Everything They Tell You About Diet Is Wrong

Zoë Harcombe debunks modern dietary myths, from cholesterol to veganism, and makes the case for real food and traditional eating. A frank conversation about nutrition, obesity, and how public health advice may be making us sicker.https://www.ukcolumn.org/video/everything-they-tell-you-about-diet-is-wrong

Episode Transcript

(00:38):
What is your background? What is my background?
Crikey, most interesting background in terms of food, I
guess, is that my brother developed type 1 diabetes when
he was 15 and I was 13, and thatacutely made me aware of things
like insulin, carbohydrate, sugar from a very young age.

(01:00):
Then went to Cambridge University and at about that
time we started getting some lowfat diet guidelines.
Let's say that was probably around the 1990s, low fat new
dietary guidelines started coming over from the US and so
suddenly you'd go home and realise your mum had put
margarine in the fridge instead of butter.
So sort of lived through some weird changes.

(01:23):
Had a proper job as my mum wouldsay.
I graduated from Cambridge, did management consultancy, went to
work for Mars Confectionery, left Mars and went to work for
Black so Smith, Kline so went from big food to big pharma.
So I've seen both of them from the inside.
Then met a Welsh guy, moved to Wales, got some jobs in Wales

(01:45):
which were very interesting and outside food and pharma.
And then since about 2010, I've been following my passion, which
is diet and health. So I've since done a PhD in
public health nutrition, particularly in the dietary
guidelines that I was observing.And what I do now, I guess I
read, write and talk about diet and health.

(02:07):
Why are we talking about diet inthe year 2025?
Because everything we're told about diet is wrong.
Just everything. I mean, I, I just cannot think
of a public health message on diet or in fact a public health
message generally that is right.And that's how we connect it
because we connected through theCOVID world and those of us who

(02:30):
are already in the real food world, the nutrition world, that
being told to eat carbohydrates and avoid fat and red meat is
going to kill you. But cereal is somehow great.
Just everything was upside down South COVID came along and it
was kind of, they're wrong on everything.
They're not going to be right onthis one.
So it has actually helped some of us in the real food world,
but essentially everything from sun cream to sunbathing,

(02:54):
alcohol, coffee, diet, exercise,it's just all wrong.
And I started looking into how wrong it was.
And I do that every week, as yousay with my Monday note.
I remember meeting Tim Noakes, who, you know, back in around
2012. We were sitting on a train
opposite each other just coincidentally.

(03:16):
And we started chatting and I, Ispoke to him about some issues
that I've got with, with heartburn and, and, and acid
reflux and so on. And the first thing he asked me
is what do you eat for breakfast?
And I said, well, I, I eat oats.And he said, well, stop that
right now. Stop the oats all together.
Change. Change it to bacon and eggs.
And therein began a whole new lifestyle for me.

(03:40):
But over the years, I've constantly heard it's a fad.
Low carb I fad. It's a fad.
Tim went through, yeah, yeah, Tim went through the same
journey, which is what's is so interesting.
So most of the people that I speak with at conferences around
the world, and I've spoken at conferences in South Africa,
Saudi Arabia, Israel, America, Scotland, Norway, I mean,

(04:03):
literally just all over the place.
And I'd say the vast majority ofpeople who speak at those
conferences who've written some of the Seminole publications,
academic publications or books did believe the narrative to
start with. And Tim is one of those people.
So Tim was researching in sportsmedicine and he was trying to

(04:24):
show that Gatorade was actually better for sports performance
than water. And of course, there's no way
that it is. And at some point you suddenly
realise that you've been duped by the propaganda and you you
need to sort of get back on track and, and realise what's
going on. And then of course, people say,
oh, you're the crazy ones and, and we're not the crazy ones

(04:47):
because if you look back over history, so if you look back to,
I don't know, 350,000 years ago when Ostropolacious Lucy first
walked upright, and that is believed to be our heritage in
terms of of being a Homo sapien.What we've been eating
throughout all of that time is basically animals.
That's when we really moved frombeing Neanderthals to literally

(05:09):
rocket scientists. So the biggest progression was
during the Ice Age, which I think it was about 10,000 years
ago. It ended.
I think it lasted about 30,000 years, if I'm remembering those
numbers correctly. And that was the time we could
not get vegetation. We, we didn't have any plants.
We were literally catching animals.
Whatever we could catch, we would eat and that would sustain

(05:31):
us. So that is our heritage diet.
And if you look back to what your grandmother would have
eaten, I look back to what my grandfather prepared for me and
it was eggs for breakfast and itwas liver and onions once a week
and it was sardines. It was fish on Fridays because
that was literally when the boatcame in.
We had all of these means. We had the Sunday roast.

(05:53):
The carbohydrate intake in our diet was absolutely minimal and
then suddenly we developed to having a lot more carbohydrate.
The agricultural revolution almost certainly changed that
around the 1700s leading into the 1800s.
Up until that point, our population, our lifestyle was
constrained by what we could tend that was local to us.

(06:16):
So we could argue that the agricultural revolution freed us
up to become poets and artists and musicians and rocket
scientists. We could also argue that that
was the time that the world population changed and that was
the time that we moved away fromwhat made us healthy and happy,
which was working on the land and preparing our own
sustainability. So what should we be eating?

(06:41):
What should we eat? Real food.
We shouldn't need to call it real food.
They should have to call theirs fake food.
And then we could reclaim the word real food.
So first principle, number one, eat real food.
Second principle, there are certain things that we need to
get. The reason we eat is not just
because it's enjoyable and it's sociable, but because we die if
we don't get certain things. And if, if, if, if they're not

(07:04):
fatal to us, then they can be very, very harmful to us.
So we have things that we call big nutrients, macro nutrients,
and things that we call small nutrients, micronutrients.
And we know the big nutrients ascarbohydrate, fat and protein.
We know the small nutrients as vitamins and minerals.
Now some of those we need some of those.

(07:26):
The term in nutrition is essential.
It means the what the word essential normally means, but it
means something that we must getfrom our diet.
The body can't make it. So in terms of the big
nutrients, two of those have essential components to them,
and those are fat and protein. There is no essential
carbohydrate. We have no requirement for

(07:46):
carbohydrate in our diet whatsoever.
The body will actually make any glucose that we need.
We could always come back to that, but there are essential
proteins, amino acids, There areessential fats.
We know those as omega-3 and Omega 6.
So there are certain things thatwe need to consume and the
vitamins and minerals, you know,if you don't consume vitamin A,

(08:06):
for example, you get eye disease.
If you don't consume vitamin D, you can get all sorts of stuff
from any illness up to the serious ones like heart disease
and cancer. If you don't get iron, you get
anaemia. If you don't get B12, you can go
completely loopy. There are things that we just
must consume and people just seem to have forgotten that that

(08:26):
is why we eat. And they just think, oh, if I
eat a variety of things, I'll get what I need.
Well, no, you won't. You need to eat some very
specific things to get what you need.
And predominantly, and I hate tosay this because I was a
vegetarian for a very long period of time, we need to eat
animal foods, the stuff that we need and in the form that we
need, it is found in animal foods.

(08:47):
So if we eat meat, fish, eggs and dairy, we'll be fine.
If you want to add some other things on top like red wine,
dark chocolate and coffee, if you like super Greek salads and
that kind of thing, that's great.
But you've got to make sure thatyou get the basics.
So at this point of the conversation, we've now lost all
the vegans. Well, I understand vegans

(09:08):
because I was a vegetarian for 20 years and I became vegan
during that period. Some people move from
vegetarianism to veganism quite consciously.
It's very deliberate decision. They get to the point where they
think, oh, I'm not even sure about cow milking.
It doesn't sort of feel right tome.
With me, it was more of a bit ofa lapse.
I'm not. I don't love cooking, I love

(09:31):
eating. So I've tended to have partners
that are good cooks, so my hubby, who you know, Andy, is a
great cook and he just put stuffin front of me several times a
day or three times a day and it's just fabulous.
I was dating someone in my 20s who was vegan and I hadn't quite
realised it. So I was coming home in the

(09:52):
evening and I was getting veggieburgers, which were actually
vegan burgers and buns, which are vegan, and brown rice, which
is vegan. And I developed a really serious
eye condition and I turned up atMoorefield's Eye Hospital and
what they should have said, and I've contacted people at the
hospital since to say you must ask people what they eat,

(10:13):
particularly when they're comingin with a newly acquired
condition, particularly when they're young, particularly when
they're female, particularly when they might be vegan or
vegetarian. Just ask them.
Because if somebody had said to me, what are you eating at the
moment? Are you eating any oily fish?
Are you eating any liver? Are you having any eggs?
Are you having any meat, any dairy?
It'd have been like, no, I'm notactually now you mention it and

(10:35):
they would have realised that I'm not getting retinol, which
is what you need for eye health.And some vegans will say, well,
you can get carotene from plants, which provides vitamin
A. You can, but the body wants
retinol and not everybody can convert from carotene to
retinol. So it's complex.
It's not just I'm going to be vegan.

(10:56):
It's better for the animals, which actually isn't because
there are a lot of animals killed in the production of
cereals and and so called vegan food.
That's also a myth that I was deluded by.
But you think it's better for the animals and you don't want
to eat any of them and it's not better for you.
It's not better for your health at one of the best books that's

(11:17):
ever been written in this field is The Vegetarian Myth by Leah
Keith. And she went through the vegan
period and she has had the most chronic health since that
period. So she's got spinal defamation.
She was never able to have children, chronic long term,
lifelong health problems as a result of thinking it was the

(11:38):
right thing to be vegetarian, stroke vegan when she was much
younger. So she kind of wrote the book
saying, let me tell you the problems that you can have so
that you don't have to experience those.
But people are still doing it right now.
I know vegans. I've got a close family member,
very young, who's vegan and I chatted to her last week and she

(11:59):
said hey, if my health suffers, so long as I don't go near
anything that's that's once beenan animal or involved an animal,
then so be it. How long that can last, I don't
know. She's already experiencing
health troubles that have taken her to some of the most advanced
hospitals in the UK. But that is a belief system.

(12:22):
The thing though, about veganismis that I understand one of the
arguments is that they don't like the idea of animals being
killed. And that's, that's a personal
thing. And I, I get that.
And you can't really argue that.I mean, I go hunting and I
don't, I don't enjoy shooting ananimal, right, which is why I

(12:44):
try and do it as cleanly and as quick as possible because I
know, I know what the results going to be.
There's going to be food and it's fairly healthy food.
Zoe. So I I, I get the I don't like
getting animals angle, but the reality is, is that if you make
the argument that eating meat isunhealthy, that's not a good

(13:04):
argument. Yeah, I've, I've looked at this
a great deal and I've actually done a presentation on Should We
Be Vegan? And because I've been in that
situation for a long period of my life and I've given it a
great deal of thought. And when you stop being
vegetarian or vegan, you really have to wrestle with some of the
arguments. So and, and Leah Keith presents

(13:25):
these brilliantly as well. She came across the same 3
arguments. There are three arguments for
going this route. One is the one that you've
mentioned. They don't want animals to
suffer or die for any food that they eat. 2 is this belief that
it's healthier, and three, is this a fairly newfound belief
that it's actually better for the planet?

(13:45):
And all three of those argumentsare wrong.
The one on it's better for the animals.
You can actually have one personlive entirely off 1 cow for a
whole year. SO1 animal could die for one
person to be fed for the whole year.
The idea that because you don't eat animals or anything that

(14:06):
comes from animals like eggs or milk, no animal has died in the
production of your food is an absolute myth.
And it's one that that you want to believe as a vegetarian or
vegan because you don't want to think of the alternative.
But the reality is if you look at combine harvesters now, if
you put a search engine in and look for images of farm

(14:28):
equipment used at the moment, you've got combine harvesters
that that can sweep the size of a, the length of a tennis court,
if not a football pitch. So they are ploughing down the
fields at the moment, preparing the cereals as the alternative
for eggs for people to eat for breakfast.
They are hoovering up animals galore.
There's a brilliant paper on field deaths in plant

(14:50):
agriculture and I think it estimated a few billion animals
that killed each Earth. I mean, just think about the
combine harvester. It's hoovering up mice and foals
and birds and rabbits and snailsand worms and insects.
If you're unlucky and living near a residential area, it can
also Hoover up a a domestic pet.So you actually end up killing

(15:12):
far fewer animals by choosing the animal that you eat more
carefully than you do, imaginingthat your cereal doesn't have
remnants of animals in and I'm sorry, but A, it might and B
animals did die in the production of your food.
Even for you to eat a lettuce, you've got to have killed some
snails or some slugs to protect that lettuce so that you could

(15:33):
actually eat it. The notion that it's healthier,
which is touching on the point that you made, the vegetarian is
healthier because the meat is less healthy.
That is a complete and utter myth.
That's probably the easiest mythto slave because you just go
back to why do we eat, What nutrients do we need, and where
do we find those nutrients? And they are found in the form

(15:55):
that we need them in animal foods.
There is no debate over that is that is not an opinion.
That is a nutritional fact. So they start making up all this
stuff about animal foods becausethere is a strong plant based
agenda because it's just much more lucrative to produce the
plant foods. There's not much margin on a
piece of meat or on an egg. There's a lot of margin in a

(16:17):
cereal that can go in a box and you can put toys in it and you
can run advertising campaigns. There's much more margin in fake
food than there is in real food.So there has been a big food,
big pharma demonisation of real food and this whole, oh, red
meat is bad for you, eggs are bad for you.
That's all part of this narrative that is just nonsense.

(16:41):
And then the one that has come about probably in the last two
or three decades and increasingly is being used in
the academic literature is, oh, This is why we mustn't eat red
meat anymore, is that it's better for the planet that we're
eating these cereals. And you'll see some great posts
on X where somebody shows a field of grazing cattle and then
a factory pumping out pollution.And it's like, seriously, how

(17:05):
dull do you have to be to believe that the cows and the
sheep grazing in the fields are the problem for the environment
and not the factory pumping out margarine and cereals and
plastic toys and boxes and transporting this stuff all
around, all around the world. Let alone the fact that
certainly where I live and whereyou live, the animals in the
fields are the local food. So what is indigenous to the UK?

(17:30):
Cows and sheep? They are out in the fields where
we graze potatoes, root vegetables, legumes, which is
what they want us eat. And they say, oh, we eat all of
these whole grains and legumes. We don't grow legumes in the UK.
They've got to be shipped over from Morocco or somewhere else
in the world. We don't have berries apart from

(17:51):
in sort of June, July kind of thing.
So everything is upside down. And of course, the other key
point about taking animals out of the food chain, which they
would dearly love, there are people who say, oh, we need to
create viruses or something thatcan put people off eating red
meat. I mean, there's some really
extreme narratives coming out atthe moment trying to put people

(18:13):
off red meat. If you take the red meat away
from the land, so you stop the ruminants, those are the animals
with the fantastic stomach systems that graze.
So it's cows, sheep, goats, deer.
Take those off the land. You end up with desertification
because it's those ruminants that are hosting the microflora
in the grasses and regurgitatingit and eating it and pooping it

(18:36):
out and weeing it. And just this incredible cycle
goes on where they're giving back to the land, which then
makes that field OK for us to beable to put some crops in the
year after. If you go entirely arable in a
field, you will lose the soil inthat field with within probably
about 20 harvests. So we absolutely must maintain

(18:57):
the red meat in our diets to be able to protect the rest of the
food that we want to grow it. Occurred to me that if we were
to all be vegans, right? And that includes not drinking
cow's milk. I think we'd have no cows,
because what would be the purpose of cows?
Who's going to keep a cow? Who's going to keep a chicken if
they don't eat eggs or chickens?So they'll become extinct most

(19:19):
likely. Yeah, yeah.
And that's pretty serious because if then a generation
said, actually, we got this wrong and the nutrients that we
need to eat are found in animals, you've suddenly
eradicated the ruminants who protect the topsoil and the
ruminants who provide the meat and the milk and the dairy.
You've eradicated those. And if you get rid of the

(19:39):
chickens as well, which I'm surethey'd love to, I'm sure that's
part of what all of this bird flu nonsense is about.
Every now and again and again, you see funny memes on eggs that
say, how come, you know, the sparrows that wake me up in the
morning and the blackbirds or whatever, How how come they're
not being slaughtered? But the ones that need to be
slaughtered are the ones that provide the eggs and the and the

(19:59):
food. Whatever.
Yeah, if we, if we went vegan for a couple of generations and
managed to lose all of those animals, they're extinct,
they're gone. We don't then have the means of
feeding the population in a healthy way.
But though we all know that eating meat increases
cholesterol and cancer. How?

(20:20):
I mean, it makes no sense. It just makes no sense
whatsoever. I think it was Surgeon General
Peter Cleve or something who once said for a modern food to
be sorry. For an ancient food to be
responsible for a modern diseaseis quite the most ludicrous
thing I've ever heard. So the idea that our most
ancient food, meat, is somehow responsible for these modern

(20:42):
diseases. We didn't have heart disease in
the terminology for death classifications until just after
the Second World War. I think it was around 1948.
Cancer. I didn't hear of anyone, you
know, my parents weren't runningaround saying, oh, John's got
cancer and Barbaras got cancer. I didn't hear the word cancer
even just in my childhood. And now it's one in two or one

(21:05):
in three people who've got cancer.
So you look back at cave paintings, they weren't eating
cereals and seed oils and sugar and Twinkie bars and McDonald's
and whatever. You know, the, the, The Cave
paintings are of people carryingSpears and chasing animals
because that was the food that we consumed.
So the ancient foods are not responsible for modern disease.

(21:29):
Far more likely it's the dangerous trilogy of the seed
oils, the sugars and the flowersand starches that are from a
dietary respective responsible for modern illness.
It's not just diet. There are many, many things in
our modern lifestyles that are not helpful in terms of the new

(21:49):
modern chronic diseases, diabetes, heart disease, cancer.
There are many, many things thatwe're doing that are unhealthy.
But you wanted to talk to me particularly today about diet.
So that's the one that we're focusing on.
Yeah, But, you know, cholesterolis the big thing.
I remember when I was a kid, youcan't have more than one egg per
week or something like that. And we got to keep our

(22:10):
cholesterol down. And everybody that I knew was
was taking this thing called a statin.
Yeah, OK. Where do we start on
cholesterol? So the guy that first looked, or
most comprehensively looked at cholesterol was an American
doctor called Doctor Ansel Keys.And he was also the person who
did the Minnesota Starvation Experiment, which was a
brilliant experiment that was published around 1950.

(22:32):
And then he started looking intoheart disease in men, because it
really was only men that was suffering heart disease.
When he started looking at this around the 1950s.
And he first of all hypothesisedbecause of some research that
he'd come across from some Russian pathologists around the
turn of the last century, there was a hypothesis that
cholesterol caused heart disease.

(22:55):
And that remains actually a hypothesis.
I mean, there are so many black Swans stuff that hypothesis,
it's not true. So he started saying, well,
okay, what might raise cholesterol?
And his first hypothesis was notunreasonably that cholesterol in
food might raise your blood cholesterol level.
And he investigated that throughout the 1950s.

(23:16):
And there'll be a quote on my website from his.
I mean, it's in my PhD thesis, in the review of the literature.
He made a really definitive statement in 1954 saying we've
looked at observational studies,we've looked at randomised
controlled trials, we've looked at it every which way.
We can categorically conclude that cholesterol in food does

(23:36):
not impact cholesterol in the blood.
Full stop. Now, there are still people who
think if you eat 600 eggs a weekit will impact your cholesterol
levels. And a guy called Doctor Nick
Norwich did exactly this recently.
And we found the fact that had been established over 70 years
ago that no, it's going to make no difference whatsoever.

(23:57):
Now, here's a really interestingfood fact because I love food
facts. Things that you should get
taught about in school, but you don't get taught in school.
And then you come across them one day.
And then I'll look at it and say, is that actually a rule?
Is that kind of a law? And there is an absolute rule
here, which is really, really interesting.
So dietary cholesterol is only found in animal foods.

(24:18):
So there's no dietary cholesterol in things that
vegans eat. You'll only get dietary
cholesterol in animal foods. So to do all of those tests
where Ansel Keys literally gave subjects dietary cholesterol,
which is basically giving them animal foods, he concluded that
giving them those animal foods had no impact on blood

(24:39):
cholesterol levels whatsoever. So he's also exonerated animal
foods at the same time because that's what he had to give
people to test his cholesterol hypothesis.
And people don't realise this. You know, again, it was the sort
of finding during my PhD. And it's like, Oh my goodness,
that is a categorical dietary rule.
He has exonerated animal foods in that research when it comes

(25:01):
to cholesterol. So eating animal foods has no
impact on your cholesterol levels whatsoever.
And on another paper that I did for my PhD that was published,
people think if you eat plant foods it will lower your
cholesterol. And there is a mechanism by
which that can happen, but it's got nothing to do with animal
foods. If you eat fewer animal foods

(25:23):
and more plant foods, you will lower your cholesterol levels.
But it was nothing to do with the animal foods.
It was entirely to do with the plant foods, because plant foods
and a number of them, many of them contain something called
plant sterols, which is kind of like the word cholesterol.
It's kind of like plant cholesterol when you consume
plant sterols. And they're particularly high in

(25:44):
things like seed oils. When you consume those, it
competes with your human cholesterol in your body to an
extent and replaces it to an extent.
So you will end up lowering yourcholesterol level.
You could do it by taking a plant sterile tablet.
You will end up lowering your cholesterol level a little bit.
But it had nothing to do with animal foods.
It had everything to do with theplant steriles.

(26:07):
Now, obviously, the next important research question is,
is that a good thing to do or a bad thing to do?
And the paper that I did on thatin 2014 published with my PhD
supervisor, Professor Julian. Oh my God, this is so
embarrassing. You just know him as Julian,
don't you? For about 3 at work.
I'll put that in the show notes anyway.

(26:27):
But Julian and I basically published this paper saying, no,
when you increase the plant sterols in the diet, it makes
it, it's, it's actually harmful.It will harm your overall health
outcomes in terms of heart disease and also in terms of
cancer. So the end outcome is not good.
So you do not want to be ingesting plant sterols or

(26:48):
taking plant sterol tablets or taking plant sterols in seed
oils because ultimately it's going to do more harm than good.
Hey, guess what? We're designed to eat animals.
Excuse me, I I chatted to an Australian doctor maybe two
years ago and I I've also forgotten his name.

(27:09):
Baker. I've just remembered Julian
Baker. Oh, bacon.
No, no, no. See if you remember you were on
now. He was making a very interesting
argument that most plants actually should not be eaten by
humans. And, and, and he, he, he adds to
that saying that they are toxic.They're just precisely why they

(27:31):
have a very bitter taste. That's a defence mechanism not
to be eaten. And I, I've never thought about
that. And it was very interesting to
me because there are certain plants that seem to trigger bad
reactions when I, when I eat them and, and I find that if I,
for example, if I just eat baconand eggs and basically almost

(27:56):
like a carnivore diet or keto diet, I tend to feel better.
Why is that? Yeah, plants contain things
like, well, the phytosterols that we've just talked about,
phytates, oxalates, they, they contain a number of things.
And I have come across that argument that they, it's their

(28:17):
defence mechanism. They don't want to be eaten.
I haven't looked into this to the extent that other people
have. If it's such a big field in, in
the world of diet and health, ifsomeone else who I trust has
done a good job in a particular area.
So my go TOS on this are Doctor Georgia Eid, who is pretty much
carnivore herself and just foundthat her entire mental health

(28:40):
and that of many of her patientshas dramatically improved by
avoiding a lot of plants. Obviously the carnivore in
Australia, Doctor Anthony Chaffee, has also.
That's it. Yeah, Anthony Chaffee, yeah, has
looked at this as well. So where I've ended up on this,
yes, I think it's a thing. We definitely know that there

(29:00):
are substances in plants where they put up a defence mechanism
and they don't want to be eaten.I think a lot of people can can
consume a lot of plants with no problem and some people can only
consume some plants with no problem.
And you've got at extremes some people who seem to get away with

(29:22):
eating any plants and at George's and Anthony's extremes,
some people who just feel so much better when they're not
eating any plants. So it's on a spectrum and I
think your experience is interesting.
And I think a lot of people realise that there are certain
plants that don't agree with them and they either just then
naturally avoid them or they go through a sort of food diary

(29:47):
exclusion exercise to try to, you know, somebody's got
bloating or irritable bowel syndrome or brain fog.
And if they came to me, for example, and said what, what
should I do? I would say keep a food diary.
Within two weeks you will identify the things causing your
problems. So write down every single thing
that you eat exactly the time that you eat it.
Write down your common lum of symptoms.

(30:09):
And there are some things that happen quite quickly.
So you might have wheat and you might bloat very quickly or it
might be a sort of 24 hour thing.
So watch out for both the immediate and the quite short
term kind of pattern. My husband, for example, if he
has wheat, he might get away with it.
More likely than not, he's on the toilet the next morning and

(30:31):
his body is just getting rid of all the stuff that he that he,
he probably would have been bestadvised not to.
Fodmaps is a whole area of research, again, that I've not
looked into, but I am aware of where they document particular
plants, particular vegetables that are more likely to cause
problems. So somebody says, look, I've got

(30:53):
some issues. A doctor, an enlightened Dr
might say to them, look, start with the FODMAP list, eliminate
those, see how you feel. If you improve dramatically, you
know it was something on that list.
And then start adding in those foods back one at a time.
And then if you add cauliflower back in, cauliflower is such a

(31:13):
strong FODMAP food. If you add that back in and you
find you get your bloating and tummy pain and Constipation or
diarrhoea, then you know it was that.
So just take that one out. But it's always the plants.
In all the times that I've been running a forum where it's
trying to help people eat real food and people raise issues, I

(31:36):
can never recall anyone who's come to me saying, oh, I have a
problem with meat or fish or eggs.
The one animal food that they might have a problem with is
dairy. And we do know quite a bit about
dairy intolerance. It's quite ethnically based.
So if someone in one of the forums that I'm in says, oh, I

(31:58):
think I've got a problem with dairy and I can see on their
profile picture they look like aNorthern European white person,
I'm going to think your chance of having dairy intolerance is
actually quite low. It's probably around 5%.
If the person is of Asian origin.
It's the opposite. It's really high.
It's like 95%. So if I see an Asian doctor, for

(32:19):
example, saying, oh, I think dairy might be a problem, I
would go back and say, I think it might because here's the
research, the academic literature where I can show you
that it's supportive of the factthat you're far more likely to
have a problem with dairy than Iam.
And my view on food is if you'reOK with things, so long as you
get in the basics, the animal foods, if you're OK with other

(32:41):
things and you like them and you're the right way and it's
not causing you any problems, then have them in your diet.
You know, I'm not a, oh, you must be a carnivore.
Otherwise, you know, you're not a perfect eater.
If if you like Curry, vegetable Curry or whatever, or vegetarian
chilli or brown rice or whateverand it's not causing you a

(33:02):
problem, then have it. But watch out for the foods that
are causing you problems becausethey will come from the plant
world. Speaking of foods that don't
want to be consumed, I I find, Idon't know if if if you have the
same experience, but I find thatif I open a bottle of wine, it
doesn't want to be consumed because the more of it I have,

(33:24):
the more I feel I'm intoxicated.So it's clearly trying to poison
me. Yeah, alcohol is different.
Alcohol has other things going on.
I mean, yeah, alcohol is a toxinto the body.
The body doesn't. It will process it as quickly as

(33:45):
it can. It will process it in preference
to other things. People say, oh, you know, I need
to watch the calories in alcohol.
It's like, well, no, because your body can't store alcohol.
Your body doesn't just just doesn't store it.
There's there's no other way of saying that.
It's not like if you eat at McDonald's, the body is going to
find a way of using it or storing it.
The body can't do that with alcohol.

(34:06):
It can't sort of, you know, store alcohol calories.
It will preferentially burn thembecause it needs to get rid of
the alcohol. That's where your liver gets
really busy and stops doing other things that might keep
your blood glucose levels normaland all the rest of it.
But of course, you know, alcoholand ethanol or whatever, it has
other impacts on the body that are going to make you feel

(34:26):
increasingly intoxicated, less able to drive, less able to have
rational debate and and make good decisions and all the rest
of it. So yeah, but.
The problem, the problem, Zoe, is you sort of also want to
choose your battles. There are some things in life
that you're OK with having, having that as a vice.

(34:48):
Otherwise, you're going to live the world's most boring life and
nobody's going to invite you over and you're just going to
sit at home sucking your thumb, you know, trying to be healthy.
I I do enjoy a glass of wine andI do enjoy a whiskey or whatever
and I know that it's toxic, but it's one of those things where
I'm like, OK, I'm, I'm all rightwith that one, but I'll, I'll
make up food and other things. I.

(35:11):
Think that's really healthy and I think it is about balance.
So I look at the carnivals and I've, I've been to carnival
conferences recently. So I was at one last October
where Anthony Chaffee was there,a guy from Wales, Keto Rich was
there, a brilliant psychiatrist from Edinburgh was there.
And at the the speaker dinner the night before, Andy and I
were the exceptions in the, you know, they bought some lovely

(35:34):
lovely buttered broccoli and sort of green vegetables, some
lovely sort of salads with healthy non seed oil Caesar
dressing on and all the rest of it.
And we were the only ones consuming any plants and a lot
was left on the table. So we kind of felt a bit left
out. But I don't want to eat in that
way, persuasive as they are, andthey do say they just feel

(35:57):
amazing. They regret the years where they
actually consume plants because they feel so great at the
moment. They could have felt even better
during those years. I don't want to go that route
because I love dinner parties. I love flexibility.
I love, as you said, choosing your vices.
If I'm in France or something, I'm going to have a croissant

(36:17):
because their croissant are justamazing.
If I'm in Italy, I'm going to have some ice cream because
their ice cream is just amazing.I eat, I eat what I eat dark
chocolate everyday. I make chocolate mousse with
dark chocolate. It's got a tablespoon of of
sugar in to stiffen the egg whites.
You know, I don't want to live like a month a month.
Most of what I do is really healthy and I find how I live

(36:42):
really non stressful. So it's just become how I live.
If I go, we're going out for dinner tonight.
There's probably going to be a Pavlova for pudding.
There's going to be a chilli. It will have whatever in Andy
will be drinking beer or wine. I want to be able to do that.
I want to be able to go to anybody's house.

(37:02):
And if they don't really know how I eat or they don't follow
that themselves and they want tocook me a lasagna or something
like that, I want to be able to enjoy it because that's, that's
such a nice thing that somebody has done for you.
They've made a dish, they've gone to a great deal of trouble
to home make a dish. I think if somebody's done that,
unless you're going to die or something or, or seriously be

(37:25):
harmed over the next few days, just eat it, Enjoy it, celebrate
it, enjoy the social occasion that you're you're a part of.
I think people can get too obsessive over food and that's
not healthy either. A lot of your work focuses on
carbohydrates, but you've also spoken about all sorts of other
things like processed foods or whatever that means, or sugars,

(37:49):
etcetera. And we'll come to fruit also in
a moment, but there seems to be a lot more fat people today than
when my parents were little. What?
Why is this? I think because we changed our
dietary guidelines, that's my hypothesis.
So the standard hypothesis, because the people who think

(38:12):
there's only one way that you can get overweight and that's to
eat more and or do less than youneed, I don't subscribe to that
view at all. So that's a whole other podcast.
If we want to get into the calorie theory and why people
have misinterpreted the laws of thermodynamics, they've miss
applied them to the human body. Basically what they're saying

(38:33):
that the human body can be viewed as a cash machine and if
you put too much food in and, oryou don't get enough exercise
out, the body just expands and the body can adapt in about a
million ways. And the body does adapt.
So if you eat less, the first thing that the body tries to do
is try to get you to eat more because it will get you, it'll
make you hungry. And if you do more, the body

(38:55):
tries to get you to eat more. So the minute you start trying
to go down this eat less, do more route, the body starts
working against you rather than with you.
So it isn't that I have looked at that.
I wrote an obesity book which was published in 2009.
I really looked very, very carefully at is it that we've
eaten too much and or done too little and it just isn't.

(39:16):
And Gary Taubes did the same thing in The Diet Delusion,
which was also published as goodcalories, bad calories and found
exactly the same thing. It just isn't that.
So you have to park that for another day.
The the one that coincides with when things take off.
So if you look at there's a great N Haynes chart, AUS chart
where it looks at obesity levelsand overweight levels in the US.

(39:40):
And that was the country that read the less led the rest of
the world in the dietary guidelines.
And you see this chart and it just takes off like an aeroplane
at about 1976 to 1980. So if you're a detective, you
would say what happened then? And one thing that happened then
is that America changed it's dietary guidelines.

(40:01):
And that was the entire subject of my PhD.
Why did we change the dietary guidelines and did we do the
right thing? And the conclusion of that PhD
was no, we changed them in the name of heart disease.
They didn't improve heart disease, and they've made a
whole. Host of other things, much
worse. And the dietary guidelines that
were introduced were what we've been talking about.

(40:22):
So you should eat low fat, you should eat high carbohydrate,
you should not eat red meat. You should have legumes and
whole grains instead. You should be having cereals for
breakfast, not eggs. You should be having pasta and
pizza and beige things for all your meals.
You know, base your meals on starchy foods was the message
that came out in the UK. That was the UK way of

(40:43):
interpreting the dietary guidelines.
Now, since then, obesity has probably gone up about tenfold.
Last time I looked in the UK, itwent up tenfold in the last
three decades of the last century.
And until somebody puts in frontof me a better hypothesis,
that's the one that I'm stickingwith.
I think it's when we told peopleto eat less fat, less real food,

(41:05):
more processed food, more carbohydrate.
That's when we got fatter. And then of course, people try
to eat less and do more and thatjust makes them hungrier.
They lose a bit of weight, they start then regaining that
weight. This is all going to happen with
these GLP ones as well. We know already that people who
lose weight on those regain it and even more rapidly than the

(41:28):
the rate at which they lost it. So we got this whole what it is
to be overweight and what causesoverweight.
We just got it completely and utterly wrong and we're paying a
massive price for it. The funny thing though, and this
is not really related to diet, but it's part of the culture
wars I guess, and the politicisation of, of weight.

(41:48):
Now fat is beautiful and it getscelebrated.
Have you seen all, I mean, now you have ramp models who are
completely obese and they it's almost as though they're trying
to stigmatise healthy being healthy.
I have seen it and and it has deeply troubled me because this
isn't about embracing everyone. I mean, yes, you want people to

(42:11):
be included. And because I've been in forums
for a very long period of time helping people to eat real food,
I wrote a book called Stop Counting Calories and Start
Losing Weight. So it's trying to say to people,
don't count calories, make your calories count.
Make your calories much more nutritious than the ones that
you're eating at the moment. But I am very, very aware of how

(42:32):
awful people feel when they are obese.
So absolutely don't be mean to people who are obese.
I mean, that's just basic bad manners, you know?
Like, don't be mean to someone who's got red hair.
Don't be mean to someone who looks different to you.
But I mean, yeah, nobody likes aginger.
Nobody likes a ginger. Behave.

(42:52):
Behave. But it's like don't.
Don't be nasty. But no, we should not be
celebrating. I don't think it's a disease.
I don't want obesity classified as a disease because then it's
it's obligatory to treat it. So the drug industry want
obesity classified as a disease because then they're compelled
to treat it. And we're kind of there already

(43:14):
because they're already saying obesity is a disease.
We've got all these GLP ones that will sort it out.
I don't think obesity is a disease.
I think it's a natural reaction to an unnatural diet.
And if we had carried on eating in the way that we grew up
eating and evolved to eat, we would be OK.
We wouldn't have an obesity epidemic, let alone an obesity
problem. But I don't think we should be

(43:35):
glorifying it, and I don't thinkwe should be celebrating that
it's become the norm, which it has.
I mean, it used to be that people felt quite conspicuous at
social gatherings. There was 1 overweight boy in my
class. I talked to my peer group.
They all remember 1 overweight child in their class.
The situation now is that more than half the class is

(43:57):
overweight. So people don't worry about
being overweight. So it's much more OK to be
overweight, but it's not OK. It's OK to be overweight, but
it's not OK to be obese when it comes to our health.
Because almost certainly at the point we've got obesity, we've
got insulin resistance, which isthe precursor to type 2
diabetes, which will shorten ourlives and comes with a whole

(44:19):
host of other, other problems. So it's not OK and we shouldn't
celebrate it. When you and I had last chatted,
Zoe, I had the most bizarre feedback I think that I've ever
experienced. And and that was that was after
you were telling me about fruit.So you got to go there again,

(44:41):
haven't you? You want the same reactions.
Because I, I cannot understand how speaking about fruit can
elicit such an emotional response.
It and I remember when I was growing up, I was told eat
fruits very healthy for you. It doesn't matter what the fruit
is, it's fruit. Fruit is fruit and it's healthy
for you and, and, and and it's good for you and, and you must

(45:04):
eat lots of it. But that is not true, is it?
It's not. And, and it was really bizarre.
I remember when you got in touchwith me.
OK, so in my experience, if I want to annoy people on X on a
particular date and I don't do that, that's not me.
I don't go out there to annoy annoy people.
But if I happen to make a comment about one of two things,

(45:26):
X will go ballistic and it's fruit and fibre.
Yes, Fibre, I want to ask you about.
That too. And they're really related and
people will not accept that fruit is just not all that fruit
is essentially water and sugar and it's got a couple of
vitamins or whatever and minerals really, well,

(45:49):
potassium, just really not that many.
And this is not an opinion. This is not something for people
to sort of write in. Oh, you know, your, your viewer,
you know, had this opinion and it's all this is just
nutritional facts. And if you don't believe me,
then go to a nutrition database.There used to be a great one
called nutritiondata.com. I think it's gone, but put in

(46:11):
nutritional information for an apple and then put in
nutritional information for liver or oily fish or red meat
or eggs or whole dairy or something.
And just do a little spreadsheet.
Look at the things that we need.So look for the essential fats
in the form that we need them, omega-3 and Omega six.
Look at complete protein in the form that we need them.

(46:33):
Look at the vitamins and look atthe minerals in the form that we
need them. And do your little spreadsheet.
I've done it and put in all these foods across the top.
You can compare them by 100 grammes and you should do it by
raw weights because when you start cooking things, things
change. So do a raw carrot, not a cooked
carrot, a piece of steak before you cook it and then do it by

(46:55):
100 calories. So you can do it in two
different ways and you will not find fruit good at all.
You just won't. It's got no complete protein.
It's got no essential fats in the form that we need them.
It's got no fat soluble vitaminsin the form that we need them.
It's just not all that for the Bvitamins.
It's just not all that. It is gorgeous.

(47:15):
I love it. If I ever had a binge food, it
would be fruit dates. Dates have more sugar than
toffee. I could eat dates all day long,
dried medial dates. I mean, I'm just salivating
thinking about it. It it, it tastes like toffee.
They're chewy, like toffee. It's just sugar with really not
as much else as you think that it's got in it.

(47:37):
So yeah, there are worse things that you could eat.
You know, having an apple is is better than having a bag of
crisps or better than having a achocolate bar or something, but
it's just nowhere near as good as having something that
actually is nutritious. Yeah, so part of the feedback
that I was getting was well, if you if you just, well, I'm, I'm

(47:59):
a vegan and I'm healthy and all that sort of thing.
And so I, I, I responded to a couple of them saying, we'll
tell you what, why don't you eatonly watermelon for six months
and I eat only meat for six months.
What do you think will will be the result?
And I suspect that person will end up getting very sick.
Yeah, plus if you look at vegan profiles, and I have done, they

(48:21):
tend to be very young and they do tend to be female and they do
tend to be short lived. So one of the biggest dramas you
can have in the vegan world is where there's been an Instagram
influencer where you've got a beautiful person, it's either
male or female and they just look amazing.
Absolutely. Role model beauty.
And then a couple of years on, they'll put on their Instagram

(48:44):
account and guys, I'm so sorry. I'm not vegan anymore.
You know, I needed to start eating fish and eggs or whatever
and there's just uproar. But most people will get to the
point that they are having health problems of some kind
within a couple of years. People who have been vegan for a
long period of time and feel healthy, whether their markers

(49:07):
are actually healthy or not, I don't know.
But those who feel healthy are almost certainly supplementing
well and are also almost certainly good converters of the
plant form of nutrients into theanimal form of nutrients.
So things like an essential fat,the plant world provides Ala,

(49:27):
and the animal world, particularly oily fish, provides
EPA and DHA. The body wants EPA and DHA, but
some people can convert from Ala.
Now you can't be a healthy veganif you can't convert essential
fat. So if you can't convert carotene
into retinol, if you can't convert some of the other fat
soluble nutrients. So some people are more

(49:50):
fortunate than others in that they will be able to continue
with their vegan diet, or maybe less fortunate because maybe a
health problem is the body's wayof saying to the person, hey,
this isn't actually how I was designed to fuel my body.
So please can you go back to having some of those animal
foods? And I'm going to give you an

(50:10):
appointment at the More Fields Eye Hospital just to remind you
that that's how things need to play out.
But what about the different sugars you get fructose and
sucrose and some people say, well, the sugar that in fruit
that that's in fruit is, is better than the the sugar that's
on your table. OK, so carbohydrates 101 because
carbohydrates are just sugars. So there are three, what we call

(50:34):
monosaccharides, which are single sugars and they are
glucose, fructose and galactose.We then have what we call
disaccharides, 2 sugars. Now immediately you should be
thinking every time I'm hearing carbohydrates, I'm hearing the
word saccharide, which means sugar.
Yeah, think carbohydrate, think sugar.
Carbohydrate is just sugar. So your disaccharides, one that

(50:55):
you've just mentioned would be sucrose, which is a
disaccharide, which is 1 molecule of fructose and one
molecule of glucose. So fruit.
And again, you can look this up on a nutrition database.
So look up different fruits because it's a very interesting
exercise to do. And the ones that breakdown the
sugars, they'll say, OK, in the apple, let's say it's got this

(51:18):
much cucrosse in it. And of the cicrosse, this much
is glucose and this much is fructose.
So some fruits will have more glucose than fructose.
They're, they're mostly around 5050 because it is shucrose
that's in the fruit in the form of glucose and fructose.
From memory, I think apples, bananas certainly have more
glucose than fructose. And then there'll be some other

(51:40):
fruits that have slightly more fructose than glucose, but
they're basically playing aroundwith those two single sugars.
So glucose is going to go into the way the body metabolises
glucose is it puts it into the bloodstream.
Now the body wants, we're getting into diabetes interest
here. The body wants about four

(52:01):
grammes of glucose in the bloodstream at any one time,
which is why if you have your blood glucose reading, you'll
come back with a reading of, of ideally around 4:00 to 5:00 MMOL
per litre in terms of your, yourblood glucose levels.
So you want 4 grammes at any onetime.
Now let's say you eat an apple and the apple has 20 grammes of

(52:21):
sugar and that sugar, let's justsay for the sake of argument, it
is 5050 glucose and fructose. So about 10 grammes of glucose
are going into the bloodstream. The body had four grammes of
glucose in the bloodstream and it was perfectly happy at that
level. It has a couple of hormones,
insulin and Glucagon, that are going to keep it at that perfect

(52:42):
level, provided you're not diabetic, and keep it at that
level 247365 days a year, providing you don't muck it up.
You've just put in 10 grammes ofglucose that the body didn't
want. So the body is going to get that
10 grammes of glucose out of thebloodstream.
And it does it by calling upon the pancreas to get insulin to
go into the bloodstream, to attach itself to the glucose,

(53:04):
take it out of the bloodstream, go and store it away in the body
in the stored form of glucose, which is glycogen.
If we use that up later in the day, because we go for a walk or
something, all well and good. If we don't use it up, it gets
stored as fat, which is related to something we talked about
earlier. Why?
The more carbohydrate you eat, the more you'll put stuff into
your storage system that can be turned to fat.

(53:27):
You're far more able to use up fat and protein than you are
carbohydrate. All right.
Meanwhile, the 10 grammes of fructose goes to the liver
because that's where we process fructose in the body.
So when people say to me, oh, which is better glucose or
fructose, I say, so which do youwant, type 2 diabetes or non
alcoholic fatty liver disease? And you know, if, if I'm lucky,

(53:49):
they'll laugh. If I'm not lucky, they'll look a
bit annoyed. And it's like, well, I'm sorry
to be the one that pointed out to you the body didn't want 20
grammes of glucose. Now, yeah, you're metabolically
healthy, you're young, you're fit, and all the rest of it.
Yeah, you can get away with an apple, an apple a day, no
problem. But don't go and put in 400
grammes of carbohydrate, which is what your dear government is

(54:12):
telling you to consume on a daily basis.
Don't have 5 apples a day if you're following this fictitious
5A day or whatever, or seven a day or 10A day.
They make it all up in differentcountries.
Don't start doing that kind of thing and thinking you're going
to get away with it long term because your body has to get rid
of all the sugar that you put into the body because it doesn't

(54:33):
want it in there. Something Tim Knox said a while
back is that fruit today is alsobeing so heavily modified that
it's no longer like fruit 1000 years ago.
Fruit today is way sweeter, and that's on purpose, and it's not
supposed to look beautiful either.
Yeah, yeah. So I'm really lucky.

(54:54):
Where I live in Wales, we don't have a huge garden, but we have
fruit. We have blackberries, we have
wild raspberries, wild strawberries.
We have the most amazing fig tree, which at the height of the
season can produce 30 to 50 figsa day.
We have different types of apples, cooking apples, a few
different types of eating apples.
We have two different types of pears.

(55:15):
And I can tell you they don't look pretty.
They are completely irregular and they taste really sharp when
you bite into them. And I'm saying really sharp,
like screw your face up sharp. And then I go to the
supermarket, particularly in America, and you look at the
apples in America, the Red Delicious, and they are so shiny

(55:35):
and they look so beautiful. And I look at them and I just
think I want one of those. And I do want one of those.
And I have one of those. And they are as sweet and as
juicy and as delicious. They are Red Delicious.
They are, as the name suggests, they are absolutely amazing.
But I don't kid myself that they're healthy and they have
been engineered to be that regular and that red and that

(55:57):
shiny and that beautiful. And goodness knows what
pesticides and modifications have been involved in making
that perfect apple look completely amazing when they're
all stacked up and makes me wantto buy ten of them, not just one
of them. But yeah, then they're not
natural. That's not the plants that we've
evolved to eat. It's not the carrots and not the

(56:17):
root vegetables that I get from my garden.
They're regular again. They're sweeter.
They're they're juicier, they'retastier.
They're not sort of the quite dense, almost woody, sometimes
starchy carbohydrates that we get naturally from the ground.
What about coffee? Well, I'm biassed I have to

(56:40):
declare use a bias here. I love coffee.
I also do but the coffee seems to be so mysterious it it seems
to be this extremely popular beverage that has very polarised
positions on it. Some sports you aren't allowed
to take it because it's a stimulant and and I'm not sure

(57:01):
what effect it has on your on your health.
It is a stimulant, there is absolutely no doubt about that.
There are other things in our diet that are stimulants.
Tea is a stimulant, green tea isa stimulant, dark chocolate is a
stimulant. There are a number of substances
in our diets that have caffeine and therefore our stimulants.

(57:23):
I think we're back to sort of where we were on the plants,
which is different people have different effects.
So coffee came up at the conference last October, the
Keto conference, and Keto Rich was saying I don't drink coffee,
it's not good for me. Anthony Chaffee, don't drink
coffee. Rachel, don't drink coffee.
I was there. Ivor Cummings was there.
And we're like, we're not givingup coffee.
We don't care what study comes out.

(57:46):
And I have looked at the academic literature for coffee
and there's as much evidence saying it's good for you as
there is saying it's not great for you.
I think it will be down to individuals.
I think it be don't overdo it. If you're consuming too much
coffee to the point that you're getting hyper and jittery and
it's impacting your sleep, it's not good.

(58:07):
Most people will say don't consume coffee after 11 because
it's very likely to impact your sleep.
I have one big latte with farm milk in the morning.
It's kind of like a milk delivery mechanism.
I absolutely love it. I don't want anymore.
It's not like I've become addicted to caffeine.
It kick starts my day. I'm not giving it up.

(58:29):
Everyone to their own. If you enjoy it, don't abuse it,
but carry on enjoying it. I tend to indulge a little bit
though with coffee. So I I I don't drink instant
coffee. I I have ground beans and I add
cream to it. I don't add milk, no sugar.

(58:50):
Perfect. And it's fantastic and.
We've got to have stuff in our lives that's enjoyable.
You know, we can't, we can't be disciplined in ourselves all the
time. That is stressful and stress is
harmful. So you've got to find a
lifestyle. You know, the good things that
we should do in life. Eat well, move.

(59:11):
Don't be sedentary. It's far more important not to
be sedentary than it is to run marathons.
In fact, and Tim may have touched on this, running
marathons probably really isn't that good for us.
Don't abuse alcohol. The the evidence on alcohol
shows that people who don't drink are not the healthiest.
It's the the people who drink, enjoy it, drink sociably and

(59:32):
don't abuse it. They tend to be the healthiest
bit. Sorry, sorry, I'm I'm
interrupting. But there's also a psychological
element here. I don't know where I'm going
with this so this is just me spit balling, but when you said
that those who do drink alcohol a small amount tend to be better
off and I'm just wondering if it's more than just biological.

(59:56):
I wonder if it's the interactionwith those around you that
increases the happy, the happy hormones, etcetera.
Yeah, totally. I mean, you look at, you know,
one of the biggest country drinkers in the world are the
Mediterranean. So you look at the French.
My husband lived in France for three years.
Having a glass of wine with dinner is like having a glass of

(01:00:17):
water. It's just what you do.
Same probably in Italy and Spainand Portugal and many of the
other Mediterranean countries. It's sociable.
It's relaxing. You know, if you say to somebody
who's come back home after a hard day at work, OK, get
yourself a glass of wine and just you know, wind down, chill,
put your feet up, get 15 minutesof me time.

(01:00:39):
Forget the stresses of the day is fantastically helpful,
enjoyable de stressing. It's a really important part of
that person's day. If you then said to them, right,
I want you to do dry January andyou're going to give up that
aspect of your day. I think it's more harm than
good. Now don't let the one glass
become two glasses, 3 glasses 1 bottle before you've even had

(01:01:03):
dinner. Then you're in problem
territory. But if you are the kind of
person that can manage your vices rather than have them
manage you, yeah, there is a huge, huge element to to being
sociable, enjoying a drink with people, not being not living
like a monk. You know a monk is a is a is a

(01:01:23):
recognised discipline for a reason, not always a great.
Reason I'm looking, I'm looking at the time.
I just want to ask you quickly one last question.
If if what if if if we're talking about low carbohydrate
diet being good for you. Is there a starting point?

(01:01:44):
Like in other words, does it start from from babies already?
Oh, yeah, I don't. I, I, I, I mean, right.
There are rules about what we need to eat, So what we need
doesn't change throughout our lives.
The quantities might change and the balance might change.
You need more iron when you're pregnant.
You may need more iron in menstruating women and young

(01:02:07):
girls particularly suddenly havea massive demand on their iron.
You know, there's some things that change in terms of the
amounts, but the basic, what do we need?
The essential fats, complete protein, vitamins and minerals.
That doesn't change. So with babies, for example,
hey, incredibly, breast milk tends to provide everything.
It does provide everything that the baby needs and then at the

(01:02:29):
point you you need to supplementwith something or want to
supplement with something, you know, the longer you can
breastfeed obviously the better.But if at some point babies now
look OK, I need more food, then it's the same principles.
You're going to find what you need in animal foods.
So get baby on to quality meat, fish or ideally oily fish, red

(01:02:49):
meat, eggs, particularly the oats, dairy, particularly whole
dairy. This idea that, I mean, you
know, the stuff that's in formula is just beyond horrific.
The idea that babies should be going on to those little
processed bottles where they've sort of made it more plant
based. Because the dietary guidelines
are the dietary guidelines. They just say that they're what

(01:03:11):
everybody needs. So they'll be making sure that
baby food mirrors those dietary guidelines in terms of being at
least 55% carbohydrate, maximum of 30% fat and maximum of 15%
protein. They'll be mandating those in
prisons, in schools, in baby food, in food for elders, in
food for hospitals when people are trying to recover.

(01:03:32):
It's just what they think we should be eating and it's just
the absolute opposite of what weshould be eating.
You've covered a lot of ground in this conversation, so for my
UK column audience, would you mind summarising what you've
spoken about here? Everything the government tells

(01:03:53):
you in public health is wrong. And if you can find any
exceptions, please let me know. I mean, smoking, maybe smoking
is the exception, but do you know what?
You look at studies that say nicotine has some benefits and
then you think, is it something else that's in cigarettes that's
maybe not good for us? Smoking might be the exception,

(01:04:15):
but on everything else, particularly on diet and alcohol
and coffee and sunbathing and sun cream and COVID and viruses
and social distancing and masks and injections masquerading as
as gene therapy or the other wayaround, on all of that is wrong.

(01:04:35):
So your starting point should beI don't trust it and then go and
do your own research. An interesting thought
experiment about smoking is you suggested there that they could
be something else in the cigarettes that that that
triggers illness. People have been smoking for

(01:04:57):
thousands of years and cancer seems to be a relatively new
phenomenon. So I do think that you you turn
onto something that that perhapsit's something else that's now
in the in the mass produced cigarettes, but I don't know.
I'm just, I'm just speculating. Yeah.
And, and maybe the smoke that we're exposed to today,

(01:05:18):
particularly if people are frying with vegetable oils, the
smoke is going to be horrific, would be very different to the
smoke that was inhaled around a campfire where there's no
treatment on the wood on the tree, there's no pesticides
around you. It is just fire that has been
started in the open, outdoors, everything we used to do very,

(01:05:39):
very differently throughout evolution and the and the closer
we can get back to that without being a bit monk like, I think
generally the better. How can I follow your work, Zoe?
Just my name. I think I've just got Zoe on my
name on the screen here is Zoe Harcombe HARCO MB E on X.

(01:05:59):
I'm at Zoe Harcombe. I've got a website
calledzoeharcam.com which is where I do my Monday notes,
which you receive because you've, because we've interacted
before. So you get those and I, I'm on
notes 740. I think I've been doing this
since about sort of 2009. I take an academic paper, it

(01:06:22):
might be red meat causes cancer,and I dissect it to show that
it's wrong. And I haven't found one yet
making a health claim that is robust.
So they're all there for the taking and.
Then, just to be clear, you are funded very well by the meat
industry. I have no funding whatsoever.

(01:06:43):
I refuse it. I have spoken at conferences for
farmers, particularly in Wales because I live in Wales, and I
have been approached by farmers saying please can you come and
talk to farmers. So I actually developed a
presentation that was called FACT.
This is hard to say facts about food to help farmers fight back,

(01:07:05):
and I will. Not be paid Wait wait wait, say
that Wait wait wait say. That again, facts.
About food that help farmers fight back.
Wow, that alliteration is impressive.
I know. So it's facts about red meat,
facts about cholesterol, the kind of stuff that we've been
through because they, they, they've heard, oh, if you eat
meat, it's going to raise your cholesterol.
I'm like, how so I will go and do a presentation and then I'll

(01:07:27):
take questions afterwards. And some of those presentations
are openly viewable on my website.
If you go on zoeharkham.com, go to the types of content, click
on videos, you'll see some of those.
I will not accept payment from any of those.
I won't even accept expenses. I go because I want to help them
because without farmers, we haveno food.

(01:07:47):
We have no food chain, which is why I'm also very supportive of
the No farms, No Food campaigns that have been going on,
particularly in the UK recently and other concerns about farmers
around Europe. Because they're trying to
replace farmland with solar panels, they're trying to
replace farmers, they're trying to put farmers out of business,
they're trying to stop the inheritance so they can't pass

(01:08:09):
it on. And that's before we even get
into the issues with farmers in South Africa.
So I support farmers. I receive no company funding
whatsoever. Never have, never will.
I have been approached by a cereal company.
I just said you clearly don't know who I am.
Go away. My income model is if people
like what I do, they can sign up.

(01:08:30):
I think it's a pound a week or something, or a dollar a week,
and they get my newsletter and they can cancel at any time and
that's it. That's where I get my money
from. Zoe Alcombe, thank you for
joining me in the trenches. Thank you for having me.
It's been real fun. Thank you.