August 22, 2024 • 39 mins
---------- Originally Aired on the Good Foods Podcast ----------
Nina and I discuss her book, which was released a decade ago and continues to impact the citizen scientist in all of us. Nina talks about how she started out writing an article about trans fats and how that segued into the book.
It took years to research and eventually be published but ultimately, The Big Fat Surprise stilL stands as the go-to manual for anyone that is concerned and focusing on their health.
Nina Teicholz, a science journalist, is author of the New York Times bestseller, The Big Fat
Surprise, which upended the conventional wisdom on dietary fat–especially saturated fat—and
spurred a new conversation about whether these fats in fact cause heart disease.
Named a *Best Book* of the year by the Economist, Wall Street Journal and Mother Jones, among others, it continues to be called a must-read for anyone seeking to understand the amazing story of how we came to believe fat is bad for health—and what a better diet might look like.
Nina is also the founder of the Nutrition Coalition, a non-profit working to ensure that government nutrition policy is transparent and evidence-based—work for which she’s been asked to testify before the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Canadian Senate.
Teicholz is a graduate of Stanford and Oxford Universities and previously served as associate director of the Center for Globalization and Sustainable Development at Columbia University. Teicholz lives in New York city with her husband and two sons.
Website ➡️ https://ninateicholz.com/
Substack Newsletter ➡️ https://unsettledscience.substack.com
Twitter ➡️ @bigfatsurprise https://twitter.com/bigfatsurprise
Facebook ➡️ @Ninateicholz https://www.facebook.com/NinaTeicholz
LinkedIn ➡️ Nina Teicholz https://www.linkedin.com/in/ninateicholz/
Instagram ➡️ @Ninateicholz https://www.instagram.com/ninateicholz/
The Good Foods podcast was created and hosted by Shardan Sandoval in March of 2023 and was active until September of 2024.
Nina and I discuss her book, which was released a decade ago and continues to impact the citizen scientist in all of us. Nina talks about how she started out writing an article about trans fats and how that segued into the book.
It took years to research and eventually be published but ultimately, The Big Fat Surprise stilL stands as the go-to manual for anyone that is concerned and focusing on their health.
Nina Teicholz, a science journalist, is author of the New York Times bestseller, The Big Fat
Surprise, which upended the conventional wisdom on dietary fat–especially saturated fat—and
spurred a new conversation about whether these fats in fact cause heart disease.
Named a *Best Book* of the year by the Economist, Wall Street Journal and Mother Jones, among others, it continues to be called a must-read for anyone seeking to understand the amazing story of how we came to believe fat is bad for health—and what a better diet might look like.
Nina is also the founder of the Nutrition Coalition, a non-profit working to ensure that government nutrition policy is transparent and evidence-based—work for which she’s been asked to testify before the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Canadian Senate.
Teicholz is a graduate of Stanford and Oxford Universities and previously served as associate director of the Center for Globalization and Sustainable Development at Columbia University. Teicholz lives in New York city with her husband and two sons.
Website ➡️ https://ninateicholz.com/
Substack Newsletter ➡️ https://unsettledscience.substack.com
Twitter ➡️ @bigfatsurprise https://twitter.com/bigfatsurprise
Facebook ➡️ @Ninateicholz https://www.facebook.com/NinaTeicholz
LinkedIn ➡️ Nina Teicholz https://www.linkedin.com/in/ninateicholz/
Instagram ➡️ @Ninateicholz https://www.instagram.com/ninateicholz/
The Good Foods podcast was created and hosted by Shardan Sandoval in March of 2023 and was active until September of 2024.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hello.
Speaker 2 (00:02):
I'm Nina Teischel's an investigative journalist and the author of
the New York Times bestseller The Big Fat Surprise. And
this is the Good Foods Podcast.
Speaker 3 (00:14):
All of us are on a journey towards better health,
and we're grateful that you've allowed us to join you
on your quest.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
In this episode, there's no food substance that grew more
rapidly in terms of consumption than vegetable oils over the
course of the twentieth century. So they went from being
pretty much zero consumption in nineteen hundred to being now
like now, they're like fourteen percent.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
Of all calories we eat are vegetable oils.
Speaker 3 (00:44):
This is the Good Foods Podcast, and now here's your
host show Dan.
Speaker 4 (00:51):
Nina, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
Great to be here, Thanks for having me.
Speaker 4 (00:55):
I know you were going to call the book The
Big Fat.
Speaker 2 (00:57):
Lie, right, oh yeah, originally, and we suggested that Big
Fat Lie, and then the publisher thought Surprise would be
a more congenial title, and I agree.
Speaker 4 (01:05):
In the end, Well, can you tell us what your
life was like before you decided that you weren't going
to worry about eating fat anymore?
Speaker 2 (01:14):
Well, I grew up in the seventies and eighties, and
like most people in my generation, there was sort of
this growing awareness in my family where we had gone
for getting my grandmother's you know, meatballs and sour cream sauce.
It's a Russian recipe, you know, And then all of
a sudden it was like, well, fat is bad for you.
Speaker 1 (01:36):
So out went the whole milk.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
Which we used to get from the milkman and that's
how old I am, and in came the low fat milk.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
We never switched to margarine.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
We always had better, but it was out with you know,
red meat not so much. We got to walk and
made stir fry vegetables, a lot more grains. And then
I became very fat phobic, like really phobic, Like I
would only have fish in parchment and wouldn't put a
drop of fat on it. And I convinced myself, like
(02:05):
many people of my other generations, that you know, salad
with just vinegar was yummy, which is just the farthest
thing from the truth. I just thought fat would make
you fat. You know, those two words, same word, different meanings,
But it's like this tragic commonem like the fat you
eat is the fat you're going to get. And then
(02:26):
I went about twenty five years not eating any red
meat or very little red meat, or largely vegetarian. And
I was always maybe ten, fifteen, twenty, sometimes thirty pounds overweight,
and I was always dieting and could never lose the weight.
And I didn't even have an interest in nutrition. It
was not on my radar. I just thought, well, I'm
(02:48):
not trying hard enough no matter what I do. I
was a maniac exerciser. It didn't matter, but I always
blamed myself. And then ironically I was as a journalist.
I was longtime a journalist for National Public Radio. I
did a stint as a foreign correspondent in Latin America.
Decided instead of radio I wanted to do writing. Started
(03:11):
to do a series of investigative food pieces for Gourmet Magazine,
a great magazine in its day, all that food. But
my job was to do investigative pieces about the food industry,
which is really not an industry that's been well investigated,
still isn't. And so one of the pieces assigned to
me was on trans fats. This is the early two thousands,
(03:32):
like nobody had heard of trans fats. So I wrote
a piece that for me was just a complete eye opener.
I mean I started researching, calling up scientists. They were
telling me stories like well. I was hired by the
Vegetable Oil Association to scientists at conferences who were presenting
(03:54):
negative findings on trans fats. It was our job to
sit in the audience and harass them. I interviewed scientists
who were literally like badgered out of the field because
they were made to feel so paranoid about their work
at that point raising questions about transfats. I talked to
a journal editor who had had the margarine industry visit
(04:16):
her and tell her to yank an article that was
negative about transfats from the journal Meta, this medical journal
at all. In all, it was this wild West picture
of what was supposed to be science. And my father
is an engineer, and I had always had thought that
science was like well, a hypothesis and antithesis and testing,
(04:36):
and you would if Hugh had observations that contradicted your hypothesis,
you would have to reformulate your hypothesis. But instead it
was this crazy world of bullying and commercial interests and
scientists like just trying to do their work, and that
really made me think there was a much bigger story
(04:57):
there about all fats. Well, actually the story is that
that article in Gourmet was so incredibly popular, it was
like the most popular article in their recent history, that
I got offered a book contract to write a book
about trans fats. And when I started researching that, I
realized that there was just this much bigger story about
(05:20):
all kinds of dietary fat, and like everything that I
had thought, you know, was so upside down and backwards,
like low fat, good fat, bad fat. You know, everything
that we I had obsessed about my whole life, and
that many Americans obsessed about it just turned out to
be almost one hundred percent wrong. And again scientists hanging
(05:42):
up on me, afraid to talk to me. You know.
At that point, this is still the early two thousands,
the low fat diet was just like if you sit
anything against the low fat diet, like people would literally
hang up on me. So it took me about nine
years to research my book. And that's because I read
thousands and thousands and thousands of scientific studies. I had
(06:03):
to educate myself in how to even read a scientific study,
and then how to read scientific studies where the scientists
are trying to hide things because their results did not
fit kind of the conventional wisdom or what they were
supposed to find. And I interviewed hundreds and hundreds of
scientists and others all over the world, and so yeah,
(06:23):
so then I came out with this book that it's
still considered like a really groundbreaking book in the field.
I don't think anybody's done quite the crazy amount of
research that I did.
Speaker 1 (06:35):
It was also the first book to introduce the.
Speaker 2 (06:36):
Whole idea of seed oils, which is a whole other
topic like why should we be avoiding seed oils? I
was the kind of the first researcher to lay out
that case. So it's been almost a decade now since
that book came out, but it's still considered kind of
like beginning reading if you're getting into this field for
the first time, which is a great pleasure for me.
Speaker 4 (06:56):
So you stated in the book that nutrition science is
found and most, if not all, of us are confused
about what we eat and what we should eat. Is
that all by design?
Speaker 2 (07:08):
Well, no, I think there's very well meaning researchers out
there trying to do good clinical trials, and that has
been true from the very beginning. But it is a
field where there are enormous interests at play. You're talking
about multi trillion dollar food industry interests and pharmaceutical interests,
(07:32):
because you just can't be too cynical about the pharmaceutical companies. Unfortunately,
they don't make money if you are getting off their
pills and devices, and like they just that is a
negative for them, so they have no incentive to make
you healthy. And one of the surprising things when I
started doing this research was how many nutrition scientists took
(07:53):
money from the pharmaceutical industry, because I thought, what, you're
studying food, why are you sticking money from pharma. Well,
pharma has an interest in you know, some of them
have weight loss medications, and but they definitely do not
have an interest is you're getting healthy using natural food approaches.
(08:15):
So there's so many financial interests in this field that
it really warps the science. So I mean, just to
give you a little sense of that, if somebody comes
out with a study saying one thing like transfats, you know,
raise your bad cholesterol, industry will do its very best
(08:37):
to come out with a study contradicting that. That's an industry,
you know, a tobacco industry tactic, which is just like
confuse the science. You always have studies that are contradicting
other studies, and so in the end everybody just has to,
you know, throw up their hands and say, well, we
don't really know. That's just one of the many tactics
that is undertaken.
Speaker 1 (08:57):
Now.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
I mean, like we could talk the whole hour just
about that. But that is basically why we have so
much trouble sorting through all the different and contradictory advice
that I think it just makes people crazy. You can
find a study that says anything, and you know, I
think for the average person, it's enormously frustrating.
Speaker 4 (09:18):
After the release of the book, Nina, how many doctors, scientists,
or people that you ran across in your research they
still weren't on board with what you presented in the book.
Speaker 2 (09:29):
Well, I mean that's still true, right, I Mean my
book changed a lot of minds. My book was the
first book to lay out the idea that saturated fats
were unfairly villainized. Right, that's a big deal. When my
book came out twenty fourteen, there was precisely one scientific
study agreeing with me. Well, I know that my book
(09:49):
was shared all over the world, and there are now
twenty five major review papers that all agree with me
with my findings. You know, they were view all the
event I uncovered all this evidence that had been hidden
and buried and ignored, and they dug that evidence up
and they reviewed it in formal what's called systematic reviews.
(10:10):
So I did convince a lot of people. But our
official recommendations still say that saturated fats are bad for health,
and I would say that's still a widely predominant belief
by most health practitioners. Other ideas in my book that
the low fat diet was not effective for fighting obese diabetes,
(10:32):
any kind of cancer, or heart disease. The low fat
diet has really been rolled back. So that's an area
where I think maybe my research in other people's research,
really helped to end something that was damaging to health.
It turns out if you follow a low fat diet,
your risk of heart disease goes up, which is a
(10:54):
terrible outcome, especially for women. It turns out women have
a much worse reaction than men do. So and that's
from you know, rigorous clinical trial data. That's so that
was one of the findings in my book also that
dietary cholesterol does not affect your blood cholesterol. So the
reason we were eating all eggs and we were avoiding
(11:15):
a yolks and shellfish, that official recommendation has been dropped.
That happened in twenty fifteen. Again, I don't know if
I had anything to do with that, but I would
say that the views on that have shifted because our
official recommendations have shifted. And then you know seed oils,
which is you know, I'm pretty sure that I'm the
(11:37):
one who kind of launched that whole idea, and there's
a lot of.
Speaker 1 (11:40):
Awareness of seed oils now.
Speaker 2 (11:42):
So I think I have made a difference, But boy,
we have a long ways to go.
Speaker 1 (11:48):
I mean, we have a long ways to go.
Speaker 2 (11:51):
I think, you know, because the basic advice that most
people are following, which is healthy fruits, vegetables, whole grains,
lean meet, nuts, seeds, is a healthy diet. That is
not a diet shown to help people recover their health
or get better in any way lose weight. And I
(12:13):
still think that that's the predominant view out there.
Speaker 4 (12:16):
When you were doing your researching, when you were interviewing people,
and the pushback that you were getting. Were you scared.
Did you feel scared at any time?
Speaker 2 (12:24):
Well, I mean not physically, perhaps naively, but I have
really been harassed and bullied quite a lot.
Speaker 1 (12:34):
I mean, if I if.
Speaker 2 (12:35):
I had money for libel lawyers, I wish I would
have hired a full rank of fallings of them. You know,
I was really called mean names. And actually I had
a very important piece, a cover story in a medical
journal called the BMJ, which is the first or's second
(12:56):
top medical journal in the world.
Speaker 1 (12:58):
And it was a cover.
Speaker 2 (13:00):
Story on how there was really no evidence for our
dietary guidelines or US dietary guidelines. It was such a huge,
major story, and both the editor in chief of the
BMJ and I had no idea that this was going
to I mean, we obviously really triggered because this is
official US policy. So yeah, I was subject to a
(13:22):
huge retraction effort, like hundreds of scientists tried to get
my paper retracted. I didn't sleep for a year while
they were reviewing that. And in the end, you know,
the paper stood. There was minor clarifications that needed, you know,
something had to be done to justify all this. But yeah,
(13:43):
and the editor in chief came out strongly in my favor.
But you know, that was a year I didn't sleep.
Was pretty awful.
Speaker 4 (13:48):
Hopefully you didn't go through some of the things that
David Kritchevski and his team went through.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
Yeah, I mean what my book documents you talk about
one nutrition scientist. There are so many stories I document
where scientists are really bullied.
Speaker 1 (14:04):
This is where I.
Speaker 2 (14:05):
Feel like, well, I'm in a whole tradition of scientists.
Well I'm not a scientist, but you know of researchers
who are saying things to the contrary. And well I
told you about people, you know, being hired to forrass
other scientists at conferences, but there were you know, people
calling people names. These are also tactics from the tobacco industry.
You know, you you slin people and you call them names,
(14:25):
you accuse them of having being motivated financially and being
backed by various industries. I'm routinely accused based on zero
evidence because there is none, of being supported by the
meat industry. All these scientists, they had multi page articles
attacking them. There was actually a guy named John Yudkin
who had the idea. He was in England, a professor
(14:48):
whose idea was that it wasn't fat that caused heart disease,
it was sugar. Well, now the evidence really is more
on his side. But in the seventies when the people
who are promoting the fat hypothesis, they went after this
professor and they drove him from the field. I mean,
they wrote nasty articles about him, they really sunk him.
(15:11):
So it's a very It's not the calm world of
science that you would hope or expect. And some of
the most calm spoken, gentle seeming people in this field
today even are some of the most aggressive in terms
of the bullying tactics that they use. So it's still
(15:31):
going on. I'm sorry to say, Well, you mentioned heart
disease in nineteen hundred, there are very few reported cases
of heart disease. Just a half a century after that,
it's the number one.
Speaker 4 (15:41):
Killer, right. What happened?
Speaker 2 (15:42):
Well, I want to point out to your listeners that
it wasn't that heart disease was not known in the
early nineteen hundreds. It had been the subject of textbooks
for fifty years. It had been known, identified, studied, but
the doctors in the major hospitals like in Boston and
New York they just were not seeing any cases. And
(16:02):
these are the people who had written the textbooks, like
they knew what they should see. It just it truly,
you know, objectively, empirically was not common at all in
the early nineteen hundreds. Then it rose to become the
number one killer in the country by the nineteen fifties.
So there's a slight little change of the diagnostic codes
(16:23):
in the twenties that might have like jogged up the
numbers a little bit, and they had better techniques for measuring,
you know, like EKGs. But there's new getting around the rapid,
rapid increase in the rate of heart disease. And actually
I do not have a simple answer as to why
that happened. We don't have good records about what people
(16:43):
were eating and how that changed in those fifty years.
We know that people in the course of the twentieth
century dramatically increased the amount of sugar that they eat.
We increased the amount of grains we eat. I have
those numbers much more in a rigorous way from like
nineteen sixty eight or nineteen seventy on. But I think
(17:06):
the other factor is that, and this is a potential
causative factor is the rise in vegetable oils. So vegetable
oils were introduced as crisco in nineteen eleven, and then
they rapidly they were placed lard, which they were intended
to do, but that had blurred. And butter were the
mean fats for cooking throughout the entire history, and then
(17:29):
you know tallow and sue it, but the main fats
used for cooking in the Western world forever. Now we
had this what was hydrogenated vegetable oil in the form
of crisco. Then we had vegetable oils and bottles that
we were told to fry in and they were good
for lowering our cholesterol and all that, and so we
there's no food substance that grew more rapidly in terms
(17:55):
of consumption than vegetable oils over the course of the
twenty century. So they went from being pretty much zero
consumption in nineteen hundred to being now like now, there
are like fourteen percent.
Speaker 1 (18:08):
Of all calories we eat are vegetable oils.
Speaker 2 (18:11):
And heart disease rose in lockstep with the increase in
those oils, and there's some evidence to suggest that they
may play a role in causing heart disease. I actually
think sugars and grains are also right up there in
terms of having some causative data that really strongly suggests causation.
Speaker 4 (18:30):
So how can we know what is right? Where should
we go for trusted, scientifically backed information.
Speaker 1 (18:38):
There is no.
Speaker 2 (18:39):
One organization at the moment that I think provides good advice.
There's something called well, I have a group called the
Nutrition Coalition, but that's really focused on policy. There's a
group called the Society for Metabolic Health Practitioners, but that
really is more about it's really focused more in practitioners.
So here's who I wouldn't trust US government and our
(19:02):
national guidelines, the American Heart Association, the American Diabetes Association,
any of those associations. I mean, the whole world of
institutions really held captive to this dominant medical narrative that
we should eat a plant based diet and avoid meat
and have vegetable oils and avoid better and that that
(19:23):
is the healthiest diet. That idea is so locked into
these institutions that I mean, really it is the contrarians.
Our writings or review of the science better explains what's
going you know, at the observations, what we're seeing like
it's more scientifically rigorous, but it's people who are following
(19:44):
the advice of you know, my book or there's another
journalist named Gary Taubs. There's now like hundreds and thousands
of practitioners out there, But those are the people who
are actually reversing their diabetes, getting off all their medications,
losing one hundred pounds sustainably. You know, I wish I
could give you a better answer. I just I don't
have one. That's okay, So your book comes out and
(20:05):
at the time you were frowned upon if you were
eating meat, cheese, butter. I guess you can add eggs
to that list. Fast forward to now there's a huge
spotlight on the carnivore movement, and I still see pushback
against those touting the benefits of eating beef. What is
going on, Nina, Well, the meat story is really complicated,
(20:26):
but let's just start with the purported health effects of
red meat. So the idea is that red meat causes
every type of disease. But just to give you a
little snapshot picture, consumption of beef has dropped in the
United States by thirty five percent, both in terms of
(20:48):
the amount of availability and the amount of consumption by
the US public between nineteen seventy and twenty thirteen. It
must be much lower today. That's the best available government data.
We don't have any data for today, but it's drop
precipitously in exactly the same time that all those diseases
have skyrocketed. So it is virtually impossible that red meat
causes those disease. I could also point you to the
(21:11):
top best quality review papers ever done on all the
data on meat that came out in the Annals of
Internal Medicine, I want to say, twenty eighteen, and they
concluded that the quality and the quantity of the data
showing any negative effects of meat on cancer, heart disease, diabetes,
any kind of metabolge disease was almost nil. And that's
(21:34):
the highest quality review papers that have ever been published.
What we see is a tremendous bias against meat that
is historical. It's a complex subject where it comes from,
but let's just to simplify it. It came mainly from
first the idea they contained more saturated fats, and saturated
fats are bad for help. Well, that idea has largely crumbled.
(21:57):
The evidence doesn't support that there's an argument that you know,
cows are bad for the planet, or animal rights activists
think we shouldn't be killing animals, or there's the problem
of in factory farms. Those are not health reasons, but
they have become reasons that people decided that they don't
want to eat red meat. But I will tell you
(22:18):
that red meat is not only not a cause of disease,
it is probably one of the healthiest foods you can
possibly eat. And I know that sounds crazy to people
listening to that, but especially beef and other ruminant animals,
so they have multiple stomachs rumin and animals, so that
would also be like goat and lamb and elk. First
(22:39):
of all, they have incredible density of vitamins and minerals
like thirteen or fourteen vitamin minerals that are essential for
your health, like especially B twelve and iron and folate
and selenium and B vitamins. It's like taking a multi vitamin,
but better because it's in a food context. Secondly, it's
a perfect complete protein. You can eat eight hundred calories
(23:02):
of peanut butter to get your protein, or you can
eat one hundred and twenty five calories of beef and
peanut butter is not a complete protein. Meat has all
the essential amino acids. And then thirdly, it has no
sugar in it, no glucose to speak in it technically,
So peanut butter has a lot of glucose in it.
And so whenever you put glucose sugar in your body,
(23:24):
your blood sugar spikes, and that is what provokes metabolic diseases,
including weight gain. And there are other reasons, but I mean, like,
you really shouldn't be avoiding red meat. It's really dangerous
for your health to avoid you know, animal foods generally.
So I think right now though, we're just living in
a time when there's just so many interests that are
(23:46):
trying to push beef off the dinner plate. I forgot
to mention the huge, the huge, burgeoning industry of fake
foods that want to you know, replacement meat. So this
are huge, huge, you know, investment companies are tremendous interest
in trying to make patentable, factory produced food that people
(24:07):
can make money on versus natural foods that you know,
produced like out in pasture.
Speaker 4 (24:13):
Yeah. And I interviewed Joel Salaton and we talked about
the largest farmland owner.
Speaker 1 (24:18):
Yeah, Bill Gates.
Speaker 4 (24:19):
Bill Gates, and after the interview it crossed my mind,
you know, I thought, well, he's got farm land. What
if he says, Okay, I'm not going to have any
of this go to any cattle by my meat. Well,
the price is going to be very affordable for a
lot of people. But it's not real meat, it's not
real food.
Speaker 1 (24:37):
Well, he was the biggest investor.
Speaker 2 (24:39):
I don't know if he has anymore in both beyond
meat and the Impossible Burger, and he I don't know
if he sincerely believes meat is a major source of
climate change. But yeah, I mean there is an effort
to force people away from natural foods and then to
buy their fake foods instead, which I mean just to
(25:00):
understand what is the replacement meat or a lab grown meat.
First of all, their studies shows there no better for
the environment because they're in these very intensive industrial plans
have to make them, so, I mean there's a lot
of carbon impact of those industries and their studies saying
like this is no better than cows out in pasture, which,
(25:22):
by the way, I live in harmony with nature and
you need them. The thing is that those like the
Impossible Worker, if you look at the list of ingredients
and you just compare that to the list of what's
in your dog food, you know, which is shelf stable
for several years. I mean, you're basically eating real, ultra
process foods.
Speaker 4 (25:38):
I think you mentioned doctor Adkins in your book.
Speaker 3 (25:41):
I do.
Speaker 4 (25:41):
He favored a high fat, low carb diet, and he
was definitely going against the grain in many respects, right.
Speaker 2 (25:47):
Doctor Atkins was the first popularizer of the low carbohydrate
diet in the twentieth century. And it's interesting to note
there was a version of doctor Atkins in like the
late eighteen hundred. A man named William Banting was hugely
overweight and figured out that if he could cut out
all carbohydrates, he lost a huge amount of weight. But
(26:10):
he initially went because he was so fat he'd lost
his hearing. And then when he lost all his weight
he regained his hearing. Anyway, his book, which he called
low car Banting and his book was like the Doctor
Ackens of his time. He sold gazillions of copies. You
can imagine in like eighteen seventy nine, and then the
diet it survived, you know, different practitioners took it up.
(26:34):
There was a guy named Pennington, and there was another
man named William Blake, and it was tried at the
you know, in various different settings, and there were actually
scientific experiments on it.
Speaker 1 (26:43):
But then boom, doctor Atkins.
Speaker 2 (26:45):
Comes on the scene in the early seventies and he
really became synonymous.
Speaker 1 (26:49):
His name.
Speaker 2 (26:50):
It was the Atkins diet, and he sort of brought
it back to the fore that was at the height
of you know, our low fat mania. And he was
just like fingernails on a chalkboard, like he just irritated everybody.
Everybody hated him, and he eventually became embittered, and there
(27:11):
wasn't really much science to back him up then. You know,
there weren't clinical trials, which is like greade a level evidence.
But he would say like, hey, come look at all
my medical files and I'll show you all these people
who have lost weight and reversed their diseases. But you know,
I think he ended up being frustrated. You know, he
was unable to convince anybody in the American Medical Association,
for instance.
Speaker 4 (27:31):
Well you mentioned your father and being a daughter of
a scientist when you're doing your research, and the pushback
and the people that didn't want to talk to you.
Was that a little heartbreaking to deal with that, But
those scientists and those people that they wanted nothing to
do with you.
Speaker 2 (27:45):
Yeah, I mean you can take it personally, like, well,
why is so and so over a University of Washington
hanging up the phone on me? But you know, you know,
a journalist, our job is not to be popular. Our
job is and it's hard for me because you know,
I want to be liked like all people. I feel
like I'm basically a nice person. But your job is
(28:08):
to figure out the truth. And if that means upsetting
people or being disliked, you just have to, you know,
you have to develop a kind of a tougher skin,
because the truth is definitely worth it. I mean, in
this case, it's not just an academic truth. It's a
truth that literally allows people to reverse horrible diseases. So,
(28:31):
you know, I believe both in just the importance of truth,
Like I think it's a kind of justice to be
able to hear and see and have access to the truth.
Like we should not censor it, we should not try
to squash it. And in this case, I've just received
so many thousands of emails from people telling me how
it literally has changed a lifetime of terrible health. So
(28:55):
that is really tremendously gratifying and worth it.
Speaker 4 (28:58):
The more people didn't want to talk to you, did
that motivate you even more to want to dig deeper?
Speaker 2 (29:04):
Well, I don't know. I mean I was just really motivated.
I mean I love reading the science, and it was
like a pursuing you know, a spy tale, a mystery
like buried science and hunting down papers that had been
published in foreign languages, and it just felt like a
mystery kind of and it was super fun and interesting.
Speaker 4 (29:26):
So since your book was published in twenty fourteen and
everything that we've learned since then, you know what question
or questions are we still not asking our medical professionals,
our government, maybe even ourselves.
Speaker 2 (29:40):
Well, I still think our basic problem is that our
official advice is one hundred percent wrong. So I founded
a nonprofit for a while that was trying to change
our government's policy. And this is not just our government,
it's the American Heart Er Series, every every group. As
I've mentioned, the basic idea that you should keep yourself
very low that's not correct and also probably increases your
(30:04):
risk of heart disease. Advice on red meat is definitely incorrect.
The advice to eat vegetable oils over saturated fats, so
margarine over butter. That is incorrect. The advice to eat
lots of fruits and vegetables and whole grains to get healthier.
No evidence that will make you healthier. The idea you
should get a lot of fiber in your diet, especially
(30:25):
for you know, gastrointestinal problems, is the reverse of what
turns out to be true. So there's so much that
we need to fix. I think people for themselves, you know,
we are. Each person is kind of lucky in the
sense that they can be their own experiment.
Speaker 1 (30:45):
Right.
Speaker 2 (30:46):
Some science nobody has any access to like we can.
I cannot figure out the effect of environmental pollution. I
can't do that science. But each and every one of
us can do our own experiment, our own what's called
n equals one EXPERI men on our own bodies, and
it's reversible. You can try it out for three weeks,
you can try it for a month. You can do
your own experiment and see what makes you feel healthier,
(31:08):
what makes you lose weight? You know where you feel better?
Speaker 1 (31:11):
I think I mean.
Speaker 2 (31:11):
A little bit of the caveat there is. Almost everybody
feels better when they cut junk food out of their lives.
We all know what junk food is, right, cookies, crackers,
chips like you don't need fancy terms to define that.
And that's true if you go on a vegan diet,
or if you go on a carnivor diet, or if
you go on a kidogenic diet or whatever. So everybody
feels better getting off of really crap food. But then
(31:35):
the question is you know, to me, the very next
question is are you getting all the nutrients that you need?
Are you getting all the complete protein that you need?
And it just turns out, you know, a vegan or
heavily plant based or plant forward diet does not provide
you the nutrients or the complete proteins that you need
to stay healthy. And that's something that often doesn't show
(31:55):
up for years. So that's where it's a little complicated.
But yeah, I mean people have to ask themselves, how
do you feel? Are you sleeping well? Are you are
you falling asleep in the afternoon? Do use your energy flag?
Are you feeling depressed and cranky? Are you just unable
to lose weight? Do you have raisation? Do you have
(32:18):
skin problems, your hair falling out, is like, you know,
some amazing number of things that are related to diet.
I used to like for me, it was like I
had sinus infections every year. I haven't had one of
those many years now. I mean all kinds of things
in your basic ability to resist colds or infections is
related to diet. Almost everything goes back to your diet,
what you put in your body.
Speaker 4 (32:39):
Okay, listen, I know there were many, but do you
remember where you were and what one of the first
big fat lies that you came across?
Speaker 2 (32:49):
Well, I mean the wow, I mean, I don't remember
what the first one was. I guess it was this
idea that like was not bad, that I could stop
avoiding fat, that I could have a salad with salad dressing,
or you know, that the fat i ate was not
the bat I got, or that the bacon i ate
(33:12):
was better for my hips than like eating that bagel. Yeah,
it was just like this idea that I didn't have
to fear fat. I think people of a certain generation
just they just don't remember the kind of phobia that
we had around fat, total complete phobia. So that was
a great discovery.
Speaker 4 (33:33):
Looking back, at the journey that the original trans Fat
writing Assignments started you on what are you most proud of?
Speaker 2 (33:39):
Oh, I mean, I'm really proud of my book still.
I think that my book, I haven't even mentioned that.
You know, it has this fantastic chapter on the Mediterranean
diet that debunks the Mediterranean diet as you commonly know it.
I mean, I got there's so much in that book
that now I can't believe I wrote it, like that
seed oils, the saturated fat arguments that, I mean, all
(34:00):
the stuff about the politics of science that I somehow
managed to weave in there. I feel pretty proud of that.
I mean, that's why I haven't written another book yet.
I don't know if I could read do that well.
I think book number two should be called all your
Big fad Liars, and you just have a list of
all the people that don't follow these people, and then
(34:23):
there's the second page. It's just trust yourself, trust your instincts.
Speaker 4 (34:27):
That's it.
Speaker 2 (34:27):
Yeah. You know the problem is that there is so
much what I would call propaganda out there, that there
are things that we have come to believe just because
these lies have been repeated over and over and over
and over and over and over it like so many
times and so many publications. So I think like if
I were to spend the rest of my life trying
(34:48):
to just to convince people that read and meat is
not bad for health, I would fail. But somehow I
feel like that story has to be told, Like we
cannot demonize one of the healthiest foods. Let me just
give you a tiny little snapshot of another thing about
red meat. There haven't been that many experiments on red meat,
but in Africa, for school children, there were these kids
(35:12):
that barely had you know, they were not getting great food, right.
They gave some of them extra red meat, some of
them extra milk or dairy, and then some of them
just like some kind of like grain formula. The kids
who got the meat, they not only improved dramatically on
their test scores and better, but they displayed more leadership
(35:32):
and skills on the playground.
Speaker 1 (35:34):
They became better.
Speaker 2 (35:35):
Like all around students, better than the kids who had milk,
and way better than the kids who just had the
grain thing. I mean, it's a really it's an extraordinary food.
So anyway, I don't know if I want to get
myself in more hot water, but I think that's.
Speaker 1 (35:49):
What I would try to do.
Speaker 4 (35:50):
Well, you mentioned the Mediterranean diet. We've also heard about
the blue zones, and now I think that's information is
coming out that maybe that's not all what is cracked
up to be.
Speaker 2 (36:00):
Yeah, so let me just say the short story of
the Mediterranean diet is the Mediterranean those countries, they eat
a lot of meat. And the basic problem is that
you know, Westerners went there and they're like, are you
eating beef? And the Mediterraneans say, no, we're adding beef.
The follow up question, which should have been are you
eating lamb and goat? Was never asked because we don't
even eat lamb and goat. We literally miss the majority
(36:23):
of their diet. I mean that's a little bit of
a simplified version, but that's a big part of why
the Mediterranean has been misunderstood. And also they had a
much higher fat diet than what we have than what
we think of the Mediterranean diet. But it was not
like mainly fruits and vegetables. Even today, if you go
to any of those countries, you will see a menu
full of things that are you know, they eat fruits
(36:45):
and vegetables, but it's mainly you know, the main courses
are meat and fish. Of course, the blue zones that
idea that these certain regions were especially long lived. They're
all these idyllic areas where zero stress, people eat eat well,
they don't walk.
Speaker 1 (37:01):
Around with cell phones like this.
Speaker 2 (37:02):
You know, they're just they have all these other characteristics
that are conducive to like a relaxing, stressful, very community
rich lives. And it turns out that, you know, many
of them, they just got the diet wrong. They got
the longevity records wrong. Some places there weren't longevity records.
Okinawa is literally means the island of pork, but you know,
(37:25):
they went and visited it while it was being occupied
by the Americans post World War two and everything was
disrupted in the food supply. So that's a commercial concept
of blue zones that has been sold and people have
made tons of money off of that, and it, unfortunately,
just is not good science.
Speaker 4 (37:44):
If you could, would you change anything or would you
have approached anything differently when you were doing your research.
Speaker 2 (37:51):
That's a hard question. I'm sure I could have done
things better and more quickly. There's little things about how
I would write a book differently now doing it again,
But they're sort of technical issues. I don't think, so
nothing really comes to mind. I could have been better, smarter, faster.
Speaker 4 (38:08):
And finally, Nina, other than your family and the nutrition Coalition,
what do you focus your attention on now?
Speaker 2 (38:15):
Well, I'm writing a column on the platform called Substack
with fellow journalist Gary Taubs, and it's called Unsettled Science.
And so if you want to follow my work, it
would be great. You can sign up for free, or
you can get a paid subscription and support me. I'm
doing that. I'm doing academic papers. I just finished my
(38:37):
PhD in nutrition, so now I'll have fancy letters after
my name.
Speaker 4 (38:41):
Congratulations, thank you.
Speaker 1 (38:44):
Yeah, I think that's about it.
Speaker 2 (38:45):
My kids are are older now and I am realizing,
like I need a couple hobbies.
Speaker 5 (38:52):
So your readers can send me suggestions. Like, you know,
I don't know what to do with all my time.
I try to exercise to cure myself, and I cook
a lot. I've been learning how to cook this new
way of eating that not so new to me. But
you know, so I'm doing a lot of cooking, but
go into more art museums. But anyway, yeah, I need
a new hobby, Nina.
Speaker 4 (39:13):
Thank you so much for coming on the podcast and
sharing your wisdom with us.
Speaker 1 (39:16):
Thank you for having me. It's been a pleasure to
talk to you.
Speaker 3 (39:23):
The Good Foods podcast is for entertainment purposes only. The claims, comments, opinions,
or information heard should never be used in place of
your medical provider's advice or your doctor's direction.
Speaker 1 (39:35):
Thank you for listening.
Speaker 3 (39:36):
Follow us on social media and wherever you get your podcasts.
Good Health through good Food, Good Foods, Grocery
Hello.
Speaker 2 (00:02):
I'm Nina Teischel's an investigative journalist and the author of
the New York Times bestseller The Big Fat Surprise. And
this is the Good Foods Podcast.
Speaker 3 (00:14):
All of us are on a journey towards better health,
and we're grateful that you've allowed us to join you
on your quest.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
In this episode, there's no food substance that grew more
rapidly in terms of consumption than vegetable oils over the
course of the twentieth century. So they went from being
pretty much zero consumption in nineteen hundred to being now
like now, they're like fourteen percent.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
Of all calories we eat are vegetable oils.
Speaker 3 (00:44):
This is the Good Foods Podcast, and now here's your
host show Dan.
Speaker 4 (00:51):
Nina, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
Great to be here, Thanks for having me.
Speaker 4 (00:55):
I know you were going to call the book The
Big Fat.
Speaker 2 (00:57):
Lie, right, oh yeah, originally, and we suggested that Big
Fat Lie, and then the publisher thought Surprise would be
a more congenial title, and I agree.
Speaker 4 (01:05):
In the end, Well, can you tell us what your
life was like before you decided that you weren't going
to worry about eating fat anymore?
Speaker 2 (01:14):
Well, I grew up in the seventies and eighties, and
like most people in my generation, there was sort of
this growing awareness in my family where we had gone
for getting my grandmother's you know, meatballs and sour cream sauce.
It's a Russian recipe, you know, And then all of
a sudden it was like, well, fat is bad for you.
Speaker 1 (01:36):
So out went the whole milk.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
Which we used to get from the milkman and that's
how old I am, and in came the low fat milk.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
We never switched to margarine.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
We always had better, but it was out with you know,
red meat not so much. We got to walk and
made stir fry vegetables, a lot more grains. And then
I became very fat phobic, like really phobic, Like I
would only have fish in parchment and wouldn't put a
drop of fat on it. And I convinced myself, like
(02:05):
many people of my other generations, that you know, salad
with just vinegar was yummy, which is just the farthest
thing from the truth. I just thought fat would make
you fat. You know, those two words, same word, different meanings,
But it's like this tragic commonem like the fat you
eat is the fat you're going to get. And then
(02:26):
I went about twenty five years not eating any red
meat or very little red meat, or largely vegetarian. And
I was always maybe ten, fifteen, twenty, sometimes thirty pounds overweight,
and I was always dieting and could never lose the weight.
And I didn't even have an interest in nutrition. It
was not on my radar. I just thought, well, I'm
(02:48):
not trying hard enough no matter what I do. I
was a maniac exerciser. It didn't matter, but I always
blamed myself. And then ironically I was as a journalist.
I was longtime a journalist for National Public Radio. I
did a stint as a foreign correspondent in Latin America.
Decided instead of radio I wanted to do writing. Started
(03:11):
to do a series of investigative food pieces for Gourmet Magazine,
a great magazine in its day, all that food. But
my job was to do investigative pieces about the food industry,
which is really not an industry that's been well investigated,
still isn't. And so one of the pieces assigned to
me was on trans fats. This is the early two thousands,
(03:32):
like nobody had heard of trans fats. So I wrote
a piece that for me was just a complete eye opener.
I mean I started researching, calling up scientists. They were
telling me stories like well. I was hired by the
Vegetable Oil Association to scientists at conferences who were presenting
(03:54):
negative findings on trans fats. It was our job to
sit in the audience and harass them. I interviewed scientists
who were literally like badgered out of the field because
they were made to feel so paranoid about their work
at that point raising questions about transfats. I talked to
a journal editor who had had the margarine industry visit
(04:16):
her and tell her to yank an article that was
negative about transfats from the journal Meta, this medical journal
at all. In all, it was this wild West picture
of what was supposed to be science. And my father
is an engineer, and I had always had thought that
science was like well, a hypothesis and antithesis and testing,
(04:36):
and you would if Hugh had observations that contradicted your hypothesis,
you would have to reformulate your hypothesis. But instead it
was this crazy world of bullying and commercial interests and
scientists like just trying to do their work, and that
really made me think there was a much bigger story
(04:57):
there about all fats. Well, actually the story is that
that article in Gourmet was so incredibly popular, it was
like the most popular article in their recent history, that
I got offered a book contract to write a book
about trans fats. And when I started researching that, I
realized that there was just this much bigger story about
(05:20):
all kinds of dietary fat, and like everything that I
had thought, you know, was so upside down and backwards,
like low fat, good fat, bad fat. You know, everything
that we I had obsessed about my whole life, and
that many Americans obsessed about it just turned out to
be almost one hundred percent wrong. And again scientists hanging
(05:42):
up on me, afraid to talk to me. You know.
At that point, this is still the early two thousands,
the low fat diet was just like if you sit
anything against the low fat diet, like people would literally
hang up on me. So it took me about nine
years to research my book. And that's because I read
thousands and thousands and thousands of scientific studies. I had
(06:03):
to educate myself in how to even read a scientific study,
and then how to read scientific studies where the scientists
are trying to hide things because their results did not
fit kind of the conventional wisdom or what they were
supposed to find. And I interviewed hundreds and hundreds of
scientists and others all over the world, and so yeah,
(06:23):
so then I came out with this book that it's
still considered like a really groundbreaking book in the field.
I don't think anybody's done quite the crazy amount of
research that I did.
Speaker 1 (06:35):
It was also the first book to introduce the.
Speaker 2 (06:36):
Whole idea of seed oils, which is a whole other
topic like why should we be avoiding seed oils? I
was the kind of the first researcher to lay out
that case. So it's been almost a decade now since
that book came out, but it's still considered kind of
like beginning reading if you're getting into this field for
the first time, which is a great pleasure for me.
Speaker 4 (06:56):
So you stated in the book that nutrition science is
found and most, if not all, of us are confused
about what we eat and what we should eat. Is
that all by design?
Speaker 2 (07:08):
Well, no, I think there's very well meaning researchers out
there trying to do good clinical trials, and that has
been true from the very beginning. But it is a
field where there are enormous interests at play. You're talking
about multi trillion dollar food industry interests and pharmaceutical interests,
(07:32):
because you just can't be too cynical about the pharmaceutical companies. Unfortunately,
they don't make money if you are getting off their
pills and devices, and like they just that is a
negative for them, so they have no incentive to make
you healthy. And one of the surprising things when I
started doing this research was how many nutrition scientists took
(07:53):
money from the pharmaceutical industry, because I thought, what, you're
studying food, why are you sticking money from pharma. Well,
pharma has an interest in you know, some of them
have weight loss medications, and but they definitely do not
have an interest is you're getting healthy using natural food approaches.
(08:15):
So there's so many financial interests in this field that
it really warps the science. So I mean, just to
give you a little sense of that, if somebody comes
out with a study saying one thing like transfats, you know,
raise your bad cholesterol, industry will do its very best
(08:37):
to come out with a study contradicting that. That's an industry,
you know, a tobacco industry tactic, which is just like
confuse the science. You always have studies that are contradicting
other studies, and so in the end everybody just has to,
you know, throw up their hands and say, well, we
don't really know. That's just one of the many tactics
that is undertaken.
Speaker 1 (08:57):
Now.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
I mean, like we could talk the whole hour just
about that. But that is basically why we have so
much trouble sorting through all the different and contradictory advice
that I think it just makes people crazy. You can
find a study that says anything, and you know, I
think for the average person, it's enormously frustrating.
Speaker 4 (09:18):
After the release of the book, Nina, how many doctors, scientists,
or people that you ran across in your research they
still weren't on board with what you presented in the book.
Speaker 2 (09:29):
Well, I mean that's still true, right, I Mean my
book changed a lot of minds. My book was the
first book to lay out the idea that saturated fats
were unfairly villainized. Right, that's a big deal. When my
book came out twenty fourteen, there was precisely one scientific
study agreeing with me. Well, I know that my book
(09:49):
was shared all over the world, and there are now
twenty five major review papers that all agree with me
with my findings. You know, they were view all the
event I uncovered all this evidence that had been hidden
and buried and ignored, and they dug that evidence up
and they reviewed it in formal what's called systematic reviews.
(10:10):
So I did convince a lot of people. But our
official recommendations still say that saturated fats are bad for health,
and I would say that's still a widely predominant belief
by most health practitioners. Other ideas in my book that
the low fat diet was not effective for fighting obese diabetes,
(10:32):
any kind of cancer, or heart disease. The low fat
diet has really been rolled back. So that's an area
where I think maybe my research in other people's research,
really helped to end something that was damaging to health.
It turns out if you follow a low fat diet,
your risk of heart disease goes up, which is a
(10:54):
terrible outcome, especially for women. It turns out women have
a much worse reaction than men do. So and that's
from you know, rigorous clinical trial data. That's so that
was one of the findings in my book also that
dietary cholesterol does not affect your blood cholesterol. So the
reason we were eating all eggs and we were avoiding
(11:15):
a yolks and shellfish, that official recommendation has been dropped.
That happened in twenty fifteen. Again, I don't know if
I had anything to do with that, but I would
say that the views on that have shifted because our
official recommendations have shifted. And then you know seed oils,
which is you know, I'm pretty sure that I'm the
(11:37):
one who kind of launched that whole idea, and there's
a lot of.
Speaker 1 (11:40):
Awareness of seed oils now.
Speaker 2 (11:42):
So I think I have made a difference, But boy,
we have a long ways to go.
Speaker 1 (11:48):
I mean, we have a long ways to go.
Speaker 2 (11:51):
I think, you know, because the basic advice that most
people are following, which is healthy fruits, vegetables, whole grains,
lean meet, nuts, seeds, is a healthy diet. That is
not a diet shown to help people recover their health
or get better in any way lose weight. And I
(12:13):
still think that that's the predominant view out there.
Speaker 4 (12:16):
When you were doing your researching, when you were interviewing people,
and the pushback that you were getting. Were you scared.
Did you feel scared at any time?
Speaker 2 (12:24):
Well, I mean not physically, perhaps naively, but I have
really been harassed and bullied quite a lot.
Speaker 1 (12:34):
I mean, if I if.
Speaker 2 (12:35):
I had money for libel lawyers, I wish I would
have hired a full rank of fallings of them. You know,
I was really called mean names. And actually I had
a very important piece, a cover story in a medical
journal called the BMJ, which is the first or's second
(12:56):
top medical journal in the world.
Speaker 1 (12:58):
And it was a cover.
Speaker 2 (13:00):
Story on how there was really no evidence for our
dietary guidelines or US dietary guidelines. It was such a huge,
major story, and both the editor in chief of the
BMJ and I had no idea that this was going
to I mean, we obviously really triggered because this is
official US policy. So yeah, I was subject to a
(13:22):
huge retraction effort, like hundreds of scientists tried to get
my paper retracted. I didn't sleep for a year while
they were reviewing that. And in the end, you know,
the paper stood. There was minor clarifications that needed, you know,
something had to be done to justify all this. But yeah,
(13:43):
and the editor in chief came out strongly in my favor.
But you know, that was a year I didn't sleep.
Was pretty awful.
Speaker 4 (13:48):
Hopefully you didn't go through some of the things that
David Kritchevski and his team went through.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
Yeah, I mean what my book documents you talk about
one nutrition scientist. There are so many stories I document
where scientists are really bullied.
Speaker 1 (14:04):
This is where I.
Speaker 2 (14:05):
Feel like, well, I'm in a whole tradition of scientists.
Well I'm not a scientist, but you know of researchers
who are saying things to the contrary. And well I
told you about people, you know, being hired to forrass
other scientists at conferences, but there were you know, people
calling people names. These are also tactics from the tobacco industry.
You know, you you slin people and you call them names,
(14:25):
you accuse them of having being motivated financially and being
backed by various industries. I'm routinely accused based on zero
evidence because there is none, of being supported by the
meat industry. All these scientists, they had multi page articles
attacking them. There was actually a guy named John Yudkin
who had the idea. He was in England, a professor
(14:48):
whose idea was that it wasn't fat that caused heart disease,
it was sugar. Well, now the evidence really is more
on his side. But in the seventies when the people
who are promoting the fat hypothesis, they went after this
professor and they drove him from the field. I mean,
they wrote nasty articles about him, they really sunk him.
(15:11):
So it's a very It's not the calm world of
science that you would hope or expect. And some of
the most calm spoken, gentle seeming people in this field
today even are some of the most aggressive in terms
of the bullying tactics that they use. So it's still
(15:31):
going on. I'm sorry to say, Well, you mentioned heart
disease in nineteen hundred, there are very few reported cases
of heart disease. Just a half a century after that,
it's the number one.
Speaker 4 (15:41):
Killer, right. What happened?
Speaker 2 (15:42):
Well, I want to point out to your listeners that
it wasn't that heart disease was not known in the
early nineteen hundreds. It had been the subject of textbooks
for fifty years. It had been known, identified, studied, but
the doctors in the major hospitals like in Boston and
New York they just were not seeing any cases. And
(16:02):
these are the people who had written the textbooks, like
they knew what they should see. It just it truly,
you know, objectively, empirically was not common at all in
the early nineteen hundreds. Then it rose to become the
number one killer in the country by the nineteen fifties.
So there's a slight little change of the diagnostic codes
(16:23):
in the twenties that might have like jogged up the
numbers a little bit, and they had better techniques for measuring,
you know, like EKGs. But there's new getting around the rapid,
rapid increase in the rate of heart disease. And actually
I do not have a simple answer as to why
that happened. We don't have good records about what people
(16:43):
were eating and how that changed in those fifty years.
We know that people in the course of the twentieth
century dramatically increased the amount of sugar that they eat.
We increased the amount of grains we eat. I have
those numbers much more in a rigorous way from like
nineteen sixty eight or nineteen seventy on. But I think
(17:06):
the other factor is that, and this is a potential
causative factor is the rise in vegetable oils. So vegetable
oils were introduced as crisco in nineteen eleven, and then
they rapidly they were placed lard, which they were intended
to do, but that had blurred. And butter were the
mean fats for cooking throughout the entire history, and then
(17:29):
you know tallow and sue it, but the main fats
used for cooking in the Western world forever. Now we
had this what was hydrogenated vegetable oil in the form
of crisco. Then we had vegetable oils and bottles that
we were told to fry in and they were good
for lowering our cholesterol and all that, and so we
there's no food substance that grew more rapidly in terms
(17:55):
of consumption than vegetable oils over the course of the
twenty century. So they went from being pretty much zero
consumption in nineteen hundred to being now like now, there
are like fourteen percent.
Speaker 1 (18:08):
Of all calories we eat are vegetable oils.
Speaker 2 (18:11):
And heart disease rose in lockstep with the increase in
those oils, and there's some evidence to suggest that they
may play a role in causing heart disease. I actually
think sugars and grains are also right up there in
terms of having some causative data that really strongly suggests causation.
Speaker 4 (18:30):
So how can we know what is right? Where should
we go for trusted, scientifically backed information.
Speaker 1 (18:38):
There is no.
Speaker 2 (18:39):
One organization at the moment that I think provides good advice.
There's something called well, I have a group called the
Nutrition Coalition, but that's really focused on policy. There's a
group called the Society for Metabolic Health Practitioners, but that
really is more about it's really focused more in practitioners.
So here's who I wouldn't trust US government and our
(19:02):
national guidelines, the American Heart Association, the American Diabetes Association,
any of those associations. I mean, the whole world of
institutions really held captive to this dominant medical narrative that
we should eat a plant based diet and avoid meat
and have vegetable oils and avoid better and that that
(19:23):
is the healthiest diet. That idea is so locked into
these institutions that I mean, really it is the contrarians.
Our writings or review of the science better explains what's
going you know, at the observations, what we're seeing like
it's more scientifically rigorous, but it's people who are following
(19:44):
the advice of you know, my book or there's another
journalist named Gary Taubs. There's now like hundreds and thousands
of practitioners out there, But those are the people who
are actually reversing their diabetes, getting off all their medications,
losing one hundred pounds sustainably. You know, I wish I
could give you a better answer. I just I don't
have one. That's okay, So your book comes out and
(20:05):
at the time you were frowned upon if you were
eating meat, cheese, butter. I guess you can add eggs
to that list. Fast forward to now there's a huge
spotlight on the carnivore movement, and I still see pushback
against those touting the benefits of eating beef. What is
going on, Nina, Well, the meat story is really complicated,
(20:26):
but let's just start with the purported health effects of
red meat. So the idea is that red meat causes
every type of disease. But just to give you a
little snapshot picture, consumption of beef has dropped in the
United States by thirty five percent, both in terms of
(20:48):
the amount of availability and the amount of consumption by
the US public between nineteen seventy and twenty thirteen. It
must be much lower today. That's the best available government data.
We don't have any data for today, but it's drop
precipitously in exactly the same time that all those diseases
have skyrocketed. So it is virtually impossible that red meat
causes those disease. I could also point you to the
(21:11):
top best quality review papers ever done on all the
data on meat that came out in the Annals of
Internal Medicine, I want to say, twenty eighteen, and they
concluded that the quality and the quantity of the data
showing any negative effects of meat on cancer, heart disease, diabetes,
any kind of metabolge disease was almost nil. And that's
(21:34):
the highest quality review papers that have ever been published.
What we see is a tremendous bias against meat that
is historical. It's a complex subject where it comes from,
but let's just to simplify it. It came mainly from
first the idea they contained more saturated fats, and saturated
fats are bad for help. Well, that idea has largely crumbled.
(21:57):
The evidence doesn't support that there's an argument that you know,
cows are bad for the planet, or animal rights activists
think we shouldn't be killing animals, or there's the problem
of in factory farms. Those are not health reasons, but
they have become reasons that people decided that they don't
want to eat red meat. But I will tell you
(22:18):
that red meat is not only not a cause of disease,
it is probably one of the healthiest foods you can
possibly eat. And I know that sounds crazy to people
listening to that, but especially beef and other ruminant animals,
so they have multiple stomachs rumin and animals, so that
would also be like goat and lamb and elk. First
(22:39):
of all, they have incredible density of vitamins and minerals
like thirteen or fourteen vitamin minerals that are essential for
your health, like especially B twelve and iron and folate
and selenium and B vitamins. It's like taking a multi vitamin,
but better because it's in a food context. Secondly, it's
a perfect complete protein. You can eat eight hundred calories
(23:02):
of peanut butter to get your protein, or you can
eat one hundred and twenty five calories of beef and
peanut butter is not a complete protein. Meat has all
the essential amino acids. And then thirdly, it has no
sugar in it, no glucose to speak in it technically,
So peanut butter has a lot of glucose in it.
And so whenever you put glucose sugar in your body,
(23:24):
your blood sugar spikes, and that is what provokes metabolic diseases,
including weight gain. And there are other reasons, but I mean, like,
you really shouldn't be avoiding red meat. It's really dangerous
for your health to avoid you know, animal foods generally.
So I think right now though, we're just living in
a time when there's just so many interests that are
(23:46):
trying to push beef off the dinner plate. I forgot
to mention the huge, the huge, burgeoning industry of fake
foods that want to you know, replacement meat. So this
are huge, huge, you know, investment companies are tremendous interest
in trying to make patentable, factory produced food that people
(24:07):
can make money on versus natural foods that you know,
produced like out in pasture.
Speaker 4 (24:13):
Yeah. And I interviewed Joel Salaton and we talked about
the largest farmland owner.
Speaker 1 (24:18):
Yeah, Bill Gates.
Speaker 4 (24:19):
Bill Gates, and after the interview it crossed my mind,
you know, I thought, well, he's got farm land. What
if he says, Okay, I'm not going to have any
of this go to any cattle by my meat. Well,
the price is going to be very affordable for a
lot of people. But it's not real meat, it's not
real food.
Speaker 1 (24:37):
Well, he was the biggest investor.
Speaker 2 (24:39):
I don't know if he has anymore in both beyond
meat and the Impossible Burger, and he I don't know
if he sincerely believes meat is a major source of
climate change. But yeah, I mean there is an effort
to force people away from natural foods and then to
buy their fake foods instead, which I mean just to
(25:00):
understand what is the replacement meat or a lab grown meat.
First of all, their studies shows there no better for
the environment because they're in these very intensive industrial plans
have to make them, so, I mean there's a lot
of carbon impact of those industries and their studies saying
like this is no better than cows out in pasture, which,
(25:22):
by the way, I live in harmony with nature and
you need them. The thing is that those like the
Impossible Worker, if you look at the list of ingredients
and you just compare that to the list of what's
in your dog food, you know, which is shelf stable
for several years. I mean, you're basically eating real, ultra
process foods.
Speaker 4 (25:38):
I think you mentioned doctor Adkins in your book.
Speaker 3 (25:41):
I do.
Speaker 4 (25:41):
He favored a high fat, low carb diet, and he
was definitely going against the grain in many respects, right.
Speaker 2 (25:47):
Doctor Atkins was the first popularizer of the low carbohydrate
diet in the twentieth century. And it's interesting to note
there was a version of doctor Atkins in like the
late eighteen hundred. A man named William Banting was hugely
overweight and figured out that if he could cut out
all carbohydrates, he lost a huge amount of weight. But
(26:10):
he initially went because he was so fat he'd lost
his hearing. And then when he lost all his weight
he regained his hearing. Anyway, his book, which he called
low car Banting and his book was like the Doctor
Ackens of his time. He sold gazillions of copies. You
can imagine in like eighteen seventy nine, and then the
diet it survived, you know, different practitioners took it up.
(26:34):
There was a guy named Pennington, and there was another
man named William Blake, and it was tried at the
you know, in various different settings, and there were actually
scientific experiments on it.
Speaker 1 (26:43):
But then boom, doctor Atkins.
Speaker 2 (26:45):
Comes on the scene in the early seventies and he
really became synonymous.
Speaker 1 (26:49):
His name.
Speaker 2 (26:50):
It was the Atkins diet, and he sort of brought
it back to the fore that was at the height
of you know, our low fat mania. And he was
just like fingernails on a chalkboard, like he just irritated everybody.
Everybody hated him, and he eventually became embittered, and there
(27:11):
wasn't really much science to back him up then. You know,
there weren't clinical trials, which is like greade a level evidence.
But he would say like, hey, come look at all
my medical files and I'll show you all these people
who have lost weight and reversed their diseases. But you know,
I think he ended up being frustrated. You know, he
was unable to convince anybody in the American Medical Association,
for instance.
Speaker 4 (27:31):
Well you mentioned your father and being a daughter of
a scientist when you're doing your research, and the pushback
and the people that didn't want to talk to you.
Was that a little heartbreaking to deal with that, But
those scientists and those people that they wanted nothing to
do with you.
Speaker 2 (27:45):
Yeah, I mean you can take it personally, like, well,
why is so and so over a University of Washington
hanging up the phone on me? But you know, you know,
a journalist, our job is not to be popular. Our
job is and it's hard for me because you know,
I want to be liked like all people. I feel
like I'm basically a nice person. But your job is
(28:08):
to figure out the truth. And if that means upsetting
people or being disliked, you just have to, you know,
you have to develop a kind of a tougher skin,
because the truth is definitely worth it. I mean, in
this case, it's not just an academic truth. It's a
truth that literally allows people to reverse horrible diseases. So,
(28:31):
you know, I believe both in just the importance of truth,
Like I think it's a kind of justice to be
able to hear and see and have access to the truth.
Like we should not censor it, we should not try
to squash it. And in this case, I've just received
so many thousands of emails from people telling me how
it literally has changed a lifetime of terrible health. So
(28:55):
that is really tremendously gratifying and worth it.
Speaker 4 (28:58):
The more people didn't want to talk to you, did
that motivate you even more to want to dig deeper?
Speaker 2 (29:04):
Well, I don't know. I mean I was just really motivated.
I mean I love reading the science, and it was
like a pursuing you know, a spy tale, a mystery
like buried science and hunting down papers that had been
published in foreign languages, and it just felt like a
mystery kind of and it was super fun and interesting.
Speaker 4 (29:26):
So since your book was published in twenty fourteen and
everything that we've learned since then, you know what question
or questions are we still not asking our medical professionals,
our government, maybe even ourselves.
Speaker 2 (29:40):
Well, I still think our basic problem is that our
official advice is one hundred percent wrong. So I founded
a nonprofit for a while that was trying to change
our government's policy. And this is not just our government,
it's the American Heart Er Series, every every group. As
I've mentioned, the basic idea that you should keep yourself
very low that's not correct and also probably increases your
(30:04):
risk of heart disease. Advice on red meat is definitely incorrect.
The advice to eat vegetable oils over saturated fats, so
margarine over butter. That is incorrect. The advice to eat
lots of fruits and vegetables and whole grains to get healthier.
No evidence that will make you healthier. The idea you
should get a lot of fiber in your diet, especially
(30:25):
for you know, gastrointestinal problems, is the reverse of what
turns out to be true. So there's so much that
we need to fix. I think people for themselves, you know,
we are. Each person is kind of lucky in the
sense that they can be their own experiment.
Speaker 1 (30:45):
Right.
Speaker 2 (30:46):
Some science nobody has any access to like we can.
I cannot figure out the effect of environmental pollution. I
can't do that science. But each and every one of
us can do our own experiment, our own what's called
n equals one EXPERI men on our own bodies, and
it's reversible. You can try it out for three weeks,
you can try it for a month. You can do
your own experiment and see what makes you feel healthier,
(31:08):
what makes you lose weight? You know where you feel better?
Speaker 1 (31:11):
I think I mean.
Speaker 2 (31:11):
A little bit of the caveat there is. Almost everybody
feels better when they cut junk food out of their lives.
We all know what junk food is, right, cookies, crackers,
chips like you don't need fancy terms to define that.
And that's true if you go on a vegan diet,
or if you go on a carnivor diet, or if
you go on a kidogenic diet or whatever. So everybody
feels better getting off of really crap food. But then
(31:35):
the question is you know, to me, the very next
question is are you getting all the nutrients that you need?
Are you getting all the complete protein that you need?
And it just turns out, you know, a vegan or
heavily plant based or plant forward diet does not provide
you the nutrients or the complete proteins that you need
to stay healthy. And that's something that often doesn't show
(31:55):
up for years. So that's where it's a little complicated.
But yeah, I mean people have to ask themselves, how
do you feel? Are you sleeping well? Are you are
you falling asleep in the afternoon? Do use your energy flag?
Are you feeling depressed and cranky? Are you just unable
to lose weight? Do you have raisation? Do you have
(32:18):
skin problems, your hair falling out, is like, you know,
some amazing number of things that are related to diet.
I used to like for me, it was like I
had sinus infections every year. I haven't had one of
those many years now. I mean all kinds of things
in your basic ability to resist colds or infections is
related to diet. Almost everything goes back to your diet,
what you put in your body.
Speaker 4 (32:39):
Okay, listen, I know there were many, but do you
remember where you were and what one of the first
big fat lies that you came across?
Speaker 2 (32:49):
Well, I mean the wow, I mean, I don't remember
what the first one was. I guess it was this
idea that like was not bad, that I could stop
avoiding fat, that I could have a salad with salad dressing,
or you know, that the fat i ate was not
the bat I got, or that the bacon i ate
(33:12):
was better for my hips than like eating that bagel. Yeah,
it was just like this idea that I didn't have
to fear fat. I think people of a certain generation
just they just don't remember the kind of phobia that
we had around fat, total complete phobia. So that was
a great discovery.
Speaker 4 (33:33):
Looking back, at the journey that the original trans Fat
writing Assignments started you on what are you most proud of?
Speaker 2 (33:39):
Oh, I mean, I'm really proud of my book still.
I think that my book, I haven't even mentioned that.
You know, it has this fantastic chapter on the Mediterranean
diet that debunks the Mediterranean diet as you commonly know it.
I mean, I got there's so much in that book
that now I can't believe I wrote it, like that
seed oils, the saturated fat arguments that, I mean, all
(34:00):
the stuff about the politics of science that I somehow
managed to weave in there. I feel pretty proud of that.
I mean, that's why I haven't written another book yet.
I don't know if I could read do that well.
I think book number two should be called all your
Big fad Liars, and you just have a list of
all the people that don't follow these people, and then
(34:23):
there's the second page. It's just trust yourself, trust your instincts.
Speaker 4 (34:27):
That's it.
Speaker 2 (34:27):
Yeah. You know the problem is that there is so
much what I would call propaganda out there, that there
are things that we have come to believe just because
these lies have been repeated over and over and over
and over and over and over it like so many
times and so many publications. So I think like if
I were to spend the rest of my life trying
(34:48):
to just to convince people that read and meat is
not bad for health, I would fail. But somehow I
feel like that story has to be told, Like we
cannot demonize one of the healthiest foods. Let me just
give you a tiny little snapshot of another thing about
red meat. There haven't been that many experiments on red meat,
but in Africa, for school children, there were these kids
(35:12):
that barely had you know, they were not getting great food, right.
They gave some of them extra red meat, some of
them extra milk or dairy, and then some of them
just like some kind of like grain formula. The kids
who got the meat, they not only improved dramatically on
their test scores and better, but they displayed more leadership
(35:32):
and skills on the playground.
Speaker 1 (35:34):
They became better.
Speaker 2 (35:35):
Like all around students, better than the kids who had milk,
and way better than the kids who just had the
grain thing. I mean, it's a really it's an extraordinary food.
So anyway, I don't know if I want to get
myself in more hot water, but I think that's.
Speaker 1 (35:49):
What I would try to do.
Speaker 4 (35:50):
Well, you mentioned the Mediterranean diet. We've also heard about
the blue zones, and now I think that's information is
coming out that maybe that's not all what is cracked
up to be.
Speaker 2 (36:00):
Yeah, so let me just say the short story of
the Mediterranean diet is the Mediterranean those countries, they eat
a lot of meat. And the basic problem is that
you know, Westerners went there and they're like, are you
eating beef? And the Mediterraneans say, no, we're adding beef.
The follow up question, which should have been are you
eating lamb and goat? Was never asked because we don't
even eat lamb and goat. We literally miss the majority
(36:23):
of their diet. I mean that's a little bit of
a simplified version, but that's a big part of why
the Mediterranean has been misunderstood. And also they had a
much higher fat diet than what we have than what
we think of the Mediterranean diet. But it was not
like mainly fruits and vegetables. Even today, if you go
to any of those countries, you will see a menu
full of things that are you know, they eat fruits
(36:45):
and vegetables, but it's mainly you know, the main courses
are meat and fish. Of course, the blue zones that
idea that these certain regions were especially long lived. They're
all these idyllic areas where zero stress, people eat eat well,
they don't walk.
Speaker 1 (37:01):
Around with cell phones like this.
Speaker 2 (37:02):
You know, they're just they have all these other characteristics
that are conducive to like a relaxing, stressful, very community
rich lives. And it turns out that, you know, many
of them, they just got the diet wrong. They got
the longevity records wrong. Some places there weren't longevity records.
Okinawa is literally means the island of pork, but you know,
(37:25):
they went and visited it while it was being occupied
by the Americans post World War two and everything was
disrupted in the food supply. So that's a commercial concept
of blue zones that has been sold and people have
made tons of money off of that, and it, unfortunately,
just is not good science.
Speaker 4 (37:44):
If you could, would you change anything or would you
have approached anything differently when you were doing your research.
Speaker 2 (37:51):
That's a hard question. I'm sure I could have done
things better and more quickly. There's little things about how
I would write a book differently now doing it again,
But they're sort of technical issues. I don't think, so
nothing really comes to mind. I could have been better, smarter, faster.
Speaker 4 (38:08):
And finally, Nina, other than your family and the nutrition Coalition,
what do you focus your attention on now?
Speaker 2 (38:15):
Well, I'm writing a column on the platform called Substack
with fellow journalist Gary Taubs, and it's called Unsettled Science.
And so if you want to follow my work, it
would be great. You can sign up for free, or
you can get a paid subscription and support me. I'm
doing that. I'm doing academic papers. I just finished my
(38:37):
PhD in nutrition, so now I'll have fancy letters after
my name.
Speaker 4 (38:41):
Congratulations, thank you.
Speaker 1 (38:44):
Yeah, I think that's about it.
Speaker 2 (38:45):
My kids are are older now and I am realizing,
like I need a couple hobbies.
Speaker 5 (38:52):
So your readers can send me suggestions. Like, you know,
I don't know what to do with all my time.
I try to exercise to cure myself, and I cook
a lot. I've been learning how to cook this new
way of eating that not so new to me. But
you know, so I'm doing a lot of cooking, but
go into more art museums. But anyway, yeah, I need
a new hobby, Nina.
Speaker 4 (39:13):
Thank you so much for coming on the podcast and
sharing your wisdom with us.
Speaker 1 (39:16):
Thank you for having me. It's been a pleasure to
talk to you.
Speaker 3 (39:23):
The Good Foods podcast is for entertainment purposes only. The claims, comments, opinions,
or information heard should never be used in place of
your medical provider's advice or your doctor's direction.
Speaker 1 (39:35):
Thank you for listening.
Speaker 3 (39:36):
Follow us on social media and wherever you get your podcasts.
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