killed.

00:45:48.000 And Those are their motivations.

00:45:51.000 There are other people who have practices or empires, like Dean Ornish has a whole empire based on his plant-based diet.

00:46:02.000 There's whole business commercial empires that are based on this diet.

00:46:07.000 So there's a whole combination of reasons.

00:46:09.000 Now there's a...

00:46:10.000 Part of the environmental movement really believes that cows cause global warming.

00:46:15.000 So there's like this whole confluence of interests.

00:46:17.000 But if you just look at the health claims, there are no randomized controlled clinical trials.

00:46:26.000 There's no rigorous evidence to show that that diet is safe or can fight disease.

00:46:33.000 And a few of these vegan diet doctors have actually done clinical trials.

00:46:39.000 And where they put people on a vegan diet.

00:46:41.000 And they were overseen by the vegan diet doctor himself.

00:46:45.000 So John McDougall did one of these.

00:46:46.000 He's here in California.

00:46:49.000 So, I mean, the most biased possible person overseeing this experiment, right?

00:46:53.000 He wants his diet to look good.

00:46:56.000 But even then, those studies could not show that the vegans were healthier at the end of a year of eating that diet.

00:47:05.000 So maybe it's a healthy diet, but it cannot be shown to be true.

00:47:09.000 And so it's fine to eat it for whatever reason that you want to, but health, there's no evidence to show that that diet will be a good option for health.

00:47:21.000 Yeah, that is a very hard pill for a lot of people to swallow that, for good reasons, don't want animals to suffer.

00:47:29.000 Right.

00:47:29.000 So they want to live a life where they have as small footprint as possible and don't harm things.

00:47:35.000 One of the things that disturbs people to no end is when I describe the process of collecting green in a combine.

00:47:41.000 And how vultures will circle over fields right after the combine rolls over because those indiscriminate gigantic machines that might be a football field wide are just chewing up everything in front of them, including ground nesting birds and squirrels and rodents and occasionally deer fawns and anything else that gets caught up in the middle of it.

00:48:03.000 Yeah, I mean, the reality is there is no life for any creature without the death of another creature.

00:48:10.000 I mean, life involves death of some kind or another.

00:48:15.000 I mean, monocropping agriculture is devastating to all kinds of life.

00:48:22.000 It's also incredibly unnatural.

00:48:24.000 It's unnatural to see...

00:48:26.000 Thousands of acres that are just soybeans.

00:48:29.000 That is very, very weird.

00:48:31.000 It doesn't exist anywhere in the world other than places where people have forced that into the environment.

00:48:39.000 Yeah.

00:48:39.000 And I think that there's also, you know, a deep discomfort with the fact that, you know, for many people, any sentient person that being human has, you know, that we evolved eating meat, right?

00:48:53.000 We're not herbivores.

00:48:56.000 And so, and we can't really survive that way.

00:48:59.000 In fact, in the early experiments that they did on omnivore animals, they did that on All kinds of omnivore animals in the 19s, 20s, and 30s.

00:49:09.000 And they tried to see if they could get an omnivore animal to survive purely on plants, grains, seeds.

00:49:16.000 And they found it incredibly difficult to keep those, you know, whether rats or pigs, alive.

00:49:22.000 And even when they could keep them alive, they live shorter lives and their offspring live shorter lives.

00:49:29.000 You know, we have, I think, you know, we're ethical beings and so we have a discomfort with killing other animals as well as we should.

00:49:39.000 But, you know, that is why I think humans evolved all kinds of ways of dealing with the need to kill animals, basically just to survive, right?

00:49:51.000 All the rituals, the asking of forgiveness, And of course, when it was your own animals, we all raised, our own people raised, lived on farms and raised their own animals.

00:50:01.000 There were ways, you know, that it was much more sort of a part of the holistic experience of being a farmer and living on the land.

00:50:07.000 And now we're all so devoured.

00:50:08.000 We live in cities.

00:50:09.000 We're thousands of miles away from where animals are raised.

00:50:13.000 We don't really understand anything about it.

00:50:15.000 It seems inhumane and cruel.

00:50:18.000 I think an ethical solution for this is probably going to be this sort of laboratory created meat that seems to be a flourishing industry right now.

00:50:27.000 They're trying to get off the ground with this stuff and it's very expensive at the moment but they foresee that in the next several years it'll be economically feasible for people to buy meat from an animal that never really existed as a living thing.

00:50:44.000 You know, if they can do that and it has all the same nutrients that real animals do, that would be a miracle, right?

00:50:52.000 Yeah, it would be.

00:50:53.000 It's going to be very interesting.

00:50:54.000 But then there's also the issue of what happens if we completely stop eating cows and chickens and pigs and what happens to all those animals?

00:51:06.000 Who manages that?

00:51:07.000 Who stops them from overbreeding?

00:51:10.000 Who controls their population? 0.92

00:51:12.000 How do we do that?

00:51:13.000 We've put ourselves into a corner here.

00:51:15.000 We've put ourselves into a corner if we choose to never eat these animals again.

00:51:20.000 How do we sustain their populations and what financial reward do people get for sustaining them?

00:51:31.000 If they're not going to profit from them whatsoever, they're going to have to spend an exorbitant amount of money or let them roam free, which people, if people don't realize, that's happened in parts of the world.

00:51:42.000 Bulls revert to a very strange form.

00:51:46.000 Wild cows do.

00:51:47.000 In Australia, they call them scrub bulls, meaning, you know, they live in the scrubs, and that these scrub bulls are incredibly aggressive, enormous, weird-looking cow things that they now hunt.

00:52:00.000 And they have a problem with them in certain parts of Australia because they'll break into these confined areas where they have domestic cattle and screw up the genes of these cattle with these wild cattle strains.

00:52:11.000 These bulls are incredibly aggressive and they're just roaming loose.

00:52:15.000 And, you know, is that what we're going to do?

00:52:17.000 We're going to have wild cows everywhere? 1.00

00:52:19.000 Like, okay, so what happens if the wild cow populations get out of control?

00:52:23.000 We're going to bring in lions?

00:52:24.000 Like, what are we doing?

00:52:25.000 I don't know.

00:52:26.000 You know, this is something I'm not an expert in, but I know people, you know, there's a whole school of thought.

00:52:30.000 You really need large animals.

00:52:33.000 You know, they're part of an ecosystem to have a healthy ecosystem on Earth.

00:52:39.000 You know, you need animals as part of, you know, they return manure to the Earth, and that's part of the cycle of life, and that, you know, plants can't survive without them, and you need animals actually as part of a healthy ecosystem.

00:52:53.000 Healthy environment.

00:52:54.000 So, you know, that's not something that I'm an expert in, but I think it is, you know, I guess I would say like the kind of really simplistic, it's just simplistic thinking to say that we should get rid of all animals or, you know, get rid of all domesticated animals.

00:53:09.000 I mean, I just think that's a kind of simplistic vision.

00:53:13.000 I think a lot of we're dealing with simplistic visions, right?

00:53:16.000 We're dealing with An incredibly complicated situation that we find ourselves in in the 21st century.

00:53:20.000 You didn't ask for it.

00:53:21.000 I didn't ask for it.

00:53:22.000 This is just the place we were born and raised.

00:53:24.000 So then we look around at the landscape and we go, okay, what do I have to do for this meat vehicle? 0.86

00:53:32.000 What do I have to do to keep this thing optimized?

00:53:34.000 And then what do I have to do for my mind that I don't feel terrible about eating some horrifying factory-farmed food where I have to watch some PETA video on how this thing was created and realize I'm a monster?

00:53:47.000 And I think that is the motivation for a lot of people to go towards veganism.

00:53:51.000 And I think it's a good motivation.

00:53:55.000 Their motivations are noble and just, if that's what they are.

00:53:59.000 But somewhere along the way, you get roped into an ideology, and you get boxed into these very rigid ways of thinking.

00:54:08.000 And out of those rigid ways of thinking, you get a documentary like What the Health.

00:54:12.000 Yeah.

00:54:14.000 Well, I also think in the same way that we're a divided nation politically, we are a divided nation in terms of the way we think in urban cities, centers, and where I've always lived my whole life, and out in the areas of the country,

00:54:32.000 the red states where they have cattle and the dairy farms are.

00:54:40.000 We actually have no idea For the most part, what goes on there.

00:54:45.000 We just see the horrifying videos shot by some undercover person.

00:54:50.000 One of the things that was surprising and a really beautiful experience for me after my book came out was that I was invited to speak all over the country.

00:55:02.000 I'm your classic flyover person.

00:55:05.000 I grew up in Berkeley, California.

00:55:07.000 And then, I mean, I lived various places in the world, but then I settled in New York City.

00:55:11.000 So, you know, I'm like, as urban, progressive, liberal as they come, and all of a sudden, I'm giving speeches in Oklahoma and Texas and, you know, Illinois.

00:55:22.000 I mean, really, it was, it was really...

00:55:26.000 A shock to me.

00:55:27.000 But it was truly eye-opening.

00:55:30.000 Like, I met all the people who, you know, all these people in the cowboy hats were like, oh, I would have, you know, I would have been one of the ones protesting throwing kale at these guys, you know, in my previous life.

00:55:41.000 And now I'm, you know, standing in front of 800 of them talking about saturated fat, you know, the findings in my book.

00:55:47.000 That's what I, you know, here's what I found.

00:55:49.000 And You know, I can't say that I did any kind of in-depth reporting, but really the kinds of conversations that they're having about how to best take care of their animals, how to treat them humanely, how to raise fewer cattle and then produce more.

00:56:08.000 I mean, they were really just not the demons that I thought they were.

00:56:13.000 And I don't pretend to really know what goes on in animal agriculture across the country, but I just want to say it made me realize In the same way that we have this polarized conversation going on now in the country politically, this is one issue where that plays out.

00:56:30.000 We have such a lack of understanding and real conversation and understanding between those of us on the coast and the people who are actually raising the food in the middle of the country.

00:56:42.000 Yeah, it's very convenient, and I do it too.

00:56:44.000 A lot of people demonize people that live in places that they don't frequent. 0.93

00:56:48.000 And it's really fun to poke fun at the middle of the country and call them a bunch of dummies. 0.88

00:56:52.000 You know the reason why Trump got elected? 0.96

00:56:55.000 And it's okay to do that.

00:56:57.000 I've noticed in my...

00:56:59.000 My colleagues, my, you know, liberal journalists, I mean, there's like the way, the kind of digs that they will take at rural white people is like, you know, we, if that was something about a person of color or a woman,

00:57:15.000 I mean, that person would be kicked out of their jaw. 0.93

00:57:19.000 I mean, it's just amazing the level of sort of the accepted kind of stereotyping that goes on in the media towards these people who...

00:57:27.000 You know, again, that would have been me, except that I just had this experience.

00:57:32.000 Well, people love to, like, pick a side and then use any means necessary to attack the other side.

00:57:39.000 I mean, you see this in not an unrelated way with the way they make fun of Trump's hands.

00:57:44.000 You're mocking this man's body.

00:57:46.000 He didn't do anything to have smaller or bigger hands.

00:57:49.000 Talk about his hair.

00:57:50.000 Talk about his ego.

00:57:51.000 Talk about the preposterous way he behaves.

00:57:53.000 But you're talking about his hands?

00:57:55.000 You're just saying the gloves are off and you can do anything you want.

00:57:58.000 And you can just be a cruel person and body shame this guy for something he has absolutely no control over.

00:58:03.000 There's plenty of things he's done wrong that you can make fun of. 0.99

00:58:07.000 But what about all the other people that are reading about his tiny little hands and they look down at their own tiny little hands and they have to feel like shit? 0.99

00:58:14.000 You know? 0.99

00:58:15.000 That's a weird thing that people do.

00:58:19.000 And you see that To tie it all together, you really see that in the vegan community.

00:58:25.000 There are a lot of vegans who are really kind people.

00:58:28.000 And then there's a lot of vegans that always say that their only reason why they're vegans is because Scientology didn't find them first. 0.99

00:58:33.000 These motherfuckers would have joined the Taliban if they took the wrong flight. 1.00

00:58:37.000 They found a group and they went with it and now they are all in. 1.00

00:58:42.000 And you see that with...

00:58:45.000 A lot of different ideologies, but with vegans, especially online, they're so vicious and the attacks are so ruthless and they gang up.

00:58:55.000 They get together and it's like part of the fun of being on this gang is attacking people that disagree.

00:59:02.000 And I know you've been the victim of this.

00:59:05.000 Yeah, I mean, I think that...

00:59:09.000 You know, I have, I am sympathetic in the sense that people are so worried about their health, and there's so much conflicting information out there, and they don't know how to make sense of it.

00:59:21.000 And then there's a kind of, and we eat, you know, you have to eat two or three times a day.

00:59:26.000 So this thing is staring you in the face.

00:59:28.000 You cannot avoid it.

00:59:33.000 Right.

00:59:55.000 I've become a very lazy cook.

00:59:58.000 But in any case, people become very passionate about their choices, and especially a choice that involves food.

01:00:11.000 It's very hard to, you know, to acknowledge that that may not have been a good choice for you or for your kids.

01:00:21.000 And so, you know, I think it's...

01:00:25.000 But it's, yeah, it's become a kind of, I mean, one of the things that I think has happened is that, you know, we live in post-ideological times, right?

01:00:31.000 I mean, you joke about Scientology, but we live in times where people are no longer members of, not as many people are members of, are religious, right, in any kind of traditional way.

01:00:42.000 And food is one thing that people become religious about.

01:00:46.000 They just do.

01:00:47.000 It's a type of thinking.

01:00:48.000 It's a food movement.

01:00:50.000 And the food movement, I mean, if you follow Michael Pollan and Mark Bittman, they encourage you to think about it as a movement, as something you can join, be a part of, be in a community.

01:01:02.000 Well, that's exactly how the vegans will get it, though.

01:01:04.000 It provides everything that religions did provide for people.

01:01:09.000 But for the vegans, what they do have on their side is that they feel that their lifestyle is not promoting animal cruelty.

01:01:16.000 And that gives them the justification for attacking someone like you.

01:01:21.000 Right.

01:01:22.000 Because...

01:01:22.000 Right.

01:01:23.000 Well, you know, I try to just stick to...

01:01:27.000 I try to really stick to the science on what makes people healthy.

01:01:33.000 So if you want to be a vegan, but if that diet comes with, for most people, If it comes with diabetes and obesity or ill health or the failure to thrive of their children or whatever,

01:01:51.000 I mean, that's their choice.

01:01:52.000 But what you can't say is that that diet has any evidence to show that it provides good health.

01:01:58.000 Well, I think one thing that a vegan diet does is it gets people off of the standard American diet. 0.99

01:02:05.000 And the standard American diet of Just a bunch of bullshit. 0.99

01:02:09.000 French fries. 1.00

01:02:11.000 French fries can be vegan, right?

01:02:13.000 But the processed food and things with a ton of preservatives.

01:02:18.000 You start eating a bunch of vegetables.

01:02:20.000 I mean, you're going to probably feel a lot better if you start eating actual real foods.

01:02:24.000 You know, yeah, anybody who gets off of refined carbohydrates and sugar feels better.

01:02:29.000 So that is definitely a step in the right direction.

01:02:32.000 I mean, we can all agree on that.

01:02:33.000 Yeah, processed food, preservatives, just eating nonsense and garbage and candy and just that kind of stuff.

01:02:40.000 If you can be conscious and proactive about the healthy foods you choose and just try to get as much healthy nutrients as you can, you're going to feel better.

01:02:51.000 But the question is, what's the best way to optimize your health?

01:02:55.000 Yeah, and just going back to those animal experiments that I was telling you about in the 1920s and 30s, you know, what leads to your long life and the long life and health of your children, right?

01:03:04.000 That's the way we used to think about survival of health, fitness of an animal, was how long did you survive and how long do your offspring survive, right?

01:03:14.000 And that was the ultimate measure.

01:03:16.000 That's always been the ultimate measure, evolutionarily.

01:03:19.000 So, you know, if a vegan diet were to support that, that would be the optimal diet.

01:03:26.000 But that was just not what the science showed.

01:03:30.000 So, you know, I mean, there's also a whole kind of evolutionary issue here, which is you have to bring in evolutionary science to understand, you know, how did humans evolve?

01:03:40.000 I mean, we're in a kind of ironic position where there's so many enlightened, progressive thinkers who are almost like...

01:03:50.000 Who are denying our evolutionary history, right?

01:03:55.000 They're almost like creationists.

01:03:58.000 I mean, our evolutionary history, if you read the science, is about evolving with meat.

01:04:04.000 That's just our reality.

01:04:06.000 So you can't really deny that and say, you know, we did not spring.

01:04:11.000 Out of, you know, out of the side of Athena or, you know, whatever.

01:04:15.000 We evolved because we ate meat.

01:04:19.000 There are many evolutionary theorists who believe we evolved only because we ate meat.

01:04:24.000 Yeah, the doubling of the human brain size, which is one of the biggest mysteries in the fossil record.

01:04:28.000 Over a period of two million years, a human brain doubled.

01:04:30.000 And one of the primary ideas is that cooking meat and figuring out a way to hunt these animals made us stimulate our brains.

01:04:39.000 And there's a couple other more outlandish theories, one of them involving psilocybin mushrooms.

01:04:44.000 It's pretty interesting.

01:04:45.000 But it's called the stoned ape theory, if you want to look it up.

01:04:48.000 But the idea that we are herbivores, And you hear this tossed around a lot and you'll literally see like vegan memes that show our teeth versus a primates teeth or a rather a Carnivores teeth and showing that we have teeth to grind up stuff But these are teeth that have evolved for people that eat cooked food,

01:05:11.000 right?

01:05:12.000 I mean, this is where it's disingenuous like know that first of all we do have the teeth of an omnivore and And second of all, we have the teeth of an omnivore that has been cooking food.

01:05:21.000 We don't need the same kind of teeth we used to need to tear apart raw meat like we did 200,000 years ago or whatever it was.

01:05:30.000 You know, it's interesting.

01:05:31.000 One of the things that I explore in my book is the way that meat has been valued through human history and it was valued as the food of warriors and that, you know, like the Maasai warriors who were studied by a biochemist out of the University of Vanderbilt in the late 1970s called the Maasai warriors in Kenya.

01:05:53.000 And he found that they ate nothing but meat and blood and milk.

01:05:58.000 And that was the warrior class, and that was what was considered that made men strong.

01:06:03.000 The women were allowed a more diverse diet, but the men who had to be strong and had to hunt, they had this just purely meat and blood diet. 0.75

01:06:16.000 And there's another interesting story about how that same tribe was compared to, they actually had a kind of vegetarian tribe nearby, and that when they were both called, when both these tribes were called up for the Boer War, the English tested their strength to see whom they could hire to fight for them.

01:06:38.000 And the vegetarian men from this one tribe, this neighboring tribe, they had no strength. 1.00

01:06:45.000 They tested them to see how that device, use your hand to clench, see how strong they were.

01:06:51.000 They found them completely unfit and unable to do work, and they weren't strong.

01:06:55.000 They didn't have the same kind of muscle mass, literally.

01:06:58.000 I know.

01:07:20.000 I think they may have, but they must take a lot of supplements and other kinds of soy proteins or other things.

01:07:29.000 I mean, there are replacements, I guess, in the modern food supply.

01:07:34.000 But historically, based on real foods available to humans for millennia, it was meat that was what was used to be strong.

01:07:43.000 Yeah, and the dirty secret in the vegan bodybuilder community is steroids.

01:07:48.000 And steroids will allow you to get away with a lot of stuff.

01:07:51.000 And obviously that's the dirty secret in all the bodybuilding communities, but the vegan ones, they want to just pretend everything, oh look, on a plant-based diet, look at my amazing body.

01:08:00.000 Sort of, yeah, you definitely, yeah.

01:08:03.000 I mean, yeah, but that other stuff.

01:08:05.000 Yeah.

01:08:05.000 I mean, this is something that gets extremely ignored, where it's way more open and out in the non-vegan bodybuilding community.

01:08:16.000 Yeah, because I'm deep into the bodybuilding community.

01:08:18.000 I know you are.

01:08:19.000 That's why I brought it up.

01:08:20.000 I know it's your thing.

01:08:21.000 I know it's your thing.

01:08:23.000 What have you, out of all this research and all this analyzing this and, you know, the publishing of your book and the way it's been received, how has this changed the way you think about the way people approach not just diet but all sort of conflicts in life?

01:08:43.000 That's a big question.

01:08:45.000 I mean, there are a couple of...

01:08:50.000 Major ways this profoundly, this whole research changed my thinking.

01:08:55.000 One, so one was really that I, it changed my thinking about, changed my political views quite a bit.

01:09:06.000 I think you're a libertarian or at least that's what I was reading about you.

01:09:09.000 I was always, I mean I grew up in Berkeley and was a real I'm a liberal Democrat and still am on most issues.

01:09:18.000 But here I found an issue where the government had started this program of telling Americans how to eat and just made this huge, giant mistake.

01:09:31.000 And spent hundreds and hundreds and billions of dollars on this program that You know, we have quite a bit of evidence now, I think, to make a pretty good case that the government made America, started the obesity and diabetes epidemics,

01:09:47.000 and continue, and don't back down from their recommendations, even though they continue to do this.

01:09:52.000 And so, you know, this is the one government program that I have researched in great depth.

01:09:58.000 I haven't really looked into anything else in the kind of incredible level of detail that I have this one.

01:10:04.000 And it made me much more I'm cautious about supporting big government programs.

01:10:13.000 Not because I don't believe in government.

01:10:15.000 I do.

01:10:16.000 I mean, I believe that humans need to govern themselves wisely, and it shouldn't just be, you know, we shouldn't have government.

01:10:23.000 The potential to make mistakes, the power of government once it adopts a hypothesis or an idea of some kind, and then the incredible institutional entrenchment that happens when you adopt a certain view,

01:10:39.000 right?

01:10:40.000 And then it's so hard to reverse out of that particular chosen line of thinking.

01:10:46.000 It becomes almost impossible.

01:10:48.000 You know, these institutions are not built for that.

01:10:50.000 They're not really built for science.

01:10:52.000 Science is supposed to be, as I said earlier, self-doubting, self-questioning.

01:10:56.000 You have new observations, so you change your course.

01:10:59.000 That's what science is supposed to be.

01:11:00.000 You test things and they don't work out, and then you move on to another idea.

01:11:04.000 But an institution, it's almost like institutional science is like an oxymoron because an institution is meant to not flip-flop on their publics, not to change their views, not to allow people to lose faith in them.

01:11:18.000 So it's the wrong kind of body to do science.

01:11:27.000 So it's made me much more cautious about how much I want our government to do.

01:11:34.000 Because if I've just turned over this one little leaf and found this huge disastrous program, you know, I just wonder if I turn over any other leaf, what else would I find?

01:11:45.000 I think you'd find similar incompetence.

01:11:47.000 Probably.

01:11:48.000 So it's changed my political thinking quite a bit.

01:11:53.000 And then I think it's also, you know, when I see the way that the scientific debate is played out, and I know the science so intimately now, you know, I know I've read every single nutrition experiment that has really been done since the mid-50s.

01:12:12.000 And, you know, when I see the way the debate plays out in public, you know, I see that American Heart Association presidential advisory, which I just see as a, you know, it's not honest science.

01:12:22.000 Or our last Dietary Guidelines Expert Committee in their report saying, you know, we should all eat a plant-based diet.

01:12:30.000 And, you know, I can see how bad that science is.

01:12:33.000 And so, you know, I see that I can see now so much better the way that PR firms spin messages and the way those messages are echoed all over.

01:12:44.000 You know, it's just the way it's what's happening in our politics.

01:12:47.000 It's happening in our science.

01:12:52.000 It makes me somewhat despair about our ability to have good science rise to the top.

01:12:59.000 Because when you have institutions like Harvard and Tufts and all of our top institutions are so deeply invested in this wrong hypothesis, I don't know where people should turn to how do we sort ourselves out of this mess.

01:13:15.000 So yeah, nutrition science is in bad shape and it's changed my faith in expert advice.

01:13:23.000 Maybe that's the bottom line.

01:13:24.000 I really don't trust expert advice because I see the way it is manipulated by financial interests and professional interests and intellectual conflicts of interest.

01:13:37.000 And so, you know, even little tiny things like anything, a warning label on a bottle, like, you know, careful of this plastic or this or that.

01:13:44.000 I'm like, I don't believe anything unless I go back to the original science and read it all myself, which I can never do.

01:13:50.000 I just won't trust anything anymore.

01:13:52.000 That's not a good place to be.

01:13:53.000 It isn't.

01:13:55.000 I need to spend time in your isolation tank, I think.

01:13:58.000 Boy, and with that, if people want to find out more, your book, A Big Fat Surprise, what else?

01:14:05.000 So, my book is called The Big Fat Surprise, and it's available on Amazon.

01:14:09.000 I have, my main website is ninateischels.com, which is, you'll never be able to spell, but if you look up The Big Fat Surprise, you'll get to Nina Teischels.

01:14:19.000 And I also started a group called the Nutrition Coalition, which is nutritioncoalition.us.

01:14:28.000 That is a group that is backed by scientists, PhDs, MDs, The odd journalists like me.

01:14:37.000 We are basically, the work of that group is to try to ensure that our nutrition policy is evidence-based, right?

01:14:44.000 Trying to unearth that suppressed science, get those studies out of the NIH basement, that kind of thing, just to ensure that if the government is going to tell Americans what to eat, It needs to be evidence-based.

01:14:56.000 So we're doing work in Washington.

01:14:59.000 And you can read about...

01:15:02.000 I mean, it's not just on fat and carbohydrates that they've got.

01:15:04.000 They've got it wrong on salt.

01:15:05.000 You know, the advice to get aerobic exercise from 45 minutes to an hour every day.

01:15:11.000 None of that is based on good science.

01:15:13.000 So we just want...

01:15:15.000 The goal of this group is to work towards evidence-based...

01:15:21.000 If we could wrap this up, please talk a little bit more about salt, because that's one that comes up all the time with people.

01:15:26.000 They want to tell me that salt's bad for you. 0.72

01:15:28.000 I'm like, God damn it, salt is an essential nutrient. 0.99

01:15:30.000 You'll die without it. 0.99

01:15:32.000 So the short story in SALT is that they did a bunch of clinical trials only on hypertensive subjects.

01:15:38.000 They were already sick.

01:15:39.000 They were already sick.

01:15:40.000 Okay, so if you're a normal person, if you're a child, none of this applies to you, should never have been generalized to a larger population.

01:15:49.000 They were called the DASH studies.

01:15:50.000 None of these studies were longer than two months, which is super short for a clinical trial.

01:15:56.000 And what they showed was that for people who already had hypertension, And ate a lot of salt.

01:16:03.000 For those people, reducing their salt improved their cardiovascular risk factors.

01:16:10.000 They didn't follow any of these people long enough to figure out who actually had a heart attack or died.

01:16:15.000 They're very, very short-term, small experiments.

01:16:18.000 They never tested more than 2,000 people on them, this whole DASH diet, this reduced sodium diet.

01:16:23.000 None of that advice should be generalized to anybody else.

01:16:27.000 And there have now been four large studies where they, they're epidemiological studies so that they're not, it's only associations.

01:16:36.000 But the important thing about it is that they contradict this salt advice.

01:16:40.000 They show that really, if you go too low, people who consume too little salt, those people have higher rates, higher rates of cardiovascular death.

01:16:52.000 So that there seems to be a sweet spot for consuming salt.

01:16:57.000 It's sort of a J-shaped curve.

01:16:59.000 So if you have moderate consumption of salt for the general population is sort of the sweet spot for good health and cardiovascular health.

01:17:11.000 So the government's advice is lower is better for all Americans. 0.90

01:17:16.000 And that's just not based on any rigorous science at all.

01:17:20.000 Boom.

01:17:21.000 Boom.

01:17:22.000 So our group is working to try to change that.

01:17:24.000 It just has to change.

01:17:26.000 Yeah.

01:17:26.000 Without people like you, people like me would be completely lost.

01:17:30.000 So thank you so much for all your research.

01:17:32.000 Thank you for your book.

01:17:32.000 Thank you for your time here on the podcast.

01:17:34.000 I appreciate it.

01:17:35.000 And people, please go out, buy her book.

01:17:37.000 Is there anything else you can recommend people check into?

01:17:40.000 They can donate to the Nutrition Coalition if they want the dietary guidelines to change.

01:17:45.000 And I'll just put in a little plug for that. 0.85

01:17:47.000 The reason they have to change, they control school lunches, military rations, food in hospitals, food in elderly homes.

01:17:53.000 Everything your doctor tells you, your nutritionists tell you, they're like, that's where it all comes from.

01:17:58.000 So, that's it.

01:18:00.000 Thanks for letting me know.

01:18:00.000 Thank you.

01:18:01.000 Thanks for having me.

01:18:02.000 Bye, everybody.

The Joe Rogan Experience - December 28, 2017

Joe Rogan Experience #1058 - Nina Teicholz

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