Bret speaks with Nina Teicholz on the subject of seed oils. Find Nina Teicholz on X at https://x.com/bigfatsurprise and on Substack at https://unsettledscience.substack.com. Mentioned on this episode: The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet by Nina Teicholz https://amzn.to/3WzaSYh (commission earned) ***** This episode is sponsored by: Masa Chips: Delicious chips made with corn, salt, and beef tallow—nothing else—in loads of great flavors. Go to http:/...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast Inside Rail.
I am sitting this morning with Nina Tychuls, who many of you will not have heard of for an interesting reason.
Um 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 title 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?
The Big Fat Surprise, which was a New York Times best seller back in 2014.
Am I right about the date?
There's the book.
Yep.
All right.
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 uh 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.
Um University of Reading in England.
There are other readings.
There's a Reading, Pennsylvania, there's a Reading, California, but you uh got your degree from the University of Reading in England.
And um, in any case, I find your story fascinating.
We met at a brownstone event, and uh I with uh some degree of shame will say I was not aware of 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.
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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'd been on a largely vegetarian diet, didn't eat red meat at all, uh, just thought it was terrible for me, baked my own bread, and sort of followed the basic standard advice.
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 condeus magazine.
And it was on trans fats, which were becoming big at the time, really, but we had not the story really hadn't broken.
And I ended up doing a story that was just hugely popular for gourmet magazine about uh seed oils.
Um, and trans fats were uh a byproduct of seed oils when you harden them, like you know, to make Crisco one of the byproducts of that industrial process is it creates trans fats, which at the time were a major public health concern.
And for that story, I had I spent uh quite a lot of time interviewing scientists inside the seed oil industry, getting to know they're called oil chemists.
And um I learned about their tactics and the 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 Edible Oils, which is the trade group for seed oils, employed people to go to conferences to uh 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 a 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.
Um, literally the the a margarine uh company executive go calling up an editor journal and trying to get an article yanked from a an academic journal because and 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 became, I just decided that I really wanted to research them more.
That article read to led to a book contract.
I was gonna write a book on trans fats, and I ended up writing a book um 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 nauseum.
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've switched their gender.
This is a chemical term, right?
So can you define trans fats?
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, a fat in order to get the, um, the chains to be as saturated with,
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 uh they're 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?
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 are unstable.
So let me fill that in.
I think this is really important.
And I think almost nobody who hasn't studied the chemistry gets this.
The idea is 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.
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.
A bunch of, you know, like toy snakes, like wiggly toy snakes.
So you can't, if you put them in your hands, you can't get them to, there's going to be air between them.
And so that's what creates 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 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 uh 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 bubbles 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 who's going to accept it as a substitute?
So now you gotta fix it, right?
You gotta make it look yellow, and you gotta flavor it so it's a little closer to butter, something like that.
Yeah, well, first you have to I mean, it comes out as this.
I actually went to hydrogenation plant.
Um, 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 um even though the perfect title suggests itself, you could have had an article called the hydrogen bomb.
Yeah, that would have really played well with his superiors.
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So yeah, I mean it's um 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 it 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 um, you know, odors of lard, and here's a new shiny new thing made in laboratories with uh steel counters.
And so this was sold, and you know I think one of 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 shoulder 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, uh, unlike saying how to be 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 Procter and Gamble, whom we will, I think revisit again in this podcast.
Um it was Crisco replacing lard.
Uh, and just in parentheses, the two main fats that have been used in the Western world, uh going back millennia were lard and butter.
Those are the two principal cooking fats.
So you've got Crisco replacing lard.
And then later, uh, in the 1920s and 30s principally, uh, you had um you had margarine replacing butter.
But there is a whole really interesting, fascinating chapter of history called the margarine wars, uh, 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 the that you would buy it and you'd have to knead with the yellow capsule, you would have to knead in the yellow color to make it look like butter.
And then there were, you know, every state had its own set of laws uh that and it was really raging.
Women would 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 uh women and um 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 uh nationwide so um yeah so it's the it's really the takeover of natural
animal fats with these ersatz fake foods um that we were told were healthy and uh
like i'd like you i mean we didn't have margarine in my house but we we definitely had skim milk skim milk you know didn't arrive in america until the early 1970s um and cereal for breakfast also the result of a marketing campaign so anyway um i think we started hold on i want to i want to say one thing just uh i am now realizing
as i've 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 this 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 to likely are to the idea that here is what the data say about
healthy food and that is it's like opening the the gates of the city to the the you know propaganda hortz 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 tech you know technologies that will seem destined to be
probably rob us of our essential human nature but this was these were uh 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 uh there were campaigns to remove what is natural and to believe in this uh industrial food fake food uh
miracle that could um that was was to be modern but i think then there's an added dimension to this which um 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 margin which was largely about lower cost and sort of the allure of the modern but then
then by the 1950s the story was uh 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 uh how you function well enough to optimize your diet in a high-tech sense, um, is ludicrous.
But you can imagine um, you know, a housewife in the 50s, 60s, 70s not having the courage to say no.
Actually, uh 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 um, I would say that even the evolutionary argument, which we seem we've come to maybe just in the last uh 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 Pollin, 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.
Uh the vegan diet, or you know, even the vegetarian diet is not one that we evolved eating.
That's just abundantly obvious.
Um, 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 like 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 effort 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 uh it is not a story of equity.
Um 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.
Umetheless, 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 too, where really the evolutionary argument comes down to uh you'd be wise to adhere to the precautionary principle.
Um, but I wanted to pick up on your your Michael Pollan point, because Heather and I have proudly cited Michael Pollen.
In fact, the exact line you're referring to eat food, not too much, mostly plants, right?
His other um proclamation of this kind, which I think has fared better, is shop the outside of the supermarket, right?
The fresh foods are 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 um just doesn't comport with our ancestry or uh our instincts, right?
Yeah, I mean, whole foods, the whole foods movement, which is what Michael Pollan was a part of and Alice Waters and Shea Panese and Berkeley.
The problem with whole foods is that it's uh 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 uh now.
Like, yes, we would all agree eat unprocessed, mostly you know, whole foods, but where you go in the supermarket is a critical answer to that question.
So um, 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 like why we all went through this nutrition transition, right?
Like why you and I in our childhoods were eating, we're drinking skim milk or eating margarine, and probably early in our childhoods, we were not.
Probably that's I mean, in my household, I grew up uh, 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 bitkey 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, um, I mean, obviously, some of this goes back to the early 1900s when we started having processed food companies.
Uh, 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.
It 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 uh, and his idea is that it's uh dietary cholesterol, like the kind you get in egg yolks and shellfish, and saturated fats that claw 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 stove pipe, 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.
Okay.
Animal fats.
We were animal fats.
And we can come back later to why animals store fat in this way rather than as a liquid.
Just suffice it to say.
I'd like to see what some liquid fat would look like in my underwear.
Probably not a very efficient way to store fat.
But um, well, 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 gonna 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 because you're not moving around, so you're not paying a price for every step.
I I'm not sure about that theory.
But I 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, I like I can't answer that question.
But um, I can hop over that 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?
Eat like even a porter house 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 monounsaturated, which is what's in olive oil.
So all foods uh have a combination of different things.
Monounsaturated and sorry, monounsaturated and polyunsaturated refer to the number of kinks per chain.
Is that right?
That's right.
So we'll get to that later.
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 accounts of him where you know, even his Friends and colleagues call him impossible to argue with anyone because he will argue anyone to the death.
He had an 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 Keyes 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 loan public health organization giving Americans advice on heart disease, desperate to evaluate 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 Proctor and Gamble, remember, Mako of Maker of Crisco also then later came out with Crisco Oil.
They really uh launched the American Heart Association in 1948 with a they made them the beneficiary of a fundraiser, a radio show uh and the walking man contest.
And they they uh they then collected all the money from that fundraiser and gave what is the equivalent, I think today now like 20 million dollars 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 in educational videos.
So, and they and Proctor and Gamble has the last time I checked, was still a donor to the American Heart Association.
But it's really well hold on, hold on.
This is such a mind-blowing fact.
I 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 is 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, you know, uh am I wrong that they invented the term heart healthy to give oils.
Go ahead.
No, 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 of the American Heart Association, just couldn't believe my luck.
I had been like I you know, 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 the that announcement in 1961 by the American Heart Association, which by the way, was accompanied also in the same year by Ansel Keyes 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 food.
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 Mizzola, tell them to, you know, prescribe Mazzola oil to you.
And 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, it 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 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 so oil squeezed from a seed, it started.
I'll just tell a little bit of the history here.
It started uh 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, but but basically, yeah.
Hold on.
I want people to understand, as soon as you say 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 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 want to just 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 kinds of because they're not yes, they do that because they can't run away.
They don't so there is an entire class of molecules that does not serve a function inside of the plant that makes them.
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 cotton seed in America at least.
And then so that's the kind of the history of how they came into production.
And then, as I said, in the early uh in 1911, Procter and Gamble, who is a soap maker and a tallow 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 um, you know, this is oh, and then so then what happened?
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, they will 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 when thing, you know, oils go rancid.
You can't, you can't eat, you can't use oil anyway as a shelf stable uh for a shelf-stable food item because it's greasy, it doesn't hold together.
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 that is 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 a continuum.
Uh, you know, fully hydrogenated or almost fully hydrogenated uh 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 uh, 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 Mazzola oil, Crisco oil, uh, 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 uh in the kitchen, especially like repeat uses, but it was sold to American housewives, you know, this is what you fry your chicken in.
Um, 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 uh 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 seven years, is that they have they are so easily oxidized and can they yield hundreds of oxidation products.
So that all started in the 1940s.
You're taking a cocktail of molecules, uncataloged molecules.
If you have heated them, I'm extrapolating from what you're telling me here.
You heat these things.
It's a little bit insidious because if you overheat olive 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 heat at which an oil will start to oxidize.
Uh, 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 oils in them.
That's the oils in them oxidizing.
The smoke point is unrelated to the oxidation.
Well, but all I'm saying is if he I'm again extrapolating from what you're telling me.
If heating wesson 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.
Um 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 um 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 uh for the same reason that they stick to oxygen, 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 uh 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, um, so these are regular oils that that haven't been stabilized, right?
So they wildly oxidizing and restaurants like 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 depolymerise these oxidation products.
And they invented things like silicon beads to absorb that they could put in the oil to absorb the oxidation project products, nitrogen blankets on top of the fryer in 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 so 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 um 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 catch fire spontaneously sometimes is fascinating.
Some of you will have had the experience of uh using, you know, some sort of uh 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 is 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 an un a bunch of studies that I found that were done in uh Asian countries where women have much higher rates of lung cancer than men do.
Um I'm talking about in the 80s and 90s, maybe these uh, 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.
Um, you know, I would not want to be a fry cook uh for that reason.
There were also experiments done in the Netherlands on this subject.
Um, 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 cause 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 um one of the scientists on that panel uh 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 them about that, and he's like, Well, we just never really dealt with that.
So Wow, that's a hell of a confound.
It's a there's 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 advice guidelines.
But uh 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 um size and duration that tested the diet heart hypothesis.
And basically they had one arm of the SETI 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 where 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 a tremendous amount of concern about this.
There were three or four high-level meetings at the NIH with all the top scientists and nutrition of the day trying to understand why were why did this supposedly heart-healthy diet end yield people dying at higher rates of cancer?
Ultimately, it was uh 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 um, you know, years ago I 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 over-expression 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 uh 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 um, you know, really 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 and you know, alter the diet in some medically recommended way.
Uh, you know, we keep shooting ourselves in the foot in the identical fashion, and um it's horrifying to hear a story like this one, um, but I guess not not surprising.
Well, and I want to to say that um you I think people rightly wonder where are the scientists talking about seed oils, why why is this just all over social media?
But where are the high-level scientists?
Where are the people we can really trust?
Why uh, you know, I don't want to read about this in the book, I want to read it about it 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.
Um 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, um, which is may or may not be related to the shellac 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, there's no oxygen for research because there was no money.
Uh conference.
I I hate to keep interrupting you.
It's really rude of me.
But um, But I 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.
Um the idea that you you've got an absence of the scientists 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 intuit.
But the point is, well, so what would you want 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 conference.
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, uh 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 a tendon to any industry that becomes wealthy and powerful and uh 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 it is astonishing.
There's sort of a story out there that it was the tobacco industry that created the playbook of deceit and and all kinds of uh you know tactics to confuse and and and create um uh you know that the science is settled and all these all these various tactics.
But my contention is that it sorry, it just going back for a second, and that it was RGR, RJR, um, 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 its 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 Oods, General Mills, uh, the National Biscuit Company, Heinz, 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 uh 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 so such an extraordinary wake up call for me.
Um, because I was just, again, as I said, so naive.
But um 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 uh had 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 uh folks who were loosely connected to the margarine industry.
And there's actually documents saying, like, yes, this is what we do.
We we put in we put in uh studies that confuse the records.
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 at uh with the science on saturated fat and cholesterol and with the NIH, it's just it's a it's a little bit of a twist on what I think people think happened, and as you described it, which is that just going back to that moment in time, the American Heart Association, 1961, don't eat saturated fat and cholesterol diet heart hypothesis.
Scientists all over the world really uh they they sort of glommed onto this hypothesis, but they knew that there wasn't there was inadequate evidence.
Um 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 uh in the 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, uh, which was a relationship, an association between saturated fats and cardiovascular disease.
There's so many, many problems with that study, but the I think the principal one from a scientific perspective is that it's an association, it does not demonstrate causation.
Um and, you know, 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.
Uh but at the time, it really was the kind of blockbuster study.
Nobody had data to counter it.
And um you had Ansel Keys, again, very aggressive scientist as its champion.
And um, I mean, that study has probably is one of the maybe the most cited study in nutrition science.
It's like sort of the big bang of modern nutrition science was um, hold on.
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 um have revealed in the data.
And 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, um, you can build it in.
You can create uh a 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.
Um, 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 to bad experimental design.
Well, you know, I in nutrition, I 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 a large number of reasons, they uh they, well, first of all, as an experimental design, they show association, not causation.
And in nutrition, so you 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, you know, they may go to belong to a religious community that gives them a sense of sustenance.
But you know, just the smoking, the alcohol and the exercise alone, you can, and even though in those kinds of studies, uh 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 uh, you know, some amount of error in the results will come out.
And so, and I just make another point, which is like epidemiology uh is a better 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 uh, you know, and they take these at intervals, and people give some version of what they ate, and that's also very unit's a very unreliable basic data set that they're working from.
You know, there's uh 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 uh mainly by Harvard, which gets tons of money from the food companies.
I mean, talk about the ability, those those studies are very, very easy to manipulate.
The reason that I 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 that's in 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 uh 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 that this, but it's like a cause and effect relationship, which is um which is I think a more rigorous form of data and and has been demonstrated, you know, I will just add this other fact of there was a paper in 2011 where uh 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 uh, 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 link to maybe all that uncertainty language is a reflection of a study based on epidemiological or observational data.
Well, they both have their weaknesses, and I will just say, yes, if the study is properly designed, then randomized control 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 evident in the method section, if the methods are even correctly reported, which they are often not.
So, you know, biasing who's in the in the control group, for example, can radically alter the uh the apparent conclusion of the study.
And you have, you know, it's very hard to figure out where the bodies are buried sometimes.
I totally agree with you.
Uh and part of my dis steady growth and dissolution with science was realizing like reading scientific studies from the 70s and 80s, 90s and onward, where when you read the abstract of the paper, it doesn't it doesn't even reflect what the actual data report.
So I mean, there's 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 call the core clinical trials, testing the diet heart hypothesis.
Uh in the 60s, 1960s and 70s, these are trials all over the world in Oslo, London, the uh 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 in 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.
Uh I have I recently on Substack published a whole long list of them.
Um 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.
Um and there was a somewhat mixed uh effect on heart disease.
But um those studies, that body of literature, so this is on all together worldwide, almost 80,000 people, right?
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 a hundred people.
This is 80,000 people being tested on Ansel Keys' hypothesis.
The results are basically null, plus that cancer effect we talked about.
Um all of those trials, so all of those trials were based on 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 uh the authors, this is actually the biggest ever test of the uh of the diet heart hypothesis, something called the Minnesota Coronary Survey.
Um it was in the 70s, the principal investigative investigators, which originally included Ansel Keys, did not publish their results for 17 years, which you know 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 hope nobody would notice.
And when asked why, the principal investigator Ivan France said, well, there was nothing wrong with the study.
We were just so disappointed in the way it came out.
Well, that's fascinating.
Um that is a such a profound violation of the scientific method that it uh inverts the nature of science, which actually goes back to um something you said a few minutes ago.
You said you were disillusioned with science.
And uh I wanted to point out that the thing that looks like science that you're disillusioned in science.
It takes place in science departments by people who call themselves scientists, but science is that which adheres to the scientific method.
And, you know, 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, the this is a theme that runs through the whole story, right?
You know, are you disillusioned with food because uh because vegetable oil is bad for you?
No, it's not really food, right?
It's a it's an industrial product that was dressed up to be a food because it was profitable to do so.
Um and so uh let's not, you know, 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.
Um, but the science still works as well as it ever did.
It just, you know, it's not fashionable.
Well, yes, I think uh everything you say is true.
I I think I 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 kind of thing you can't do today because it would be considered an ethical, 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 yielded results that were contrary to the prevailing nutrition dogma.
And they were at that point, the diet heart hypothesis had really so quickly full uh kind of congealed and hardened to be the dominant hypothesis in the field.
At the NIH, it was fully adopted uh at the American Heart Association, as I mentioned.
And so the cognitive bias that exists at, you know, every one of these uh 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 effective saturated fat, but we you know, diet high hypothesis still must be true, but there must be something wrong with our experiment.
I mean, I I know you know this in science, but staying in the kind of the the popular crowd is 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 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.
Um I write also 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?
85, I guess.
75, yeah.
75.
So from back 1975.
Um 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 uh of mental disorders.
Right?
That that never had any support with it.
Or the uh causal uh 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 it's it's 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 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 that you you nurture and you lavish with love and uh and and there creates an intellectual barrier to challenging it as the way that Carl 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 we all possess that 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?
I 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 I guess I want to say on my behalf that there are now, and also for the mainly for the listeners, um, 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.
Uh 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 unsaturated fats.
So that you know, that makes me feel better than I that, but it, you know, mainly I, 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,
but you also are 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 the 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 uh 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 elements.
And I and yes, uh it is true in so many disciplines, and the added the added element in the food in nutrition science and uh 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 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 it is it it's got an it's got added dimensions, you know, the remote dimension of religion, the pharmaceutical angle, which was not opposite really obvious to me when I started.
So it is an even more distorted scientific field than others might be.
So I 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 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 uh 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 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 gonna 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, uh 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 will that has been demonstrated in clinical trials to reverse type 2 diabetes,
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 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, uh, which are dependent on a model of everybody taking four to five medications every day for their chronic diseases.
That's, you know.
And and we just can't be too cynical about that.
So what I uh, you know, what transpires 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 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 in-coate 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, uh, I can't remember now, but it was, you know, a keto-like diet likely to uh 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 mean, 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 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 the 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, or the people who are demonizing the so-called anti-vaxxers actually uh steering their families away from uh 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 uh to ignore their own advice.
Yeah, I mean, it's it's impossible really not to conclude otherwise.
I can uh, 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.
Um I remember uh a medical school professor who was teaching the approved, let's just call it the food period, but the government's the government's dietary advice, you know, 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, you know, it 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 or totally moly.
So I mean, that's a that's a uh, you know, a version of the story that I can actually tell.
But yes, I mean, I I know um many people who will confidentially tell me that they, oh, I'm cutting carbs, but I'm not talking about it.
I mean, you know, I have to wonder, like all these movie stars who, you know, publicly are on the vegan diet, you know, 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 walking their walk because can I just spend one moment of annoyance here?
Sure.
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 you 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, you know 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 we 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 the, you know, I documented people losing their careers and and being cast out, very high-level scientists in the mid-80s.
Um, and you know, 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.
Um, and so one of 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.
Um Yeah, but uh I'm sorry, I'm I I can't let this go.
Okay.
Look, I 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 um 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 I guess I'm just wondering if people who have a, you know, a deeper relationship with uh with God, for example, are more likely to say, you know what?
Yes, I'm gonna lose my career, but I don't want this career because there are more important things.
Well, I obviously really deeply to that story.
I I'm thinking of this one uh Randall Wood scientist who was also an early scientist in the 1970s on seed oils, and was harassed for that.
And he uh 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.
Was he happy?
He seemed pretty happy.
But uh, 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 amuck with religious sentiments.
And I will say probably the most corrupt and well-sided scientist in the world at Harvard, the most influential nutrition scientist ever, uh has you know joined an effort by the World Economic Forum to uh shift us all to a even more grain-based diet.
So the allure of power connection, prestige, glob the global stage is I mean, this is emblematic of what's happening in our time, but obviously that is greater 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.
Um, 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 you focus on the scientists 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 uh 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's 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 1980s, the beginning of our dietary guidelines where the US government, USTA and HHS basically adopt the entire platform of the American Heart Association, diet low and saturated 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, dietitian, nutritionist, nurse, and also is then implemented through our school lynches and feeding programs for the elderly and our uh educational programs for the military, how they should eat.
So that has we have been we and also in 1980s, sorry, 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 uh 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 you 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, uh a message I've heard you speak on elsewhere, you know, you've 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 uh that before we close out here?
Yeah, I do.
Thank you.
Um it's 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 uh is it's the way that you should bring up your children and the way that you should preserve your health.
Uh 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 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 you eat it becomes glucose in your bloodstream.
Starch is just sugar molecules holding hands.
Normally the pancreas releases insulin, takes the glucose and sticks it in your body tissue.
Right.
That can either go into your muscle tissue and then you feel like exercising, or it can go into it when your muscle tissue becomes uh what we call insulin resistance, which means it can't really take its insulin receptor cells, sort of get tired of accepting glucose, it will start taking insulin will start taking your glucose to your fat cells.
And then you will start to get fat.
But insulin resistance has many manifestations.
There are people who get diabetes without getting fat.
There are people there are different ways it has an impact on the body.
Um but insulin really is the king of all hormones for it is a hormone and it's the king of all hormones for making you fat.
Once you are insulin resistant, meaning you cannot deal with the incoming glucose, you have to pump out more and more insulin to deal with it.
You can, you're it's another way of expressing that is to say you are basically intolerant of carbohydrates.
You really cannot take in so many carbohydrates anymore.
And that means you have to reduce the amount of carbohydrates you eat.
And that is a diet um that may feel restrictive, but it is truly what you have to do once your your metabolism is broken in this way.
Um, and it's probably a little closer to, you know, how uh, you know, I believe like many of us we you we evolved to eat, which was not that many, certainly not refined processed carbohydrates, but not that many carbohydrates overall.
And um so that's I think it's people try to say, well, what is the healthy diet?
But it really depends on your metabolic health.
You know, how tolerant are you of carbohydrates?
Are you a 19-year-old boy who's an athlete?
You know, no problem.
You're you're probably going to be quite tolerant.
Are you, you know, a woman of my age, you probably are not going to be able to take in too many carbohydrates, especially after growing up eating Captain Crunch as a kid.
So I have to I have to also wonder what the impact I don't know anything about what the actual evidence base looks like.
But I've heard a lot more in my adult life about pancreatic cancer.
And I'm actually wondering if putting the pancreas on overdrive with a focus on carbohydrates in the diet, as if that was healthy is actually driving that as well.
You know anything about that?
I do know about pancreatic cancer specifically, but there is a truly fascinating body of scientific literature that is on the idea that glucose is really the preferred fuel for cancer cells.
And so glucose is what fuels really glucose and glucagon gone, which is a stored form of glucose in your liver, but that those are what fuel cancer.
That's a hypothesis that actually goes back to Otto Warburg in Germany under uh under Hitler and was very well developed at the time and then largely disappeared uh until quite recently.
But there are case studies of reversing, particularly brain cancer, bringing your brain is very susceptible to glucose uh and the complete remission of brain cancer by going on a ketogenic diet.
And those are case studies that have been published.
So and because cancer is associated with always tracks with obesity.
In other words, your risk of cancer in every part of your body goes up with the ink as you get as you gain weight.
I have to assume that there is you know a connection there, most likely, I think that this glucose explanation.
All right.
Um, did you um so ketogenic diet has uh tremendous capacity to actually restore health to people who have um got a metabolic syndrome?
Um is there anything else that you want to add before we close out here?
No, I think that's that's good.
I mean, uh I feel like that's just a super important concept for people who are like, well, why can't we like the Japanese?
Because you're metabolically unwell.
It's just a different story for me for you.
So anyway, yeah, we've gone over our time.
So that's good.
Okay.
Um Nina, this has been fascinating.
Uh I'm, of course, left with a huge number of questions.
Maybe we'll revisit this another time.
Um your book is The Big Fat Surprise, is that right?
Yes.
Okay.
Uh so people can get that uh anywhere books are sold.
You are the founder of the Nutrition Coalition, um, which has been tremendously important in uh raising awareness of these issues.
Where can people find you?
Uh I have a column called Unsettled Science on Substack.
Um, and I do I only read my social media on X slash Twitter.
So you can find me there at Big Fat Surprise.
All right.
Excellent.
Uh Nina Toshals, this has been fascinating.
And uh anyway, I thank you for your work and for uh waking a lot of us up to the nonsense that we were sold about food.
