Original subtitles

Camera speed, Vinnie 4. Take one, Mark.

The 20th Century gave us so many misconceptions when it came to health.

One egg equals five cigarettes.

Eggs cannot legally even be called safe.

Cutting down on meat is a good idea.

So, is the pendulum swinging back

in the opposite direction?

Where are we since the last movie came out?

Is there progress?

Has meat made a comeback?

In some cases, I can say yes.

I swear by the ketogenic diet.

I hear more doctors talking about it.

The low carbohydrate keto community is based on science.

And I can see a few things moving in a direction

that people want to see it move into.

There is a bottom-up revolution going on.

But then I see the other side of it.

There was another vegan propaganda movie

that came out in this past year.

Surprise, surprise, there was a product hooked to it.

The impossible burger is the world's only burger

that looks, handles, smells, cooks and tastes

like ground beef from cows.

People are becoming guinea pigs.

Completely replace animals

as a food production technology by 2035.

InFat, part one, we talked about the war for information.

But I actually think we also live in a war with ourselves.

It's almost like we're gaming the system of our own bodies.

We're trying to get our system to do

what it's not supposed to do.

"Eat this, eat that, don't eat this, don't eat that."

Our program is known as a starch-based diet.

"Take this supplement,

"it'll make your muscles grow bigger."

We have more questions than ever.

And the world always speeds up

and it gets more frenzied all the time,

and sometimes even people who are so-called experts

don't know what's going on.

You suck it all up.

Mmm.

"This study says this."

"That study says that."

"Well, that study wasn't done correctly."

"This is healthy."

"That's not healthy."

The answers we're searching for

seem to have these long winding roads

that eventually lead to nothing.

But maybe it doesn't have to be so hard.

In this movie we're going to expand

on what we talked about in Fat, part one.

We're going to talk to the same experts you saw before.

-But let them stretch out a little bit.

-Great. We're going to discuss

why some of the things we believe are wrong.

Fat tends to cause you to be fat.

We're going to also get into why

some of these things are right.

Based on the research,

we cannot say with any certainty

that eating red or processed meat

causes cancer, diabetes or heart disease.

And also why there's so much confusion between the two.

It doesn't have to be that divisive.

My name is Nina Teicholz. I'm a science journalist

and author of book called The Big Fat Surprise.

I'm also the executive director of a group

called the Nutrition Coalition,

which aims to ensure

that our nutrition policy is evidence-based.

Nina Teicholz was a one-time vegan.

She crossed over. She crossed the aisle.

And that led her into ten years of research.

She went through all the papers,

she went through all the studies

to come back to figure out where we had gone wrong.

And it's the work like her book,

The Big Fat Surprise,

that has led a lot of this pendulum swing,

in my opinion, to start moving in the right direction.

I got into this field just completely by accident.

I was doing a series of investigative food articles

for G ourmetmagazine

and one of them that was assigned to me

was on trans fats.

Well, what are trans fats? I had no idea.

Researching that story

really plunged me into the whole world of dietary fat,

which is the subject that Americans and nutrition

have obsessed about most.

And that really led me down the rabbit hole.

For nearly a decade,

I researched everything I could find

about dietary fat and cholesterol.

When I started doing my research,

I couldn't believe the kind of reactions

that I got from interviewing scientists.

I mean, I'm the daughter of a scientist

and in my father's "dreams" journal,

if you open up, there are math equations.

I always thought that science was full of people like him,

who rationally, soberly, would discuss interesting ideas

and consider other ideas and change their minds

based on the scientific observations.

And instead, in nutrition science,

I couldn't believe what I found.

People who were afraid to talk to me.

People who said,

"If you're going to take that line on dietary fat, I can't even talk to you."

There is some huge story here.

If people are afraid to talk to me,

that means there's a really big story here.

Saturated fats, butter, lard, cheese,

fatty beef and poultry with the skin on,

all said to be bad for your heart,

but you should replace most saturated fats

with more monounsaturated healthy fats

which help reduce your risk of heart attack and stroke.

Limit red meat, dark poultry meat,

or poultry with the skin on

to a serving the size of a deck of cards per day.

In good science, you try to do everything you can

not to go public prematurely

because as soon as you go public,

as soon as you claim you've discovered something you haven't

or you've realized something

that you don't have evidence to support,

all these consequences kick in

and make it virtually impossible to back out of.

My name's Gary Taubes,

I'm an investigative journalist,

co-founder of a not for profit research organization

called the Nutrition Science Initiative,

author of Good Calories, Bad Calories

and Why We Get Fat, of The Case Against Sugar.

Gary Taubes is largely considered a lightning rod.

Gary has never shied away from media.

He will go up against anyone

because what he has on his side is a little thing called facts.

I often asked myself when I was writing Good Calories, Bad Calories,

it's like, I have friends

who sort of have conspiratorial turns of mind

where they think people do things

because they're venal and they're getting paid by industry.

And I just think, "I don't see any conspiracy there."

I don't really think the industry

had much to do with that.

The food industry was given

this enormous gift of this bad science.

And these people just literally could not have caused more harm

if there had been a conspiracy.

At least if there had been a conspiracy,

enterprising Washington Postreporters

could have interviewed

the right people in garages in Washington and exposed it.

My name is Dr. Eric Westman.

I'm an associate professor of medicine

at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina.

The US government got involved

in creating guidelines for what people should eat.

And it was not based on science.

What can you say about Eric Westman?

You know, the original Atkins Diet

has been around since the early 1970s.

But when they wanted to update it,

they had to find a doctor to write that.

Eric Westman is that guy.

He wrote The New Atkins for the New You.

He also started his own little obesity clinic

over on the east coast.

The guy is just phenomenal.

I was involved in research communities

where we would look at a guideline

and see that as a straw man,

as something to either prove or disprove.

So unfortunately, the research

that was going to support

and back up the low fat guideline

never proved that it was healthy.

What's the information people are getting about their health,

because everybody wants to know what does it mean to be healthy?

And that's sucha difficult question to answer.

They're interested in their health,

they've been searching for answers.

And they found an answer

that has actually done them more harm than good in the long run.

Bret Scher was this great guy I met

when he came on my Fitness Confidentialpodcast.

And just fell in love with this guy.

He's a cardiologist

who doesn't believe that red meat will kill you.

He also feels the same way about saturated fat and cholesterol,

which is a paradigm shift when you think about it

because there are not many cardiologists out there

that are thinking that way.

Hormones in our body play a huge role.

So, things that raise our insulin

are going to encourage our bodies to store more fat.

So just because you're taking fat out of something

and then you're enhancing it with increased carbs and sugars,

that is actually making this problem worse, not helping it.

Clearly this idea that we are supposed to avoid fat

has been a major factor

in causing, paradoxically,

the obesity epidemic.

That's the big myth,

the idea that it's dangerous to eat natural foods

with fat and cholesterol in it.

Andreas Eenfeldt is a great guy

who noticed that

the more medicine he handed out, the sicker people got.

And he felt that there had to be a better way.

So he started working with food,

pulling certain things out of people's diets, adding other things.

And the certain things were junk foods, and sugars,

and grains, and this sort of thing.

And he started adding in red meat, and fish,

and more fatty foods, and noticed that people were healing right up.

If you avoid fat,

you end up being hungrier

and you have to eat more

of something else

to feel satisfied.

And that something else

is carbohydrates.

Obviously, aside from the way it looks,

you end up eating a lot more sugar, processed carbs.

That is probably the cause

of the obesity epidemic today.

By this point, everyone knows there's an obesity epidemic.

And while we can argue all day about fat versus low fat,

pretty much everyone agrees that sugar is bad for you.

Sugar makes insulin work better and cures diabetics.

Well, almost everyone.

But we'll get to that later.

BMI is one of the most commonly used measurements

to determine if you're obese.

But the newest research says that BMI may not be reliable.

The biggest problem with getting useful data

has to do with doing the math honestly.

We actually have a problem of philosophy with science right now.

We have a replication crisis where things can't be replicated.

We have people who do research

that do something called P-Mining.

The P is sort of the statistical

significance of your study.

You can actually get your data

and then find the statistical model

that fits best to prove that your data is working.

I'm Dr. Drew Pinsky.

I'm an internist and addictionologist.

Dr. Drew, look, like everyone else in LA, we love Dr. Drew,

all those years of Loveline.

But the fact that he does what he does with addiction medicine

and the lives he has saved,

I'm happy to call Drew Pinsky a friend.

The way we examine populations,

we're looking at sort of

average effects on the mean.

So people on either end

may have very different physiologies

that have very different sorts of interventions

that we're completely missing.

There's really a crisis coming

in the philosophy of science.

Intelligent people should know

the difference between

causality and correlation.

And weirdly enough,

in this field of nutrition,

because it's so hard to do the necessary experiments,

what you end up with are correlations between health and disease.

And one of the correlations is that people

who consume a lot of artificial sweeteners

tend to be more obese and diabetic than people who don't.

Artificial sweeteners have been a staple for dieters

since the 1980s.

And there's a real debate about the harm they cause.

The problem is, if you think about who uses artificial sweeteners

are the people who have weight problems,

the people who can't control their weight drinking

full sugar sodas.

And so, you have no idea which way the causality runs,

whether these people are unhealthy

because they consume artificial sweeteners

or whether they consume artificial sweeteners

because they're unhealthy and they're predisposed to get fat.

The major points about your diet really sort of

hover around two things, fat, fruits, and vegetables.

You've got to really get your saturated fat and trans fat

as low as you possibly can.

And we know that if we do that, you can actually decrease

your risk of coronary heart disease 40/50 percent.

There is a correlation between obesity and heart disease

in that people with obesity often have other risk factors

like high blood sugar, high blood pressure,

dyslipidemia, meaning bad cholesterol profile.

And all these things increase the risk of heart disease.

It's so easy to blame heart disease on fat.

Let's take a hamburger for instance.

They'll say, "Well,

"red meat is bad for you because it's in a hamburger."

They won't take into account that there was ketchup, mayonnaise,

a big breaded bun, and all of the other condiments around it.

And guess what? Most people never eat a hamburger without French fries.

But they never blame it on the seed oils,

they never blame it on the bread,

they never blame it on any of the goop that's put on it.

They just go to the meat and say,

"Meat, bad. Meat causes heart disease."

It makes no sense.

It's black and white thinking

combined with numerous studies coming out of respected names

like Harvard that lead people to believe that things may not be true.

What does Harvard have to do with this?

The role that Harvard plays

in the nutrition story

is a sad and powerful one.

Extremely powerful.

If you compare butter with calories from refined starch and sugar,

it's going to be pretty much a wash.

They'll both have adverse impacts on metabolic factors

and on risk of heart disease and diabetes.

Harvard is home to two of the largest

nutritional epidemiological databases in the country.

What is that? That's a kind of science

where they take a large group of people

and they follow them for years. And they ask them what they eat

and then they see who dies or has a heart attack or gets cancer.

This is a kind of science that is so fundamentally weak.

Right? I mean, people are asked

how many cups of spare ribs did you have in the last year,

or how many peaches, or how many plums

did you eat on average per week?

Hundreds of questions.

First of all, people lie about what they eat.

They want to please themselves or they want to please the interviewers.

And this has been documented in science.

Secondly, that dietary data,

even when they try to validate it,

they find that it is highly unreliable.

So you're talking about very, very weak evidence.

Right? And then this kind of science,

epidemiology, can never prove cause and effect.

It can only show an association.

So it was only ever meant to generate hypotheses,

which then go on to be tested.

The way you test something properly, to show cause and effect,

is to test it in a randomized, controlled, clinical trial.

This weak science that Harvard has been publishing on

dominates the whole nutrition landscape.

And it is what is echoed throughout all of the media.

"Oh, this is only association but not causation."

But then they just breeze right by that

with headlines that say things like, "Coconut oil kills you,"

when that headline should read,

"Coconut oil, we have found a small, weak association

"between coconut oil and increased risk of cardiovascular disease."

People who eat a lot of red meat,

who are those people?

Those are the people who have ignored their doctor's orders

for the last 35 years.

That means they do a lot of other unhealthy things.

They probably drink too much, they don't go to cultural events,

they don't follow their doctor's orders, they don't take their medicine.

They don't have happy family lives.

Maybe they live next to a toxic waste dump

because they're poor, or whatever.

And then they come out with a finding that said,

"Red meat eaters,

"people who eat a lot of red meat,

"tend to die earlier."

Well, was it the meat? Was it the unhealthy lifestyle?

Was it the excessive binge drinking?

It could have been any one of these other things.

But that is why this science is so fundamentally weak.

Your overall lifestyle,

food just being one factor,

is going to determine your overall health.

If you eat well, change your habits, don't smoke,

maybe start exercising,

well, you'll be healthier.

The problem is that studies get done

where people get healthier by changing everything about their life,

and then the results are touted as food being the reason

they got healthier.

This is especially rampant among vegan studies.

There have been some studies in the past, some small studies,

that have had some problems with them,

that have been propagated over and over again

showing that diet can reverse heart disease.

And a big one was the Ornish studies in the '90s.

If you eat more calories than you burn,

then you gain weight.

Fat tends to cause you to be fat

because fat is very dense in calories.

Fat has nine calories per gram,

whereas protein and carbs have only four, less than half.

So an optimal diet is low in fat, low in the bad carbs,

high in the good carbs, and enough of the good fats.

And then again, it's a spectrum.

When you move in this direction, you're going to lose weight,

you're going to feel better and you're going to gain health.

What's frequently lost in that is that

that was a whole lifestyle program.

So they got people to quit smoking, exercise more,

manage their stress, and follow a vegetarian diet.

But what's come out of that

is that a vegetarian diet reverses heart disease.

And you can't say that from that type of a study.

A vegan approach, a vegetarian approach,

is consistent with standard dietary guidelines.

And the question is,

"Is that really a healthy approach?"

I'm Dr. Jeff Gerber.

I'm a board certified family doctor from Denver, Colorado.

I've been a doctor for over 30 years.

About 20 years ago,

I realized I didn't know much about nutrition.

So I took it upon myself to learn more.

And I use nutrition as a tool

to treat and prevent chronic disease.

I look at Jeffry Gerber and I think, "Hero."

He looked around and went,

"Wait a minute. I'm healing people with food.

"What I'm doing,

"what I was taught in school is not working."

Instead of just going down the road the way the AHA or the ADA does,

where they just keep spewing the same lies hoping for different results,

Jeffry Gerber looked around and said,

"Hey, we need to do something about this."

We think, especially with vegan diets,

it's quite a challenge because you're often deficient of macronutrients

that you would get from animal-based proteins.

Most people tell me they feel great when they go on a vegan diet

only to feel bad later.

My view has always been,

well, when you go on a vegan diet,

you're cutting out a bunch of crap,

a bunch of processed food in your life.

But at some point, it's not sustainable.

I think there are lots of different approaches

that can be healthy.

You could even do an extreme diet like a vegan diet

and feel great because you're not having sugar.

You're reducing the starches

that raise the blood sugar.

But in my experience,

some people will blindly follow certain diets,

including the vegan diet, and gain 50 to 100 pounds

and never even think that the vegan diet

might be the cause because they know it's healthy.

Because everyone else says it's healthy,

it must be the plastic in my bottle that's causing the obesity.

It must be the microbiome or that I'm not sleeping,

when actually it was the food that they were eating.

As a cardiologist, I've come across

a number of patients who are vegans.

And of course, I read the literature every day

that supports a vegan diet for heart health.

Unfortunately, for a lot of vegans,

it takes a lot of work to maintain a vegan lifestyle.

You have to think about food all the time,

you have to prepare your food all the time,

you are hungry all the time.

A number of people have decreased energy.

So I think that is a downfall to the vegan way of life,

not that there can't be healthy vegans.

Of course there can.

But the question is, "For how long?"

Today we're going to explore all of the vitamins and nutrients

you might need on a vegan diet.

Vitamin b12, calcium, iron,

choline, Omega-3 fatty acids, iodine, zinc, selenium.

They don't make a very good argument.

And especially like, they want to come after meat

as being unhealthy in multiple ways,

leading to heart attack and to diabetes.

And you have to understand that a lot of their comments

are based on the ethical treatment of animals.

And we feel the same way,

that we do want to treat animals ethically.

But that has nothing to do with health.

Can we prosper and thrive by

feasting, in effect, on animals?

And that worries me personally as well.

Part of the movement is driven by the idea

that eating animal products are unhealthy,

which I think is just bad science.

But unfortunately, the leaders,

the proponents of the vegetarian/vegan movement

don't like the argument we're making

'cause we're saying... Not only are we arguing that

the problem isn't red meat and animal products,

but we're arguing that people can be very healthy,

and perhaps healthiest, eating animal product rich diets.

One of the questions today is why we're so anti red meat.I've really wondered about that.

It goes back to the 1970s

when really the kind of burgeoning

of the vegetarian movement in the United States,

in my hometown, Berkeley, California.

That was the time the peace movement...

We had just come out of two World Wars

and we wanted to make peace, not war.

Meat has always, throughout all of history and every culture,

been associated with virility.

It's the food of warriors.

It's the food of people who make war.

And it gives men and women muscle mass.

It makes them strong.

For instance, in the Maasai warriors,

who were studied rigorously by

the University of Vanderbilt scientists in the 1970s,

they found that the warrior class,

but not the women, the warriors consumed only meat.

Meat, milk, and blood was their entire diet.

So now we're being told...

Americans are being told in the 1970s,

not to eat meat because we want to make peace instead.

This was sort of our modern idea of masculinity.

And it totally makes sense for a culture

that does not want to be at war.

It is so interesting if you look at the way we used to eat

before the obesity and the health epidemic.

And red meat was plentiful then.

And then, when things changed,

with the McGovern Report,

with Ancel Keys' Seven Countries Study,

with President Eisenhower's heart attack,

with that conglomeration of events,

now fat being demonized and red meat being demonized,

that's when everything changed.

And it happened to coincide

with the health epidemic that we're having now.

Red meat is back in vogue again.

I mean with the paleo diet, you have low carb diets, you have Atkins...

You even have my very own "no sugars, no grains"

approach to eating. All allows red meat.

So everything is back on the table again.

But it wasn't always that way for red meat.

One of the factors that did emerge

as being related to cancer risk was consumption of red meat,

especially processed red meat,

in relation to risk of colorectal cancer

and some other cancers.

I think the bias against eating red meat

has come from nutritional epidemiology.

These studies look at the associations

between what people eat

and then look at the effect on the health

over a long period of time.

But in the clinical research world,

these are thought of as relatively weak studies.

And the association level has been really low

for red meat and cancer for example.

Why can't people eat meat and vegetables?

Why is this controversial? It's food.

Both are real and both can fit into your diet.

This "either or" argument that's going on

has nothing to do with health

and more to do with ideology.

They were yelling like,

"Don't eat chickens, don't eat meat."

And I was like, "Well, I love chicken."

These are two distinct phenomena I think.

One is this identification with a group

and tribalism around which

diet is yet another manifestation of that.

But this need to move

from fad, to fad, to fad, that's consumerism.

That is us needing a solution to how we're feeling

or looking or how we think about ourselves

with something now.

Buy something now, do something now,

and fix everything, fix how I'm feeling now.

And fad diets suit that beautifully.

I think the media has a lot to do

with our ill psychological well-being.

To blame diet and sedentary lifestyle...

I mean, I've heard blame on TV my entire life.

But it's us. I mean, look,

people that create mediaonly create stuff that we watch.

It's us that they're creating it for.

If we didn't watch, they wouldn't create it the way they do.

So we need to watch ourselves and learn how to train ourselves

not to consume this garbage in such a unthoughtful way.

Bad news for bacon and sausage lovers.

The World Health Organization says those foods

can cause colon and stomach cancer.

Again, a lot of this information does come from media,

who loves to tout institutions like Harvard

whenever they put out dietary findings.

"Harvard said this, Harvard said that.

"Why shouldn't we believe Harvard?"

Walter Willett of Harvard University

is widely considered to be the most influential person

in nutrition science today.

He presides over

the largest two

what's called epidemiological databases in the country.

And those databases, you have to understand,

all I need to do is to find an association.

It's just a whole bunch of statistics

in there they get from dietary questionnaires.

And they can just, like a mimeograph machine,

they can just pull out anything.

Like meat is associated with this outcome,

or vegetables are associated with this outcome,

or French fried potatoes lead to more this kind of cancer.

They can run those statistical tests all the time.

Right? Those associations...

So they're publishing all the time.

Well, in science, sort of

the frequency of publication is part of what makes you powerful.

Um, and compare that to somebody who's doing clinical trials.

They might do a clinical trial and it takes them two years.

And that's where they're actually feeding people and they...

They change their diets, and they give them counseling.

They get one paper out of that.

Walter Willett really believes a vegetarian diet

high in whole grains,

is the diet that is the healthiest

and he wants everybody to follow that diet.

One, I think, important concept

that's developed over the last decade or so

is that diet quality,

the combination of foods, the pattern of foods,

uh, is important in directly influencing disease risk

but also in helping us better control our body weight.

So, these we used to think were sort of separate things.

But now they're intertwined.

And the kind of dietary pattern

that Dr. Hu was talking about, like a Mediterranean Diet,

that has lots of fruits and vegetables,

low amounts of red meat, whole grains,

that actually makes it easier for us to control our weight

than eating a diet of refined foods

that's directly unhealthy but also makes it

more difficult to control our weight.

What I found in my research is that Harvard

has also received a great deal of money

from one of the largest vegetable oil manufacturers in the world

called Unilever.

Willett is a scientific advisor

to numerous industry backed consortiums

that promote grain consumption.

Like Old Ways

and the International Carbohydrate Quality Consortium

all funded by Barilla Pasta and Kellogg's

and all these carbohydrate makers that have Willett

on as their top spokesperson or top advisor,

organizing conferences for them.

In 2013, I think, when Naturemagazine,

when they had a rare editorial kind of critique

of Walter Willett, they said

one of the things that he did

was that he continually simplified his data and published data

that really ought not to be published.

How could we find out who to trust besides your book.

There's overload of information.

Anybody can set themselves up as being an expert.

Uh, and the public is understandably confused.

It's interesting that

there's such a crusade against red meat versus other meats.

And this really comes down to the fact that

red meat has saturated fat

and that we've been told that saturated fat is bad.

Is there a scenario where we shouldn't eat saturated fat?

There's no reason to fear saturated fat.

It's just fine to eat.

It's not an issue for health

if you look at the medical studies

that have tested this hypothesis.

If you take them all together and look at all of the data,

there's no effects on health really.

People have been warned for years

about the dangers of eating too many saturated fats

and the risks they pose for heart disease.

But a new analysis of more than 70 studies

finds that saturated fats

do not necessarily lead to greater problems

with heart health.

My strength and my background is in clinical medicine,

using a keto diet to help

fix obesity, diabetes, and many other health problems.

I've learned a lot

by reading the books Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes

and The Big Fat Surprise by Nina Teicholz.

And one of the things I've learned

is that the emphasis against saturated fat

is also a political emphasis.

So, that because America doesn't make

lots of saturated fat kinds of products

and because the nutritional epidemiologists

are funded by other companies

that make products that don't have saturated fats,

there's a bias against them which is not scientific.

If saturated fat raises your cholesterol,

and if cholesterol can in some situations

be related to increased heart risk,

then anything that is a saturated fat

must be related to increased heart risk.

It's this line of illogical thinking

that has led institutions

like the American Heart Association

to demonize anything that's a saturated fat.

Yeah, nothing against medical doctors.

It's just that when,

you know, when you're in a club

and they keep telling you the same thing in the club,

and this is the only way it is,

and you never see any other viewpoint,

you just start believing.

Religion works like that.

You know, um,

you will be in one religion at the expense of every other religion.

And even though they all say pretty much the same thing,

some people will look at their religion and go,

"Your religion's not good because mine's the best."

I tell people who are in my clinic,

who are working with other doctors

and cardiologists in particular,

to just tell them

they're doing a Modified Mediterranean Diet.

And the other doctor will go, "Oh, well, that's fine."

And they won't ask any more

because they're not really sure

what the Modified Mediterranean Diet is.

But they know it's good.

So, I know it kind of plays the politics a little bit,

but we're in that space where, um,

doctors sometimes knee jerk against things

that they don't know and using familiar terms

can actually make it easier for my patients

to not get pushback from other doctors.

I guess the other question though,

is it something magical that's going to help everybody

shed pounds and feel wonderful.

And the truth may not be that far either.

But it's important that we can't go out

and demonize one type of food

simply because we think there's a theory

that it might be related to something.

I mean, people listen strongly

to the recommendations of these guidelines.

The vast majority of the calories

are really coming from bad stuff.

And so, if you're looking at red meat

and don't specify the comparison,

you may not see much with red meat

because you're comparing it

with a lot of other bad stuff in a diet,

a lot of refined starch, sugar,

uh, partially hydrogenated oils.

Epidemiology, you always find at the bottom of one of the Harvard papers,

"Oh, you know, our caveat is that it's only in association.

"It does not prove causation. More studies are needed."

But if you look at the press release that accompanies it,

uh, the headline is almost always like,

you know, "Oh, coconut oil causes heart disease."

Well, there's nothing wrong with coconut oil.

It's perfectly safe

and actually very healthy

to use in your diet and in cooking.

Good for your skin, not good in your body.

But we always hear about

these controversies coming out

and it only has to do with the fact that

other industries who are making hydrogenated oils

don't want this pure natural oil

to be anywhere near their product.

The big problem with coconut oil

is it's high in saturated fats.

And as the American Heart Association tells us,

saturated fat can increase your bad cholesterol,

and that can lead to heart disease.

Coconut and palm oil have definitely been

polarizing oils over the past few years,

and it's so interesting to see why.

You know, they're...

First, they're vegetarian based oils.

So, based on that,

you would think that they should be healthy

if the myth of vegetarian being the best diet is true.

But because they have saturated fats,

the American Heart Association came out against them

cautioning their ingestion

because they have saturated fat.

So, it's that transitive property of math

that doesn't always work.

I was invited once to speak

at a palm oil conference

by the manufacturers of palm oil.

And they explained to me that

they were having difficulty getting through

a sort of taboo or cartel against palm oil

because of the saturated fat in the food.

And because we know saturated fat is bad and all that.

And I think it was in Nina Teicholz's book

where I first learned that.

The whole campaign against so-called tropical oils,

which is coconut oil and palm oil.

In my research, I discovered

that this was

something of just a trade war between industries.

And it's been going on,

uh, actually since the 1920s and '30s.

Palm oil, I think it was at the time,

started being imported in increasing amounts from Malaysia.

And the vegetable oil industry said,

"We can't have this happen. They're talking over our market share."

And underwent this huge campaign

basically to just slander these oils.

And actually I think that what they did is they put a tax on it at that point.

They got the government to tax these oils

because they didn't want the competition.

Fast forward to 1980s.

There's a rise in the use, again,

of coconut oil and palm oil because they are solid,

safe fats, so they're good for popping popcorn in movie theaters.

They were used by all the packaged food companies like Kraft.

Nabisco used them for their cereals

and anything that needed to stay safe

and solid on a shelf in a supermarket.

So, there started to be this increase in the importation again

of coconut oil and palm oil.

Well, that really threatened

the makers of soy bean oil

and the soy bean industry

because soy bean is far and away

the biggest oil that Americans consume.

So, they started a campaign

against coconut oil and palm oil.

They call them the tropical oils.

And this was a campaign, really a trade war campaign

sort of in the shroud of a health concern issue.

So, if they're going to say something like that,

they should have very strong evidence behind it to back it up.

And there is no evidence

to demonize these oils the way they have.

They can be a very good part of a healthy diet

and there's no reason at all

to be worried about them as has been proposed.

There's a lot of bad science that I think implicates

saturated fat and leads to this idea

that we should replace it with vegetable oils.

"Oh, those must be good for us because they're vegetables."

In fact, they're not from vegetables,

they're from seeds and beans.

So, sunflower, safflower, corn, soy bean,

they're all beans and seeds.

And you have to use high heat

and a heavy metal chelate

in order to get the oils out of them.

Winterized, deodorized and stabilized.

I mean, they initially come out of this gray, disgusting liquid.

And then they have to be turned into something

that might seem like it could be consumed for humans.

And they've also gone through name changes.

Now they're trying to call them plant oils I think,

to seem even more appealing.

If you compare saturated fat with healthy plant oils,

uh, using those healthy plant oils

will definitely reduce the risk of heart disease

while they're improving blood lipids at the same time.

You know, healthy people tend to eat vegetable oils.

It's the jest of the problem when you do these studies,

what you do is you tell people how to eat.

So, in the 1970s, you tell them they should avoid saturated fat

and eat vegetable oils and then you follow them for 30 years

and lo and behold you find out 30 years later

that healthier people have indeed been doing exactly

what you told them to do because they're health conscious.

By the end of the 1980s,

between that campaign and various other efforts to get rid of tropical oils,

most of the tropical oils had been taken out of the food supply.

And so, they're avoiding saturated fats

and using vegetable oils to cook with instead,

and they're healthier.

But that doesn't mean they got healthier

because they used the vegetable oils.

You know, I do wonder if the recent outcry against tropical oils

that you've seen by the American Heart Association and by Harvard,

I really wonder to what extent we're seeing just a redux of this same trade war.

I know that Harvard is funded

by vegetable oil companies

that compete

with tropical oils.

So, one really has to wonder

if they're now sort of trotting out scientists

to protect the domestic American soy bean and soy bean oil industries.

So, there are two changes that I think are necessary.

First, we need to get away from this idea that

saturated fat is bad for us.

It's really not a major factor.

We need to accept that saturated fat can be part of a healthy diet.

Second thing,

we need to get away from is this idea that it's all about calories,

that just by counting calories, eating less,

and running more you would magically sort of lose weight.

It's really not effective for the vast majority of people

and we need to focus more on

the hormonal regulation of weight,

live in a way that makes our body

normalize the hormones

including the fat storing hormone insulin,

so that it becomes much easier to maintain a good weight.

The fact of the matter is exercise is very important.

I always call it the fountain of youth.

The problem is that it's not good for weight loss.

We've been teaching people you have to exercise,

you have to exercise.

And I've had people who can't exercise

because of a bum knee or just they don't like it

and they don't even try to lose weight

or fix their diabetes

because they've been told they have to exercise.

In fact, this is perpetuated by a lot of doctors as well.

And because it's worked for them,

they think it'll work for other people.

Now, I'm a big proponent of exercise

and I think exercise is crucial for a healthy overall lifestyle.

But it's not the go-to way to lose weight.

It was in the best interest of these snack companies

and the companies making the high carbohydrate, low fat foods.

It was in their best interest to say

as long as you're exercising and as long as you're burning calories

then you can eat whatever you want and however much you want.

That's what padded their bottom line.

And that's what sold more products.

And that's what helped perpetuate this myth

that exercise was the best thing you could do for your health

and you could exercise away

any amount of poor dietary indiscretion.

In theory, the idea makes a lot of sense.

You burn calories through exercise,

which must lead to fat loss.

The laws of thermodynamics is a good idea.

It just doesn't work here.

You cannot outrun a bad diet.

So, modern nutrition science begins in the late 1860s

with the invention by German researchers

of devices called calorimeters

that allow you to measure the energy expended

by a large animal like a dog or a human.

So, you live inside these rooms

and you can get a measurement of how much energy's expended.

And so, by the 1860s,

the nutrition community, for the first time ever,

can measure the energy that people consume in foods

and burn the foods in what's called a bomb calorimeter.

And you measure the heat released

and that tells you how much energy was in the foods.

And now you can measure the energy out.

And for the next 50 to 60 years,

all of nutrition science...

All of nutrition science

was basically measuring energy in and energy out

and vitamin and mineral deficiency diseases

and protein requirements

and a little bit about things like fiber.

And so, by the early 1900s,

when researchers,

clinical investigators, physicians interested in these problems

are trying to come up with a hypothesis of obesity.

And related to the food we consume,

all they have are energy in, energy out,

vitamins, minerals, protein, fiber.

And they can't figure out a way that vitamins and minerals

and protein and fiber can play a meaningful role in obesity.

So they end up with energy in and energy out. That's it.

That's because that's what they can measure.

And that becomes a theory ever since.

And it gets locked in. And it stays locked in. That's the weird thing.

And 1921-22, the hormone insulin is discovered

and the science of endocrinology,

of hormones and hormone related diseases starts to explode.

But you still can't measure the impact of food

on the hormone levels in the blood until the 1960s.

So, it's only in the 1960s, that you have another way

that you can study that food influences

what our body is doing.

And by that time we've had 50 years of thinking

of obesity as an energy balance disorder.

We realize that

if you change the hormonal status,

elevate insulin levels, depress glucagon levels.

You know, growth hormone is playing a role

and our foods are influencing all of that.

Nobody cares.

It's just too complicated.

This energy balance idea is too big to fail.

And then diet book doctors get involved.

First Herman Taller writes a book called Calories Don't Count

and then the infamous Robert Atkins.

And they read the research and they say,

"Wait a minute. Wait a minute.

"It's not about how much you eat.

"It's a hormonal thing.

"It's the carbs are the problem.Get rid of the carbs."

And now the research community doesn't like this idea

'cause it's coming from these cowboy diet book doctors.

And they don't want to listen to them.

Some very petty human emotions

feed into this idea that we should continue

to tell people to do the wrong thing.

And they should do the wrong thing,

and if it fails we can blame them.

Never think that our advice is wrong

'cause we've got the laws of thermal dynamics propping them up.

We always get into this argument over

what's the best fuel to put in your body.

One thing everyone agrees on is that sugar is bad for you.

And when I say everyone, I mean almost everyone.

Some doctors, including one who proposes a vegan diet,

says sugar is not the major cause of diabetes.

You really have to see this to believe it.

Carbohydrate, including pure white sugar,

increases the sensitivity to insulin.

It was published by Brunzell

from the University of Washington

in The New England Journal of Medicinein, I think, '78.

Brunzell is his name.

He took Type 2 diabetics,

he made a synthetic diet...

45% sugar and then double, white sugar,

multi-dextrose, plain table sugar,

doubled it to 85% white sugar.

Every aspect of the diabetes improved.

Walter Kempner back in the '40s and '50s

published his results on treating Type 2 diabetics

with rice,

table sugar, fruit and juice.

And Kempner knew back in the '50s

that sugar makes insulin work better and cures diabetics.

But you see, we've got it entirely backwards these days

thinking sugar causes diabetes.

It's just, it's so backward and bizarre.

Nobody stands a chance.

I didn't think we would have to clarify

what sugar does to your body.

But here are just a few reasons

why it's bad for you.

Some people easily understand

that sugar is bad.

And they can avoid foods

that have sugar or the sugar free things.

And the problem is,

it doesn't explain all of the carbohydrate effect on the blood sugar.

So starches,

including the breads, pasta, rice, fruit, those things,

raise the blood sugar just like real sugar

or actual sugar and even honey,

natural sugar, raises the blood sugar.

One of my favorite things when you walk in to Eric Westman's office,

and I've never walked in, but people who have,

apparently there's a sign on the wall that says that

fruit is nature's candy.

The reason that sign is up there

is that most people don't realize

that having fruit can raise the blood sugar,

can make diabetes worse,

can lead to obesity.

It raises your blood sugar,

increases the fat storing hormone insulin

and puts the body into fat storing mode,

fat in the liver.

If you eat a lot of sugar,

you would end up with a fatty liver

and that increases, um, fasting insulin levels.

You get insulin resistance

and high insulin levels all through the day.

Sugar is addictive.

And it may not be addictive for everyone,

just like alcohol isn't addictive for everyone.

But it's addictive for a large number of people.

I mean, I've been spending

the past at least 17 years as a psychiatrist

talking to people,

thousands and thousands of people hearing their stories.

And when I talk to people about food,

there are many clues to addiction in their stories.

My name is Georgia Ede. I'm a psychiatrist.

Georgia Ede, the only words I could come up with for her is pioneer.

She's a psychiatrist. She's a medical doctor.

And as a psychiatrist,

the first thing that happens if you go to one of these people with a problem

is they're looking to put you on a medication.

Georgia, not the same thing.

Georgia is there,

uh, trying to figure out if she can heal you,

number one, without medication,

number two, which is as important as number one,

let's try to do it with food.

Being preoccupied with food,

feeling guilty after eating food that they think is,

"bad for them,"

and spending a lot of time

thinking about food

that would be better spent doing other things.

And I think that it's one of the things

that people really want a lot of help with.

When I'm talking to people about food,

I hear the same patterns as if I'm talking to somebody

with any other substance abuse disorder.

For the average person,

that reward is enough to keep you going, keep you going.

And I can tell you personally, when I get off carbohydrates,

I've known this for years, you have a withdrawal.

I get all the same symptoms,

milder, mind you again. So, I don't like

too powerful a connection with addiction per se.

It minimizes the misery of my patients.

But when I come off carbohydrates,

get irritable, discontent, I have pain,

I have sleeplessness, I have anxiety.

Opiate withdrawal,

I have full on opiate withdrawal for three days every time.

That's what we're trying to protect against on a keto diet,

to try to stop that raise of blood sugar

to prevent diabetes or treat it

and to prevent the insulin rise,

which is the hormonal state of creating obesity.

We'll go into depth about the ketogenic diet momentarily.

But we first have to understand

that most of our problems stems from what industry is doing.

And as I said inFat, part one,

industry is a machine.

It's not a person.

It's a thing that's designed to make money.

And that's it. It's not good or bad, it just is.

It's tough if you're the sugar industry.

But the beverage industry was always happy

to sell artificially sweetened beverages

because artificial sweeteners were cheaper than sugar if nothing else.

They didn't care what people drank as long as they drank their products.

Grain industry, they could create grain that's got a lower glycemic index.

You have a lesson of

the 1980s when we told people to create low fat foods,

they were happy to do it.

And they changed the way we eat.

The problem is they changed the way we eat for the worse.

I think the tide is starting to shift somewhat.

People now realize that

added sugars are not good.

I mean, there was a point, it sounds ridiculous to say,

but there was a point where people didn't quite realize

added sugars were unhealthy for you.

Eating sugar is not essential whatsoever.

And in fact, our body will make sugar at a certain point from eating protein.

The institute of medicine

itself acknowledges that

there is no essential need

for any carbohydrate.

The body needs a certain amount of glucose

for the functioning of its brain and its eyes.

But your body is able to make that

glucose through a process called gluconeogenesis

from the protein that you consume.

Gluconeogenesis is the process

by which your body will take excess protein and convert it into glucose.

Many people wonder

if there's a need for carbohydrate in the diet at all.

In other words, is there an essential carbohydrate,

meaning the body can't make it,

so you have to eat it.

That is in debate. It's not clear.

One of the most unbiased sources of nutritional information,

the Institute of Medicine, actually says pretty clearly,

"There is no essential carbohydrate.

"You don't have to eat carbohydrate."

Based on that, I wrote a letter to the editor some years ago

just questioning whether carbohydrate was essential.

It's interesting that, that letter has been cited many, many times.

It was just a letter to the editor.

Um, the science,

in regard to how you create an essential nutrient

and what you call a macronutrient.

So, when you're on a keto diet,

your macronutrients are proteins and fats.

The idea that sugar had any benefit

actually stems from fallacies propagated in the 1970s.

Ads in magazines saying things like,

"Sugar can be the will power you need to under eat."

There's a famous headline for an FDA study that hilariously reads,

"Government gives sugar a clean bill of health."

That clean bill of health was that the amount of sugar

that the FDA was estimating we were consuming at the time,

which they said was 40 pounds per capita, per year,

which was probably, uh,

40 to 60 pounds less than we were consuming.

And then they said we don't know what would happen

if we were to actually consume more than 40 pounds per capita.

Virtually, the year that they made that claim,

sugar consumption then starts to skyrocket.

The reliable data you have is on what's called

food availability.

How much sugar is being made available

to the American public

by the industry and by imports.

And that number around 1800 was four pounds.

By 1984, when the FDA said it was 40,

the food availability numbers were already about 120 pounds per capita.

And they estimated that we were consuming about a third of that.

They're taking what they know,

which is how much is made available.

It's a reliable number you could use to compute trends from.

And then they're creating this estimate of how much we actually consume.

And then say, "Well, 40 pounds doesn't sound like a lot."

But it's kind of a meaningless number

because you have nothing to compare it to.

It's certainly ten to 20 times larger

than what we were consuming 150 years earlier.

They started doing this in the 1940s

during World War II 'cause we had to know how much food

was available and what we could expect

to deal with food rationing during the war.

And they kept it up religiously since the 1940s.

And they backdated it to 1907

to get a feel for what had happened

in the previous war and World War I to get this history.

And so if you accept the backdated data from 1907,

it looks as though we used to be eating a lot less meat then.

And then we added meat to our diets.

We added animal products,

and it went along with this epidemic of heart disease

that appeared to emerge after the 1920s.

And the arguments I make in my book is both the USDA data

is faulty, and perhaps

what you have is a correlation again between two things.

Change in diet over time

and change in health status.

And it doesn't tell you that there's any causality between the two.

It just tells you they're correlated.

Now you can generate a hypothesis

and say we think meat consumption

causes heart disease.

And then you can do an experiment,

which is called a randomized controlled trial

to test that hypothesis.

And that experiment has never been done.

As we discussed in the last film, money has a lot to do with this.

When you don't spend the money on the studies,

it's easy to say, "There's no study that says keto works."

These studies are extremely expensive,

and there have been enough good studies done

to support our moderate approach,

which is looking at balanced foods,

vegetables, fruits, grains and lean meat and dairy products.

How do you know it doesn't work

if there's never been any large scale studies?

Back before I wrote my book Fitness Confidential,

I only had my clients in LA who I worked with.

After the book came out, and then the podcast got popular,

now it wasn't just 20 or 30 students.

It was first hundreds,

and then thousands and then tens of thousands.

So once you have

that many people doing N=1,

and it's working, well, it's not an N1 experiment anymore.

It's actually been known for a long time that the root cause

is eating too much, and specifically, carbohydrates.

So, um, 150 years ago,

the first treatment for obesity

was actually a low carb ketogenic diet.

It was written about in England,

and I find myself, um,

in a curious situation where I'm just reminding people

of something that we've known for 150 years.

That one, you know, solution for the obesity and diabetes epidemic

is a low carb, ketogenic diet.

If you go back to the 1970s,

Dr. Atkins was considered a kook!

I remember the big joke back then was,

"Do Atkins. You'll lose weight,

"and then you'll be a really good looking corpse

"because you're gonna die from this diet."

Telling people that, you know, beef is good

and so on is, you know,

or that butter is good or,

you know, telling people what they want to hear

is a good way to sell books. It's a good way to,

you know, magazines are hurting for business now on the Internet.

Everyone's looking for something controversial

that they can tell people what they want to hear, and I understand that.

But it does people a tremendous disservice.

The low carbohydrate keto community is based on science,

and I understand that there are lots of ways to be healthy.

You don't have to do a low carbohydrate ketogenic diet

if you don't have carbohydrate tolerance.

Or if you don't have insulin resistance,

you can eat lots of different things.

And it's this insulin resistance that can drive so many

downstream markers of inflammation

and glycation and other

detrimental processes in our body

that can then lead to heart disease.

So whether obesity itself causes heart disease

or whether it's this constellation of health problems

that occur in people who are obese, that seems more likely.

People will say to me emphatically, "Well, keto is bad,"

and I'll ask them why, and there's no answer.

They'll just go, "It's bad. My doctor said it was bad."

And it throws your body into a state of emergency. That's what ketosis is.

As we said in the first movie,

ketosis and ketoacidosis are two completely different things.

Nutritional ketosis is quite a different scenario.

Blood sugar's absolutely under control.

The patient is healthy in every single way.

Electrolytes, insulin, glucose.Perfectly, perfectly controlled.

We have now trained the body

to switch over from burning carbohydrate

as the primary fuel.

Now the individual becomes fat adapted,

and that's really the difference between

a very unhealthy and a very healthy state.

If we're going to even pretend we're on the same page,

we need to know that basic fact.

A lot of the times when even medical professionals especially,

TV nutritionists describe in essence what ketosis is,

they always point out completely harmless

and sometimes unproven things to get you to not do it.

There are some really interesting

side effects that come with it.

Your autophagy process is totally out of whack.

Disaster pants.

Zero calorie restriction on a ketogenic diet.

Keto crotch.

If you have a sandwich or something right now,

you might just want to go ahead and put that down.

Animal fats and animal proteins.

Unless you have epilepsy, I'm not seeing a whole lot of upside to this.

They're just... They're desperate. They're just desperate.

Bacterial vaginosis.

Rich in saturated fats.

Um, so, actually have not done keto myself, as you might guess, but...

The keto diet is

the sort of latest thing

which is already promoting pushback from the community.

Like they're trying to tell people don't even try it

because it's gonna give you bad breath or constipation.

And therefore, you know, if you weigh 300 pounds,

you should just continue weighing 300 pounds.

Because if you lost 100, but

your breath smelled like ketones, that would be a tragedy.

Get all the benefit over here. None of the negatives over here,

and all the benefits over there.

For a ketogenic diet is a particularly, um,

I want to use the word magical diet for many

neurological conditions.

Many brain and, uh, body nervous system conditions.

When you eat a ketogenic diet,

you're using fat primarily for energy,

and the brain is using, uh, to a large extent,

ketones instead of glucose.

It can't use 100% ketones,

but about two-thirds of its energy can come from ketones

if you're eating a fat based diet as opposed to a carbohydrate based diet.

So we're not entirely sure why this diet is so healthy for the brain

and has been able to,

you know, help people with early Alzheimer's disease

and Parkinson's disease and seizure disorders,

but it stands to reason that

if these diets, which have been used to treat epilepsy now for almost 100 years,

perhaps longer,

if these diets can be helpful in calming brain chemistry in that way,

uh, perhaps they could be helpful for other brain disorders as well,

including psychiatric disorders,

which have a lot in common with neurological disorders...

Psychiatric disorders are neurological disorders.

It's simply that they manifest, um,

as changes in behavior and emotion

as opposed to changes in the sensory motor system

with the muscular system, for example.

So the ketogenic diet,

with the way we think it works is that

ketones burn cleanly and more efficiently

than glucose does in the brain,

so you create less oxidation, less inflammation.

So I tell my patients to think of refined carbohydrates,

in particular, sugar, flour, fruit juice, cereals

as mood destabilizers.

I think that there's a lot of potential benefit here.

The science is very, very new

when it comes to psychiatric disorders and ketogenic diets.

But it's emerging, and it's all pointing in the same direction.

It's very, very promising.

If we get this message out, I think that there are many doctors out there

who really want to understand this

and would be open minded

and would be curious to incorporate some of these principles

into their practice because we have

so many patients who do not respond to medication

or who get side effects from medication

or who don't want to take medication or can't afford medication.

And so isn't it wonderful

if we have something else to offer those people?

When I got into this field in the early 2000s,

the sort of medical orthodoxy,

the dominant hypothesis

in the nutrition establishment

was that fat, saturated fat, uh, cholesterol, are terrible for health.

And if you believe otherwise or if you wrote otherwise,

you would really suffer as a scientist.

If you said anything against that orthodoxy in the field.

So here I come along, saying, "Oh, you know, but this paper,

"the conclusions don't reflect the data.

"Can you explain that to me?"

Or, "This doesn't seem to add up."

And people were terrified to go on the record

saying anything against this dominant hypothesis.

Because the cost to them... There are real costs

to a scientist in challenging that orthodoxy.

People who couldn't get their papers published,

uh, because they had said something that was challenging to this orthodoxy.

They were disinvited from expert conferences,

they could not get research grants or their research grants were canceled.

Scientists learn to self-censor because

what they want to do is they want to do science.

That's their job. And if they can't get money,

and if they can't publish their papers

because they're talking out in ways that their seniors disapprove of,

then they can't do their science.

So they really did not want to talk about this issue

that was so deeply risky to them.

But I've been told that in order to get NIH funding,

they actually look at how many times

your name appears in the news media.

So there's this incentive to make your studies

into this kind of click bait, which is completely irresponsible.

You know, consumers don't know. They're completely confused.

One of the clever kind of rhetorical things that Harvard and others, uh,

somebody like David Katz at Yale do is they always say like,

"You poor consumers, you're so confused.

"And all these Internet crazies out there,

"and book authors are making you confused."

We are here, assembled in Stockholm,

and all seem to agree

that we need a more plant based diet

and they're talking about how to achieve it.

And yet the public is fascinated by the currently prevailing meme

that we should all eat more meat, butter and cheese.

We have lost the faith of the public.

We are like firefighters who bicker among ourselves

about who has the right caliber hose.

The mission is to get there from here, and there is a beautiful place,

the place we want to bequeath to our children.

What is making people confused

is the publication of this weak epidemiological data,

which almost 100% of the time turns out to be wrong.

I mean, what is the list of things that epidemiology has been wrong on?

Vitamin E supplements, vitamin A supplements,

vitamin C supplements,

hormone replacement therapy turned out to be killing women.

Uh, dietary cholesterol caps,

why we all ate egg white omelets and avoided shellfish for all that time.

That turned out to be wrong and was retracted.

The low fat diet.

The government and the American Heart Association

have backed off the low fat diet.

Why were we eating a low fat diet?

Because of epidemiology.

So the people confusing us

are the epidemiologists, the experts themselves.

Most of the current social media argument is over extremes.

Go all vegan

or go all meat.

No one knows who to trust,

and then both messages get commercialized and bastardized.

Now you're in fad diet land.

Now it's de facto quackery.

Because if it wasn't quackery,

why would you need this cardiologist in New York, this gynecologist in Brooklyn

writing about it instead of it coming out of Harvard or Cornell or Yale?

They've been fighting this thing for 50 years,

and the longer you fight it,

again, now we're into the cognitive dissonance,

the more you have to be right.

I have a lot of patients who are confused,

or, at least tell me about, uh, the vegan diet

and how, especially among young women,

uh, my daughter included, one of them,

um, it's very fashionable to be a vegan,

and you feel like you're doing the right thing for animals,

but as a scientist,

I wanna promote or recommend a diet

that's actually healthy for humans,

not just for animals, right?

So I'm here to help the person in front of me in a clinic.

So I want the diet to be as healthy as possible,

and it's possible with a vegan diet

to have, uh, nutritional deficiencies.

Some of the nutrients of concern in the vegan diet

include vitamin B12, iron, calcium, vitamin D,

Omega-3 fatty acids, including EPA and DHA, and protein.

We found that some of these nutrients,

which can have implications in neurologic disorders,

anemias, bone health and other health concerns,

can be deficient in vegan diets.

Low carb diets for a vegetarian is possibly a successful approach.

We actually have low carb vegetarians

who, um, perhaps can add

dairy or eggs or fish and chicken to the diet.

And in this way, um,

they can lead a healthy life.

But I think it is fair to say that, uh, we are omnivores

and animal based proteins

as well as plant based proteins can be healthy for us.

You know, you can say what the science says,

and then you can say what people actually do and actually stick with.

And you want a diet, a nutritional program

that's gonna make you feel good, give you energy,

make it so you're not hungry all the time,

so you don't have to think about food all the time.

We get a lot of pushback from the vegetarian community

where I think they, I wish they would see they were all arguing.

We all want people to be as healthy as humanly possible,

and we want the ethical decisions to be made on

the correct implications.

So if I'm going to risk my health for the health of...

other species, I want to know that's what I'm doing.

I don't wanna have the misconception that I'm gonna be healthier

because that's what I'm, you know...

Also that the ethical decision is also the one that's supported,

by, you know, medical science.

All we do is talk and talk and talk about health

and at the same time, we're just getting fatter and more unhealthy.

If America is so worried about its health, how did we get so fat?

Because we have such big problems with obesity,

Type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure,

all kinds of diseases, it's not surprising

that people are more interested

in their health than ever because they have to be.

You don't have to be interested in your health

if everything's all right, right?

It's only when you have a problem that you need to do something about it.

The myth is that, is that the health care system

is the best place to go to get healthy.

That's another terrible myth

that so many people are falling into that trap.

And, you know, if you're acutely ill,

if you need a surgery,

if you have a bad infection,

the health care system is fantastic.

But when it comes to these chronic diseases we're facing, unfortunately,

it is a myth that the health care system is the best place to address those.

There's a lot of information today on the Internet.

It's a wonderful thing, and it's a terrible thing.

There are people who have their own agendas to promote,

saying the darndest things, and my patients watch those and read them,

and I have to try to correct them.

Based on the research, we cannot say with any certainty

that eating red or processed meat causes cancer, diabetes or heart disease.

The study recommends adults continue

current red and processed meat consumption.

It's a finding that's prompted calls for a retraction.

The most prominent critic, Harvard School of Public Health,

which labeled that conclusion "irresponsible and unethical."

It's crazy because the more that we learn that meat is healthy

and people are getting healthy, with these hundreds of thousands

of N1 experiments,

the more the chasm grows between the meat eaters and the vegans.

I was watching one vegan propaganda film about a year ago,

and they were claiming that eating one egg is equivalent

to smoking five cigarettes a day.

One egg.

I never really thought about eggs much.

I just thought of them as a standard part of a healthy diet.

But then I found a study suggesting that eating

just one egg a day can be as bad as smoking

five cigarettes per day for life expectancy.

In that case, I'm smoking a pack every morning.

It makes absolutely no sense.

The problem is, is people are gonna watch these movies and believe this.

Researchers found a stepwise increase in risk

the more and more eggs people ate.

Even just a single egg a week

appeared to increase the odds of diabetes by 76%.

The reality is that a food that has just fat,

or an egg, for example,

doesn't raise the blood sugar at all.

It has a glycemic index of zero,

and so if a site is claiming that

the egg has a glycemic effect, it's just not true.

Uh, eggs don't cause diabetes,

not unless you're eating carbohydrates and you put it all into

one mix together.

But, uh, the interesting thing when you look at

the glycemic index of different foods

is that the foods that have no carbohydrates are not on that list.

So oils, butter, eggs have a glycemic index of zero.

There is a fear,

unfounded fear of the cholesterol going up,

eating more fat, more eggs.

And we now know that it is an increase in good cholesterol as well,

and a reduction of the bad cholesterol called triglyceride

or bad fats in the blood, for example.

So the extreme case of some people being told not to do this

even though there're clear benefits, based on a worry

about a long term effect of cholesterol

is just sadly wrong,

and through the lens of today's understanding of the science.

So you look at who gets heart disease.

You look at how many eggs you're eating and lo and behold,

people who eat eggs get more heart disease than people who don't.

They're probably not as health conscious as people who don't eat eggs,

'cause for 50 years we've been told don't eat eggs.

So very health conscious people in the '90s...

I probably boiled 10,000 eggs in the '90s,

and I probably threw out 10,000 yolks.

Okay? Because the yolks have fat and cholesterol

and we were taught they were killing people.

So you do these studies, and lo and behold,

you find out that people who eat eggs have a higher rate of heart disease.

That's a correlation. And then you pretend

correlation is causation, because that's why you did this study to begin with.

And then you make this claim, and then you have this whole world,

then the people who want to believe that's true,

embrace the claim and act like it's true

because they had a single published study

that said it's true.

I don't think

these people really care that much about whether

it makes us healthier.

Maybe they do. I think they care about the animals,

and that's a wonderful cause.

But that's not what I'm trying to do at the moment.

The group says that activism isn't violence,

and that they have a love-based approach.

Not everyone's like you that don't care about animals.

I do care about animals.

-You care about animals? -Yeah, absolutely.

But you condemn them to a slaughterhouse

when you eat them.

But if somebody gives up meat

and goes vegetarian or vegan and gets healthy

and they can control their weight and they control

their blood sugar,

you know, then geez, that's the greatest thing in the world

and I'm happy for 'em.

But if they can do it by eating a, you know,

a low carb, high fat diet, which clearly people can,

then I think we should be happy for them and support it.

A high fat diet is not unhealthy on its own

and should not be avoided, even if you're a green-only vegan.

Unless, in fact, you don't like the food.

The myth still persists that fat is going to kill you

or at the very least, make you fat.

It's what I call the tragic homonym.

The fat in bacon is not the same as the fat on your hips.

It's different, and another idea that is just

deeply ingrained in us is this idea that you know,

all green things are good, all vegetables are good.

And vegetables are good.

But again, it's not "either or".

What does a doctor say about adding fat?

Well, it sure seems logical that the fat in the food

would become the fat on your body,

you know, on your bottom, for example.

But it turns out that it's the insulin hormone inside

that creates the situation for you to be able to deposit the fat

and insulin is actually generated by eating carbohydrates.

So it's actually the dietary carbohydrates, the sugars

and the starches that are fattening.

But the confusion comes into play because

if you're eating carbohydrates and fats,

then you will get fat.

But it's not the fat that caused it.

It was the carbohydrates that led to the insulin

that caused the fat to be fattening.

So another part of the confusion is that low fat diets work.

And, the problem is that they cause excessive hunger

for most people,

and so they don't practically work for many people.

And we've seen that to be true because

the US has been advocating low fat diets for the last 30 years,

and it hasn't worked practically for most Americans.

It's not that it can't work. It's just that it hasn't been a practical solution.

I've always thought that our government

should operate according to the principle,

like medical doctors, when they swear an oath to their profession,

that they should at least do no harm.

You know, when they started off the dietary guidelines,

they didn't even have to know what to tell Americans what to eat.

They just simply said, have seven to 11 servings

of bread every day.

That was what they told people.

Then they actually went and told the food industry,

"You must go out and create thousands of more low fat,

"and therefore high carb food products for us."

The defenders of the nutrition establishment say,

"Oh, we could not have anticipated that people would eat more sugars."

"It's not our fault that they all went out and scarfed down SnackWell cookies."

Well, the government told the industry to make those foods.

New SnackWell's reduced fat candy!

Yes, like luscious chocolate caramel, not clusters.

And the American Heart Association was also putting its,

you know, heart healthy check mark on, you know,

Frosted Flakes and Cocoa Puffs and all these foods

that were super high in sugar.

But because they didn't have a lot of fat,

they were considered healthy.

The only measure of health was that it didn't have fat in it.

What a creamy way to cut the fat.

Is the pendulum swinging? That is a big question.

I think clearly it is, in that there is a bottom-up revolution going on.

The people who end up in an obesity medicine

clinic like mine

happen to be the ones who have the bad metabolism,

where a very small amount of sugar or starch or grains can be detrimental.

And so that's why we're very strict

about teaching people how to stay away from those foods.

Teaching people to have great foods,

things that they thought they couldn't have,

like bacon and pate and brie

and, you know, depending where you live, there's just

a wide array of foods that don't have carbohydrates,

that are very tasty and healthy.

It takes motivation to do a diet.

And I've not really been very motivated

to make a dietary change the last few years.

I don't know why.

I don't know, my head wasn't in that space,

but this is one of the important psychologies about dieting.

You have to decide to make a change,

and I was doing a podcast about health and fitness,

so I thought, "Walk it like you talk it, so I better do it."

But I remember it was a moment. It's like any major change.

There's a moment where you go, "Okay, I'm gonna do this."

A lifestyle that you can stick with,

that is going to help you control your hormones, your insulin hormones,

your fat storage hormones,

that's gonna be the best way to lose weight in the long run.

Because we don't care

if you're gonna lose weight in two weeks,

four weeks, six weeks. That's not where health is.

Where health is, is permanently reversing any metabolic damage,

making you healthy on the inside,

and then weight loss will follow.

You have to be ready to do it, just like stopping smoking,

anything else.

If you're ready to do it, you have to do it.

The great thing about this diet is it's painless.

The diet itself is painless.

And once you make the change, you feel so good, it's self-sustaining.

You want to stay with it, you want to optimize it,

and you certainly don't want to lose what you've got.

There is a Credit Suisse report that came out a little while ago

saying the market is going to shift on fats.

So you know, telling business, "Get ready for this. It's gonna change."

You know, we see butter sales going through the roof.

We see meat consumption actually increasing.

There are, there's signs in the market

that consumer driven demand is changing.

So there seems to be somewhat of a groundswell.

You walk into grocery stores and things.

There's now paleo, the way things used to be vegan.

You walk into bookstores and there's books on low carb

and the computer is just full of all of this stuff.

Look, I get it. We live in a society where everyone wants everything fast.

Just tell me what to do. You want no sugars, no grains.

Eat bacon, eat beef, eat an avocado.

That's NSNG.

NSNG, you have gray areas.

-I know you want the whole 30 right? -Yep.

-It's like either you're in, or you're out. -Yeah.

-Eh. -Yeah.

NSNG, you could mess up at noon time,

and you're right back in that evening, you know?

And you just go with it.

As long as you're cutting out sugars and grains,

you're on point.

I've done well over 1700 podcasts at this point,

and I use one line in each and every podcast.

Your good intentions have been stolen.

I'm just here to try to help you get them back.