Original subtitles

They were all in agreement about what

we could do for Charlie, what the treatment

options were, there was drugs,

and there was brain surgery

and you're out of luck, and so.

It was a while ago but .

So Charlie was born March 11th, 1992,

and he had a pretty normal first year

and then right around his first birthday a little before his first birthday

I was actually pushing him in a swing one day

and he kind of threw his arm up in the air

and twitched his head a little bit

and I didn't even think much of it

and I asked my wife Nancy, I said,

have you seen anything like that

and she said yeah, I've seen a bunch of it.

So that was the beginning and we

started seeing neurologists.

Okay, Charlie, okay.

The seizures increased in intensity

and in duration, he wound up having seizures

in the arms of the Chief of Pediatric Neurology

at Boston Children's Hospital, Seattle

Children's Hospital, UCLA, LA Children's Hospital

so we tried all the drugs that were available

at the time. Charlie had a brain surgery

a horrendous brain surgery and nothing

really stopped his seizures and we lost hope

we were basically told there was no hope.

And one day after the visit, I stopped

at the Medical Library. As soon as I started researching

pediatric epilepsy, one of the first things

that came up was a ketogenic diet

and was kinda shocking to me because

what it said was, uh, that about a third

of the kids with epilepsy as bad as Charlie

um, who go on a ketogenic diet have

their seizures go away, and another third

are significantly improved, and for a third

it doesn't work, and yet all of these folks

that we had taken Charlie to see

never mentioned a word about diet.

Nutrition information can be so confusing and as advanced as we are medically

and scientifically, the question remains what foods should we eat to achieve good health?

We're in a war for information

and the fallout affects all of us.

The media's just gonna sell what

people are gonna buy and if people

knew the truth, they would know what to ask for.

My name is Vinnie Tortorich and I've been

in the health and fitness game

for the better part of 40 years,

specializing in weight loss.

Over the years, I've seen everything come and go

at least a hundred times, but as a country,

we've only gotten fatter.

What should I eat, what pills should I take,

should I take a pill, what about those protein shakes?

We all know someone who's trying to lose weight

and most of those people don't realize

simply losing weight doesn't mean good health.

My mother, for instance, she was always

on some diet, one week it was the Cambridge Diet

the next week it was the Scarsdale diet,

the next week it was the Cabbage Soup diet.

But wait a minute, the next week

she ate nothing but bananas.

Where did that come from?

I always wonder about things like eight,

eight ounce glasses of water per day.

Really, where did that come from?

High blood pressure, your doctor will say

oh, you have high blood pressure,

stop drinking coffee, really?

These are all just myths.

The myths have become ingrained

in our society far too strongly

for people to realize they're myths.

What are some of the health myths we hear every day?

Grains are good for you and fat is bad for you.

Obesity is an energy balance disorder.

Calorie in, calorie out.

Calories in, calories out

as long as you're burning enough calories,

you can ingest whatever you want.

That you have to exercise to have better health.

Saturated fat is the cause of heart disease.

A low fat diet is a healthy diet.

We saw fat in the coronary arteries

and that must come from ingested fat.

A growing number of doctors are learning

that almost everything we're taught about nutrition is wrong.

And I realize there was this incredible story

that we had gotten it pretty much

completely upside down and backward on fat.

Believe it or not, the story of how we got to where we are today, started in

the 1860s, with the Seventh-day Adventist Church

and a woman named Ellen White.

Ellen was a higher up in the church

and she would have these premonitions

and one night she had a dream, that God came to her

and said that we shouldn't eat anything

-with a face. -I was taken to another place

high above this world and I

I-- I heard a voice.

There started modern-day veganism.

It really didn't exist before then, there were other religious groups

who were more vegetarian, they would eat eggs

and dairy and so on and so forth

and as a matter of fact, God also told her

that coffee and tea were bad, which made no sense

because both of those are vegetation.

Not long after in our history, there was

a man named Vilhjalmur Stefansson.

He also believed, to a certain extent

that a vegetable heavy diet was mandatory

for good health, he was an explorer

who ended up living with Inuits in Canada in 1906 and in that time and place

he was forced to adopt a new diet due to the lack of options.

He made a discovery that will change the way you look at food.

Now this raises the whole question of food, then.

You yourself must have longed for a green

-vegetable once in a while. -Well, I did at first.

At first his preconceived notion is

I'm gonna die, there is nothing green here.

There is no vegetation, they simply

eat fish and drink water.

It was unlike anything that he'd experienced, right?

Completely unlike the Western diet,

it was probably 70 to 80% fat, the Inuit lived

half the year on caribou

and half the year on whatever they could fish out of the sea.

For four and a half months, I lived on literally nothing but fish and water

and at the end of four and a half months, I was healthier than I'd ever been before.

And this is on an exclusive meat diet?

That was exclusive fish in this case.

On this diet, they were perfectly healthy.

I mean, Stefansson was somebody from

the medical world and he knew what cancer

looked like, he knew what heart disease looked like

and he did not see anyone suffering

from ill health in that community.

When he came back to the United States,

no one believed him, of course,

what, people eating nothing but meat and fat,

how could that be, they certainly would die.

Dr. Charles Norris, Chief Medical Examiner

does not approve of an all meat diet.

We have a weakness of not learning

from the natives, but rather teaching them.

You see everything through the colored spectacles

of your education, your bringing up.

We go through this whole idea of green good

red bad, Greenpeace, a light turns green

it means go, eat your greens, yet when you look

at red, well red means stop, blood is red,

it doesn't take long for media to pick up

on these thing and we don't realize it's happening

but it's happening right in front of us.

It's 10 p.m. do you know where

your children are?

Back to Ellen White and her visions.

Ellen was having these premonitions

and all of this was happening, the rioting's

were happening, in the mid-1860s,

but ten years earlier in 1856, a 12 year old boy

came to work with the church, his family

was in a church and that was John Kellogg.

John, by the time he was 16, was writing

and putting out literature for the church.

He would go on to share some of the most bizarre

beliefs that Ellen White and the church had

including the idea that masturbation

and sex were off limits.

Excuse me, Ricky.

To stave off these sins of the flesh,

you should never eat meat because meat

increases sexual desire. Well, this is what

eventually led to Cornflakes.

That's right, Cornflakes were created

by Seventh-day Adventists to curb sexual desires.

He was the guy who figured out something

that he termed dextrinization, it's when

you cook down grains so much it turns

into dextrose, it turns into a sugar.

Today when you see dextrose in a product

you should run in the opposite direction.

It's as bad as seeing high-fructose corn syrup.

It's used for bacon, it's used in salami,

all the luncheon meats that you get

includes dextrose nowadays because

it gives it a shelf life, it's a way

to cure it fast, it's cheap, it's easy to do

so something that John Kellogg started

way back in the day has also seeped

across to the other side, into the meat industry.

There are two issues, there's always

multiple questions, one is if you switch from

a standard American diet of processed foods

and sugary beverages and, you know, for lack

of a better word, we'll call it junk

and switch to a vegan diet with healthy

vegetables and beans and legumes and fruit

you're getting rid of a lot of crap

that's probably bad for you, which is the sugar

and the highly refined processed foods.

You would expect somebody to feel better

if they did that, the second question is

if you did that and switched to

a whole food diet that was animal food based

rather than plant based, would you be would they be healthier?

I have spent aggregated more than six years

on red meat that is seal meat, caribou meat,

muskox meat, polar bear, grizzly bear, so on.

The Stefansson diet was considered

an all meat diet, so what he did

in 1928, was subjected himself and a friend of his

to living in a hospital, being monitored

for an entire year eating nothing but meat

fish and water, and that became the famous Bellevue Study.

The studies on Stefansson, which were intensively made

from every clinical angle, started on February 13th, 1928.

Stefansson was tested during the experiment

with an excessively high protein, minimal fat diet

and as a result, became ill.

Stefansson said the only time that he felt ill

was when he ate too much lean meat

not accompanied by the fat, but that some thick steaks

made him feel better again .

You have to have fat with the lean

as lean and fat together make a perfect diet.

At the end, there were six publications that came out of that experiment

by different doctors looking at whether or not they got enough vitamins and minerals

and everything they could possibly measure and they were found

to be in perfect health.

I wanted to try to dispel from the world

the same misconceptions which I had

of the Arctic when I went north.

I used to think that I was well-informed

on the Arctic before I went north,

and-- but I concluded eventually that out of

ten things that I believed about the Arctic

before I went north, about six were wrong.

The medical community has been promoting

saturated fat as being the bad actor

for heart disease mainly and that really

came from weak science called epidemiology.

Experimental evidence that shows

that that's actually true has never been done.

For example, you could radio label

saturated fat in the food and see

if it shows up on the arteries. That's never been done.

The entire teaching about saturated fat

being bad for the heart is not really

founded in good science.

It's not that the information is not out there.

I remember early on when I was in college,

I had a college professor explain to us

that fat was our body's preferred source of energy.

Okay, fat is a very good way to have energy

and that same professor a couple of weeks

later said, our bodies prefer sugar

when we do exercise. Weren't we talking

about fat just a couple of weeks ago?

Yeah, forget about all that, it's sugar.

So, the message even in top universities

right here in the United States

are a bunch of mixed messages.

Do I think there's a big responsibility

for media to do the right thing?

Yes, I do, you know, we have three big networks,

the big three, ABC, CBS and NBC.

Whatever they told us, we went with.

Hell, when I was a kid, there was still

even cigarette commercials on the air.

At least we figured out that that was a bad idea.

♪ Don't settle for some of the taste ♪

♪ Some of the time

It's very easy to see how someone

can think something or just say something

and that becomes a reality.

Breakfast, no eggs or fatty meats

instead, eat grains and fiber

that actually lower cholesterol.

How about the term heart healthy grains.

We've all seen it, many people believe it.

After all, the terms come from studies that prove it to be true, right?

Those were studies looking at whole grains

versus white processed flours and grains.

So of course, when you're comparing it

to something like white processed flour,

it's going to be better, but does that mean

it in and of itself is therefore heart healthy?

You could make the argument that whole grains

are less bad for you than refined grains

but that doesn't make whole grains good.

Oatmeal, or oat bread, or an oat muffin

or oat bran that can either incorporated

into some other cereal product.

It's like cigarettes, you can have

cigarettes with a filter on and they're less

bad for you perhaps than unfiltered cigarettes.

Doesn't make the filtered cigarettes good. It just means they're less bad

and the same thing is true for whole grains. They are less bad.

We should put more emphasis on our vegetables we should think about the vegetables

we're gonna have for dinner rather than the meat portion.

Listen I'm not a doctor, I'm just a guy

with a physical education degree

who became a trainer and somehow

found myself in the world of modeling.

Before I became a trainer to the stars

and eventually, a best-selling author

and podcaster, but when I started modeling

in LA in the early 90s, I realized that the media will sell us anything

to make a buck, regardless of whether it's healthy or not.

Let's face it, every beer commercial

you've ever seen is a bunch of ripped-up guys

on a beach playing volleyball because

that's what beer drinkers look like.

If you have ripped up abs or you have

a nice set of shoulders, they want you

modeling everything in the infomercials.

It was the heyday of the infomercial.

If we think fat, then we are.

Fad diets, powders, pills,

still my weight's been up and down like a yo-yo

until the Ayds Plan taught me how to

take off weight and help keep it off.

Just 20 minutes a day will turn

your body into a calorie burning furnace.

We were coming into this age of, hey,

if you just do what I tell you,

you can look like this guy or this woman in just a few weeks.

Dexatrim did it, I lost weight and feel great!

Nobody wanted the truth, they just wanted

a lie that they could get everyone to believe.

Now you can lose weight without diets...

No, this product really doesn't work.

...without pills.

No, that product really doesn't work.

...without exercise.

Well, what does work?

Now you can lose weight

just by watching television.

So I learned very quickly, be careful

as to what you advertise.

The 1920s and 30s it was a lot different,

we were learning a lot of things back then.

We were discovering vitamins for the first time.

Uh, we also learned that food could heal

and a lot of these therapies are what

were being used to heal people.

They were using non-starchy, non-sugary diets

to starve cancer in the 1920s and 30s.

Take Otto Warburg for instance.

He was doing cancer studies on rats.

He thought that the outcome would be

that oxygen was what was fueling

cancer cells to grow and what he learned

with rats was that it was actually the sugar.

♪ Eat an apple everyday

His discovery was well known as

the Warburg Effect and it was shown to help

in somewhere near 80% of the cases

of people who had cancer. Why does it feel like

no one knows this information?

We were making these discoveries.

So what else contributed to them not taking hold?

We had a Great Depression and then we had a war,

a lot of people were having trouble putting food in their mouth, period,

so I don't think people were caring that much about their health, people were just

trying to eat anything, people didn't eat out as much.

We made home-made dressings, you didn't have

dressings that were full of processed oils

and we weren't adding high-fructose corn syrup

to everything that we ate, we ate real whole foods

that were cooked at home.

Even fast food was different back

in the 1940s and 50s. If you had french fries

they were made from rendered animal fat.

Basically beef tallow, which was a better way

to cook junk food, so even our junk food

was better in the 1940s and 50s and 60s.

It wasn't until we got to the 1950s

where people start to become more prosperous.

We saw the advent of TV dinners

and other stuff and more sugar

and processed foods came from everywhere.

But what really happens happened in 1955

when one of the most popular Presidents of our time,

Dwight D. Eisenhower, had a heart attack.

News of President Eisenhower's

sudden illness, described by his doctors

as coronary thrombosis, came as a severe shock to us all.

Films of President Eisenhower made just before his heart attack

are dramatic evidence of the suddenness of the illness that shocked the nation.

President Eisenhower's heart attack...

Well, if he could die, what could happen to me?

You have to understand, this is a period

in the 1950s when America is in

a complete panic about the rising tide of heart disease.

Before that, we never thought about heart attacks,

we never thought about health and fitness,

we didn't think abut the food we were eating.

No one back in the 1950s knew what

their cholesterol score was, much less

even knew what the world cholesterol meant.

Cholesterol is kind of a fat type molecule,

it's in all of our cells, 30 trillion cells.

Cholesterol is actually so important

to the body that it actually makes

the majority of cholesterol that's in your blood

right now, most of the dietary cholesterol

you eat will go through you and very little

actually gets absorbed, and of that cholesterol

you find in the blood, most of it was made by your liver.

It is an essential of nerve tissue for instance...

If you eat more cholesterol, your body will make less, if you eat less

your body will make more, which makes it very interesting

that it was maligned in the past few decades.

Heart disease had been rare in

the early 1900s and had really risen

since the late 1920s to be the number one

killer disease by the 1950s.

We took a collective gasp in this country.

We didn't wanna have another President die in office.

Just imagine your President not being

in the Oval Office for ten days and he's in bed.

Besides, this guy was very popular,

people wanted to find out what caused it.

Could it have been his diet, and if so,

what was he eating and how can we change it?

This is also the time when the media was more prevalent.

Motion picture cameras join newspaper reporters

in the old State Department building

for an historic Presidential press conference.

The first ever filmed in sound by newsreel cameramen.

I see we're trying a new experiment

this morning, I hope it doesn't prove

to be a disturbing influence.

The power of media, you can't really

tell that story without telling the story of Oprah Winfrey.

It was 1993 and by happenstance, I was put up for an appearance on Oprah.

They needed someone the next day. They were looking for younger men who were dating

older women and since my girlfriend was seven years older at the time, I was invited on.

I wasn't into it, I had no idea what really happened on Oprah,

but I was told no, you have to do it,

it'll be great for your career.

So they fly me to Chicago and I get

to the green room, I was introduced

to a woman named Doe.

The theme of the show was younger men

who were dating older women.

Older women having the courage

to live their dreams and fulfill

their fantasies and live their lives

exactly the way they wanted to,

including dating younger men.

Doe said that I would have to pretend

that I was dating her and I said what are you talking about?

My guests today, they're all members

of a provocative new kind of dating service.

I told her that I would not go on stage

and lie, that I would go on stage

and sit next to Doe, but I would not say

that we dated, I quickly realized

that I had been bamboozled, because Doe

introduced me as her boyfriend.

I'd like you meet Vinnie Tortorich,

he's a Beverly Hills fitness expert,

he's hot, sweet, he loves women

and he's emotionally accessible.

-Ah, get out of here.

I couldn't believe what was happening

and at that moment, I said to myself,

I'm gonna turn this into not the Oprah show but the Vinnie show.

Number one, women don't even hit

their sexual prime until they hit 40,

they don't even know what's going on until they're 40!

I've been dating older women--

-Gee, I'm only 39!

I'm gonna make this show so bad that they won't possibly

be able to run it on national television.

You wanna be with an older woman, it's the difference between riding in

a Volkswagen and a Cadillac. If you wanna ride in a Volkswagen,

go right ahead, if you want the Cadillac,

-go for an older woman. -Well, now--

It turned into a circus, the people

in the audience actually believed all this.

Doe and I had just met.

It was like the audience was participating

in this huge game of Mad Libs.

Two different generations.

How was school, oh I learned arithmetic.

I don't see how two people can have something in common

if they're not the same age.

It seems like people are treating this

like some sort of fetish.

What could you possible

have in common?

Let's say Cher

walked into the room

and said she had to have you.

Sally, get Cher on the phone!

I ended up asking Cher out on a date

-during the show. -Cher is on the phone.

Cher, my name is Vinnie Tortorich and...

I wanna say this in front of the whole country.

-Is the camera on me? -Yeah, the cameras on you.

Cher, I live in Beverly Hills, let's get together

and have lunch, I'll have my agent call your agent, and we'll do it

because we'll have a great time.

No matter how outlandish I got,

they seemed to enjoy it more and more.

What I wanna know is from the ladies

in the audience, should I have lunch with this guy?

As a matter of fact, you can see Oprah,

Oprah started dancing in the aisles.

The show ended and I went back to LA

and I just assumed, well that show's gonna bomb.

As of last year, it was the seventh

highest rated show in Oprah's history.

People still recognize me for it today

and virtually none of it was true.

I took that realization that media

can change everything.

Eisenhower has a heart attack and he wants

the whole country to know that this

-was a real issue. -I am happy the doctors

have given me at least a parole if not a pardon

and I expect to be back at my accustomed duties

although they say I must ease my way

into 'em and not bulldoze my way into 'em.

But the media had other ideas.

They have their own agenda, ah,

he had the common cold of heart attacks,

he didn't really have a bad one.

The media was trying to show him

on the golf course, having a great round of golf.

It was thought that diet was the cause. He was also like a four pack a day smoker.

Which may very well have given him his heart attack.

Yes, according to this survey,

more doctors smoke Camel than any other cigarette.

Try Camels yourself.

Right around that time, enters Ancel Keys.

Ancel Keys was a pathologist

at the University of Minnesota.

He got the idea in the 1950s that saturated fat

and cholesterol were what caused heart diseases.

It strikes without warning. Of ten men, we can expect five to get it.

But we can't say who or when or why.

Ancel Keys was this incredibly persuasive person.

He had a really outsized belief in his own ideas.

The facts are simple, you know the chief killer

of Americans is cardiovascular disease.

Disorders and degeneration of the heart and blood vessels.

Here are vital statistics.

They show that this problem here in America is the worst in the world.

Ancel Keys was famous for something

called the Seven Countries Study.

This is where he went and studied

seven different countries and came up with

this hypothesis as to how we're supposed to eat

based on correlation.

Ancel Keys is the one who proposed

what he called the Diet Heart Hypothesis

and that was that saturated fat and cholesterol,

dietary cholesterol would give you a heart attack,

especially saturated fat, like hot oil

down a cold stove pipe, it would just

clog up your arteries and give you a heart attack.

The problem is, he cherry picked

these countries to fit what he was

trying to hypothesize and set out

to prove that the more calories you got

from fat, the better chance you had

of getting heart disease.

It seemed like a straight line between

the least fat consumed and the most fat consumed

with the US at the top.

The only problem is, Key studied 22 countries

and if you factor in all of those countries,

the results are all over the place.

He just took the seven countries

that proved his point that fat causes heart disease.

This study made Keys the temporary savior

of the medical community, and therefore, the world.

Such that he was able to get on

to the American Heart Association Nutrition Committee

and he turned the whole Association around

in one year and got them, in 1961

to recommend that all Americans

restrict saturated fat and cholesterol

in their diets in order to fight heart disease.

This is the first advice anywhere in the world

telling people not to eat saturated fat

and cholesterol to fight heart attacks

that's like the beginning of it all.

That is what just blossomed, bloomed,

grew into the giant oak tree of advice that we have now.

We have no credible evidence to say

that saturated fat causes heart disease

and that sounds crazy to say when you look

at our Government guidelines and our dietary guidelines,

but there is no high level, credible evidence

to show that saturated fat causes heart disease.

The interesting thing about Key's

he got virtually everything wrong,

but it never infected his humility.

We're living in a time right now

when we've had a narcissistic term

people are very primitive and narcissistic

a lot of injuries in childhood,

and it has caused us to, umm, perhaps not

have the most secure sense of self

and identity. People attach themselves

to one particular approach to diet

and it develops into an identity

around which people maintain a religious

intensity, they defend it as though

any question in their dogma is like

you're questioning their religious dogma

or threatening their very sense of the fabric of reality and so

we start looking around for things to attach ourselves to and political groups,

religious organizations, different diet fads.

We attach ourselves to these groups

and we look to the groups for our identity

so our going forward in life is somehow

threatened by somebody saying,

hey maybe fat's not so bad for you.

It's positively comedic but it's becoming ridiculous.

The United States' coronary heart disease

is so common that you all wanna have to do

to study the complete natural history

of the disease is to take a sample of men,

any sample of men that are known healthy follow them, wait a little while,

and a lot of them will have coronary heart disease.

But it wasn't very long before it appeared

there was some connection between

coronary heart disease and cholesterol in the blood.

No question, we hear over and over and over again

that cholesterol equals mortality.

We've seen it in the commercials.

Fleischmann's margarine!

It's the only leading margarine made

from 100% corn oil, it has no cholesterol!

We've heard about it from our doctor.

Over time, the build up on the walls of veins and arteries

helping to clog them, restricting blood flow,

it's what causes heart attacks and strokes.

We've heard about it plenty of times from our friends and our family,

and because of that, we tend to think it's just simply the truth.

It certainly has the degree of repetition that we would expect.

In the 60s and 70s we were focusing

more on the specific types of cholesterol,

LDL and HDL and LDL became known as the bad cholesterol

and all of a sudden, medicine was focused on LDL.

It was noticed that higher cholesterol

in the blood appeared to correlate

or track with higher heart disease rates.

Cholesterol is carried in the blood by proteins called low density lipoproteins,

or LDLs, the more cholesterol we eat

the more the number of LDLs, and that's dangerous.

So essentially, the idea was developed

that the higher cholesterol was getting

in to your arteries and was causing

the arterial disease.

Because the higher that lipoprotein level goes

the greater the risk of heart disease.

There are some studies that show a correlation.

Does that mean causation, and this

is a very important differentiation

that is too infrequently made.

Because something is correlated,

doesn't mean it is the cause.

So if high cholesterol is present

in people who are having heart disease

we have to look a little further

as to why that is and if there are other factors.

When you really look at the studies

and you crunch the data, LDL is not

the best marker for heart disease.

What's even more powerful, are your ratios.

So whether it's your total cholesterol to HDL ratio

or your triglyceride to HDL ratio.

Those have better predictive value than LDL itself.

The ratios indicate your level

of insulin sensitivity or insulin resistance

so the best cholesterol measures

are not actually even talking about

a cholesterol thing, they are indirectly

talking about insulin resistance and health.

A lot of the fat research, well look we saw fat in the coronary arteries

and we thought that fat must be coming from somewhere, it must come from

circulating fat and that must come from

ingested fat, it was a very simplistic kind of idea.

The contrary opinion, the alternative hypothesis

which has been around for, ooh, a couple

of hundred years, is that we get fat

because we eat carbohydrates like pasta

potatoes, bread, they used to be called

simple carbohydrates, uhm, now the terminology

is changing to adjust to the fact

that a lot of people think maybe these

starches as my mother called them

are not quite so good for us.

We focused in, just by timing and bad luck

on this idea that saturated fat causes heart disease

and we bought into it even though

the evidence ultimately didn't really support it

and we made everything else we believed

about diet have to be reconciled with that.

Dr. Keys singling out of excessive...

In front of us, day by day, are

increasingly more and more very tempting foods.

In the mid-1960s, John Yudkin comes on the scene, he's a British scientist.

He thinks sugar's the problem.

When people have heart disease, they don't just have elevated cholesterol.

In fact they often don't have elevated cholesterol,

they have a whole cluster of metabolic abnormalities.

10, 15, 20 things you could measure

and Yudkin was saying if I feed animals sugar

or I feed college students that I'm using

in my experiments, sugar, I could cause

pretty much all of these things

just by giving them a lot of sugar.

So you're apt to say 2 or 300 years ago,

the average consumption

of sugar in this country was about

four pounds a year and that's splendid,

I'd be very happy if everybody had

four pounds of sugar a year.

They eat a hundred pounds.

Moreover, many sugar containing foods, cakes, candies, cookies,

chocolate, ice cream, various kinds

of puddings, also contain fat.

You always eat some fat, so if you eat

high carb foods, you raise your blood glucose

you raise your fat storing hormone insulin

and you're gonna store the fat that you eat.

It's all individual how much

you can tolerate, but if you eat more

than your body can tolerate, then you will

most likely gain weight, gain fat.

And instead of looking at it,

Ancel Keys just jumps right on top of it

in the media and turns this guy into a nut job.

Keys was really a bully when it came to

trying to quash anybody who opposed him.

Ancel Keys wasn't gonna let anyone

come in and rain on his parade.

He published a nine page rebuttal

in a journal called Atherosclerosis,

in print, he said Yudkin is a "mountain of nonsense."

...in the etiology of heart disease.

Keys and his colleagues managed

to paint Yudkin as a quack and portray Yudkin

and his sugar theory as quackery

and to say there is absolutely no evidence to support it.

Keys was more-- had more political influence and more savvy maybe

than Yudkin and somehow, this dietary, and we were

spending money testing the dietary fat hypothesis

so even though the tests weren't confirming it,

the more money they spent, the more people

were wedded to the hypothesis having to be right.

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.

The argument once again is it has to be tested

when you believe it's wrong, Prima facie,

you're not gonna spend the money to test it.

Why are these nutrition scientist

just not more curious about other ideas?

I was at a conference recently

where we talked about a low carb study

where they reversed the diagnosis

of diabetes for, it was a large university-based study

in just one year, on a very low-carb diet

and one of them said wait what, diabetes reversal,

wow, how'd you do that, can you just explain your study a little bit to us

because that's what we, as nutrition experts

we really need to do in America.

And I actually got up to ask

a question from the audience I said--

I said, did you hear that, that was 60% reversal

of diabetes, should that not be headline news

and should you not be curious?

Why are you not even curious about these ideas?

You know it makes you think of stories

like the McKenzie family.

Parents in South Dakota who realized

they had to take matters into their own hands

when their son lost five pounds in five days.

I called the doctor that morning and I explained that I thought my son

had rapidly lost weight and something was wrong

and we knew within five minutes

of him doing a urine analysis test

that there was sugar in his urine

and we were escorted to the hospital

to learn how to manage our new life.

We both concluded that we were

gonna make drastic changes in our diet,

reducing carbohydrate intake.

Shortly thereafter, we were told

that we didn't need to do that,

that we could feed our son recently diagnosed

with Type 1 diabetes whatever he wanted to eat.

Take a look.

I'm trusting these people, who are now

in charge of caring for my son,

and they're telling me give him pancakes

and give him french fries and cupcakes

and pizza, because now that your kid

has this disease, his life is pretty crummy already

and the worst thing you could do

as a parent is to try and change his food.

I fed my kid the exact prescribed amount

of carbohydrates, I pre-bolused his insulin

I put a continuous glucose monitor on him

I bought him a diabetes alert dog,

I literally did everything in my own capacity

to follow the guidelines and manage his disease

and I failed miserably.

- Riv?

Do you want the yogurt, the tablets, or the gel?

I put a big message out in the social media groups

that I'm connected to in the diabetes community

and I asked, how are you people achieving

normal blood sugars, what are you doing?

And about every fifth answer I got

was that these people were changing

their children's diet and implementing

a very, very low carb diet.

We removed all the processed carbs,

the flour, the sugar, the grains, the fruit

anything that would spike his blood sugar

and so the next appointment we had

with our endocrinologist I skipped in there

like I had won the lottery.

Oh my goodness, I stumbled upon

a low-carb diet and look at my son's blood sugars

and during that appointment, our very

kind-hearted doctor looked at me

and told me my son was going to resent me

for the rest of his life, that this way

of eating is not sustainable, that I'm

subjecting my son to an eating disorder

and he also handed me a business card

to go see a therapist, uhm, because he thought

maybe I was struggling with some things

and had some issues for wanting to do this

for my son and to change his diet.

And I'm told to follow these guidelines

because without those carbohydrates,

my child won't grow properly and his brain function

will be compromised, so when you're a parent

of a Type 1 and you're told

the American Diabetes Association,

this large governing body, that must know

exactly what we're up against,

they're recommending this, that's intimidating.

We either had to either make a change

or accept mediocre care.

I'm an orthopedic surgeon, it seems now

as if it's the patients that are trying

to make the medical community aware

of what they already know of what

the patients know, because they have tried

to follow the rules as given to them and they failed.

When somebody comes to me with the belief

that they-- and they tell me, I believe your son

is gonna do better if you feed them

more carbohydrates, I know they're wrong.

And when it comes to my son, I'm gonna do

what I know as opposed to what they believe.

Our son went from taking 45 to 50

units of insulin every day to maybe 15 units of insulin.

If you extrapolate that over every child

with this disease, you're gonna understand

that that's gonna have a marked effect

on the profitability of the disease.

I think we underestimate peoples ability

to make a change, and I think if there were

doctors and nurses and dieticians

who were willing to give patients

that option, I think the face

of diabetes would be different.

We're a very weird culture, because

we have an endless amount of energy

to talk about almost everything,

but when it comes to the core issues

and the ones that just effect everything,

such as family or such as diet,

we have-- you know, just went through an election.

We talked about everything, but no one

ever talked about diet or family or any of this stuff.

Now you have kids with Type 2 diabetes you have fatty liver disease,

you have sleep apnea, none of this stuff

existed before and if you think it's just old people

using this, it's getting younger and younger

-and younger. -It's an epidemic

and it's one of those things, like hey,

powers that be, hey folks in charge,

let's, this is gonna break the bank.

How do people scream all day about Medicare

-and this doesn't come up? -It never comes up.

Because it's not sexy, it doesn't work.

You want votes, telling people

like hard news, like, hey mom, you're poisoning your kid

get your shit together, no votes for you.

The current recommendations, it started in

the late 60s in response to a documentary

that aired on CBS News called Hunger in America.

This spring, a private agency,

The Citizens' Board of Inquiry,

released an exhaustive report claiming

that serious hunger exists many places

in the United States, out of a total population

of 200 million, the report states,

30 million Americans are impoverished.

With family income below $3000 a year.

Five million of these people are helped

by two existing Federal food programs.

Now, a new figure must be added.

Of the 30 million who ae impoverished,

10 million Americans, whether or not

they are reached by Federal aid, are hungry.

The Federal food program might be

better administered by the Department

of Health, Education and Welfare

or by a special commission whose only concern

would be to see that hungry Americans are fed.

This leads right to 1968 and the McGovern Committee.

Public calls to address the issue

of hunger had been building, ever since

Robert F. Kennedy had toured the devastated

slums of Mississippi.

It's obviously as great a poverty

as we've had and they're going to lead

a very difficult, unhappy life

for the rest of their existence.

But it was George McGovern, the Senator

from South Dakota who would head a committee

that started in 1968, privy to the poverty

that the nation was now aware of,

the former director of Food for Peace

in JFK's administration was intent

on bringing change that would eventually effect all of us.

It's always bothered me to see hungry people

in the world, I like to eat.

If we are to save ourselves in this country

it seems to me that a radical restructuring

of our policies and priorities is absolutely necessary.

There is nothing more to say, really.

Senator Kennedy died at 1.44 this evening.

We've got to draw the line at violence,

so I have mixed emotions, I'm supporting

the President as he tries to bring this war to a close.

It was quite sad, really, to break up

with the Beatles, 'cause to see it just fall apart was sad.

We have a mystery story

out of Washington, five people

have been arrested and charged with breaking

into the headquarters of the Democratic National

Committee in the middle of the night.

When you think of 1972, 1973,

we're still in Vietnam, it's not a popular war.

-Then 1972 comes around and we have Watergate.

People have gotta know whether or not

their President's a crook, well I'm not a crook.

People were just in a haze about diet.

No one was really paying attention to this McGovern Committee,

we had bigger problems.

-This complacency at the time

is what allowed these health myths to seep in.

As you know, I represent all sorts

of delicious things, greasy bacon,

potato chips, french fries, potatoes,

fatty meats and gobs of butter on everything.

-Now as you know, us fats

separately are just little guys,

but put us all together and what do you have?

You have millions of calories,

that's what, I have to store those

calories as fat and I can't take it anymore.

I'm getting bigger and bigger and bigger!

And the bigger he gets, the harder

his heart cells have to work, Mr. Fat,

you're a real killer!

You know, I don't know the answer, but why is it

whenever a new study comes out, it's always

talking about how food is gonna kill you?

I think that's a major misdirection

to what we should be focused on.

Food should be used to prevent illness,

not to just help reverse it once it's too late.

One of the areas we haven't talked about

until recently, is how food can affect

your brain health.

I became interested in mental health

and the connection between mental health

and diet after I had developed a lot

of my own health problems and had changed

my diet and discovered that diet

had a lot more to do with health

and mental health than I had ever been taught that it had.

In my early 40s, about ten years ago,

I developed a number of mysterious symptoms

that I think a lot of people, especially

middle aged women will identify with,

so things like chronic pain, fibromyalgia,

IBS, chronic fatigue, migraines,

uh, lots of different symptoms that all

of my very smart Harvard-affiliated doctors

couldn't help me with. After about six months

of trial and error, I arrived at this diet

that was completely upside down

from what I had been taught was good for me.

It was basically a mostly meat diet,

high in meat and fat and cholesterol

and when I arrived at that diet,

all of the symptoms that I had been

struggling with completely went away

and I thought, you know, this diet actually is also

improving my mental health and I'm

a psychiatrist, the most powerful way

to change your brain chemistry

would be through food, because that's where

brain chemicals come from in the first place.

If you're getting most of your sugar

and most of your glucose from the

outside of the body, you run the risk

of getting spikes, uh, peaks and troughs

in your blood sugar and insulin level

and those can destabilize brain chemistry,

so those can create mood swings,

insomnia, irritability, changes

in appetite throughout the course of the day.

When you eat a ketogenic diet,

you're using fat primarily for energy

and the brain is using, to a large extent,

ketones instead of glucose.

Today, if you're anywhere near Google

you will learn that

this is known as dietary ketosis.

Most healthcare professionals are familiar with ketoacidosis, and that's a state

where the body is out of control.

Diabetes it out of control.

Blood glucose is through the roof,

insulin is not able to keep up with

this glucose derangement and so that's

a life threatening state when you're

a Type 2 diabetic of control.

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 they use fat as the primary source of energy

and that's really the difference between

a very unhealthy and a very healthy state.

We had a scientific question in the 1960s where the researchers asked the wrong question,

but they were questions we needed answered.

We know that the way you gain weight

is you take in more calories than you don't-- than you burn.

And those calories can be fat or they

can be carbohydrate.

And so they get this hypothesis

which sounds reasonable that fat people

get fat because they accumulate a little

of extra calories every day and we could get

back to this by not asking how much

extra calories, they don't have to really

confront the problems with the hypothesis

and that becomes the theory ever since.

The history of science once again,

is full of common sensical facts

that turned out to be dead wrong when we did the science.

You're certain, you use words like it proves

when you look at the data, it either isn't there, or we just didn't do the experiment.

Speaking of experiments, here's a timeline

of events that happened with the McGovern Committee.

After a year of fighting for funding,

the committee operations began in 1969.

There were Democrats and Republicans

including future Presidential candidates,

George McGovern, Walter Mondale and Bob Dole.

The initial goals of the committee

centered around hunger and malnutrition

and this led to the legislation in 1970

with principles of free food stamps

and nationwide standards for eligibility.

It was in 1971 that the committee expanded

to focus on eating habits in poor neighborhoods,

but in 1972, this extremely pressing issue

was put on hold so that McGovern

could run for President. When he lost 49 States

to Richard Nixon, who would eventually

resign and be replaced by this guy,

it was back to fixing America's health.

Unfortunately, dietary guidelines, were based

on the singular focus to lower cholesterol.

Why we're treating heart disease

by supposedly lowering bad cholesterol,

we're gonna help people lose weight.

If you tell a public of 250 million people

what they're eating is gonna kill em

they're gonna probably listen.

And the unintended consequence is that

someone is gonna step in and take advantage

of these people when it doesn't work, right?

Coincidentally, drug companies were spending

millions of dollars developing drugs to target LBL.

In the 80s and 90s, a class of drugs

was invented called the statins,

and these drugs did lower the cholesterol

very effectively and they also were shown

to lower heart disease rates.

But the question that's probably more

interesting to me, that I think should be

more interesting to you, is does it help you live longer?

It might reduce heart attacks

by 20 or 30 percent at best, and it doesn't

really reduce mortality much.

We like simple answers that we have

treatments for, but that's not where

the best evaluation and treatment for heart disease is.

It's absolutely amazing to me,

the trajectory of statins and low fat diets

with everything we have today stem

from a Committee that was focused

on poverty and people who weren't

getting enough to eat. And somehow

cholesterol got into the mix, thanks to Ancel Keys.

-And in a complete U-turn...

...in 1974, they expanded the committee

to focus on overnutrition.

The very recommendations made

led to people eating way too much

of the wrong kind of food, so now we have

just the opposite problem, we don't have

a hunger problem, we have an obesity epidemic.

- The Senate Committee

finally issued a set of dietary goals

in December 1977, the McGovern Committee

issued a set of nutritional guidelines

for all Americans, intended to battle

heart disease, cancers, strokes,

high blood pressure, obesity.

In the dietary guidelines for Americans,

they recommend fewer calories, less fat,

less saturated fat, less cholesterol,

more poly-unsaturated fat.

All in favor of nominating vegetable oils, say aye.

Aye.

Less sugar, less salt,

more fiber, more starchy food.

The Committee's original report

urged Americans to reduce the risk

of heart attacks by reducing their intake

of cholesterol, down to the equivalent of about one egg a day.

This great experiment we were doing

with tax dollars seemed to have one idea

repeated over and over, cholesterol is bad, cholesterol is bad.

On its own or in conjunction with other things.

One way to look at it, is that

saturated fats are healthy when you're not

eating carbohydrates, or that saturated fat

was never unhealthy all along,

but that gets you into the realm

of you're telling people that what they've believed, is wrong.

As time has gone on, both doctors

and private citizens have done their own experiments.

As a software engineer, I look a lot

at networks. Networks are basically

objects talking to each other and a lot

of understanding a network is kind of like

understanding a brain, no one cell in the brain

controls your whole body, and actually

cholesterol was part of a larger

network of objects and how it is

that they can move about to provide us with what we need.

Another thing we don't talk about

is how complicated the human body is.

For the Government to even recommend

what you should be eating in the first place

is one thing, but for them to do it

in such a simplistic way, is another.

There were certain scientists that

had some hypothesis and they said

well some of the stuff we're looking at

is leaning towards red meat might be

bad for your heart, the Commission would say well, what do you think?

Doctors took issue with that at the hearing

saying that eight studies involving

five thousand patients failed to show

hard medical evidence that diet

has anything to do with heart attacks.

I pleaded in my report and will plead again

orally here for more research on the problem

before we make announcements to the American public.

Yes, before you make announcements to the public, you should have data

that proves what you're saying. Maybe like Dave Feldman did.

My story's a bit interesting. I found that I could move my cholesterol

up and down with the dietary fat that I ate.

The more fat I ate, the lower my LDL-C.

The less fat I ate, the higher my LDL-C.

On a three day diet of over

5000 calories and 450 grams of fat,

he lowered every marker of cholesterol.

I eventually got a number of other people

to replicate this, the success rate

is somewhere around 85% of those people

when on a low carb high fat diet.

Fatty cheeses, fatty meats, fatty nuts

and in doing so, even though their calories

increase substantially, even though

their saturated fat just jumps through the roof,

their LDL-C and their total cholesterol plummeted.

It's a very unintuitive, but sure enough

the more fat they would eat, the lower their LDL-C.

Dave Feldman is not a doctor at all.

This guy took all of the science that was available

and figured it out, yet members

of a publicly funded Committee

took ten years to find nothing and when

they were pressured to change recommendations

with no science to back it up

they ran around in circles for a while

and came out with the same report

but this time they said, oh, you can

have some meat and some salt.

I would only argue that Senators

don't have the luxury that a research scientist does

of waiting until every last shred of evidence is in.

So there you have it, the national advice

that everything you see today is based on.

That report was then taken over

to become Government-- official Government policy

so it went over to the US Department of Agriculture

and by 1980, they came out with the policy

which was the dietary guidelines for all Americans.

I think it's audacious that the Government

based on very weak evidence should tell

Americans what to eat, a healthy population at the time.

How do you tell some guy from the Midwest

who's been living on beef his entire life

to start eating vegetables, especially at that time

you couldn't get em year round, you couldn't

get fruit year round, it wasn't like it is today

where we refrigerate and ship fruits and vegetables around the world.

You're telling people from different parts

of the United States what to do,

how to do it and everyone's just

throwing their hands up, going,

I'm gonna do the best I can.

Do I think the Government was complicit

in causing this problem, yes.

Do I think they meant to do it, absolutely not.

I think McGovern's heart was in the right place,

they just went the wrong way about it.

But we went on that experiment and the Government put us

on that experiment, they didn't ask us about it, they didn't

ask our advice, they just told us how to eat, then they told the food industry,

uh, asked the food industry to produce low fat food products.

Industry slowly is responding

to it, producing foods that are lower

in salt and fat and so on and people

are beginning to get the message.

Low cholesterol, no cholesterol,

-lowers cholesterol. -Good fat, bad fat,

-low fat, non-fat. -Milk suddenly came

in, you know, a bewildering number of varieties

all of them reduced in fat and whether or not

it was a result of the experiment,

this coincided with the obesity explosions

in obesity and diabetes we've been seeing today.

The 1980s brought in all sorts of brand new foods.

There's a Dannon body in everybody.

Unlike some yogurts, it's low in fat.

Wow!

The whole thought pattern was,

if you didn't eat fat, you couldn't get fat.

Not having fat does not automatically

make something health food and that's where

we get into this debate about is it just

calories in, calories out, does it not matter

what we eat as long as we're burning

enough calories to burn it off?

We still don't know if eating a low fat diet

is a good thing, some of the smartest scientists

and the President of the National Academy of Sciences

in the late 1970s called this a huge experiment

in which the American public were the subjects.

Let's examine why there is so much

confusion about good nutrition.

One reason is that we have been given

a lot of misinformation, usually

by those looking to make a profit.

-Today, there are still

many unusual ideas as to what you should eat.

People tend to believe that just because

it's in print or on television, it must be true.

The 80s also brought in all sorts

of new fitness trends.

Make the commitment now

and watch how fast you see results.

Are you ready to do the workout?

We couldn't get enough of fitness in the 1980s,

but although we were doing all of this,

we weren't getting any thinner.

Sugar consumption increases

in part with the introduction of

high-fructose corn syrup and that's

an unintended consequence of these

Government actions, it's arguably the case

if they had done nothing, we wouldn't

have had this epidemic, we might have had

it anyway, but they probably,

almost assuredly, made it worse.

For 25 years we've been pushing

a low fat dogma, that said eat less fat

first it said eat less total fat and you'll have less heart disease,

-less cancer and you'll weigh less. -But that's not exactly true.

This started because there's incontrovertible

evidence that saturated fat is bad

and that is well established in long-term trials.

You build up in a community, institutions

organizations, everybody collects to them,

people who think just like they do.

Like we like each other, we respect each other

'cause we think alike you know.

I know nothing about you other than that

you think like I do, so I respect

the way you think and institutions do this

and then somebody else comes along

from the outside and says, oh you guys

all got it wrong, look, here's the evidence,

all these obese diabetic people neck-deep

in obesity and diabetes, we gotta change everything.

It's hard to accept, it's hard to back out of.

There's no way to back out of it

that doesn't destroy your credibility.

In this country, we have freedom of choice

to say what we wanna say, we have freedom

of choice to print what we wanna print

we have freedom of choice to think

what we wanna think, but we do not

have freedom of choice for our own healthcare.

Why, I guess profit and politics and power.

The MDs and nutritionists and all people

need to work together for the total benefit

of this country's health.

So in 1992, we did the most brilliant

thing we've ever done as a country.

We started the food pyramid.

Now, this is so ridiculous that I can't even

ever remember-- because in my own mind

it makes no sense, I always have to

read it off of a piece of paper.

The pyramid at the base, the biggest part

was bread, cereal and rice, six

to eleven servings, not per week,

hang on folks, per day!

If you went to the maximum vegetables,

that's five vegetables a day.

Five servings, and fruit, if you went

to the max, that's four, that's 20 servings

of carbohydrates every day and then

when you get into milk and dairy,

milk has carbohydrates, there's lactose in milk

that's like drinking sugar, and on meat?

The most you can have in any given day

is three servings. Now it gets even worse

because we start wondering this,

what's a serving, what's a serving of meat?

They didn't tell you how many ounces.

Well I could tell you it was two to three

ounces per serving, but who knew that?

You gotta eat the right stuff.

Start with a little meat, a little dairy,

you gotta add a bunch of fruit.

You have Timon and Pumba telling people

-to eat more grains! -Bread, cereal, rice,

-noodles. -And eat a whole lot less fat

and if you thought that was ridiculous,

the servings ad they did give us

with the food pyramid did not match

what the Government told us that servings should be

on the packages of food, those servings,

which are also mandated by the Government,

were completely different from the servings

that we heard about when it came to

what was on the pyramid.

The new food label represents nothing less than a major victory for the consumer

and for the public health.

When you're given a percentage

and you see that this is 50% or this is 10%

of your expected daily total

then you know very quickly that this food

either contributes a lot of fat

or a little bit of fat and how to plan

the rest of your diet around this particular food.

This food label which will be on virtually

all foods, will be a benchmark for nutrition

information well into the 21st century.

The Government makes the manufacturers

put the product ingredient list and the amount

in which it appears on the package. If the number one thing is grains,

you will rice first, if the second thing is sugar you will see sugar second.

These companies got really smart at some point

and figured out hey, wait a minute

we can't do it this way because people

are seeing sugar, sugar, sugar, sugar,

so what they do is they name the sugars other things.

At last count, we were at 70 names.

70 different names for sugar on packages.

Let's say you're diabetic, Type 1, Type 2

it doesn't matter, if you don't know how

to read these labels, your life hangs in the balance.

This is the world we live in, this is

our society, this is our community

and if we don't fix it, who will? No one will.

The food label has become a veritable minefield

of misleading and downright false claims.

And many in Congress feel the same way

they're concerned that any confusion

over the truthfulness of health claims

could be dangerous because the potential benefit

of displaying important health information

on food labels would be lost if consumers

lose confidence in what they're being told.

When I was a kid in the late 70s,

the term metabolic syndrome did not exist at all.

Metabolic syndrome is not one thing

it's several things, it's fatty liver disease

it's Type 2 diabetes, something else

that barely existed in the 70s, we have people

on statins and metformin, none of this

existed in this quantity in the 70s.

We've gone from here to here in just a few short years.

So the same foods in my mother's generation

grew up believing would go right to their hips.

You know, by the 1980s, we were being told

to eat six to eleven servings per day

they were the base of the food diet pyramid

in the 1990s and they coincided with this obesity epidemic.

I mean we couldn't have screwed up

the science of obesity more if we had tried.

We don't know what to do.

Nutrition experts, the establishment,

the orthodoxy, just doesn't know what to do

so they continue raising money

for the American Heart Association,

the American Diabetes Association,

but they don't have any new ideas.

They keep saying just keep applying the advice that we've given you

and somehow, it'll turn out different this time.

One of the things that I always say is

why not just be open to new ideas?

Like, here's some other ideas coming along

let's just consider them. Don't we have

an obligation to the public to consider

at least, other ideas?

You're about to meet a father who refused to give up, a man who defied

the doctors and went looking for a miracle.

My generation remembers Jim Abrahams quite well.

He did some of our favorite movies

like Airplane!and Hot Shots!and all

of these funny movies in the 70s and 80s.

Well it wasn't very funny when Jim Abrahams

had a 16 month old son who was having

seizure after seizure after seizure

and he was going-- because he was a big producer

and he had the means, he went to the top

doctors In the United States.

And at the time, Charlie was averaging

about a dozen seizures a day.

He was on four anti-epileptic medicines.

If you have a critically ill kid,

what would your choice be?

Do you wanna drug him, do you wanna cut his brain

or do you wanna change what he eats?

And it just seems obvious to me.

This is not to blame doctors.

Doctors are spread really thin and they have

to try to do the best they can,

but it was Jim who figured out on his own

by going to a library in the hospital

and just happened to open a book

to a page that showed the ketogenic diet

as being the best way to deal with seizures in infants.

The book claimed that experts here

in Baltimore were perfecting something called

the ketogenic diet, a diet consisting

largely of something most doctors

-tell us to avoid. -I called Dr. Freeman

from Johns Hopkins, told him about Charlie

and he said, send his medical records,

we did and he said, well bring Charlie

out to Hopkins and we'll try the diet

and we started the diet and in two days

his seizures were gone.

- Two days? -Two days.

Jim was angry and puzzled that none

of the six doctors he went to for help ever mentioned the diet.

What has stopped Charlie's seizures

has been in existence for 70 years,

it's been sitting there, it was waiting for him.

You had some knowledge that this diet

was probably working back at Johns Hopkins

and yet you dissuaded the Abrahams from attempting it. How come?

Well, because I don't think we had exhausted all of the medical approaches yet.

Uh... There were actually still other medications that we hadn't tried yet.

Dr. Freeman tells us that 50 to 70%

of the patients that come through his doors

and get put on a diet have success.

Can you think of any drugs in these hard cases

that have 50 to 70% success rates.

Probably not anything that comes up to that level.

In another month, Dr. Freeman weaned him off

all four anti-epileptic medicines and

Charlie went from a prognosis of a lifetime

of seizures and what they call "progressive retardation"

to we got our son back and his smile is back

and he was happy again, and our family

could go on with life.

This is Charlie Abrahams and his mom, Nancy.

I've known him since birth, I watched

his delightful personality emerge

through a normal first year, I witnessed

his debilitating battle with seizures

and medicines, I rejoiced with his family

when the ketogenic diet stopped his epilepsy

and now I derive strength and joy

like so many of his other friends

as we watch him begin to develop again.

It's too early to tell whether the nine months

of pummeling from seizures and medicines

did any permanent damage to Charlie's brain.

If he has anything to say on that matter

I know they won't, however, it's not too early

to tell that had Charlie's parents

been informed about the existence of

the ketogenic diet when he first got sick,

and about the success they've had with it

at Johns Hopkins, a vast majority

of Charlie's seizures would not have occurred.

And most of his $100,000 worth of medical,

surgical and drug treatment would not have been necessary.

Even today, 1.5 out of every 10,000 people

with epilepsy who would benefit from a ketogenic diet

are using it today. Doctors are not taught

diet therapy or even nutrition in medical school,

they just simply aren't. Try an informal

survey on your own, next time you see

a doctor, your doctor, any doctor,

say, "When you were in medical school,

how long were you, how much time

did you spend investigating and learning

about nutrition and diet therapy?"

I didn't really have much nutritional training like most doctors.

In four years of psychiatry training,

we didn't talk about food once.

The extent of my training, I got in nutrition,

let's see, year one, two, three, four

then four years of residency, zero.

Zero, I got zero in addiction too.

Zero in nutrition, zero in addiction.

We were-- we were so damn busy taking care of sick

taking care of illness and trying

to push that back and save lives

that trying to prevent illness

was not really on our radar.

I feel anger, I'm pissed off

and again, I think that part-- that the reasons

that the diet hasn't become more popular

has nothing to do with efficacy at all.

It has to do with revenue sources

that are more lucrative. The ketogenic diet

isn't that expensive, the problem is

it doesn't generate revenue for the medical world.

There are powerful forces at work

in our medical system that have nothing

to do with good health.

My patients have been getting fatter

and sicker over the last few decades

and in particular, we're starting to see

diabetes out of control, and that changes everything.

I used to see the occasional person

who needed diabetic foot ulcer management

and needing an amputation, and it started becoming virtually weekly.

When you come into a clinic and there's patients

with, you know, rotting flesh and it is rotting flesh

and it smells bad, it looks bad

and all you're doing is just trimming

off a little bit of foot, starts with a toe,

starts with an ulcer, then it moves up the foot

and sometimes you know, you get to a point after doing two or three operations

it's been going a couple of months and then the decision is you've actually

got to chop that leg off.

There's something which really upsets me

and that's when you actually amputate

someone's limb, there's a sound of actually

dropping that leg into a bucket.

I don't want anyone to hear that, you know, that noise,

it's just... Yeah it's just sickening, I started talking

to my patients about reducing sugar

and the benefits were immediate.

Not only would the peoples fatty liver disease

get better, not only would all of their blood

numbers get better, but in fact,

he would not have to end up chopping off a foot or a leg.

I then went to the hospital dieticians

and said hang on, this is really exciting

this stuff about sugar, started talking about it

to the staff and then I started implementing

a sugar reduction for my patients,

only to find out that I was starting

to tread on some big toes.

The dieticians then started kicking up

a stink about that involving their parent organization,

the Dieticians Association of Australia

who started becoming involved into pressuring

the hospital into silencing me.

We received evidence in Sydney

from a medical practitioner in Tasmania,

Dr. Gary Fettke, he gave the evidence to

the Committee in the morning of our hearing

in Sydney, three hours later, he received

an official caution from APRA.

The first time I heard this story,

I just thought it was a joke.

The Boards actual statement requires

that doctors double check that their personal beliefs

don't compromise care, that they don't put

their commercial interest in front of patients

and lastly, doctors should provide

appropriate dietary advice.

Ultimately, the Medical Board made a ruling

that I am now the only doctor as far as we know

in the world to be banned from advising

his patients to reduce their sugar and junk food intake.

And if that sounds crazy, then that's what it is.

We recognize that uh, the-- being subject

to the notifications process for a practitioner

can be an extraordinarily stressful, uh, thing

because there are pretty serious issues at stake

ultimately in terms of their practice

-of their profession and-- -And their reputation.

And their reputation and, uh, despite the fact

that we are not punitive in our focus,

we are protective in our focus

and our mandate is a public protection focus

we understand and appreciate that it may not

feel like that for the practitioner

involved in the process.

For a long time, I couldn't actually

work out why there was anything actually

against what I was talking about,

everything about reducing sugar and carbohydrate

is basic biochemistry, it's in the first

hundred pages of textbooks, so there's nothing

extreme about it, once you see the results

of reducing sugar and carbs, particularly in diabetes,

you can't unsee them.

You know, at this point, I think there is active

suppression of this science,

and this has been going on since the 60s.

One of the things I found in my research,

the biggest ever test of Ancel Keys' hypothesis

was something called The Minnesota Coronary Survey

it was on more than nine thousand men and women

in five Minnesota mental hospitals, which was a really well-controlled study

because somebody in a hospital, you can control everything they're eating.

They gave half the people what was considered the normal amount of saturated fat,

regular milk, regular meat, cheese, butter etcetera.

The other half they gave 9% saturated fats

soy-filled milk, soy-filled cheese,

soy-filled burgers, they found that the people

on the vegetable oil, soy-filled diets

there was no effect on cardiovascular mortality

or total mortality. That study

was not published for 16 years.

One of the principle investigators,

Ivan Frantz was asked by a journalist

why did you not publish this study?

He said well, there was really nothing wrong with it

we were just so disappointed in the way it came out.

Well that's basically scientific fraud,

not publishing your results.

I started to ask the question what got in the way?

What's withholding the message?

Well, there is a pharmaceutical and medical

device industry that makes billions

selling their products to doctors

who have no interest in diet therapy.

There, uh, is a sugar industry that adds

sugar to all of our processed foods

that has no interest in promoting a sugar-free diet.

There is a cardiology community led by

the American Heart Association

that has been spreading misinformation

about a high-fat diet based on flawed science

for over 70 years.

Those diets have been used in children

for many years who have epilepsy

and those children show definite

cognitive dysfunction, also those diets.

Which means they don't think as clearly.

-That's right. -Those children are also

children who have as many, they're intransigent

childhood epilepsy, they have as many

as 400 seizures a month, they're untreatable

by drugs, they go on the diet, and the diets

I think it cures 33% of them, cures them.

The epilepsy and then they aren't able to think.

Today Charlie is a elementary school teacher

a certificate in early childhood education,

he boxes, he plays piano, and we are

beyond grateful every day for his outcome.

I'm not sure what would have become of me

if my family hadn't found the ketogenic diet.

But I doubt that today, I would be an A student

in high school with lots of friends.

I doubt I would have been playing piano

for the last eight years and I doubt

I could hit an 8 iron a 160 yards.

And they just couldn't accept that they were dealing with these

intractable conditions and not just pediatric

epilepsy, but obesity is an intractable condition,

diabetes, Type 2 diabetes is an intractable condition,

Type 1 is, and here you have this diet

that appears to put these conditions into remission.

The establishment here, represented

by our friends, its a little too dogmatic

and that we may never know the truth

unless we acknowledge that there is a counter-theory

that has never been tested and that

that theory more and more people

are beginning to accept parts of the theory,

as being legitimate and that it could

answer a lot of problems and it could

even make it easier for Americans to lose weight.

People are able to reverse diabetes,

people are able to lose weight sustainably.

Most, if not all cardiovascular risk factors

are improved along the way on a lower

carbohydrate diet. That diet ought to be at least considered.

If it turns out to be true, I'll be the first

to change my mind, but show me the data.

Well, here's just one study that says

that long term ketosis reduces body weight,

triglycerides, LDL, and blood glucose

and shows that it's safe to use a long term

-ketogenic diet. -You can lose weight on

a plant-based diet, you can lose weight

on a ketogenic diet, but are you

mortgaging your health when you do that,

and the answer is yes, the ketogenic diet

when you look at the arteries of people

or animals that go on a ketogenic diet

they tend to be more clogged,

even though...

Imagine someone who spent his whole career getting the wrong answer,

and not only getting the wrong answer, getting the wrong

answer that dangerous, that actually

may have killed tens of thousands

of hundreds of thousands of people.

Millions of people prematurely, there's no

way to tell, then these outsiders

come along and say you're wrong,

not only are you wrong, you're completely wrong

or not even wrong it's so senseless

what you've been doing and you're killing people

and you have to switch. I don't think

any human being, I mean were just not wired

to be able to say oh yeah, that's a good point

I get it, I see what you're saying

and I'm sorry. And if you're an institution

like the American Heart Association,

I mean imagine the press release

you would have to write, "Dear American public

we're sorry if we killed prematurely

your loved ones and your parents

and maybe we're killing you, but in retrospect

we shouldn't have given the advice we did."

-You know, we think

about corporations are-- our Government

which is a corporation, and the first question is

do we blame them? Well, you can't hurt

the Government's feelings, you can't hurt

the corporations' feeling because

corporations and governments are not people.

They're machines, they're just big giant machines

and any person in that machine is just a cog

and there's no way to hurt anyone's feelings

or to get on anyone's bad side.

It's just a machine that keeps running.

Decisions of a nation, and of a Government

that at one time could tolerate

three or four weeks of study, now demand

almost instantaneous a reaction.

The people of the United States

recognize one by one, thousand by thousand,

million by million that this I a problem

which solution is long overdue.

Long before Lyndon Johnson came into position

of power, our leaders were recommending

great advances in the field of civil rights

and great advances in the field of health

and things of that nature.

Uh, I just happened to be the catalyst.

We're living in a fast age and all of us

are rather impatient.

I am proposing today a new national health strategy.

Emphasizes keeping people well,

not just making people well.

I do envision the day when we may use

the private health insurance system,

to offer more middle income families

high quality health services at prices they can afford

and shield them also from their catastrophic illnesses.

Today I'm proposing to the Congress

a national health plan, this major initiative

will meet the most urgent needs

in health care of the American people.

Our Administration will propose to Congress

a comprehensive plan to cover catastrophic illnesses.

I am proud to have been part of an Administration

that passed the first Catastrophic Health Bill.

Whatever form it takes,

a catastrophic illness costs money.

There are some little known but very important

provisions in this new balanced budget

that will take us a tremendous step

forward in our fight against diabetes.

These investments total more than

two billion dollars over the next five years.

We must remember that the best health care decisions

are not made by Government and insurance companies

but by patients and their doctors.

Because you're eating heathy,

and you're out there active and you're playing

sports and you're out in the playground

and doing all those things, not only

are you gonna have a better life,

but you're also helping to create

a stronger, healthier America,

and that saves us money, it means people

are not sick as much, it means that

our health care costs go down.

When you roll up at a McDonalds, what does Donald Trump order?

A Fish-O-Filet sometimes, right.

The Big Macs are great, the Quarter Pounder with cheese, I mean there's great stuff.

Do people at the windows be like, "What?"

I think all of those places, Burger King

McDonalds, I can live with them.

I had the other night, I had Kentucky Fried Chicken,

not the worst thing in the world.

If you think it's up to Government, you're wrong,

if you think it's up to industry,

you're wrong, it's up to you. And if you're gonna

make a change, if you're watching this,

change right now, tonight, don't wait

until tomorrow, if it's a Friday night

don't say Monday you're gonna start,

start now, there's no time better than right now

to get your life in order.

I've been doing a podcast with Anna Vocino for about seven years.

When we first started the podcast, uh, nobody was listening.

Someone's gone, alright, I wanna lose weight

wait, that steak is 1200 calories.

This bowl of pasta is 500 calories less?

And, as a woman, you're told

don't eat more than 1200 calories a day

if you wanna lose weight, so you think

oh, I can't have that steak, because that's my whole day!

We started attracting the attention

of people in the low carb community,

doctors, authors, like Gary Taubes

and Nina Teicholz, it's important for us

to have the experts on, 'cause we're like see

what that guy said .

Anna also, turns out, is a great cook.

As a person who works with food a lot,

I get asked many questions about

fake sweeteners or fake this or fake that

and I personally think it's gonna have to

go in an even more natural direction

to where we just have this return to just

eating food in its most natural state.

Vinnie and I are very passionate

about this topic, let's say you watched

this documentary, let's say you watched

the others and you're like, this is it,

I'm gonna do this. I am going to give up

the processed sugars and grains

and I'm gonna go for a high-fat, low-carb diet

and which you should, do it, try it.

It can't hurt to not have sugars and grains.

Like just try it. When that happens

and there's an adjustment phase,

all of us in this country, myself included,

have been in the diet mentality.

If we can peel back that diet mentality,

it would be amazing.