How The Real Truth About Health Gets Suppressed In Several Health Studies

while we’re here in this seven of you it’s very easy to feel like this is the consensus but when you go on the internet there’s all kinds of people and on youtube and i want to read you something um from someone who has her own following and um your response um nina tysholt’s author of the big fat surprise why butter meat and cheese belong in a healthy diet wrote the following ronald m christ krauss decided in 2000 to review all the evidence purporting to show that saturated fats cause heart disease krause is director of arthrosclerosis research at children’s hospital oakland research institute and an adjunct professor of nutritional studies at the university of san francisco at berkeley kraus concluded in 2010 after reviewing all the scientific literature that saturated fats could not be said to cause heart disease in march another group of scientists including faculty from cambridge and harvard came to the same conclusion after conducting a similar meta-analysis for instance the masai worries in kenya were observed in the 1970s eating nothing but meat milk and blood not a vegetable in sight if they were not overweight their cholesterol levels remain low even as they aged and scientists could find no evidence of heart disease despite conducting electrocardiographs on 400 of them in india researchers studied a million railway workers and found that those in the north ate 8 to 19 percent more fat mainly from dairy products than their coworkers in the south yet the northerners lived in average 12 years longer this disparity led the study authors to conclude in a 1967 paper that to prevent heart disease people ought to eat more fermented milk products such as yogurt yogurt sherbet and butter half a world away scientists observed 80 percent fat they should have been in a wretched state wrote vladimir steffensen the harvard trained canadian anthropologist who lived in the in inuit for years but to the contrary they seem to be the healthiest people i ever lived with the best possible science from the past decade now indicates that too many carbs overall even of the supposedly healthy whole grain kind increase the risk of these disease diseases compared with the diet low in carbohydrates in other words too much whole grain cereal for breakfast and whole grain pasta for dinner with fruit snacks in between add up to a less healthy diet than one of the eggs sausage followed by fish our dietary guidance has been followed by the followed the ansel keys view for 50 years now despite a half a billion pounds spent trying to prove this hypothesis the evidence of its health benefits have never been produced meanwhile the rates of obesity and diabetes are rising and heart disease remains a leading cause of death your thoughts

all right i’d be happy to take that on although um there’s about 25 things you mentioned there i can’t be sure that i can remember all of those but the main points uh that uh yes dr kos is a colleague and actually some of very early papers were with our data and on small ldl particles but that particular paper that you mentioned does bring up a very important issue in any kind of study be it an epidemiologic study or a randomized controlled study that the comparison always is really important and will affect the results and in the kind of analysis that most people did actually until not too long ago if they were looking at something like red meat in the diet they would look at red meat compared to everything else in the diet and we already heard i can’t remember who said it that that the average american diet quality is really low that only about two and a half percent uh have an optimal diet by some criteria by the dietary guidelines only five percent of americans meet the dietary guidelines uh we’ve scored the national diet it gets about 50 out of 100 score in our in our business that’s a pretty low f so if you’re comparing red meat with that rest of the diet and you don’t find any difference it means that red the red meats as bad as the rest of the american diet which is a huge amount of refined starch sugar and until recently a lot of trans fat as well so the real issue is red meat compared to what we would think would be a healthy diet that would be predominantly plant-based protein sources like nuts legumes soy products etc with lots of fruits and vegetables and whole grain and when you do that kind of analysis red meat raises ldl and randomized controlled trials and also we see very clearly in the epidemiologic studies is related to higher risk of cardiovascular disease now ron krause and also the paper more recently that you mentioned couldn’t do that kind of analysis because they were that was a meta-analysis summarizing published papers and those published papers had not done that kind of appropriate comparison looking at a healthy alternative not just the rest of the junky american diet and that that’s a fundamentally important point i know collins made that point earlier on too that the the comparison is is critically important whether it’s an observational epidemiologic study or a randomized trial the comparison uh determines uh to a very heavily uh heavy uh degree then what you’ll have is the outcome uh so a lot of these other sort of anecdotal uh comparisons uh the eskimos uh for example inuits uh that in reality we don’t really know what their health was that the best data we have is that they didn’t live i haven’t been living very long so but we just simply haven’t had good records human beings are remarkable we can survive and reproduce on an incredibly wide range of diets we are adaptable we’ve um our evolution has equipped us to exist for a while and reproduce on a very wide range of diets uh but that doesn’t mean that they’re going to be optimally healthy if we want to be living to age 70 or 80 with the best function uh that we that we possibly uh can uh so i think those those kind of anecdotal comparisons uh maybe get us started they ask questions that raises intricate interesting questions about uh that what uh inuits have been eating and their health conditions but it really is uh if you want she’s been critical of epidemiologic studies but she raises the crudest kind of epidemiologic study to to try to make a point now she also raised the point about carbohydrates versus fat and there’s a now a huge amount of data to say that the percentage of calories in the in the diet from fat is really not important uh all kinds of studies but the quality of the fat and the quality of the carbohydrate is very important um the plant source is of fat are have positive health values um and uh and the quality of the carbohydrate whole grains especially in tactile grains have a very different effect than refined starches do uh and in the studies from india there is a real issue uh in most of the diets around the world people are eating they are consuming too much carbohydrate probably in general uh often 80 of calories from carbohydrate and increasingly it’s refined carbohydrate so a lot of the a lot of what would have been consumed by the south indians there would certainly be very far from what we see as an optimal diet it would be very unbalanced until very recently very little fruit and vegetables and for the most part what we call poverty diet the cheapest thing which is a lot of carbohydrate and increasingly refined carbohydrate so we really can’t gain uh can’t conclude very much from that kind of study

i i i was really i was hoping walter would step up and go first with that i i was tempting to go with what a shocking load of rubbish kind of leave it at that but walter did a much better job but just a couple things to append in 2020 we no longer have the privilege of talking about diet for human health without considering environmental impact even even if it were true and it’s not but even if it were true that your diet could be optimal if you were eating red meat and high intake of saturated fat routinely if it’s going to destroy the planet frankly scarlet who gives a damn i don’t understand that blind spot in the carnivorous argument there are no healthy people there are no healthy people on a ruined ravaged planet it’s our one shared home all dietary discussions have to factor that in so completely omitted walter went over all of the epidemiology and i completely agree the one thing that i would append there’s a shibboleth in the mix here and that’s the notion and you hear it all the time from this particular writer and many others we’ve had this dietary advice to cut back on saturated fat for a long time and yet we’re fatter and sicker therefore the advice was wrong no we never took it and besides there’s more than one way to eat badly and the american public is totally invested in exploring them all so we never really cut back much on saturated fat but to whatever little extent we did we loaded up on snack wells we weren’t eating more broccoli robin lentils and so what we wound up with was a higher intake of total calories a high intake of refined carbohydrate and for the most part an excess of saturated fat relative to recommendations into the bargain you can’t say the advice was wrong if all of the data you have about bad outcomes pertain to people who never followed the advice in the first place and then in terms of why we never followed the advice pam i think that’s in your sweet spot because the marketing of all the junk food was highly effective right when we were fascinated with cutting fat if all there had been were wholesome natural foods to do it with maybe we would have eaten those but immediately we got snack wells and low-fat junk food when we became obsessed with cutting carbs there was a whole suite of low carb junk foods now you can have gluten-free junk food and you know basically you can have any flavor of junk food you want and that’s all marketed very successfully so we never followed any sensible guidance and for the most part we still don’t

i’ll i’ll add something to that as well i think that um a couple of things worth mentioning um one is that uh there was a recent study 2018 i think was seidelman’s group that that looked at carbohydrate intake and and and mortality risk and and in fact those eating the least amount of carbohydrate had a 32 percent increase in mortality uh the folks that had uh as a group the the the lowest mortality were consuming about 50 to 55 percent of calories from carbohydrates and then at the other end of the spectrum the people eating the most carbohydrates had about a 23 increase in risk however uh the the the research team said that that it was very clear that there was a segment of that group uh that had higher mortality that their carbohydrates were coming from refined foods and of course you can’t remove everything of value to human health from a food add a bunch of crap to it and expect it to support health that doesn’t happen but what was really interesting was that the the the other end of that high carbohydrate group was actually the lowest risk of mortality of all uh segments of of that particular population and those i would expect were the people that were getting their carbohydrates from foods that were packaged with fiber and phytochemicals and antioxidants and everything else and that and that study went another step and they they looked at replacing carbohydrates if you replaced carbohydrates with with animal protein you increased mortality 18 percent but if you replaced uh carbohydrates with plant protein you actually reduced mortality by 18 and that tells us something and then the second thing i would like to mention is people need to understand sometimes uh research can take a slant uh that that we might not necessarily recognize based on headlines butter is back and so forth i think one of the best summaries of what we know about the effect of fats on on human health and saturated fat in particular was the presidential report from 2017 and and and they concluded what we know saturated fat increases risk of heart disease but what’s really interesting uh was i remember when the 2014 childhood study came out um that that concluded that that saturated fat has been vindicated essentially and those studies that that that suggested saturated fat has been vindicated i don’t think any of them actually showed saturated fat has been vindicated rather if you replace saturated fat with refined carbohydrates you’re no further ahead if you replace saturated fat with polyunsaturated fat you are further ahead so those are the kinds of things that we learned from these studies but one of the things i thought was particularly interesting was i i realized that one of the authors or co-authors on that study had been a researcher with epic oxford and i i asked her i said can you can you explain the findings of this study well she said it’s very simple she said i had no idea that she she was involved in the beginning and she said in the beginning when they did this study we we found that there was a 19 increased risk in in heart disease uh with uh increased intake of saturated fat i can’t remember all of the details but she said the study was rejected by the journal we submitted it to so they so so the the elite author reworked the data removing uh certain things until there was a different result and the study was accepted and she said in no way does that study change anything we know about saturated fat and its impact on heart disease as far as i’m concerned and she was one of the co-authors we still need to be restricting saturated fat

that’s a very interesting story that the journal basically changed their conclusions and i heard that from another co-author on the paper and the other who is not uh who is not told by the primary author that they had basically changed the data and the conclusion and it’s very curious because it was the same journal in the same editor that just pushed this story about you can eat all the red meat you want to very interesting yeah that’s disturbing i just uh great comments by brenda and raised some good points about the studies just one thing she mentioned a presidential report that was the american heart association president it wasn’t trump [Applause] oh thank you yes [Music] exactly