Seeds of Doubt: Nina Teicholz, PhD on DarkHorse

Hey folks, welcome to the DarkHorse

Podcast Inside Rail. I am sitting this

morning with Nina Teicholz, who many of

you will not have heard of

for an interesting reason.

Before I get to telling you who she is,

let me just say, Nina,

welcome to the podcast.

Thank you. I'm really happy to be here.

All right, so Nina, you are in many ways

the OG of the consciousness that is

dawning on so many of us about the upside

down nature of the food health advice

that we have been given over our entire

adult lives and that our parents were

given when we were children.(...) In some

ways, you suffer, I think, from the fact

that you were so early that the tidal

wave that you are largely responsible for

triggering is not understood by many

people to have anything to do with you.

You published a book called, is it the

Big Fat Surprise?(...) Yeah. Big Fat

Surprise, which is a New York Times

bestseller back in 2014. Am I right about

the date? There's the book.

And

you covered many of the issues that are

now on so many of our minds, including

things like seed oils and highly

processed foods. So what we're going to

do is we are going to(...) delve into

your knowledge base and talk about these

issues. I should probably say you have a

PhD in nutrition science from the

University of Reading, the University of

Reading in England. There are other

Reddings. There's a Reading Pennsylvania.

There's a Reading California, but you got

your degree from the

University of Reading in England.

In any case, I find your story

fascinating. We met at a Brownstone event

and I, with some degree of shame, will

say I was not aware of you until we met,

but now I know. And I want the audience

to get the full depth of the story that

you have brought to light. So tell us a

little bit about how you ended up in this

space and what you discovered. Our first

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Yeah, well, I am a journalist first

before I got my PhD in nutrition and had

no interest in nutrition.(...) But like a

lot of people had a number of health

problems, mainly that I was about 25

pounds heavier than I am now, and that

had plagued me my whole life. But I had,

you know, I'm from Berkeley, California.

I had been on a largely vegetarian diet,

didn't eat red meat at all.(...) Just

thought it was terrible for me, baked my

own bread, and sort of followed the basic

standard advice.(...) And, and then I was

assigned in the early 2000s, a series of

investigative food stories for Gourmet

magazine, if any of your readers are old

enough to remember that a Conde Nast

magazine.(...) And it was on trans fats,

which were becoming big at the time,

really, but not the story really hadn't

broken. And I ended up doing a story that

was just hugely popular for Gourmet

magazine about seed oils. And trans fats

were a byproduct of seed oils when you

harden them like you need to make Crisco,

one of the byproducts of that industrial

process is it creates trans fats, which

at the time were major

public health concern.

And for that story, I had I spent quite a

lot of time interviewing scientists

inside the seed oil industry getting to

know they're called oil chemists. And I

learned about their tactics. And, you

know, I learned about sort of brave

scientists who were challenging the

healthfulness of seed oils in the late

1970s, and how they were attacked by

industry scientists, how the Institute

for shortening and eligible oils, which

is the trade group for seed oils,(...)

how you employed people to go to

conferences to, to criticize any

researcher who was presenting problems

with seed oils or raising questions about

them to the point of really driving

people out of the field.

And I grew up in it, my father is an

engineer, and I just grew up in a

household where we literally thought,

like, oh, hypothesis,

antithesis, arguing around the dinner

table. And I thought that science sort of

proceeded in this kind of reason

methodological way where everybody played

by the rules. And what I just found was

so radically different from that.

Literally, the the the a margarine

company executive go calling up an editor

journal and trying to get an article

yanked from a an academic journal because

and going to and visiting and harassing

the researcher who had written the

article things that were these stories

were so extraordinary and appalling to

me, that I just decided that I really

wanted to research the more that article

read to led to a book contract.

I was going to write a book on trans

fats. And I ended up writing a book,

really about our history of erroneous

nutrition advice with a particular focus

on how we had really gotten it wrong to

advise people to cut back on saturated

fats and replace them with seed oils.

Okay, hold on, I want to pause you there

and go back and just collect some stuff.

Yeah, one, I will say I grew up also in

California, in a decidedly scientific

family. And we had the same dinner table

culture where we hash stuff out ad

nauseam. And I, it's one of the most

important contributors to who I ended up

being was that that's how you figured out

what was true was you had you had the

discussion, you presented both sides, you

reasoned it through at

that same table margarine,

which I didn't even understand.(...) You

know, I guess I technically knew that

margarine was sort of a replacement for

butter. And that butter was understood

now to be bad due to science, and that

margarine was the

reasonable thing to eat. I now,

you know, having been through story after

story where the science turned out to be

not scientific at all, but basically

propaganda, it does not surprise me

terribly that that was

nonsense. But in any case,

even the scientifically minded have this

stuff put over on them all the time, you

can't be vigilant enough. And so anyway,

I want to get to this story. But you've

mentioned several terms, and I want you

to define them, because I think people

talk about them very frequently without

understanding them. You've talked about

trans fats, I assume these are not heavy

people who switch their gender. This is a

chemical term, right?(...)

So can you define trans fats?

Yes, I mean, this is, you know, 20 years

ago now. But so seed oils are long chain

molecules. And when you go through this

process of hydrogenation that was really

invented in the late 1800s, but the first

hardened seed oil was Crisco came into

the food supply in 1911.

And it was discovered in I want to say I

think the 1970s that one of the

byproducts of this process were actually

dozens of long chain fatty acids in

formations, chemical formations that were

completely unknown and and not part of

the, you know, the natural universe.

All right, hold on, I want to do a little

translating for the audience.

Hydrogenation, okay, you are and by the

way, I'm going back now to my basic

biological education, who knows what I've

got wrong, but hydrogenation is the

process of I think literally bubbling

hydrogen through a lipid of fat in order

to get the the chains to be as saturated

with hydrogen as

possible. Is that correct?

Yes, yes. And I just want to take a

moment to explain something to the

viewers or listeners.

Because it helps you understand so much

about fats, which I gather we're going to

be talking about today. So the reason

that an oil is an oil is that the there,

these long chain carbons have some

hydrogens on them, but they also have

double bonds which cause those chains to

kink. So the kinks in those chains make

them wiggly, and they can't stack on top

of each other neatly, which is why

they're an oil, right? They, there's kind

of air and space between them, or not

air, but you know, there's space between

them. So that's why they're an oil.

Maybe we'll talk later about

why those oils aren't stable.

So let me let me let me fill that. And I

think this is really important. And I

think almost nobody who hasn't studied

the chemistry gets this. The idea is the

what you're describing as double bonds,

okay, you can have the two carbons bonded

together twice where they share two pairs

of electrons, or they can surrender one

of those pairs of electrons, and they can

start each picking up a hydrogen instead,

leaving only the single bond between

them. And you just stop me

where I get something wrong.

That's correct.

Okay, so then the point is, this sounds

like who would even know if this is true?

Is that just some story in the textbook,

except for the observation, that when you

saturate these fats with hydrogen, they

change phases, they become solid at room

temperature, because they stack neatly.

And the idea is if they have odd shapes,

then it's like a bunch of things that

you've thrown into a closet. And you open

the door to the closet, and they spill

out kind of like a liquid, as opposed to

a bunch of boxes that you put in the

closet, that if you open the door, they

remain a stack of boxes. Is that fair?

That is exactly right. So you just think

about like a whole bunch of squiggly,

(...) I don't know, squiggly things, I

can't think of an analogy, but a

bunch of, you know, like toy

snakes, like a wiggly toy snake.

So you can't you they, if you put them in

your hands, you can't get them to,

there's going to be air between them.

That and so that's what creates this, the

distance that is makes it an oil. When

you stack straight molecules or straight

anything, you know, those things in the

pool on top of each other, there's no

space between them. And therefore, they

are a solid. So when we say we saturated

fats, which we all sort of throw around

that term, but literally what we mean is

that they are

saturated with hydrogen atoms,

they so so you have corn oil.(...) And

again, any place I get something wrong,

you just jump in, you've got corn oil,

okay, corn oil is an oil, because the

chains, the carbon chains are not

saturated with hydrogen, they're kinked,

and they don't stack neatly. Somebody

bubble some hydrogen through it, maybe

under some special conditions to get

those double bonds to break to pick up

the hydrogens. And the next thing you

know, you've got a substance that is the

basis for margarine,(...) and now you got

a problem,(...) which is it's sort of in

the neighborhood of butter.

But it doesn't taste good, and it doesn't

look good.(...) So yeah, it's going to

accept it as a substitute. So now you got

to fix it, right? You got to make it look

yellow. And you got to flavor it so it's

a little closer to

butter or something like that.

Yeah, well, first you have to I mean, it

comes out as this I actually went to

hydrogenation plant.

And I didn't report on it in my book,

because the plant manager was so

terrified that he would get fired for

letting me come visit it.

But even though the perfect title

suggests itself, you could have had an

article called the hydrogen bomb.

Yeah,

that would have really

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So yeah, I mean, it's, it comes out as

like this grayish murky liquid or

substance and it needs to be deodorized,

winterized, stabilized, because the

process takes out all the nutrients, some

of the nutrients need to be added back

in, and then you get a hard substance

that, well, as I said, initially was

Crisco. Crisco was aimed to take the

place of lard in American kitchens and

there was this massive marketing campaign

to make that happen. You know, cookbooks

went out and all the ladies magazines, it

was all about get rid of the, you know,

those dank dark, you know, odors of lard

and here's a new shiny new thing made in

laboratories with steel counters. And so

this was sold and, you know, I think one

of the themes that runs through all of

American food history is that because we

are a nation of immigrants who want to

assimilate and we do not have our

grandmothers or mothers maybe hanging

over our shoulders saying, this is not

the way you do it. You have to, we do it

the old way.(...) Everybody wants these

many American women were looking to

women's magazines on how to, how to be

domestic, how to cook food,(...) unlike

say,(...) modern, how to be modern.

Literally, there were ads saying, cast

off the old food of your grandma like the

spinning wheel and join the modern

American woman. This was hugely

persuasive. Crisco is made by Proctor and

Gamble, whom we will, I think revisit

again in this podcast.

And so this, so it was

Crisco replacing lard.

And just in parentheses, the two main

fats that have been used in the Western

world, you know, going back millennia

were lard and butter. Those are the two

principal cooking fats. So you've got

Crisco replacing lard. And then later in

the 1920s and 30s, principally,

you had, you had margarine replacing

butter. But there is a whole really

interesting fascinating chapter of

history called the margarine wars,

because the dairy industry, of course,

resisted the intrusion of margarine,

which was appealing to many housewives,

because it was cheaper. There were

literally wars, there was white blocks of

sort of a proto margarine that were sold

and you would buy it and you'd have to

need with a yellow capsule, you would

have to need in the yellow color to make

it look like butter.(...) And then there

were, you know, every state had its own

set of laws that, and it was really

raging, women would march into other

states so they could get cheaper

margarine to replace it with butter.

There was a campaign to try to make this

seem like an elite food that would be

seen on, you know, even the Tony tables

of wealthy women. And so,(...) and I

think that came to an end, I don't

remember the date, but it was like, in

the late 1940s, there was finally a

federal solution that allowed margarine

to be sold nationwide.

So,

yeah, so it's the, it's really the

takeover of natural animal fats with

these ersatz fake foods(...) that we were

told were healthy. And like, like you, I

mean, we didn't have margarine in my

house, but we definitely had skim milk,

skim milk, you know,(...) didn't arrive

in America until the early 1970s.

And cereal for breakfast, also the result

of a marketing campaign. So

anyway, I think we started...

Hold on, I want to say one thing, just

I am now realizing,

as Heather and I have become aware of the

fact that our level of vigilance, though

it was really high with respect to, you

know, false stories, dressed as science

and all that wasn't a quarter as high as

it needed to be to understand the stuff

until recently. And who knows what we

don't yet know? But what I'm realizing

was that the very scientific bent of the

family that I grew up in was more or less

weaponized against them. That the idea

that science has finally come to

understand what foods truly do make us

healthy, and a bunch of the things that

do come from the old country are really

bad for you, right? They're going to

shorten your life and we have understood

that the right things for you to be eaten

are these products of a mysterious

process you know essentially nothing

about, fits with this ethos of, you know,

in the past there was ignorance and now

we are becoming enlightened. That sense

that you want to eat enlightened food is

upside down and backwards, I now know

having spent a, you know, a career in

evolutionary biology, I know why that

story is wrong, but the average person,

the more scientific they are, the more

susceptible they likely are to the idea

that here is what the data say about

healthy food and that is, it's like

opening the gates of the city to the, you

know, propaganda hordes.

Yeah, I mean it's very much what we see

today in other fields which is the, you

know, the allure of new technologies that

will make us better, faster, brighter,

and the desire to go along with what are

truly horrifying and fake technologies

that will seem destined to probably rob

us of our essential human nature, but

this was, these were, these were

campaigns that I think the overarching

theme of all of this was in various

different areas of our, let's say our

dinner plate to say, you know, the whole

universe of foods, we were, there were

campaigns to remove what is natural and

to believe in this industrial food, fake

food, miracle that could, that was, was

to be modern, but I think then there's an

added dimension to this which we also see

today in many of these kinds of

conversations, but which was fear,

the fear, the nudging to drive us, so we

talked about the shift to margarine which

was largely about lower cost and sort of

the allure of the modern, but then by the

1950s the story was,

and really the whole foundation for why

we have guidelines today and why they are

wrong, was the marketing of fear, fear of

heart disease, fear of disease,

and lo and behold these newfangled foods

would protect and cure you from disease.

And, you know, it will be a surprise to

none of our listeners that that story

turns out to be effectively the inverse

of the truth, again for evolutionary

reasons that are in retrospect totally

obvious, right? We are creatures built

for an environment. We are each as

individuals and together a nested set of

complex systems and our knowledge of

those complex systems is far from

complete. So the idea that people who

know something about human physiology are

in a position to tell you, you know, what

you should be eating to make your health

better is predicated on some world we

don't live in where we have a complete

understanding and therefore can detect

all of the effects of swapping this food

for that food. Really the best guidance

almost invariably is going to be you want

the environment that you're built for.

That's the environment in which your

health will be optimized and any

environment that is distorted and our

environments are distorted across the

board, psychologically, physiologically,

socially, all of these ways, those

environments will make us sick.

So the argument that our immediate

ancestors did not have at their disposal

(...) was something like the chances that

that health advice is right are

exceedingly low. This even before you get

to the propaganda incentive, the you

know, the perverse incentive to sell you

a product like margarine,

just the simple arrogance

to believe that we understand

how you function well enough to optimize

your diet in a high-tech sense is

ludicrous. But you can imagine, you know,

a housewife in the 50s, 60s, 70s not

having the courage to say, no, actually

I'm shopping in the aisle people are

afraid to shop in, but that's the right

aisle because it's closer to what our

ancestors ate and I'm not going to shop

in the fancy aisle that I'm told is quote

unquote heart healthy because that aisle

is liable to have all kinds of unintended

consequences that we'll

know about 40 years from now.

There's so many things that you just said

that I want to pick up on, but I would

say that even the evolutionary argument,

which we seem we've come to maybe just in

the last decade, even that argument has

been twisted and used by, I would say,

you know, the corporate agendas, like

this idea that we evolved to eat plants,

like the famous food writer and sort of

food guru Michael Pollan who would say,

you know, eat food, mostly plants and eat

what you're, don't eat what you're, you

know, eat like your grandparents, right?

Well, our grandparents

were not eating mostly plants.

The vegan diet or even the vegetarian

diet is not one that we evolved eating.

That's just abundantly obvious.

Yeah. Oh,

go ahead.

No, no, no. I mean, we're in some ways to

me, this is part of like long before we

started having debates about biological

sex that seemed a little crazy because it

seems undeniable.(...) We, you know,

going back to, I would say the early to

the 2010 or so, really when the vegan

diet became started taking off, it was

asking us to suspend our belief in basic

human biology as if we evolved eating

plant foods. And there's even an inside

the field of evolutionary biology to try

to, I would say pretend that we, we

evolved as mostly plant eaters(...) in

order to justify the

current nutrition recommendations.

Yeah. In fact, the argument is tied up in

a battle over, I mean, I hate to pile on

here, but it's tied up in a battle over

feminism, frankly, because the story of

man, the hunter is it

is not a story of equity.

So I do think that there is a complex

tale to tell.(...) Our ancestors, our

hunter-gatherer ancestors certainly did

eat a lot of plant matter. What they were

eating is not the food

pyramid. That's for sure.

But nonetheless, the idea, I agree with

you as with all of these scientific

claims, the fact that there's a vast

amount of money to be made by creating

the impression that the science tells you

one thing rather than another has caused

the evolutionary argument to get muddled

to where really the evolutionary argument

comes down to you'd be wise to adhere to

the precautionary principle.

But I wanted to pick up on your, your

Michael Pollan point, because Heather and

I have proudly cited Michael Pollan. In

fact, the exact line you're referring to

eat food, not too much, mostly plants,

right? His other proclamation of this

kind, which I think has fared better, is

shop the outside of the supermarket,(...)

right? The fresh foods are on the outside

of the supermarket, whether that's meat

in the refrigerator cases or, you know,

fresh vegetables, but those foods tend to

be better than the highly processed

stuff. But watching,

you know, it's like it is in some sense

layers of an onion. There was a point at

which Michael Pollan's advice was a

breath of fresh air relative to the

advice, the high tech advice that we had

been given.(...) But even that advice is

distorted by this received wisdom about,

you know, the vegetarian diet would be

ideal. And if you're not going to be a

vegetarian, you should certainly be

leaning heavily in that direction, which

just doesn't comport with our ancestry or

our instincts. Right.

I mean, whole foods, the whole foods

movement, which is what Michael Pollan

was a part of and Oz waters

and shape in East and Berkeley.

The problem with whole foods is that it's

it just lacks definition in the crucial

way that people are looking for. Is it

mostly plants or is it mostly animal

foods, which I would say is pretty much

at the heart of the diet debates.(...)

Now, like, yes, we would all agree, eat

unprocessed, mostly, you know, whole

foods. But where you go in the

supermarket is is a critical answer to

that question.(...) So but maybe before

we get to that, I don't know where you

want to go, but I was thinking maybe we

could talk about why

we all went through this nutrition

transition, right? Like why you and I in

our childhoods, we're eating, we're

drinking skim milk or eating margarine.

(...) And probably early in our

childhoods, we were not probably that's

my household. I grew

up, you know, in the 70s.

We went through the transition nutrition

transition in my household. We when I was

very young, we were getting milk in a

bottle delivered to our door, whole milk.

And then somewhere along the line, we

were having skim milk and my mom bought a

wok to do stir fry so that we could, you

know, be healthier, no more bitky and

sour cream sauce from my grandmother. So

why did that happen, which I think we

could talk sort of about the history of

how we came to be in this confused state

that we are in. I mean,

I mean, obviously, some of this goes back

to the early 1900s, when we started

having processed food companies and but

the real big bang of the nutrition change

starts in the 1950s when heart disease is

on the rise and is number one killer in

the United States. Heart disease had been

known, documented in textbooks, but was

quite rare, not seen in hospitals in the

early 1900s and then shot up. So these

are men having heart attacks in the prime

of life and their fathers had not even

known heart disease.

President Eisenhower himself has a heart

attack in 1955 is out of the Oval Office

for 10 days. That seems like,

unbelievable, we just had three days of

Trump not being around and we're all

apoplectic. This is 10 days in 1955. And

there's a vacuum of information. What is

causing heart disease? There were various

viable hypotheses proposed by leading

scientists at the time. It could be

nutrient deficiency, it could be the

rising tide of auto exhaust in the air

that people were experiencing, could be

the type A personality. We go around

yelling at people and then, you know,

have a heart attack.

Into that vacuum steps, a scientist from

the University of

Minnesota named(...) Ansel Keys.

He is, and his idea is that it's dietary

cholesterol, like the kind you get in egg

yolks and shellfish and saturated fats

that raise your total cholesterol, which

is all they measured at the time, in your

blood and like sort of like hot oil in a

cold stovepipe, it clogs your arteries

and then you have a heart attack.

So that was called the

diet heart hypothesis.

And so in that case, hold on, in that

case, the saturated fats in question that

became suspect were animal fats.

Correct.

Correct. Okay.

Animal fats.

We were animal. We can come back later to

why animals store fat in this way rather

than as a liquid, but

just suffice it to say.

I can see what like some liquid fat would

look like in my underwear,

probably not a very

efficient way to store fat.

But, um, yeah, and it impinges badly on

moving around, right? A sloshing bag of

liquid fat is not good. It's also, I'm

going to extrapolate here. I don't know

this from evidence, but I'm going to

argue that the density of saturated(...)

animal fats is actually, you know, the

reason that we store energy as fat is

because fat is comparatively light. And

so the cost of carrying it around as an

animal is low. If you're a plant, the

opposite is true. You can afford to have

heavier fats because, and in fact, you

can afford to store energy in other ways

too, um, because you're not moving

around. So you're not

paying a price for every step.

I am not sure about that theory, but I

like, I'm not sure I, uh,

you know, yeah, it's complex, like

saturated fatty acids are necessary for

all kinds of functions in the body and,

um,(...) evolutionarily, like I can't

answer that question,

but, um, I can hop over that and, and

say, uh, that this basically, if you're,

if you're condemning dietary cholesterol

and saturated fat as the enemy, the most

likely enemy, uh, for heart disease, as

the dietary villains, you are targeting

animal foods, right? What has cholesterol

in it are animal foods, eggs, butter,

meat, cheese. It's also got saturated

fats in them and all to varying degrees.

And one really important note is that is

for everybody is just that all animal

foods are not just all saturated fats,

right? Like even a porterhouse steak is

one third saturated fat. And, um, and the

other bits are polyunsaturated fats,

which are the same kind that you have in

seed oils and the kind of what's called

mono unsaturated, which is what's in

olive oil. So all foods are, have a

combination of different kinds.

Mono unsaturated and sorry, mono

unsaturated and polyunsaturated refer to

(...) the number of kinks

per chain. Is that right?

That's right. So if we end up talking

about oxidation, that's an important

point why it's better to use olive oil

than these other seed and bean oils. Um,

so,(...) um, so Ansel Keys is a very

colorful, charismatic individual.(...)

Uh, he is extremely aggressive. There are

counts of him or even his friends and

colleagues call him impossible to argue

with anyone because he will argue anyone

to the death. He had enormous

overconfidence in his own beliefs. He had

the erroneous, uh,(...) assumption that

he was right until proven wrong, which as

you know, and I hope many of your

listeners do is the opposite of how

science takes place, which is that

you're, you are really wrong until

there's a body of evidence where you feel

like you can be semi-right about

something. And then it always can be

disproven by, uh, the slaying of a

beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.

But Ansel Keys was also a very

self-promotional sort of person, and he

was able to get himself into the American

Heart Association nutrition committee

such that in 1961,(...) the American

Heart Association, which is the premier

still is, but at that time, even more so

the lone public health organization

giving Americans advice on heart disease,

desperate to provide some kind of

guidance to Americans who are clamoring

for guidance on how to prevent heart

disease. Again, the number one killer,

they come out with a statement in 1961,

the first anywhere in the world saying,

(...) avoid saturated fat and dietary

cholesterol as the best measure of

prevention against heart disease and

replace those saturated fats with what we

now call(...) seed oils, then called

vegetable oils.(...) So that is really

the little acorn of advice that grew into

the giant oak tree that we now have

really worldwide. Um, but it all started

with the American Heart Association,

1961. And I just have to tell a little

story here, which is that

Procter and Gamble, remember, make of

maker of Crisco also then

later came out with Crisco oil.

They really launched the American Heart

Association in 1948 with a, they made

them the beneficiary of a fundraiser

radio show, and the walking man contest,

and they, they, they then collected all

the money from that fundraiser and gave

what is the equivalent I think today now

like $20 million to the American Heart

Association from this contest in 1948.

And according to the company's own

history, that really catapulted the

American Heart Association into being

able to open chapters all over the

country and, um, becoming sort of the

beginning of the powerhouse that it now

is today.(...) So, and there are other

stories about how the president of the

American Heart Association was called out

by his colleagues for posing with a

bottle of Crisco oil and educational

videos. So, and they, and Procter and

Gamble has,(...) is the last time I

checked was still a donor to the American

Heart Association, but it's really to

say, hold on, hold on.

This is such a mind blowing fact. I

remember when I first heard this having

to fact check it because it's so,(...) it

contravenes our understanding. When you

hear American Heart Association and you

see that logo, you think(...) these are

medical people who are telling me things

based on the evidence that has

accumulated in science and medicine. You

don't understand that this has been

launched by a for-profit corporation(...)

that has an interest in what you believe

is good health advice.

Um, and you know, am I wrong that they

invented the term heart healthy to give?

That's right. I mean,

so, uh, yeah, I mean, I remember when I

was research investigating this story,

like coming across this memoir by a

former vice president, American Heart

Association, just couldn't believe my

luck. I had been like, I had one of these

alerts on my eBay to like the moment it

came up, I bought it. Um, and now it's

just impossible to get a copy of that

book.(...) But, uh, yeah, they actually,

so that announcement in 1961 by American

Heart Association, which by the way, was

accompanied also in the same year by

Ansel Keys getting himself on the cover

of Time magazine as the guy who's cracked

the mystery of heart disease.

Um, that was the beginning of the

medicalization of seed oils. Uh, and you

might say the medicalization of foods. So

all of a sudden seed oils are being

marketed as heart healthy, you know, rip

out this page in the magazine and take it

to your doctor and buy Misso, tell them

to, you know, prescribe Missola oil to

you. And, um, it was also the beginning

of our(...) decreased

consumption of animal foods.

And it, but it really represents this

shift from instead of trusting our

ancestors for, or our cookbooks or

recipes that have been handed down to us,

we started looking to our doctors to tell

us what to eat. You know, instead of your

recipe pad, that came from the doctor's

prescription pad. Uh, so your food was

medicalized and, uh, and, and a big, big

part of that was

switching over to these seed oils,

which, you know, which, yeah. You want to

say something about where these things

come from? Why did we

have them to switch over to?

Well, going back to the hydrogenation

story, um, and Chris, so, so after see,

so oil squeezed from a seed, it started,

I'll just tell a little bit of the

history here. It started in, in a major

way with cotton seeds, which were a

byproduct of the cotton crop. And they

figured out if they could squeeze, they

could squeeze them and they would make

cotton seed oil that was then kind of

snuck into butter. There was adulterated

butter and there was a ways

of, but, but basically, yeah,

hold on. I want people to understand as

soon as you say that that there is

immediately an evolutionary question

because plants make seeds for a reason.

When animals open those seeds to get the

calorie rich contents, which exists in

seeds for plant reasons. In other words,

the plant is feeding the, the

seedling by loading calories

and nutrients into a seed.(...) The plant

has an interest in preventing the animal

from accessing those resources, which are

obviously otherwise highly desirable. So

what does it do? It puts secondary

compounds into the seed in order that it

isn't worth it to an animal, that the

cost of eating the oil in that seed

exceeds the benefit, which prevents most

creatures who are not in a position to

detoxify what's in that seed from

engaging in this behavior.(...) So at the

point that you say, Oh, well, we've got

all of these fats that we can learn to

squeeze out of seeds. It raises an

obvious question that we all should have

been asking all along, which is how safe

would it be to eat that stuff given that

the plant has defended it

from exactly this behavior?

And in large quantities, right? I mean,

even if you were able to consume some of

those seeds, such as in sunflower seeds,

you wouldn't be expressing the oil just

to consume the oil, right? It's a little

bit like, I guess, a parallel is fruit

juices. Like it's, it's just you're,

you're the seed comes with, you know,

it's a whole nutrient package and you're

not just taking out the oil.

So, but I wanted

to the extent that there are secondary

compounds in it, the chances that you can

detoxify a little are high, but that you

can overwhelm the system by taking in so

many of those secondary compounds that

you're going to cause health impacts is

highly likely for a creature that is not

specifically adapted to do it.

Right. Well, and that we could just maybe

put a pin in that because plants beyond

just their seeds contain all kinds of

what we call anti nutrients that inhibit

nutrient absorption or cause inflammation

or various things. Because they're not,

yes, they do that

because they can't run away.

Right. So, so there is an entire class of

molecules that does not serve a function

inside of the plant that makes the

function it serves is to disrupt animal

physiology to dissuade herbivores.

Correct. Right. And they

do a very good job of that.

You know, we've, anyway, let's I don't

want to get too far down that, but I want

to say going back to the seed oil story.

So the reason oils were first produced

from cotton seeds was that there was a

desperate need for oil to lubricate the

machinery of the industrial revolution.

This is something that whale oil had been

used. In fact, whales were

mainly hunted for their oil.

And when we hunted all the whales out of

the ocean,(...) then replacing that

dearth of this commodity was cottonseed

in America, at least. And, and then so

that's the kind of the history of how

they came into production. And then as I

said, in the early in 1911,

Proctor and Gamble, who was a soap maker

and a towel maker, because oil is also

used to make candles, fats in general are

used to make candles. They looked at this

hardened substance and thought, ah, let's

try to feed it to as food. I mean, that

was really the kind of the

essence of the thought process.

So I can't remember how we got started

down this, but you know, this is oh, and

then so then what happened that there's a

missing piece. So remember that so oils

are fundamentally unstable, as we've

described, they, because of those double

bonds in each of those molecules that we

talked about, and the fact that those

double bonds at any time can open up and

attach themselves not only to hydrogen,

which is what happens in

hydrogenation, as you explained,

but oxygen.(...) So and especially under

conditions of heat and light,

they will like any chemical reaction,

they will speed up, they will attach to

the bond, double bonds will open up and

they will attach to oxygen.

And that's called oxidation.

So oxidation is not good in many ways.

That's one of the reasons we take

antioxidants is to combat oxidation in

the body, which drives inflammation. But

as a food product from a manufacturer's

perspective, it's also unusable. That's

one thing, you know, oils go rancid, you

can't you can't eat, you can't use oil

anyway, as a shelf stable for a shelf

stable food item, because it's greasy, it

doesn't hold together. So so they had to

figure so with hydrogenation, they

figured out how to make it solid. And

then they had to figure out something

called we call partial hydrogenation,

which was a little touch of hydrogenation

that would allow it to stay as an oil,

but not go rancid, not spoil.

So and I

didn't understand this part of the story.

The idea is the more of those double

bonds you have, the more vulnerability to

going rancid it is the less suited it is

to some long supply chain or sitting on a

shelf. So they want to hydro hydrogenate

it enough to limit the opportunity of

oxygen to bond to that chain without

causing it to go solid.

That's right. So there's hydrogenation is

something that exists along on continuum.

You know, fully hydrogenated or almost

fully hydrogenated vegetable oil becomes

something really hard, like the coating

of a chocolate candy hard. If it's a mid

range of hydrogenation, you get something

like a cake frosting, or you get, you

know, something that's softer. Touch

hydrogenation allows it to stay as an

oil, but be shelf stable on the shelf.

And that is how we got Missola oil,

Crisco oil, all of those oils, and they

started being marketed to the public in

the 1940s, ironically, as perfect for

frying things. When we know, even when

they're hydrogenated so that they stay

stable on the shelf, they're certainly

not up to being heated in the kitchen,

especially like repeat uses, but it was

sold to American Housewives, you know,

this is what you fry your chicken in.

And the reason it can't, you know, it's

especially bad to heat those oils is,

again, those chemical reactions speed up.

And you're talking about

more and more oxidation

and something called perioxidation

products. Anyway, that's a whole subject.

I mean, it's(...) one of the main it's

really the main reason that we have

turned on seed oils in the last, say,

six, seven years is that they have they

are so easily oxidized and can they yield

hundreds of oxidation products.

So, but you're taking a cocktail of

molecules, uncatalogued molecules.(...)

If you have heated them extrapolating

from what you're telling me here, you

heat these things. It's a little bit

insidious because if you overheat all of

oil, it smokes. So you know, it sort of

trains you to cook with

it better, right? Like not

the smoke point is not the same as the

the heat at which an oil will start to

oxidize. Like an oil will start to

oxidize even on your kitchen shelf with

no heat, just over time. And you can, you

know, if you leave, say, sunflower seeds,

which are rich in these oils, or even

nuts, you'll notice that they go rancid

just sitting on a shelf. And that's the

oil. That's the oils in them oxidizing.

(...) The smoke point is

unrelated to the oxidation.

Well, all I'm saying is if he I'm again,

extrapolating from what you're telling

me, if heating,(...) Westin oil is bad

because it causes oxidation products that

are potentially hazardous to you, you

don't get a warning with it because it

does have a high smoke point. So it

encourages you to use high heat because

it doesn't, it doesn't, you

know, set off your smoke alarm.

And I would also just throw this in here.

I remember from decades ago, advice on

how to season cast iron cookware so that

you get that nice anti anti stick natural

coating. But the advice was to use seed

oils that actually they create these very

durable polymers that stick to the cast

iron, presumably, they can stick to the

iron for the same reason that they stick

to oxygen. All right,

they bond there permanently.

Well, that is a fascinating point that

you bring up. And let me just put it in a

slightly different light, which is that

oxidation of seed oils results in some of

these oxidation and perioxidation

products, which there are hundreds.

Some of them are like shellac like

substances, polymers, and not too long

ago, I won't go into the whole history,

but restaurants basically had to get rid

of hydrogenated oils when trans fats were

banned and switch over to just regular

non hydrogenated, mostly soybean oil,

that's the main oil we consume in America

in their rest in their fryers.(...) And

so this is happening in the mid 2000s.

And according to these industry

scientists that I interviewed.

So these are regular oils that that

haven't been stabilized, right? So they

wildly oxidizing and restaurants like

McDonald's and Burger King were having

problems because the fumes from these

restaurant fires were turning into like

shellac like substances on the walls. And

they were clogging up the fryer drains

and they they could not clean them. They

had to invent a new type of cleaning

solution in order to depolymerize these

oxidation products. And they invented

things like silicon beads to that they

could put in the oil to absorb the

oxidation project products, nitrogen

blankets on top of the fryer, again, to

absorb the oxidation products. And I'll

just tell you one more story, which was

that when this was going on, and these

restaurants were dealing with this, the

oxidation products would saturate the

fryer worker uniforms such that they

would they were so volatile that they

would spontaneously combust in the back

of the trucks taking them to the dry

cleaners,(...) or the cleaners, and then

even after they had been washed, they

would spontaneously

combust and cause dryer fires.

So this is from industry insiders who

like who I talked to the guy who invented

this new cleaning chemical. He's like,

Yeah, it's harsher, they have to wear

gloves and this and that. But you know,

we had to do it because we were having

all these problems with this

regular old soybean oil, which

I want to connect some dots here for

people. Sure. The polymers

that you're talking about,

anybody who has done the dishes,

following cooking with seed oils will

have encountered these stains that just

simply soap has no impact on them, right?

(...) That's, that's what you're talking

about. The fact that it causes the

uniforms that have absorbed these things

to get fire spontaneously sometimes is

fascinating. Some of you will have had

the experience of using, you know, some

sort of oil based product to stain a

piece of wood or something and throwing

away the rags and the rags get extremely

hot, right? I'm imagining this as a

relative of that process.(...) But

here's, here's the the missing piece of

this. You, all of us

take in whatever is aerosolized in the

air, and then the body has to figure out

what to do with it. So not only are these

creating a problem for how to clean in a

restaurant, but they're creating an

undiagnosed problem in the people who

have breathed these things in. And now

they have polymers that their bodies are

not evolved to deal with. And what are

the health consequences? I don't know,

maybe you do, but let's put it this way,

the chances that there aren't health

consequences, I would

rate at approaching zero.

Well, there have, there were a bunch of

studies that I found that were done in

Asian countries where women have much

higher rates of lung cancer than men do.

I'm talking about in the 80s and 90s,

maybe these, and maybe even more

recently. And they, they did a number of

analyses to try to figure out whether it

was these really enclosed cooking spaces

in which they would be frying the oils.

(...) And there's a lot of big literature

on that. There was never a clinical

trial, but there's a lot of associational

evidence that seems quite powerful.

You know, I would not want to be a fry

cook for that reason. There were also

experiments done in the Netherlands on

this subject.(...) And so, you know, just

to also plant an idea in everybody's

minds, one of the, you know, one of the

confounding factors of our understanding

on meat and the study of meat is that

we're talking in all those studies that

are these observational studies, and they

ask people about their meat consumption,

we're talking about cooked meat. Meat

cooked in, most likely seed oils. So, and

in fact, that's the body of literature

that makes us think that seed oils, or

that meat causes cancer. That's the body

of literature that the WHO used to

condemn meat and say

that it caused cancer.

I actually did an article on that

decision, which I feel like I keep

distracting us, but I interviewed the,

(...) one of the scientists on that panel

that made that decision in 2015, I think.

And I said, did you ever consider,

actually in his testimony, he says, you

know, we don't know what the confounding

effect is though of the oils that the

meat is cooked in. I asked him about

that, and he's like, well, we just never

really dealt with that.(...) So.

Why? It's a hell of a confound.

It's a big,(...) no kidding, especially

since we're on the seed oil topic, I'll

just stay here for one minute longer,

which is, and hopefully we'll, I can

reconnect this back to the other story

we're talking about, how we got our

erroneous dietary guidelines.

But in the years following this 1961

dietary advice by the American Heart

Association, there were a number of

really large government funded clinical

trials of enormous size and duration that

tested the diet heart hypothesis. And

basically they had one arm of the study

eating a high seed oil diet. The other

arm eating a diet, which was what was

considered normal and saturated fats,

which is pretty much twice of what we

think is normal. We're told to eat today.

But in any case, the point I'm making is

that the folks on the seed oil diet in

several of these large experiments ending

ended up dying at higher rates from

cancer inexplicably.(...) There was no,

there was a tremendous amount of concern

about this. There were three or four high

level meetings at the NIH with all the

top scientists in nutrition of the day,

trying to understand why were, why did

this supposedly heart healthy diet and

yield people dying at higher rates of

cancer? Ultimately, it was decided that

the, you know, the importance of lowering

dietary, of lowering your cholesterol was

just so overwhelming(...) that they were

going to push aside these findings on

cancer, which were never really

adequately explained.

So I think there's some, you know, I

mean, clinical trials are the highest

level of evidence that we have. Not all

clinical trials are perfect, but that's

some pretty rigorous evidence showing

that seed oils may cause cancer.

Yeah, I would say, you know, years ago I

did some research on the process of

senescence, which is what most people

would call aging, but the process by

which we become feeble and

inefficient as we grow older.

And cancer is really one of two failure

modes of the body, right? The

overexpression of the tendency to repair

tissues is a tumor. When it starts to

spread, it becomes a cancer and the under

expression of repair capacity causes

organ failures like a heart attack, you

know, emphysema, these sorts of things.

So the body is trying to dodge both of

these bullets and these perturbations

tend to push you in one direction or the

other.(...) And so, you know, really

these results are screaming, stop

disrupting the normal relationship

between people and food rather than, you

know, try to deduce what it is in your

food that, you know, is causing this and,

you know, alter the diet in some

medically recommended way, you know, we

keep shooting ourself in the foot in the

identical fashion and it's horrifying to

hear a story like this one,

but I guess not surprising.

Well, and I wanted to say that I think

people rightly wonder where are the

scientists talking about seed oils? Why

is this just all over social media? But

where are the high level scientists?

Where are the people we can really trust?

What do we really trust? Why,

you know, I don't want to read about this

in the book. I want to read it about in

the peer reviewed public literature. And

so one of the things that, well, first of

all, there's the big story of how food

companies drive research.

And so what you will not find research in

are the areas of science that would

undermine the food industry.(...) So, or

it's so I, in my book, I document how in

the early 1970s, there were, I actually

found a scientific conference on seed

oils at Columbia University. And there

were a number of really shocking studies

that were presented by researchers from

all over the world, including just one

that sticks in my mind about how rats

were found on high seed oil diet diets to

this is such a disgusting image, but to

stick to the bottom of the cage because

they had shellac like

substances in their feces,

which is may or may not be related to the

slack on the walls and

McDonald's. But in any case,

but what you don't see is any kind of

attention or any conferences or anything,

any there was no oxygen for research

because there was no money. I hate

to keep interrupting you. It's really

rude of me, but, but I, you know, I'm

part of me is just listening on the

audience's behalf. And you're saying so

many bombshells that I just want to stop

and highlight them and point out whatever

I might know that's connected.

The idea that you've got an absence of

the scientist that you would expect to be

sounding the alarm on this issue. And if

you have been in the space for any period

of time, you know, it's that pattern one

topic after the next, the scientists who

should be telling us this

don't exist. Then you say, well,

you can't come up with a conclusion if

it's really bad for a very powerful

industry, which implies a level of

capture and control that most people

don't into it. But point is, well, so

what would you want if, if industry finds

ways to advance conclusions that aren't

even right and to hide conclusions that

are important? What would you want? Well,

you would want an agency to level the

playing field so that the truth could

find its way into a place that we can all

go read it and learn from it. You would

want, you know, the NIH, the CDC, the

FDA, you would want these agencies to

play that role. And the problem is there

is so much money to be made that it is

inevitable that the industries, an

industry that did not attempt to capture

these regulatory agencies would perish in

competition. It's not doing its job.

Right. It is not doing its fiduciary

responsibility to its shareholders. So

what we see is industry after industry,

the ones that have survived are the ones

that have successfully captured these

agencies, which then deliver us what

appears to be science is the exact

opposite. It is propaganda. It is not

only propaganda that gets us to buy

things for which there is no positive

evidence, but it actively hides the

evidence that we need, that we are

actually endangering our health and the

health of our children.(...) And that is

the battle that you see Bobby Kennedy

involved in. I mean,(...) I think we are

all lucky that we are not him because it

has to be absolutely maddening to be

fighting that battle daily with these

incredibly powerful forces.(...) But the,

you know, it is hard for the public to

imagine that what passes for scientific

advice is almost always wrong because of

this process of capture. But you don't

have to see terribly many of these

stories to understand, oh, that's a

natural, that's basically an evolutionary

process of capture that is going to be

attendant to any industry that becomes

wealthy and powerful and is dispensing a

product that you

probably shouldn't be eating.

Okay. So let me, you put it perfectly and

I want to flesh out the specifics of this

story for people in nutrition,(...)

because it is astonishing. There's sort

of a story out there that it was the

tobacco industry that created the

playbook of deceit and all kinds of

tactics to confuse and create, you know,

that the science has settled all these

various tactics. But my contention is

that it, sorry, just going back for a

second, and that it was RJR,

this tobacco company that bought Nabisco

food, and that was the beginning of the

tobacco industry giving its playbook to

the food industry, which has then

unfurled those techniques.

What I found is that probably the reverse

is true, which is that the big food

companies in 1941 got together and

created something called

the Nutrition Foundation.

I'm talking Quaker Odes, General Mills,

the National Biscuit Company,(...) Hines,

they created a foundation and their sole

stated goal was to influence the science

on nutrition.(...) So this is before the

NIH is even formed. That's in 1948.

To influence the science on nutrition.

Correct.

What a mission.

Yeah. And one of the earliest examples I

had of that, and this was such an

extraordinary wake up call for me,

because I was just,

again, as I said, so naive, but

was looking at the very early studies pre

the Nutrition Foundation in the 1920s

when they were examining this new thing

called margarine. And there were studies

that said it was questionable findings

about its health, and there were all

these unknown fatty acids that were

created by it. And then there were other

studies by folks who were loosely

connected to the margarine industry. And

there's actually documents saying like,

yes, this is what we do. We put in

studies that confuse the record. So you

can never, and this, of course, goes on

today, you can never say for sure that

anything is true, because there's science

on both sides of the question. It's just

that one side of the question is more or

less honest science, and the other is

industry putting its foot

on that side of the scale.

So just to continue this story a little

bit, because(...) I want folks to

understand what happened with the science

on saturated fat and cholesterol, and

with NIH, it's just it's a little bit of

a twist on what I think people think

happen, and as you described it, which is

that just going back to that moment in

time, American Heart Association in 1961,

don't eat saturated fat and cholesterol,

diet, heart hypothesis, scientists all

over the world, really, they sort of

glommed on to this hypothesis, but they

knew that there was inadequate evidence.

At the time, there were, it had not even

been published, but there was something

called the seven countries study.

I mean, I spent maybe six months of my

life studying the seven countries study.

It was very ambitious, pioneering almost

13,000 men from seven countries in Europe

and also the US and Japan. Ansel Keys was

the lead investigator,

and it purported to find exactly what he

had set out to do, which was a

relationship, an association between

saturated fats and

cardiovascular disease.

There's so many, many problems with that

study, but I think the principle one from

a scientific perspective is that it's an

association. It does

not demonstrate causation.

Also, there were all kinds of problems

with the collection of the dietary

records on only 3% of the men, very

uncertain how they collected that data.

But at the time, it really was the kind

of blockbusters study.

Nobody had data to counter it.

You had Ansel Keys, again, very

aggressive scientist as its champion.

That study is probably one of the maybe

the most cited study in nutrition

science. It's like sort of the big bang

of modern nutrition science.

I wanted to say something about the point

you made about

randomized controlled trials.

I think the public is

very confused on this issue.

They're told that

these are the gold standard

and there's a reason that they are very

high quality or can be, which is that

they're very sensitive.

They can reveal a

pattern that is very subtle.

But at the same time, they are highly

susceptible to bad design, either

unintentionally or because somebody is

pushing a conclusion that they want to

have revealed in the data.

It is that ability to manipulate the

conclusion in the structure of the study

that I think is why we have been sold the

story that it's effectively the only kind

of evidence you should accept is that

when an industry has a story that it

wants us to believe,

you can build it in. You can create

what's called a systematic error in a

study so that the study spits out a

conclusion that may seem very strong and

it may be exactly the

opposite of the truth.

But in any case, you don't get anything

for free. The sensitivity of those

studies makes them sensitive to very

subtle processes, but also sensitive to

bad experimental design.

Well, in nutrition,

it may be a little bit of a different

story because actually what you're

describing to me in terms of being able

to manipulate science better describes

what we call observation or

epidemiological studies where for a large

number of reasons, they,(...) well, first

of all, as an experimental design, they

show association, not causation.(...) And

in nutrition,(...) so what you will find

is say the people eating lots of

ultra-processed foods also exercise less,

smoke more, do like they do everything

wrong. And the people who are eating

whole foods are doing everything right.

And there's something called the healthy

user effect, which is that people who are

healthy are healthy in so many ways. They

have better relationships. They may go to

belong to a religious community that

gives them a sense of sustenance,

but just the smoking, the alcohol, and

the exercise alone,(...) and even though

in those kinds of studies,

the researchers will try to adjust for

what we call confounders, they're

impossible. There will always be what's

called residual confounding, which some

amount of error in the

results will come out.

And I just make another point, which is

like epidemiology is better used in other

fields. The particular reason that it's

especially bad in nutrition is that it's

based on self-reported dietary

questionnaires.(...) And I don't think I

need to explain at length how we all lie

about what we eat or that we can't

remember what we ate even yesterday.(...)

So, and they take these at intervals and

people give some version of what they

ate. And that's also very, it's a very

unreliable, basic dataset

that they're working from.

So there's numerous problems with

nutrition, epidemiology, I mean,(...)

just to layer it on top of that is that

now the most influential nutritional

epidemiological studies are run mainly by

Harvard, which gets tons of money from

the food companies. I mean, talk about

the ability, those studies are very, very

easy to manipulate. The reason that I

will still err on the side of clinical

trials, it's true, clinical trials can

also be manipulated, but they do by

isolating an intervention. Half of you

get the pill, half of you get the

placebo, half of you get the diet, it

would be half of you get the high

saturated fat diet, half of you get the

seed oil diet, you are isolating the

thing you're studying. And if there's a

different outcome in whatever your health

outcome is, you can isolate the

intervention as the most likely probable

cause. And so that's what we call, you

know, you know, this, but it's like a

cause and effect relationship,

which is, which is, I think, a more

rigorous form of data and has been

demonstrated, you know, I will just add

this other factor, there was a paper in

2011, where scientists went back and

looked at all the nutritional

epidemiological findings. This was mainly

on the antioxidant effects and the

beneficial effects of

various vitamin supplements.

And none of those were confirmed in

clinical trials. So, or zero to 11% of

them were confirmed in clinical trials.

So I think that form of data, even though

we rely on it a lot, every headline you

say linked to maybe all that uncertainty,

language is a reflection of a study based

on epidemiological observational data.

(Dr. Seheult) Well, they both have their weaknesses.

And I will just say, yes, if the study is

properly designed, then randomized

controlled trial is the best kind of

evidence. But the chances that it is

structurally broken in a way that is not

evident in the data, that is evidence in

the evidence in the methods section, if

the methods are even correctly reported,

which they are often not.(...) So, you

know, biasing who's in the control group,

for example, can radically alter the

apparent conclusion of the study. And you

know, it's very hard to figure out where

the bodies are buried sometimes.

(Dr. Patrick Seheult) I totally agree with you.

And part of my steady growth and

dissolution with science was realizing,

reading scientific studies from the 70s

and 80s, 90s and onward, where when you

read the abstract of the paper, it

doesn't even reflect what the actual data

report. So, in so many ways, very, very

common. I was so shocked when I first

came across that. But let me go back to

the story that I'm slowly

unfolding here, which is

seven countries study was basically weak

data. That was what

our policy was based on.

Clinical trials then took place, what we

call now called the core clinical trials,

testing the diet-heart hypothesis in the

1960s, 1960s and 70s. These are trials

all over the world in Oslo, London,(...)

Australia. The biggest ones

took place in the United States.

These were enormous studies. This is like

the golden age of nutrition research. The

NIH was pouring huge amounts of money

into the question of what is a healthy

diet and should we avoid saturated fat

and cholesterol.(...) So, these studies

had thousands of people in them.

Recently, on Substack

published a whole long list of them.

But the universal conclusion of them was

that a high saturated fat diet had no

effect on cardiovascular or total

mortality. So, that's your likelihood of

dying from heart

disease or anything at all.

And there was a somewhat

mixed effect on heart disease.

But those studies, that body of

literature, so this is on all together

worldwide, almost 80,000 people. I just

want to let you know if you have a

clinical trial on the front page of a

major newspaper that probably has maybe

less than 100 people. This is 80,000

people being tested on Ansel Kiesa's

hypothesis.(...) The results are

basically null,(...) plus that cancer

effect we talked about.

And all of those trials were basically,

the results of that, those were basically

just submerged and ignored, not included

in review papers. They were not really

accounted for. There

was one study that was,

the authors, this is actually the biggest

ever test of the diet heart hypothesis,

something called the Minnesota Coronary Survey.

It was in the 70s, the principal

investigators, which originally included

Ansel Kies, did not publish their results

for 17 years, which is a form of

malfeasance in science. And when they

finally did publish it, it was in this

very out of the way journal, I guess they

hoped nobody would notice. And when asked

why, the principal investigator, Ivan

Frant said, "Well, there was nothing

wrong with the study. We were just so

disappointed in the way it came out."

Well, that's fascinating.

That is such a profound violation of the

scientific method that it inverts the

nature of science, which actually goes

back to something you said a few minutes

ago. You said you were disillusioned with

science. And I wanted to point out that

the thing that looks like science that

you're disillusioned in ain't science. It

takes place in science departments by

people who call themselves scientists,

but science is that which

adheres to the scientific method.

And that is sufficient. You don't have to

have a degree or a lab coat or any

technology whatsoever to conduct science.

(...) And no matter what degree you have

and how high tech the experiment you're

running is, if you don't adhere to the

scientific method, it isn't science. And

so it's kind of in some ways, this is a

theme that runs through the whole story.

Right? You know, are you disillusioned

with food because vegetable oil is bad

for you? No, it's not really food, right?

It's an industrial product that was

dressed up to be a food because it was

profitable to do so.

And so let's not lose faith in the thing

that actually works that, you know, yeah,

granted, it's pretty rare to see a

properly scientifically run study these

days. It's not the majority of them, but

the science still works as well as it

ever did. It just, you

know, it's not fashionable.

Well, yes, I think everything you say is

true. I think that these core clinical

trials were intended to be as ambitious

as possible.(...) They were, some of them

took place in inpatient facilities, like

mental homes, veteran hospital, the kind

of thing you can't do today because it

would be considered unethical, but allows

you to have very high level of control

over the subjects because you're feeding

them their food. You're not just simply

handing them a diet book and an hour a

week of counseling, you actually can

control what they're eating.

So I think they were for nutrition, they

were pretty well controlled experiments.

And they, the story is that they yield

the results that were

contrary to the prevailing

nutrition dogma.

And they were at that point, the diet

heart hypothesis had really so quickly

(...) kind of congealed and hardened to be

the dominant hypothesis in the field. At

the NIH, it was fully adopted at the

American Heart

Association, as I mentioned.

And so the cognitive bias that exists

at, you know, every one of these, in

these institutions or at universities is

so strong. In fact, a number of these

papers, the authors write in shame about

their results. They're saying, well, we

didn't find an effect of saturated fat,

but we, you know, the diet hypothesis

still must be true, but there must be

something wrong with our experiment.

I mean, I know you know this in science,

but staying in the kind of the popular

crowd is vital to remaining a scientist.

Otherwise, you're disinvited from

conferences, you don't get invitations to

write in journals, your papers don't get

published. So the lifeblood of science

(...) is to be, you know, part of the

scientific community, get

research friends from NIH.

Then NIH jumped on the diet heart

hypothesis almost the

moment they were formed.

So I write also- Hold on.

I just want to point

out, this is not uncommon,

right? We are now(...) living through the

same story over and over again, multiple

different fields, right? So the diet

heart hypothesis, which has altered

people's diets for how many decades now?

E85, I guess, 75.

Yeah, 75. So back 1975,

diet heart hypothesis, well, a properly

run studied reveals that it doesn't

predict anything. It's just not true.

Okay, but it was the prevailing wisdom,

and you were only able to publish if you

said things that were consistent with it.

That is the inversion of science. But we

see the same thing with the chemical

imbalance theory of mental disorders,

right? That never had any support with

it. Or the causal hypothesis of plaques

and Alzheimer's, all of these very

fashionable ideas have basically created

a bias in what was allowed to be

published, which invalidates all of it.

You can't infer anything from the portion

of the evidence that was allowed to be

published if it is biased, right? You

can't look at a study and say, well, this

study says X if the point is, well, I

don't know how many studies that said the

inverse of that were never published

because they went against the prevailing

wisdom. So, you know, those people, those

aren't the scientists. I know it sounds

wrong, but those people who themselves,

I'm sure go home and think I am a

scientist, that's what I do. They're not

scientists because they're not practicing

science.(...) Publishing only things that

comport with your pre-existing notion is

the inverse of science. So they're

inverse scientists,

they're not scientists.

You know, the English biologist Thomas

Huxley, who is famously known as Darwin's

bulldog, he talks about the propensity to

fall in love with your own hypothesis, to

treat your hypothesis like a favored

child, that you nurture and you lavish

with love and there creates an

intellectual barrier to challenging it as

the way that Karl Popper would insist

that we do, right? And having that degree

of bias towards one's own ideas is, of

course, deeply human. We

all possess that kind of bias.

It's just that in science and myself,

I've tried to do as a science journalist,

we(...) have to go through, we are taught

to go through the exercise of trying to

challenge our own beliefs, trying to

disprove it. I mean, you can imagine me

as a nobody journalist in my, you know,

Upper West Side New York City apartment

with like two young kids lying on the

floor thinking, "I can't be right about

saturated fats. How is it possible that I

could be right and all these people could

be wrong?"(...) And I would revisit all

of the, you know, everything that I had

looked at and question myself, "Am I

biased? Do I have bias? Like, is there

bias here?" And, you know, I want to, I

guess I want to say on my behalf that

there are now, and also for

the mainly for the listeners,

there have now been 24, roughly,

systematic reviews and meta-analyses that

have(...) been published in the last 15

years, going back and looking at all

those original core trials, in part

because my book really

brought them all to light.

And so this was sort of a new renaissance

of thinking unsaturated fat that

happened. Papers were published,(...)

rigorous reviews all over the world that

say there is insufficient evidence to

recommend caps on saturated fats. The

clinical trial evidence doesn't support

it. The observational evidence doesn't

support it. There are major bodies of

evidence that contradict it. And so we

should no longer have caps on saturated

fats.(...) So that, you

know, that makes me feel better.

But, you know, mainly, you know, and what

motivates me throughout all my work is

just that you want to see, you want to

see truth revealed for its own sake, for

people to know, that you also, or I also,

have a, you know, a tremendous desire for

people to know about the foods that will

make them healthy, given like the

devastation that we have really all over

the world, but, you know, of chronic

disease in our country.

So. Well, so the experience that you had

is one that I wish every student I had

ever taught could have. The experience of

concluding something

that seems like it can't be right because

everybody disagrees with you.

And then being vindicated reveals what in

retrospect is obvious. If you've got all

of this corruption, that means you've got

a lot of experts saying things that

aren't true. It should be relatively easy

to find those wrong stories and figure

out what a more accurate story would be.

The problem is people get socially driven

away from it, right? You're told you're

out of your mind and you begin to

question whether you might be.

So anyway, I think, you know, that

experience you had while you describe it

in terms that are, I don't know,

frightening, is actually, it's the most

liberating experience you can have,

realizing that the experts,

you know, science is a very delicate

process. If the experts aren't doing it,

then what they're telling you isn't of

any use at all. It's probably, you know,

motivated by perverse incentives and

upside down and backwards, which is again

and again what we find. So I wish people

would just learn that lesson and then

apply it across

various different domains.

And yes,

it is true in so many

disciplines and the added

element in the food, in nutrition science

and the reason that my more recent

reporting has really shifted to financial

conflicts of interest, corruption, is

that I realize this is not(...) really a

science, it's a problem of science, but

it's a science that has a multi-billion

dollar industry attached to it. So really

the problem, the question is who is, who

are the actors that are influencing this

science? Who is really pulling the

strings here? Can I pull back the curtain

a bit to help people understand not just

the food industry, but the pharmaceutical

industry and, you know, a few other

interests that are,(...) I mean, I won't

go into it all, I don't think we have

time, but you know, the animal rights

movement, the global warming movement,

which depends on vilifying animal

agriculture, you know,

animal livestock agriculture.

And in a wild story, the Seventh-day

Adventist Church, which is highly

influential in this field and believes

that the Second Coming will not happen

without all of us becoming vegetarian, if

not vegan.(...) So there are so many

forces bearing down on this science that

it's got added dimensions, you know, the

dimension of religion, the pharmaceutical

angle, which was not(...) really obvious

to me when I started.(...) So it is an

even more distorted

scientific field that others might be.

So I think people should

start with the following question.

Given, I don't know how many, how many

billion dollars do Americans, for

example, spend on food per

year? Do we have any idea?

I wish I knew that number. I don't. I

mean, it's just, you know,

(...) trillions of dollars.

It's a huge amount of

money. So in light of that fact,

let's say that you had a product that was

making tens of millions, hundreds of

millions of dollars, but that was not

really fit for human consumption.

Well, normal nutrition

science would reveal that.

And your good thing would disappear.

So do people really expect that

industries that are selling something

that's bad for your health are going to

sit idly by as a bunch of know-it-all

nutrition scientists reveal the danger of

their product, maybe even put them in

legal jeopardy for selling it? Or do we

think that they are going to put their

thumb on the scales in science and push

the science in a direction that makes

their product look good?

And if you think, well, an industry would

be expected to advocate for its product

in spite of proper nutrition science, do

you think science is so well-defended

that they would be unsuccessful? If so,

by what process is it defended? Well,

there is no such process. So therefore,

we should expect industry to be feeding

us propaganda dressed up as science fed

through our scientific institutions

because nobody built an immune system for

those institutions that would have fended

off those attacks. That's what we're

experiencing. You're going to get

propaganda because there's no bar to it

working its way into science and

displacing the

information you actually need.

And those same companies also are funding

our media outlets and they are funding

our public health supposedly trusted

institutions like the American Heart

Association, like the American College of

Cardiology.(...) I mean, just to

exemplify your point a little bit,

the low carbohydrate diet, which has been

studied now rigorously in clinical trials

for, I would say more than 25 years and

has been shown to be effective for really

the only whole foods diet that well, that

has been demonstrated in(...) clinical

trials to reverse type two diabetes,

reverse is hypertension, reverse is most

cardiovascular risk factors, reverse is

fatty liver disease. I mean, a very

highly effective(...) intervention that

unfortunately for that field of science

is whole foods based. A well-formulated

ketogenic diet does not involve processed

foods. And anyway, to accomplish that

diet, you really need to

mainly eat whole foods.

So what is, I think it's fair to assert

that that diet has now been studied in

more trials on more people than or equal

to the famed Mediterranean diet.

And this is an enormous body of

scientific literature that has

systematically been suppressed by these,

not just the food companies, right? It's

the pharmaceutical companies, which are

dependent on a model of everybody taking

four to five medications every day for

their chronic diseases. That's, you know,

and you just can't be

too cynical about that.

So what transpires are, are, you know,

basically, I have to call it propaganda

campaigns by the American College of

Cardiology, by the American Heart

Association to demonize low carbohydrate

and ketogenic diets, to the point where I

just a quick story, like about a year and

a half ago, where a woman at the American

College of Cardiology annual conference

gave presentations in the form of a, she

just spoke about a study that she was

researching that apparently looked at the

ketogenic diet.(...) She didn't present

really any, you know, hardly any facts or

figures. It was not, there wasn't even an

abstract that was published, like very,

it's just was a very

inchoate form of a presentation that was

taken by the American College of

Cardiology and blasted out as a press

release that then resulted in, I would

say, you know, dozens and dozens of

articles saying, oh, a keto like diet.

(...) I can't remember now, but it was,

you know, a keto like diet likely to

increase mortality or, you know, increase

your risk of stroke or whatever it was.

(...) But the fact that the American

College of Cardiology, which is funded

largely by pharmaceutical companies, the

fact that they did that, I actually went

through all their press releases from

that conference to see if there was any

other press release based on just the

mere presentation of data without even an

abstract. And that was, they had not done

that in any other instance, you know,

it's either a published paper or at least

an abstract or a trial protocol had been

registered. Anyway, that to me is hard to

understand as anything but propaganda

designed to keep people from learning

about or being continuing their fear of

this kind of way of eating.

You know,(...) I'm plagued by a question

across many different domains. And the

question is, I'm sure most of the people

at the American Heart Association are

decent and think that they are on the

side of science and health.

But some of this stuff is so cynical that

I have to imagine that there are people

who are both dispensing this dangerous

propaganda and protecting

their own families from it.

In other words, what I would love to know

is if the people who are in charge of,

you know,(...) demonizing ketogenic diets

are availing themselves of the health

benefits of those diets, are the people

who are demonizing the so-called

anti-vaxxers actually steering their

families away from adjuvanted vaccines or

maybe all vaccines because they're aware

of the downsides that have been buried.

I don't know how to get the answer to

that question. But again, I think most of

the people involved in these

organizations are probably good people

who've been duped.(...) But

some of these strategies are so cynical

that I have to imagine the people

deploying them are smart

enough to ignore their own advice.

Yeah, I mean, it's impossible and really

not to conclude otherwise. I can,

you know, I know many people in the field

tell me a lot of things privately that

they won't say publicly for fear of

losing their standing or falling out of

their community or, you know, I'm sure

you have had similar experiences. Oh,

yeah. I remember a medical school

professor(...) who was teaching the

approved, let's just call it the food

period, but the government's dietary

advice, low fat, high carbohydrate diet.

And a student went up to him afterwards

and said, "You know, have you heard about

the ketogenic diet?" Because it turns out

it's really quite effective for chronic

disease reversal. And he said, "Well, I

personally am on a ketogenic diet, but

I'm not allowed to teach it."

So,

I mean, that's a, you know,(...) a

version of the story

that I can actually tell.

But yes, I mean, I know many people who

will confidentially tell me that they,

"Oh, I'm cutting carbs. I'm not talking

about it."(...) I mean, I have to wonder,

like all these movie stars who, you know,

(...) publicly are on the vegan diet,

there's no way post age 40 or so as a

woman, unless you have a miraculously

good metabolism, that you can stay thin

if you aren't cutting back a little bit

on the grains, the rice, the starches.

It's just incredibly hard to stay slim on

that diet. And sometimes when I see a fat

movie star, I think, "Well, that person is watching me. I think, "Well, that

person is walking their walk."

Well, all right. But can I just spend one

moment of annoyance here?

What kind of ghoul do you have to be to

dispense advice on health that you don't

think is healthy? In other words, the

idea that, "Oh, I'm on a ketogenic diet,

but I can't talk about it publicly,"

translates to, "I'm actually willing to

let people who listen to me

be advised into poor health

when I know better because I'm too much

of a coward or too selfish to actually

pay the price of what I believe." And

then you actually, if that was your

story, right, "Oh, I can't talk about a

ketogenic diet even though I'm on it,"

you actually have an obligation to go

Paul Revere on that,

right? You should be saying, "Hey, I was

in an industry in which we were

dispensing advice that privately people

knew was bad and the New

York Times was broadcasting it."

You should be alerting the public, "Hey,

this field is phony." And instead, you're

going to continue to pretend that it's a

real field while you're doing privately

the opposite of what

you're saying publicly?

Well, I mean, we've, you know, cancel

culture we've been living with now for

more than a decade, and I think people

well understand the loss of their

professional lives, their, maybe there's

economic loss, loss of friends.

Cancel culture has been going on in

nutrition for an extremely long time. I

documented people losing their careers

and being cast out, very high level

scientists in the mid 80s.(...) And one

of the purposes of

cancel culture is to instruct

other folks that if they raise their head

above the parapet, that

they too will be shot down.

And so what are the consequences of my

being, as you say, it's sort of an early

person talking about this in the field is

that that's also my role in this. You

know, I was, when I came out, I had a

cover story in the British Medical

Journal, which is a pretty big deal as a

journal.(...) And on, it was the first

major critique of the US dietary

guidelines, going into a lot of detail

about all the clinical trials they had

ignored, how they had never reviewed,

done any proper

systematic review on red meat,

even though they called for the reduction

in red meat, a number of

pretty serious accusations.

And that was subject to the largest

retraction effort in modern history, at

least that I can find.(...) So, and I

think that quite a few people would see

me as a cautionary tale.

Yeah, but I'm sorry, I'm I can't let this

go. Okay, look, I'm not a religious

person, for whatever reason, the home I

grew up in wasn't a religious home. And

I have a complicated relationship with

those stories, which I think are very

important, but not literal. But never

mind that. I'm

wondering if the problem here is

that people have become so secular, that

they actually think it's reasonable to

betray the public, not only to fail to

say what they know, but to, to say the

opposite, with the credentials that cause

people to listen to them is to harm those

people. So I guess I get it, cancel

culture is frightening, it can ruin your

career, absolutely. But we need more

people who will say, you know what,

that's bad. But it's also my obligation.

It's not the worst thing in the world to

lose your career, especially if your

career is involved in advancing the phony

wisdom of a field that's lying, right? At

the point you're in a field that's lying,

you really want to stay in it, or, you

know, I guess I'm just wondering if

people who have a, you know,

a deeper relationship with,

with God, for example, are more likely to

say, you know what, yes, I'm going to

lose my career, but I don't want this

career because there

are more important things.

Well,

I obviously relate deeply to that story.

I'm thinking of this one Randall Wood

scientist who was also an early scientist

in the 1970s on seed oils and was

harassed for that. And he, he was a

religious, is still alive, a religious

person and left the field. And last I

talked to him, he was raising cattle on a

ranch in Texas. He seemed pretty happy,

but you know, if you go up to Harvard and

Tufts and Stanford, those, you know,

there's,(...) I don't think those are

institutions run amok with religious

sentiments. And I will say probably the

most corrupt and well cited scientist in

the world at Harvard, the most

influential nutrition scientist ever,

has, has, you know, joined an effort by

the World Economic Forum to shift us all

to a even more grain-based diet. So the

allure of power, connection, prestige,

globe, the global stage is,

I mean, this is emblematic of what's

happening in our time, but obviously that

is greater than, than the call to moral

clarity, goodness, honesty for many, many

people in our, in academia.

Well, you know, at some level, this is

parallel to the, the technical story that

we've been discussing, because the

technical story, you know, we can(...)

say, well, what does the evidence really

suggest about what kinds of fats you

should be eating and how much, right? At

another level, the answer evolutionarily

is very simple. You're built for an

environment and the closer you live to

something that resembles it, the

healthier you're going to be.

And in this case, we can tell all kinds

of stories about the perverse incentives

and the nature of fields and what was

discovered when, but the basic answer is,

look, if you have a public and a private

scientific position, you're not a

scientist.(...) You are betraying the

public. You are doing wrong. If your

field happens to be anywhere near health

and medicine, you are

actually hurting people.

It's wrong. Cut it out. Whatever the

costs.(...) I gotta tell you, I've just

seen so much of this. And you know, you

focus on the scientist saying the thing

that's just wrong and that's all very

antiseptic. But then you've got the other

side of the equation where there's the

person who lives their life obese because

somebody told them the wrong stuff about

what they were supposed to eat. That

person has been maimed. They had a right

not to be maimed. And I

guess I'm just wondering,

how did the world get full of so many

people who even in the case that their

misdeeds are maiming

other people, they won't stop?

I don't have an answer to that. I mean,

it just like it breaks my heart.

Continually.(...) And I think any of us

doing what we're doing are just struggle

not to become too angry and bitter and

find ways to try to contribute to

exposing what's going on in a way that

like spiritually is not too burdensome

because it is confronting an almost

unspeakable world where I'm a scientist.

I see somebody walk, you know, with a

cane, I see, you know, walking around the

street, barely able to walk. I know that

they would be healthier if

they got correct dietary advice. And yet

I give them the opposite

through official channels.

And that is basically what our government

has been doing. I never finished my

story, but 1980 is the beginning of our

dietary guidelines where the US

government, USDA and HHS basically adopt

the entire platform of the

American Heart Association.

Diet low unsaturated fats, cholesterol,

low in fat overall, high in grains.

And that becomes the law of the land

really hugely influential(...) in terms

of, you know, it's really considered the

gold standard and downloaded by every

single(...) doctor, dietician,

nutritionist, nurse, and also is then

implemented through our school lunches

and feeding programs for the elderly and

our educational programs for the

military, how they should

eat. So that has, we have been,

and also in 1980, so in 1980, you know,

obesity rates had been really in the mid

to low teens among adults in America in

the 1960s, 70s, and in 1980 on the dot,

there's a sharp turn

upwards in our obesity rates.

You know, what happens in 1980, the

dietary guidelines, because it also has

an impact on the whole food supply. All,

you know, all pork is bred to be lean,

all, you know, everything changes. All

the labels are changed to make us aware

of fat, low fat milk comes, you know,

into the picture, skim milk.

So, you know, there's tremendous

disillusionment to think that our

government policy has maybe innocently at

first, but certainly not now been

delivering a diet to us that almost

assuredly drives chronic disease is the

most likely explanation for our chronic

disease epidemics today.

Yes. And the idea that we are fighting a

public relations machine,

none of this is scientifically that hard.

All of these questions are studyable. We

can have the answers. What we need is a

system that is immunized from industry so

that it is capable of figuring out what

the evidence actually points to. And, you

know, a message I've heard you speak on

elsewhere,(...) you know, you've touched

on it here, is that actually

not only do we have the ability

to feed ourselves better and reduce the

chronic disease epidemic, but we actually

know a certain amount that's highly

useful and actionable and works quickly

that reverses disease. So, you know, it's

not just a question of what you should

eat to stay healthy. It's a question of

what you should eat to restore health

after your health has been broken by some

of the bad advice you've been given. So

you want to talk a little bit about that

before we close out here?

Yeah, I do. Thank you.

And it's just a fundamentally important

point, which is there is a healthy diet,

what we would consider, let's say, an

ancestral diet that is what is the way

that you should bring up your children

and the way that you should preserve your

health. A healthy person should eat.

Once you tip over into metabolic, what we

call now metabolic ill health, but let me

explain. Like you have obesity, diabetes,

(...) fatty liver disease, heart disease,

(...) any one of these chronic conditions,

even like autoimmune diseases, irritable

bowel disorders, even skin conditions are

caused by, they, I would argue that they,

and this is fairly well accepted now,

that they have a root cause, which is

called insulin resistance.

And once you have insulin resistance,

which I'll explain, you can no longer

sort of eat like a normal person.(...)

And the basic way to explain it is

insulin resistance means that you're

normally functioning pancreas, which

secretes insulin to deal with the

incoming glucose, right? Glucose is the

sugar that comes in not only sugar, but

also starches. So even whole grain, once