Full Transcript Introduction to Gary Taubes 0:00 We've gotten ourselves into this fix with obesity and diabetes, 0:03 not because people just doing the research didn't think very hard 0:07 about what they were doing. 0:08 They didn't never question their assumptions. 0:11 They never said to themselves something simple like, why is I'm thin 0:15 in this person's like my Aunt Elma is not because I've seen a reach. 0:20 You doesn't need a lot of food. 0:22 And yet she's rotund and I'm lean. 0:25 So how can I blame her obesity on eating too much? 0:28 If she eats less than I did. 0:30 This is doctor talks. 0:38 So thanks for joining us, Gary. 0:40 It's you again. 0:42 Thank you for having me, Jason. Yeah. 0:44 So I just want to introduce our viewers to Gary Taubes. 0:49 In case you don't know him, he's sort of the OG. 0:53 He's like one of the guys in this space. 0:56 Everybody knows and everybody really respects. 0:59 Because you've been probably one of the most influential voices in nutrition, 1:04 which is interesting because that wasn't your original background, in fact. 1:09 But he came to it sort of happenstance. 1:12 And in your sort of groundbreaking book, Good Calories, Bad Calories, really laid 1:16 into some of the myths of nutrition and some of the really things 1:22 that were just sort of, I don't know, I guess a lot of the stuff 1:26 had never been looked at critically and really sort of laid it to bear. 1:31 And so that's one of the reasons 1:32 everybody really respects you and really been trying, you know, 1:35 you've been in this space for a bit now and really has been a champion 1:39 of good science, which I really appreciate you. 1:41 So thanks for being here. 1:43 I guess let's start off with your background, how you got into the space. 1:47 You know, what made you interested? 1:50 I mean, I think that's a great story, a great back story to start with. 1:54 Okay. So yeah, I'm a journalist. 1:56 I'm not a physician. 1:58 I'm not a I'm a PhD. 2:00 I'm not a nutritionist. 2:02 I have a hard science background, physics and engineering. 2:05 And then when I went into journalism, I sort of stumbled into studying 2:11 bad science. 2:12 Technical term might be pathological science, 2:14 which is the science of things that aren't so. 2:17 And my first book was about high energy physicists who discovered, much 2:21 to their chagrin, nonexistent elementary particles. 2:25 And I documented how they came to learn they were wrong. 2:29 My second book was about the sort of great scientific 2:32 fiasco of the second half of the 20th century, called cold fusion. 2:37 Cold fusion now shows up in every other science fiction 2:40 movie as the, the, the, 2:44 the fuel that will change society. 2:47 In doing these books, I was mentored by some exquisite 2:51 experimental scientists in sort of what's necessary to get the right answer 2:56 in science, how critical you have to be, how skeptical you have to be, how office 3:01 you have to be, because the possibility that you've screwed up 3:05 and over interpreted your evidence is just much greater 3:10 than the possibility that you have to get something right and do something 3:14 worth paying attention to. 3:17 And when I finish my cold fusion 3:19 book, I had a lot of fans in the physics community, and some of them said to me, 3:22 that book was called Bad Science, and it came out in 1991. 3:26 And some of the my physicist friends said, if you're interested in bad science, 3:31 you should look at the stuff in public health. 3:33 That's terrible. And I did, and they were right. 3:36 That's the short form. 3:37 Everything I had learned from these, these hard nosed 3:40 scientists working in hard sciences and hard sciences or sciences, 3:44 where you can actually test your hypotheses rigorously. 3:47 Everything that I had learned about what you had to do 3:50 to make sure you got the right answer was considered kind of a luxury 3:53 in public health, because for the most part, we can't do it. 3:56 If you have a hypothesis at some aspect of your diet or environment causes 4:02 a chronic disease, you can't really test that hypothesis and experiment. 4:06 You can't randomize people to, for instance, smoke cigarettes or not
How Taubes Got Into Bad Science 4:11 smoke cigarettes and see run it out for 20 years 4:14 and see if the people who smoke it more lung cancer. 4:18 So instead of doing these experiments, I mean, you technically you can do them. 4:23 They're always possible, but they're either unethical 4:25 or exorbitantly expensive. 4:27 They could take decades to do. 4:30 And it's very easy to screw up an experiment. 4:33 So if you take a decade doing an experiment, 4:35 you don't actually know if you got the right answer or not. 4:38 So then you have to spend another decade replicating it, 4:41 and you have to get the funding to do all that. 4:43 And so you have to convince the people in the government 4:46 that they should spend tens of millions of dollars 4:49 funding a trial that may or may not get the right answer. 4:52 And when you're done with that, 4:53 they're going to have to fund the same amount of money again 4:56 to do the study over or to improve upon it, to increase 5:00 the likelihood that you got the right answer. 5:02 So instead, we ended up with these fields public health and nutrition 5:08 and chronic disease, where for the most part, 5:11 our hypotheses are never really rigorously tested. 5:15 And people believe them in part because their colleagues believe 5:19 them and their colleagues believe them because they believe them. 5:22 And you end up with dogmas that may or may not be correct. 5:26 And in the late 90s, I was working then doing most of my work 5:29 for the journal science as an investigative reporter, 5:32 and I launched into first an investigation of this conventional thinking. 5:38 That's that high blood pressure is caused by excessive salt consumption. 5:43 And this evidence to support that turned out to be sort of 5:46 woefully inadequate to do the kind of public health interventions we were doing. 5:51 And it turned out that the researcher who had been most prominent 5:56 in promoting this low salt diet 5:59 dogma was one of the worst scientists I had ever interviewed. 6:03 And he also took credit for getting the world on the low fat diet 6:07 we were all eating in the 90s, 6:09 and when he did that, I literally hung up the phone 6:11 and called my editor at science and said, well, I'm done writing about salt. 6:14 I'm going to write about fat. 6:16 I have no idea what the story is, but if this guy was involved 6:19 in any substantive way, I can guarantee there's a story there 6:23 that we don't know about. 6:24 And the low fat dietary dogma that we all grew up believing that 6:29 a healthy diet is a low fat diet also turned out to be built on, 6:34 you know, sort of inadequate scientific evidence. 6:38 A lot of people seeing what they wanted to see in the studies and ignoring 6:42 whatever they didn't want to see, 6:44 which happened in that that situation to be the great bulk of the evidence. 6:48 And then that led me into my first book with calories, bad calories. 6:52 And turned out while I was sort of 6:56 in doing these investigations and learning how bad the science was about these, 7:01 what I think are incorrect theories, 7:04 dogma that there was a very obvious alternative 7:09 hypothesis that had always been mostly ignored or swept under the rug 7:14 because it challenged the conventional thinking. 7:16 And that was this idea that refined, processed 7:19 carbohydrates and sugars are the primary cause 7:24 of the sort of chronic diseases that are so common in our lives now. 7:28 So BCT, diabetes, heart disease, and then you can even 7:31 get the stroke, cancers, Alzheimer's. 7:34 The further you go out on that spectrum, the harder 7:37 it gets to I mean, the more you're speculating. 7:41 But I ended up writing my book so that in one hand 7:46 kind of explaining why, well, we had grown up believing was almost 7:50 assuredly wrong, and then supplanting that belief system was something 7:54 I believe to be right, which is where I stepped over the line 7:58 from being a journalist to an amateur scientist, 8:01 and probably pissed off people more than what I think is interesting 8:07 is your hard science background, because the thing about calories is. 8:12 So I grew up, I went to medical school in the 90s, 8:15 so I grew up in the thick of the low fat era. 8:18 You know, all fat was bad. 8:20 I learned that through medical school. 8:22 Super interesting because when it came to weight and calories, 8:27 what you always hear about is it's like the first law of thermodynamics. 8:32 And I'm always like, God, like the hard scientists think that's all crap. 8:38 And yet the nutritionists and the, you know, people trying to say it's 8:42 all calories are equal and all this sort of stuff 8:45 are always like trying to point to hard science. 8:48 I called it physics envy, you know, because they want to try and pretend 8:52 they got this sort of soft science with very poor evidence, 8:56 and yet they're trying to link it to physics, which is, you know, 9:01 much more definitive in that way, especially this whole idea 9:05 of cutting calories and, you know, fat being bad for you. 9:10 And I find it interesting that, you know, that that, 9:14 you know, the nutritionists think that they're hard science, the hard scientists 9:18 think that they're just, you know, really, really poor. 9:22 Like it's just thought science at all sort of thing. 9:24 Right? It's just a lot of opinion. 9:26 I mean, this idea that we get fat because we too much seem so intuitively 9:30 obvious that, 9:31 I mean, we all spent decades of our life believing it just seemed natural even. 9:36 Yeah. Didn't matter. 9:37 Like I often look back, I was in the junior high school in the 60s. 9:42 I'm old enough and, you know, there was two obese kids 9:45 in my junior, two kids with obesity in my junior high school class. 9:49 I knew it because we all did heavyweight wrestling, and there was 9:52 three of us who were sort of big kids and two who were 40 pounds heavier. 9:58 We never thought of them as kids who ate too much 10:01 or kids were lazy, just thought of them as kids who were different. 10:05 And you didn't, I? 10:07 I can bet we didn't treat them with the respect they deserve, but everyone does. 10:12 But still, we never thought of them as suffering from gluttony and sloth. 10:17 But this became the sort of common way that the medical community 10:21 thought about this disorder. And I do actually. 10:23 I've spoken a very good physicist. 10:26 I've tried to enlist in my cause, and I can't get them to understand 10:30 that it's not necessarily about eating too much, 10:33 and it may not be about eating 10:35 too much for anyone, that there are people who are predisposed to get heavy 10:39 and they're going to get heavier, even if they restrict their diets 10:42 their whole life. 10:43 And there are people who are predisposed to stay lean, 10:46 and they're going to stay lean even if they eat a lot. 10:48 I have a sibling like that. 10:50 No matter how much he ate, he couldn't. 10:53 Just like Lean and Boston, I would get sick and he would stay thin. 10:57 The you know what happened 10:59 when we talk about good science, one of the founding principles of good 11:03 science writing, these can never fall in love with your hypothesis. 11:07 So the way to avoid falling in love with your hypothesis, your belief. 11:11 Because once you fall in love, 11:12 you're going to just spend it very much relates to romantic attachments as well. 11:16 You're only going to see the good things about the person you're in love with. 11:19 And so you come home 11:21 and you tell your mother, I'm going to marry this wonderful woman. 11:24 And your mother looks at her and sees somebody who's completely inappropriate 11:28 for you. 11:28 And all you see are, you know, she's got beautiful hair 11:32 and look bigger, and she can hold an intelligent conversation with me. 11:35 And like, three years later, you're thinking, 11:36 I should have listened to my mother, 11:38 or she's thinking she should have listened to her mother. 11:40 But we see what we want to see once were with someone or some idea.
Questioning Calories and Obesity Dogma 11:45 And the way you get around 11:47 that and science is you make sure you have alternative 11:50 hypotheses, so many different ways you can interpret the data. 11:53 And if you can think of all those many different ways yourself, 11:58 you'll be equally enamored with different variations, 12:01 and you won't selectively see only that which sort of feeds your love. 12:06 And in nutrition and obesity, they just never did this. 12:10 They got this idea and based on the laws of thermodynamics, 12:13 and they thought it was physics, they did have physics envy. 12:16 This is like a hundred years ago that this determined why people got that. 12:22 They would never say it determined why people got tall, even if somebody tall 12:26 was very heavy, or why children grow or any of these other growth phenomenon. 12:31 But that became their belief system. 12:34 And it's still nowadays people spend a lot of time 12:38 trying to blame obesity on something other than behavior. 12:41 So it's like ultra processed food, right? 12:45 And why is ultra processed food bad for you? 12:48 Because if you blame it on processed food, you can blame it on the food industry. 12:51 The reason it's bad for you is, in theory, because we do much of that, 12:55 and the reason we too much of it is because it tastes too good. 12:58 And then if you ask the question, why do some people eat too much? 13:00 And other people clearly don't because they're lean. 13:04 Now you're back to blaming behavior. 13:06 And so one of the issues that I brought up in my books 13:10 is that people we've gotten ourselves into this fix with obesity and diabetes, 13:14 not because people just doing the research just didn't think very hard 13:18 about what they were doing. 13:20 They didn't never question their assumptions. 13:23 They never said to themselves something simple like, why is I'm thin 13:26 in this person's like my aunt, 13:29 you know, Elma is not because I've seen her reach. 13:33 He doesn't need a lot of food. 13:34 And yet she's rotund and I'm lean. 13:37 So how can I blame her obesity 13:41 on eating too much if she eats less than I do? 13:44 Yeah, I think that the the whole idea, it comes from 13:48 this sort of calories and calories out sort of idea, which is that, 13:52 hey, calories in is what you eat and calories out is exercise. 13:56 So therefore that's all under conscious control. 13:58 So therefore if you gain weight, it's your fault. 14:02 Therefore we can make fun of you. 14:03 We can shame you because it's, you know, it's that 14:06 person's fault, which I actually think is super, super unfair. 14:10 So, you know, in terms of the, 14:13 you know, the sort of you point out these sort of prevailing hypothesis, which is, 14:18 you know, calories and it's just eating too much, it's all too much. 14:22 It's all about calories and so on. 14:23 You know, 14:24 maybe you can lay out your alternative hypothesis for this, because I think 14:28 it's very interesting because, you know, when we're talking about longevity, 14:31 you know, you want to talk about preventing chronic disease, as you said, 14:34 and maintaining a proper weight is obviously a very good part of that. 14:38 Diabetes is another part about about it. 14:40 And we'll go into that later. 14:42 But, you know, how would you explain sort of in a nutshell, your alternative 14:46 hypothesis, which, by the way, I and a lot of other, you know, 14:50 doctors think is much more correct than the prevailing hypothesis, 14:53 which unfortunately refuses to die. 14:56 It's it's always there. 14:59 We're always arguing about this hypothesis. 15:02 So okay. 15:03 So and this let me link it into longevity. 15:07 Because one way to think about longevity is the prevention of these chronic, 15:11 the delaying of these chronic diseases that tend to kill us 15:15 as long as humanly possible. 15:18 So if you can, if you can delay the onset of obesity and diabetes 15:22 and heart disease and cancer and dementia and stroke, and, you know, the longer 15:27 you delay it along, your first of all, the longer your health span is. 15:31 So the longer you're healthy, the better you feel, the younger you feel 15:35 because you've delayed these chronic diseases. 15:37 And then ideally you compress the chronic. 15:40 You know, at some point your body can't do it anymore. 15:44 And it manifests itself in some series 15:47 of pathological phenomena that will kill you. 15:50 And they're very likely to be similar to these diseases. 15:53 So the question of longevity is also the question 15:57 of preventing and delaying these major chronic diseases. 16:01 And when I talked about this alternative hypothesis being sugar 16:05 refined brain hypothesis that appeared in my research, obvious. 16:10 When you look back at this, it's basically there was a whole group 16:13 of physician researchers, mostly British, 16:18 because British had this colonial empire around the world, the British Empire. 16:22 So they had physicians working all around the world and in government hospitals 16:26 and missionary hospitals. 16:27 And they would notice that populations 16:29 that ate their traditional diets, whatever their traditional diets, were. 16:33 So it could be, you know, mostly grain and mostly carbs. 16:37 And Basia could be mostly, you know, meat and fish and sea 16:42 mammals and the among, you know, the Arctic regions, it could be cattle 16:47 and the pastoral populations and buffalo and then elk 16:51 and the Native American populations. 16:52 Whatever it was they were eating, they didn't seem to get these common 16:58 chronic diseases until they went through what's called a nutrition transition. 17:03 So they started interacting with the West, with the Europeans 17:07 and the European descendents, and we start trading them sugar and flour. 17:12 And when that happens, you start seeing these epidemics of obesity and diabetes. 17:17 And as this science was being written about in the medical journals, was fairly 17:22 prominent, researchers studying heart disease, studying obesity 17:27 and then diabetes, of course, were identifying high blood 17:31 sugar and elevated levels of the hormone insulin 17:35 as possible causal factors in driving high blood pressure. 17:40 And this whole science of metabolic syndrome, which begins to sort of appear 17:45 in the medical literature in the late 50s and 1960s, courtesy mostly of a Stanford 17:50 endocrinologist named Gerald Raven, and then begins to be accepted. 17:55 Only the 1980s to 1990s 17:59 implicates this whole slew of sort of prediabetes, 18:04 obesity related risk factors and heart disease, and it's always 18:09 linked to the sort of carbohydrate content of the diet and the flour. 18:14 So it connects completely with this idea 18:17 of a nutrition transition, these other populations. 18:20 So the end result is effectively the of the carbohydrates to each other. 18:25 Processing and the sugar content drive insulin 18:29 resistance for lack of a better term, which is what type 18:32 two diabetes ultimately is severe insulin resistance. 18:36 They drive obesity and elevated blood sugar. 18:40 Elevated insulin levels are the most likely cause of 18:44 of atherosclerosis, coronary heart disease. 18:47 You could link them to stroke, 18:48 you could link it to cancer, or you could link it to Alzheimer's. 18:51 So basically, it's a very picture that emerged in all these 18:55 different fields in obesity and body weight per se. 18:59 The idea is that, you know, we don't get fat because what we 19:02 we get fat because what our body does with what we eat. 19:05 This is a line to which I have to give Eric Westman credit, 19:11 what our body does with what we eat 19:13 is a process called intermediary metabolism, 19:16 and it's dominated by the central nervous system 19:19 and the endocrine system, hormonal glands and the dominant gland. 19:23 Driving fat storage is the pancreas, insulin in effect the dominant hormone. 19:30 So once again, you've got basically you raise insulin levels. 19:34 Your body preferentially stores calories, is fat, 19:37 and the insulin inhibits the release of fat from the fat cells. 19:41 So if you're insulin resistant, 19:43 you're, you know, storing fat, not burning it in effect. 19:47 And everything ties together very neatly. 19:50 It doesn't mean it's right, 19:51 but I think it moves the tax better than than the whole calories. 19:55 Well, I mean the calories thing and we could get into it. 19:59 And however depth you want explains nothing. 20:02 And that's the simplest way the value of a theory 20:05 is what it can explain, you know, explicate 20:09 power and the idea that you get fat because you eat too much has an effect. 20:13 Is your explanatory power not explicate, 20:16 explanatory, even, even the 20:20 you know, if you say that all calories are equal, what you get, you know, 20:23 this is the sort of dominant sort of theory. 20:27 Even now, 20:27 I find it very strange because, you know, the body runs on hormones, right? 20:33 That's how like, everything in our body is run by hormones, 20:37 pretty much, you know, pretty much. 20:39 And certain foods stimulate certain hormones. 20:42 Okay. That's not controversial in any way. 20:45 Some foods will stimulate insulin and some foods won't really won't stimulate. 20:49 And again, that's not controversial. 20:51 That's just fat. 20:52 It's accepted fact that this point because you can measure these things. 20:56 So it's like so if you eat 100 calories of certain food which stimulates 21:01 a lot of insulin, say white bread, or you eat an egg which stimulates 21:06 100 calories, same calories, which stimulate zero insulin. 21:10 Yet somehow we have to believe 21:13 that the super high insulin versus no insulin, 21:16 same 100 calories makes no difference to the human body. 21:20 Oh, it's like, why wouldn't it make a difference like 21:25 this? 21:25 Nonsensical. 21:26 You know, and this is the problem with people growing up with a belief system. 21:32 Because you could sit down and I've done this. 21:35 You sit down with these very esteemed, respected researchers 21:40 or their professors at their institutions, their head of committees. 21:44 They serve on consulting boards. 21:46 They work with the American Heart Association, they write journal articles 21:50 and commentaries. They host conferences. 21:53 And you sit down and make the argument that you just made. 21:57 And I've made this with them. 21:59 I mean, it doesn't matter what. 22:01 We're not talking about energy here. 22:03 We're just talking about the effect on the human body or any organism 22:07 and the macronutrient 22:08 content of the food has, whether it's a carbohydrate or a protein 22:12 or a fat or a very different effect on the endocrine response of that food. 22:16 The endocrine response has a very, you know, the fat tissue and the non fat 22:21 tissue, the liver and the organs and the muscles that are burning 22:24 the fuel respond to the endocrine response differently 22:28 depending on which hormones are secreted and how much. 22:31 And so you've got different macronutrients, different endocrine 22:35 response, different fat storage or fuel oxidation or mobilization of fuel 22:42 or use of fuel, 22:43 even choice of fuel, whether you're going to burn glucose or glycogen 22:47 or whether you're going to burn fat or, you know, ideally not protein. 22:51 And they'll look at you like, I mean, it takes used to take me seriously. 22:57 I'd like to think they still do. 22:58 But the problem is, is what you're saying to them 23:01 is they have been wrong about the most profound 23:05 concept in their field for their entire career. 23:10 And everybody 23:11 they know, all the people they respect, who think like they do, are also wrong. 23:16 And, you know, Jason Fong and a allergist in Toronto, or Gary 23:20 Taubes, a journalist of all things, is explaining to them why they're wrong. 23:24 And nobody it's like I compare this. 23:26 It's imagine, you know, be an atheist going in to speak to the Pope, 23:31 and you're going to explain to him why God doesn't exist. 23:34 Yeah. 23:34 Or the pope going to, you know, a you're a, you know, a devout 23:39 Catholic going to Richard Dawkins or one of these 23:43 very famous atheists explaining to them what God does exist. 23:46 And you just yeah, we're not built to accept this possibility. 23:51 None of us can do it. Yeah. 23:52 And we part, I think, is that the sort of 23:56 if you just follow the logic, it's so logical. 24:00 That is, insulin is not an evil hormone because I get this all the time, right? 24:04 Oh, you're saying insulins evil? 24:05 I'm like, no, I'm not saying insulin. 24:07 Evil insulin is like a normal hormone. 24:09 But to tell your body to store fat and to block fat burning, 24:14 which is lipolysis, that's its job, right. 24:18 And again, that's not controversial. 24:21 That's his job. 24:22 I'm just saying that some food stimulate a lot of insulin. 24:25 Therefore it will encourage you to store that energy as opposed to leaving it
The Carbohydrate-Insulin Hypothesis 24:30 for you to use, which is, you know, to me is is not controversial in any way. 24:36 And yet they can't see past. 24:37 And that's I totally agree with you. 24:39 That's where that belief system, it just sort of Trump's everything. 24:44 And in the end it's always hard to sort to discuss. 24:48 But even harder I think, is that they looked at the studies and then everything 24:53 gets interpreted in that way that they're it is all about calories. 24:58 And like, this is yeah, you can show. 25:00 So one of the reasons we believe we're right is you can tell people. 25:03 So the simplest view of what often called the carbohydrate 25:08 insulin model is carbohydrates stimulate insulin secretion. 25:13 You know, the sugar has an effect 25:15 that's different than, than grains or starches. 25:18 But that effect is and result is to increase insulin secretion. 25:23 And insulin stimulates fat storage, inhibits the release of fat. 25:28 To eat carbs, you get fatter, you don't eat carbs, you get leaner. 25:35 So we now have, 25:37 well, there's 200 years of history 25:41 of very influential commentators, physicians, 25:45 writers saying, look, you know, carbohydrates make people fat. 25:48 That's the simplest way to think about it. 25:49 Don't make everyone fat. Clearly not. 25:51 But those of us who get fat get factors of the carbon content, the diet. 25:55 And if we don't eat those foods, we get leaner. 25:58 And now we have 25 years of clinical trials confirming that. 26:02 So we have a test. 26:03 But the problem is often when people get leaner, they also eat less. 26:07 That's because I would say because they're burning their own fat also. 26:11 So when you're weight stable, you're not burning more fat 26:16 than you're storing because it's staying stable. 26:18 But if you're losing weight, you're burning that fat. 26:20 That's where it's going. 26:22 So you don't have to eat as much so you're not as hungry. 26:25 And so you eat less. 26:26 And now people say, look, we did the clinical trial. 26:28 These people didn't eat as much. 26:30 Therefore they lost weight because they ate less. 26:32 So there's always a way to interpret the evidence. 26:35 Yeah. 26:36 Not always. 26:37 The key to doing good science is to creating an experiment 26:40 where there is not an alternative way to 26:43 interpret the evidence if, depending what you see. 26:47 But there's always a way around it, so they can keep their belief system intact, 26:52 and they don't ever have to confront the possibility that they made 26:56 a mistake of this magnitude. 27:00 Yeah, I hear what you're saying. 27:01 I think it's because there is a confounding between calories 27:05 and insulin effect, because if you keep the food stable, 27:09 the more you eat, the more the insulin effect. 27:11 So then people say, well, it's the calories, 27:12 whereas other people will say, well, it's the insulin. 27:14 But it could also be the calories include carbohydrate calories. Yes. 27:19 Yeah. So, you know, if you 27:22 let's say you starve someone, this is always the observation. 27:25 When I was doing my research for good calories, bad calories, 27:28 I said, we don't talk about calories 27:30 because when we starve people, they get them leaner. 27:32 And I would say, yeah, but when you start thin people, they also get thinner. 27:36 Yeah. 27:37 They don't say they're thin because they eat too much, 27:39 but you're willing to say they're fat because they eat too much, 27:41 because the people with obesity also get thinner when you starve them. 27:46 But the point is, if you somebody is eating 2500 27:49 calories a day, or let's say 3000, that's a lot. 27:52 Now, it wasn't a lot 60 years ago, and 50% of that is carbs. 27:57 That means you're eating 1500 calories a day. 27:59 So now you starve them and you can say 600 calories. 28:03 That's a classic very low calorie diet. 28:06 And they're getting 300 calories from protein or 200 calories from protein. 28:11 And the rest is even if the rest is all carbs. 28:15 You've cut their carb content from 1500 calories to 400 calories a day, 28:21 so maybe that's why you're seeing what you're seeing. 28:24 And again, a good scientist says, oh, that's an interesting point. 28:28 What experiment can I do to examine that hypothesis and see if it's valid? 28:33 And you can plan experiments to do that. 28:36 But in order to do that, you have to legitimately be curious. 28:40 You have to be legitimately 28:42 accepting the possibility that your belief system is wrong, 28:47 so that you can devote energy and ingenuity and effort into figuring out 28:52 which is right. And that all comes back 28:55 to having to accept the possibility that you screwed up. 28:59 Yeah, it's hard for people to do that. 29:01 I mean, it's almost impossible. 29:03 And again, I get accused of the same thing. 29:05 And then I say, well, you're right. If I'm wrong, I'm never going to. 29:08 There is no evidence that will convince me. 29:11 Yeah. 29:11 And then they say, albums is so close minded and we can't trust anything. 29:16 I said, I'm not being close minded. I'm being honest. 29:19 Yeah, I'm accepting that. 29:21 I'm just like everyone else. 29:22 We're all like this. The history of science. 29:25 So the history of science for sure. 29:27 I mean, I think that, you know, what to me is very interesting in your book, 29:32 and I think this was quite sort of eye opening to a lot of us who read it, 29:37 at least a lot of our physicians, 29:38 because I've spoken to a lot of the physicians in the low carb sort of space, 29:42 is that there was a lot of history 29:45 of this being a, well, sort of accepted, you know, that carbohydrates, 29:51 you know, they didn't know about insulin, of course, in the 20s, 30s, 40, 50, 29:55 that wasn't they didn't know about it, but they yet 29:59 they knew and not just physicians, but almost everybody knew that 30:03 sort of some foods make you fatter and some foods don't make you fatter. 30:07 So some foods are more inherently fattening than others. 30:10 And those foods tend to be sugars and refined starches. 30:15 And that was sort of just sort of accepted wisdom. 30:18 And that part was very interesting to me because one, I think, 30:24 you know, if 30:24 you ever ask, like your grandmother, they'll tell you exactly that, right? 30:28 You know, they'll be like, nobody gets that eating broccoli, right? 30:33 It's like, but eat cookies. 30:35 Yes, you're going to get fat. 30:36 So stop eating cookies if you want to get me. 30:38 Yet there was actually a huge history, you know, and not elsewhere, like, 30:43 but in North America, everybody was sort of well accepted for so long. 30:48 And then it sort of all changed in the sort of 70s 80s. 30:53 So a lot of us just don't remember if this is, you know, Rich 30:59 and exactly the time 31:01 that people started that obesity started becoming such a noticeable problem, 31:06 that diet books were becoming bestsellers regularly 31:11 and clinicians 31:15 would experiment on themselves. 31:16 Right. So they'd get this idea. 31:18 There were some research articles through the 40s. 31:22 Guy named Pennington, who was a work for the industrial medical division at DuPont. 31:27 And he had done experiments putting executives on low carb diets. 31:30 And then people like Robert Atkins and Herman Taylor, who wrote a famous book 31:35 called Calories Don't Count. 31:36 And so they tried it on and it worked. 31:38 And you tried it on your patients. 31:40 It's this conversion experience that we've all gone through. 31:43 People say, well, you only wrote this because it worked for you. 31:46 And I said, well, that's not actually true. 31:48 But if it didn't work for me, I would have been a much harder sell. 31:52 The science wouldn't have meant so much to me if I 31:56 when I tried carbohydrate restriction, I got fatter, for instance. 32:01 And there are people out there who swear this has happened to them, and I'm 32:04 willing to believe them because I think we should believe everyone 32:08 until remarkable evidence demonstrates otherwise. 32:12 But it just it's, you see, the same 32:16 thing happen and virtually everyone 32:20 and again, it's hard to judge without really well done clinical trials. 32:24 What proportion of people benefit? 32:25 I mean, you know, in your patients the, you know, do you give these foods up, 32:30 you get healthier. 32:31 But this was happening in the 1960s. 32:34 Again, there are other dogmas that entered into this field. 32:38 And one of them, beginning in the 1960s, was this idea that dietary 32:41 fat causes heart disease and particularly saturated fat. 32:45 And so now you have obesity. 32:48 Doctors and cardiologists like Atkins saying, look, 32:51 if you want to get lean, don't eat carbs, just eat, you know, meat. 32:55 And he said, cheeseburgers, double cheeseburgers, lobster Newberg. 32:59 Don't worry about the fat content. 33:02 Just stay away from the carbs. 33:03 And this outrage the rest of the medical community, 33:07 because they were beginning 33:08 to promote this idea that it was a dietary fat that caused heart disease. 33:12 And it's a reason people like me 33:13 never experimented with Atkins, because who cares if you lose weight? 33:16 If you have a heart attack, right? 33:19 It's a trade off isn't really worth it. 33:21 So this saturated fat causes heart disease. 33:24 Dogma became conventional wisdom. 33:26 It was tested in multiple clinical trials. 33:29 It never panned out in the trials, you know. 33:32 And yet people believed it anyway. 33:34 But people well, again, it's the sociology and politics are fascinating. 33:39 So researchers go to the Congress in the United States 33:43 and they say, we want to test this hypothesis. 33:45 And Congress says, okay, we're going to give you $50 million to do the test. 33:50 It's only seen as a success 33:54 if the 33:54 test turns out to it's a hypothesis can be confirmed. 33:58 So if you do the test and then you say to, well, it turns out 34:01 we were wrong, which in any other science is a massive victory 34:05 if refuted your hypothesis, that's that's when you have to do 34:09 you have to get rid 34:10 of all the wrong stuff, and then you're eventually only left 34:13 with some ideas, the few of them that might be right. 34:15 And then you slowly do those experiments and you would have it down 34:19 until there's only one theory left that you can trust. 34:22 But in this world, if you came up with what was seen 34:25 as the wrong answer to your hypothesis was incorrect, 34:29 you not only failed the medical community and the public, you failed congressmen 34:34 who had been so kind as to a lottery this money to do the study. 34:39 So there was an extraordinary amount of pressure, both the researchers 34:42 who wanted to prove they were right, but who wanted to justify the investment. 34:47 And again, despite that study after study failed to confirm, we pushed it anyway. 34:53 The public health people, the US, 34:56 the agricultural Department, the USDA, the 35:00 you know, you're pushing this idea that we should all be low fat diet. 35:03 It was probably not just a coincidence. 35:06 And most of the processed foods and the miracle are high carb. 35:10 So, you know, you're pushing agriculture, 35:13 you're pushing brains and sugars as much as livestock. 35:17 We end up with an untenable sort of conflict between what you have to do 35:22 to lose weight and what you're supposedly have to do to prevent heart disease. 35:28 And if we're talking longevity in doing this conversation 30 years ago, 35:32 you're telling people to avoid fat and avoid salt 35:36 and avoid saturated fat specifically. 35:39 And now, 30 years later, we're saying, you know, don't eat sugar, refined grains 35:44 and seed oils depending on the strength of your belief system, 35:48 the whole salt thing hasn't really there's not been a lot of evidence for 35:52 that either. 35:53 Well, that's what got me into this. 35:55 It's it's less press, but it's still also 35:59 one of those things that got pushed and still out there. 36:02 I mean, it's sort of again, as a nephrologist, I get this all the time. 36:07 And this whole idea that eating a low, low salt diet is good for you. 36:11 It's there's no evidence, really to suggest that that's true. 36:14 There's even evidence to suggest that. 36:17 Quite the opposite. 36:18 Yeah, but this was just, you know, it was the nature of the sign. 36:22 The whole idea of establishing dietary cause of product disease 36:27 is basically a post-World War II conception. 36:30 Yeah. 36:30 And this idea of, you know, using epidemiological studies, 36:34 observational studies, these huge cohorts of 100,000 people 36:38 to see what they eat and who's healthy and who's not. 36:41 As a post-World War II phenomenon, brand new sciences. 36:46 And the people doing this, they weren't trained as like physicists or engineers. 36:51 They didn't have they were, you know, they they were nutritionists and dietitians, 36:56 and they had no real conception of what the real science is. 37:00 And they were making up the rules of these sciences as they went along. 37:04 So let's talk about diabetes because you wrote another book, 37:08 your most recent book, Rethinking Diabetes, 37:10 which was, again, the very insightful sort of, 37:14 you know, huge amounts of information that I hadn't known before
Why Calories Alone Donu2019t Explain Weight Gain 37:18 about diabetes, because that too is linked to obesity, obviously. 37:23 So weight loss, diabetes there linked. 37:26 And both have a huge impact on health, mostly cardiovascular disease and cancer. 37:32 But how does that sort of bad science play out in the field of diabetes? 37:36 Well, again, that's another long story. 37:39 I mean, the book was written during the research, by the way. 37:41 I wrote that book just because I thought diabetes is the most it's kind 37:46 of a crucial disease in this discussion because, okay, 37:50 you could argue with obesity. 37:51 It's not the carbohydrates, it's the calories. 37:54 A calorie is a calorie, it's a calorie. 37:56 But diabetes is a disorder of insulin dysregulation. 38:00 Type two diabetes is in some resistance. 38:03 Type one diabetes is insulin deficiency. 38:06 The insulin is responding to the carbohydrates on a fundamental level. 38:10 I mean the glucose and the circulation stimulates 38:13 the pancreatic beta cells to create insulin. 38:17 So we can put aside this whole calorie as a calorie thing 38:21 because it's not relevant. 38:22 And we can just ask for patients with diabetes. 38:25 What's the proper way to control this disorder. 38:29 And how do we prevent, you know, in the past 60 years, the 38:33 prevalence of 38:34 diabetes in the United States has increased sevenfold. 38:38 I mean, imagine any other disease increasing 38:42 seven X in 60 years, and there'd be this public outcry. 38:47 And here there's none. 38:49 It's just people say, well, we have drug therapies and the drugs 38:52 and device therapies are getting better and better every year. 38:55 And and it's linked to obesity. 38:58 So these are people just don't have the problem. 38:59 They don't know how to eat moderation. 39:02 So we can't have an outcry because it's it's a patient's fault right there. 39:07 They're eating too much 39:08 or eating the wrong foods or whatever they're doing, but it's their fault. 39:12 So it turns out when you look at the history. 39:14 So the first sort of successful treatment of a diabetes case was in 1797 39:19 by a British physician working for the British military, who put an army 39:25 colonel who, with diabetes, a guy, had lost a lot of weight. 39:29 He was thirsty all the time. 39:30 He was peeing constantly. 39:32 And all these symptoms of out of control diabetes. 39:35 And this British doctor decides 39:38 that, you know, look, the the way you diagnose diabetes, 39:42 you look for sugar in the urine or back 39:44 then they had their assistants taste the urine. 39:47 And if it tasted sweet, you knew they had diabetes. 39:49 Ideally you had an assistant for that job. 39:52 The the. 39:56 Was interesting how many diseases were diagnosed by tasting the urine 39:59 back then, but that's a digression anyway, he figures a urine sweet. 40:04 It's a carbohydrates are not being properly metabolized. 40:07 So let me make this guy you to die without carbohydrates. 40:10 It's basically fatty meat and rancid meat and some green vegetables. 40:16 And the guy gets better. 40:17 Colonel Meredith gets better. 40:19 He actually lives for 12 more years. 40:21 And Rollo tries in another patient, a general who is 40:25 someone gets better, but then falls off the diet, goes back home. 40:29 His regular doctor says, don't worry about you. 40:32 Eat and he eats whatever he wants and he dies. 40:35 So Rollo writes a pamphlet explaining what he's done, 40:38 and he circulates the pamphlet all throughout the United Kingdom. 40:41 And he asks physicians back then I try it with your patients. 40:45 Diabetes was so rare that a physician might see a patient 40:48 once or twice in his lifetime and let me know what happens. 40:53 And few dozen physicians right back to him when he publishes the revised versions 40:58 of his pamphlet with their letters saying, you know, it works. 41:03 I get people off carbs. 41:05 Their diabetes more or less goes into remission. 41:07 And so through the 19th century, this becomes the standard of care. 41:12 The diabetes is seen as a disorder of carbohydrate metabolism, 41:16 and the idea is that they can't metabolize carbohydrates safely, don't eat them. 41:20 But because the patients usually whether type one or type two 41:23 and they didn't differentiate back then, they would usually show up at the doctors 41:27 only after having experienced significant weight loss. 41:31 You want to put weight back on them, so you don't want to. 41:36 You want to 41:37 replace the carbohydrate calories that they're not eating with something. 41:41 And the one macronutrient that doesn't stimulate incidence creation is fat. 41:47 So through the 19th century, these diets became higher and higher and fat. 41:50 And by 1900 doctors are saying, look, the 41:54 the essence of a diabetic diet is butter. 41:59 And their patients, 42:01 you know, their older patients, the younger patients who have type one 42:04 diabetes cannot they they need insulin and they're going to die without it. 42:08 And they do. 42:09 This diet will slow down the disease progression, but it won't stop them 42:13 from passing away from pretty awful deaths. 42:17 But the older patients, who we would now say have type two diabetes, did fine. 42:22 They lived as long as anyone. 42:23 And there's some variations in therapy. 42:26 A Harvard doctor comes along and does what I'm getting used to Harvard 42:30 doctors doing, which is pushes a bad idea and it gets accepted. 42:33 And now they're starving all these patients, 42:35 and you end up with these photographs of these kids who suffer 42:40 from this disorder, type one diabetes, that makes them ravenously hungry. 42:44 And then they're treated by being starved. 42:47 So it's a little bit breezy and they're emaciated. 42:51 They look like they, you know, the concentration camp victims from World 42:55 War Two. 42:55 And then insulin is discovered in 1921, the hormone insulin. 43:00 And it's a miracle drug. 43:02 One piece for the Atlantic earlier this year that how this affects 43:06 how I see the drugs like will go. 43:10 And you know semaglutide which are their obesity drugs and also 43:15 can be wonder drugs for the people who suffer with these disorders. 43:19 So as soon as insulin comes in, you could give it to these kids. 43:22 The message to kids who are days away from dying or already 43:26 in diabetic comas and revive them. 43:28 And within days they're putting weight back on, and within weeks 43:31 they're running around the wards, and within months they've gone back home. 43:35 And as long as they take 43:36 their insulin, they're living apparently perfectly normal lives. 43:40 And the problem is one of the side effects of insulin is low blood 43:45 sugar is almost impossible to figure out how to dose this drug. 43:49 Everybody was different. And you can be different 43:51 at different times of day and different days of the week. 43:54 And if you exercised, you needed less or more insulin than if you didn't. 43:58 And if you got a cold, you needed. 44:00 I mean, this was an incredibly dangerous drug. 44:03 And it turned out that the easiest thing to do was you wanted 44:07 to prevent low blood sugar. 44:09 So you told these kids to eat carbs. 44:11 So they these are kids who didn't eat carbs and adults who didn't eat carbs 44:15 stay alive. 44:15 And now you're telling them to eat carbs to avoid the possible 44:19 fatal side effect of the cure, which is insulin. 44:23 And as time went on to the 20s, doctors said, look, 44:25 you know, these kids don't want to be on diets anyway. 44:28 And these kids have been diagnosed with this awful disease. 44:31 You don't want them to go 44:32 their whole lives not getting the ice cream at their birthdays or cake. 44:36 And so let's just give them more and more insulin 44:39 and let them eat what they want. 44:42 And in fact, this was known as a liberal carbohydrate diet. 44:44 And it got ever more liberal. 44:46 And it started with kids and then it moved to adults. 44:49 And by the late 1930s, this is sort of now the standard of care. 44:54 You might tell them to carefully consume the same amount of carbs every day 44:58 to make it easier to dose their insulin to the carbs, but they're also eating 45:04 carbs to make the insulin doses safe. 45:08 Yeah, and they get to eat like their family, so 45:12 nobody has to go on a diet. 45:13 And by the mid 1930s, it's clear that there is a new epidemic going on. 45:19 And these all these kids, you might have been dead at age 12. 45:23 You've now kept alive for 10 or 15 years, are manifesting 45:27 all the classic complications of diabetes, heart disease, kidney failure, 45:33 the neuropathies a nerve failure, the amputations are going blind. 45:37 And many of these patients, it's happening very quickly say go from being 45:42 apparently healthy to dead within 18 months. 45:46 And the medical community is mystified. 45:49 They assume it's 45:50 because of poorly controlled blood sugar, because that seems natural. 45:54 And the older patients are also manifesting 45:56 these same chronic conditions is just happening slower with them. 46:00 But they're all getting insulin. 46:01 And what they don't even think about is it's they don't actually know 46:05 what the blood sugar is doing alone, because they didn't have people 46:09 staying alive without using insulin to control the blood sugar. 46:13 All they know is that the combination of the insulin doses, which are very high 46:17 compared to what you're paying for, is secretes naturally, 46:20 and the high blood sugar, because you're still doing a lousy job 46:24 of controlling blood sugar, might be causing these chronic conditions.
The History of Diabetes Treatment 46:28 And they struggled with these chronic complications. 46:32 We still struggle with these complications today, 46:36 80 years later, 90 years later, 46:40 the side effects of 46:42 complications, consequences of living with diabetes or can be awful. 46:47 Most of the, you know, is in Africa the dialysis, the kidney failure, 46:51 most of the amputations in America, limb 46:55 amputations are from Naropa and poorly controlled by Betis. 46:59 And along the way they never said to themselves 47:03 they meaning the medical community at large, never said, well, wait a minute. 47:07 You know, we never tested this alternative approach. 47:10 And we're actually physicians writing about this in the 1920s 47:15 just don't feed these people carbs. 47:18 Yeah. 47:18 And I think that there's yeah, back then it was also confusing 47:22 because there was the type ones and the type twos, 47:25 which are really two completely different diseases. 47:29 Yes, they both have high blood glucose, but you know, 47:33 so they're like, that's diabetes. 47:34 But that's sort of like saying, oh, you have a fever. 47:37 Well it could be from, you know, Covid, it could be from the bacterial abscess. 47:42 It could be from 10,000 things. Right. 47:44 Lupus whatever. 47:45 And saying, oh, it's the same disease. 47:47 We should all treat them the same. 47:49 It's like, so this is it's just so stupid sometimes. 47:52 I mean, it's when you look at the history 47:55 I can report in this book is not, as you know, it's not a diet book. 48:00 It's not any particularly easy read. 48:02 But the reporting was then writing was fascinating. 48:05 The they couldn't measure, we couldn't measure normal levels in the blood. 48:11 Okay. 48:12 So the assumption was if you have a what they call an endocrine disorder, 48:15 endocrine is a fancy word for hormone, 48:19 you know, some kind of glandular disorder. 48:22 We assume the problem is with the glance. 48:25 So there's something wrong. 48:26 And they would have, 48:27 you know, they had hypothyroid conditions, too much thyroid being secreted 48:32 and you had hypothyroid too little thyroid, but you couldn't 48:35 actually measure the level of thyroid hormones. 48:39 You just knew that you saw these symptoms for one and these symptoms for the other. 48:43 And the hypothyroid, too little could be treated by giving the person thyroid. 48:47 So the assumption with insulin was it was all insulin deficiency 48:51 because we could treat it by giving them insulin. 48:53 And there was some talk of insulin resistance because he's older 48:56 or heavier, patients with diabetes needed massive amounts of insulin 49:01 to lower their blood sugar, but nobody really knew what that meant. 49:05 And not until 1960 is there a technology, a test 49:10 and assay that allows you to measure hormone levels in the blood. 49:14 So they're the very first paper by this team, yellow and Burse 49:18 and very first paper they talked about insulin resistance 49:22 because patients with type two diabetes are overweight. 49:25 Older patients with diabetes and obese patients have high levels of insulin 49:29 and high levels of blood sugar, so that they're not insulin deficient. 49:34 They actually have too much insulin. 49:36 And as you said, when talking about hormonal disorders 49:40 and every other field, I'm reading textbooks from German textbooks, 49:44 which I get translate ChatGPT or translate form, 49:48 and I'm reading them from the 1920s and it's, you know, 49:51 you've got, like I said, hypothyroid and hypothyroid, you've got hyper 49:56 pituitary diseases and hyperspeed. 49:59 They hadn't discovered growth hormone, but then you've got typo genitalia. 50:05 I knew that too much sex hormones created this disease. 50:08 Too little created that disease. 50:10 But if you didn't actually 50:12 see the symptoms, you just assume the symptom was high blood sugar. 50:16 Then nobody ever questioned why is there one disorder? 50:19 Did not until the 1960s. 50:21 Do you learn type two is too much insulin. 50:23 Type one is not enough. 50:25 Type two is insulin resistance type. 50:27 Well, what's interesting about that is that that whole idea, like you're 50:32 saying that these sort of when you see everything through a belief system, right? 50:37 So even through now you hear this now, which is, I find stunning type 50:42 two diabetes where you can measure insulin levels, you know, they're too high. 50:47 Everybody knows they're too high. 50:48 But it gets called in the medical literature as relative 50:52 deficiency is like, what the hell is not doing its job right? 50:56 It's not doing it. 50:57 So it's too low actually, even though it's too high. 51:02 Yeah. And that justifies right. 51:04 The treatment justifies give them more insulin. 51:07 Yeah. Exactly. Which I think. Yeah. 51:10 And then you, you do clinical trials 51:12 and to the diabetes communities they actually do these trials 51:18 because in obesity research they won't do it. 51:21 They know it's all about calories. 51:22 So they're not going to test it. 51:23 But the diabetes researchers have done clinical 51:27 trials clinical testing their fundamental beliefs. 51:30 And they've refuted almost all of them. 51:33 And now where they lose credit is they don't say. 51:36 I mean, one of my favorite quotes was from a guy at Harvard 51:39 who, in the New York Times in 2013 is quoted saying, you know, 51:43 they do this huge study because fundamental belief in diabetes, 51:46 if you could reduce weight type two diabetics, 51:50 you will have less what are called macro vascular complications, heart disease, 51:56 stroke and huge study called look ahead $200 million. 52:00 Get these people to lose weight. They get them to lose weight. 52:03 There's no difference in heart disease completely demolishes 52:08 the fundamental belief system in the field that gone back 52:11 100 years is the professor at Harvard very well respected? 52:15 Diabetes is quoted in the New York Times saying, 52:18 we have to have an adult conversation about this, 52:21 and they never do because it's what do you do? 52:25 Like I said, nobody wants to accept the fact 52:27 that they're wrong about these things. 52:29 But then when you're demonstrated that you're wrong, what do you do about that? 52:33 Particularly if you're a clinician, you know, a medical doctor, 52:36 if you're scientists, you could say, well, let's do some more tests, 52:39 and then you're accused of being in it for the money because let's do 52:42 some more tests means give me more funding and I'll do my studies. 52:46 But what do you do with that? 52:47 And what they do with it is they just kind of ignore it. 52:50 They just they write some commentaries and some some opinion pieces, 52:56 and they move on and go back to doing what they've always done. 52:59 And if they wait long enough, you'll get a better drug, which is what's happened. 53:04 Yeah, I think that happened to and I'm going to have to wrap this up. 53:07 But also in 2009 when the accord the advanced study. 53:11 So this idea that everything bad was due to the high blood sugar. 53:16 So therefore do whatever you have to do. 53:19 Get that blood sugar down. 53:21 You're going to do better intensive insulin therapy. 53:25 Give them more insulin. 53:27 They'll do better. In fact they did worse. 53:29 It wasn't one study. 53:31 It was multiple studies showed this. 53:33 So that I remember being, you know, you know, I was in practice by that time. 53:38 And I think this change I was reading these paper like, this changes 53:42 everything, like everything about treating diabetes, 53:45 because that's a huge disease for me as and 53:47 and what changed in the treatment of diabetes? 53:50 Nothing. They didn't recommend any changes. 53:54 I was like, My God, like what is happening here? 53:58 And this is an obvious issue. 54:00 It's just, look, there are two levers you could use to manipulate blood sugar. 54:05 You could use diet or you could use drugs. 54:08 You made your levers, minor levers like exercise and sleep. 54:12 But those are the major levers. 54:13 And so we've demonstrated that drugs don't help. 54:18 A natural question to ask is, well, what if we pull the other level? 54:21 What if we use diet to lower blood sugar? 54:25 As we know, we did that for 123 years before 54:30 insulin was discovered, and it seemed to work. 54:33 That's just a natural question to ask. 54:35 But these people, they, you know, they also have when you hold 54:39 an incorrect belief system and it's constantly 54:42 being challenged by evidence, you develop sort of a defense immune system 54:47 to defend yourself against these, these, these infectious nuggets of evidence. 54:53 And so you develop all these ways to think about the problem that convince you 54:57 you're still right, even as the evidence is saying you're wrong. 55:00 So one of these belief systems is nobody follows a diet. 55:04 Why would we do that? 55:05 Why would we tell people to eat this way when we know 55:09 they're not going to follow it? 55:10 And then you could have a conversation. 55:12 I've had conversations like that. 55:14 How do you know people are not going to follow it? 55:16 And, well, it's because it's wants to eat like that. 55:19 And I said, well, yeah, I'm going to acknowledge to you that that I do 55:24 because I find that I could sustain a 30 pound weight loss, you know, 55:28 I mean, I seem to be very healthy for 55:31 the guy who's getting on in years, and I want to stay healthy. 55:35 And they'll say, oh, you're one of those keto people. 55:37 And now they can dismiss you because of the there's it's just a 55:42 and again, you can't blame the people like you actually allow the evidence 55:46 to change your mind are few and far between. 55:50 Yeah. You need not only personal experience. 55:53 Ideally it's personal experience. 55:55 A lot of the people who think like we do now do it because they said, okay, 55:59 who knows, maybe it's fun. 56:01 Character knows what he's talking about. 56:02 Let me try some intermittent fasting and then give up carbs and see what happens. 56:06 And they get healthier. 56:07 And then it's like, oh well that was interesting. 56:10 Now I care or they try it on their patients and their patients get healthier. 56:15 But if you're like, if I'm talking to a lean 56:18 marathon running physician, it's like, I'm never going to get through it. 56:22 Yeah, it's like a wall. 56:24 You know, they just can't break through that wall. 56:26 I think the and the academics are even harder because they've got this, 56:32 you know, they've got this idea that they're the smartest people 56:35 in that subject in the well, and they've got all this feedback, right. 56:39 They've moved up in their careers, they've become professors, they got accolades. 56:43 It's like, who wouldn't? 56:46 You know, since we're running out of time, we should tie this back, right? 56:50 Yeah. 56:50 So let's just say I think we're just over, actually. 56:53 But let's let's just tie this back quickly to the longevity story and then 56:57 and then wrap it up from there. Right. 56:58 So longevity you want to prevent delay chronic diseases. 57:02 That's part of it as long as you can if not indefinitely. 57:06 This alternative hypothesis, these chronic diseases are triggered 57:10 in effect a predisposition. 57:11 It's a genome, you know, the genes triggered by the environment. 57:16 The environment has changed. 57:18 We've added sugar and refined grains. 57:20 And if like I said, if you believe the seed oil hypothesis, 57:24 sugar, refined process, grain seed oil, 57:27 we know now several hundred clinical trials that if you remove the car, 57:31 if you tell people don't eat the sugars and the grains and the starches, 57:35 don't drink 57:37 caloric beverages for the most part, 57:39 which are inevitably sugar, you know, beer, then you'll get healthier. 57:43 We see that happening with people, and you can't. 57:47 I mean, I don't believe you can. 57:49 I can promise these people they'll live longer again. 57:52 That was the scary thing about the diabetes experience 57:56 with type one and insulin is, you know,
Diabetes Trials, Insulin, and Longevity 57:58 you clearly wonder drug comes in, saves these kids lives. 58:02 And then 15 years later, either all hell breaks loose, you never know. 58:07 But you could make a very good argument that if you want to, the first step 58:11 to maximizing longevity is removing these foods from your diet. 58:16 I completely agree, because if you think about, you know, 58:20 the two main causes of death, like by far and away 58:24 in the United States, cardiovascular disease and cancer, 58:28 both huge, very, very powerful 58:32 links to both obesity and diabetes. 58:36 Diabetes much more strongly because of course, that's 58:38 a much more serious health condition. 58:41 But you see, like there's tons of data showing 58:45 that there's obesity associated cancers, including extremely important ones 58:50 such as breast cancer, colorectal cancer, pancreatic cancer. 58:54 So very, very strong link between obesity and cancer, very, 58:58 very strong link between diabetes and cardiovascular disease. 59:01 So clearly, since those are the two sort of dominant diseases of our day, right. 59:08 You know, 59:08 100 years ago we'd be talking about, I don't know, TB or something like that. 59:12 Right. 59:12 But you know, of, of this modern era, those are the things we have to focus on. 59:18 And, you know, I thank you for sort of bringing your hard 59:22 science hard nosed coach to a lot of these fields 59:27 because it's opened a lot of people's eyes and bleeding mine. 59:30 And, you know, I think that's, you know, thank you so much for being here. 59:34 And thanks for having such a great conversation about this. 59:36 I really enjoyed it. Again. Thank you Jason. 59:40 Thank you for tuning in to Doctor Talks. 59:42 We hope today's episode has enlightened 59:44 and inspired you on your path to optimal health. 59:47 Each day is a new opportunity to make choices but empower your wellbeing. 59:52 For more insights and strategies, subscribe to our podcast 59:55 and visit our website.www.drtalks.com. 1:00:01 Stay connected, stay healthy and join us next time on Doctor Talks. 1:00:06 Real talks from real doctors on the issues that matter to you most.
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