Is Animal Fat or Meat Really Good For You? with Garth Davis, M.D.

Intro

you will hear all the time when you tell people this on the internet or whatever they’re gonna say well that’s a correlation study it’s not causation correlation does not equal causation it is a correlation study but here’s the thing there’s a lot of them there are a lot of correlation studies out there and where there is smoke there is fire and the funny thing to me is you might hear like Oh fats good for you now like oh butter is good for you you’ve heard this the people the people that will argue with the most the people I’ll tell you that butter is good for you and they’ll say that study that you just looked at that’s a correlation study but the whole foundation that butter is good for you comes from a correlation study the whole thing they’re so hypocritical in this manner and that correlation study was not done with the rigor that this study was and it was funded by dairy and egg and beef and they did all kinds of crazy statistical manipulations in order to show a correlation that didn’t even show that butter is good for you just so maybe it wasn’t as bad as we thought but it is that’s another topic

but I mean no matter what you look at with animal fat if you look at different countries the more they eat the more cancer they have and the more heart disease they have and when you look at the people that are

Gary Taubes

arguing that fat is good or that meat is good for you like Gary Taubes they’re not these are not scientists all right these are journalists they’re not practicing medicine Gary Taub has never sat across from a person and followed them for years trying to help them lose weight he doesn’t know that struggle and he says you need to eat like him to get fat well he looks pretty pica daily and he put his labs up on the computer because he wanted to show people how healthy he was eating fat and protein and the interesting thing is his protein levels are the same as my protein levels so he’s not he doesn’t have higher protein levels than I do but if you look up there where it says carbon dioxide his is at 19 which is low he doesn’t know what that means cuz he’s not a doctor what that means is his body is an acidosis its metabolic acidosis and what we know is that meat has more sulfur amino acids that are actually acidic to the body and your body has to try to buffer that acid and that creates all kinds of problems and so he’s not healthy he thinks those labs look healthy but he doesn’t know what that 19 means

in fact there have been many many studies looking at vegetarians looking at vegetarians that are getting plant-based proteins they’re not getting any animal-based proteins and you could see over there this is a meta-analysis where they looked a whole bunch of different studies and they concluded that the overall cancer incidence was significantly lower in vegetarians compared to meat-eaters

and in another

Metaanalysis

meta-analysis you could see that the plant-based eaters these are risks adjusted so if it’s less than one that means there’s a lower risk of it by percentages so like for lung cancer vegetarians had almost a 20% reduction in the risk of getting lung cancer but look at look at heart disease ihd is heart disease ischemic heart disease 0.76 a tremendous drop in the risk of heart disease in vegetarians

now people will tell you okay these are all correlation studies if we’re gonna prove anything we have to do a prospective randomized controlled trial because that is our gold standard the problem is you can’t do that with food I can’t take I mean it takes years and years and years to get heart disease it takes years and years to get cancer I can’t take a group of you and say you guys are gonna be vegan you guys are gonna eat a lot of protein for the next 20 years and 20 years later we’re gonna see the results it just can’t be done

they tried a one-year study which was called the A to Z trial and this is it and Atkins did the best with weight loss in the beginning but by a year and a half everyone had lost the same amount of weight and it wasn’t much weight loss so they concluded that Atkins was the best but it wasn’t that much better than all the others here’s the problem the Atkins people did do the Atkins diet in the beginning but then they started falling off of it like people always do the Ornish diet people you guys know the Ornish diet that’s the vegan diet in this study they never did it so it’s funny when you look at the data and you hate it the Ornish people they got about 20 grams of fiber a day that’s I don’t know if you guys have ever seen Ornish’s meal plans that should be 60 grams of fiber a day and their fat went from 35 percent to 30 percent so they dropped 5 percent fat 30 percent fat is not what awareness tells you to eat he tells you to eat 10 to 15 percent fat so they never followed an Ornish diet which drove Warner’s crazy and which makes the study really worthless basically says if people don’t follow a diet everybody gets the same result

and you know the funny thing about is like they’ll I mean this is all really complex to tell you but like they they did they compare these two studies okay and they were looking at people that were in ketosis is that people weren’t in ketosis and they wanted to look at how much fat was burned when they exercised and they saw that the people in ketosis burn more fat than the people that weren’t in ketosis and therefore you should be in ketosis could you gonna burn more fat with exercise oh okay well then I’m gonna go get ptosis wait a second they didn’t look so in the first study where they weren’t in ketosis there were 300 people in the study that they were in ketosis there were five people in the group that weren’t in ketosis they exercise for fifteen to thirty minutes in the other group they exercise for two hours two hours these were overweight untrained individuals these were cyclists that were trained so they’re it’s a totally different group Suki it’s comparing apples and oranges but to the lay person who doesn’t know any better they see this they say oh man I better go on ketosis and that’s how they fool you

and

Epidemiology

in fact we have to look at epidemiology because it’s our best examples and there have been some unbelievably fantastic huge epidemiologic studies like the epic study the epic study looked at ten countries five hundred thousand people they followed for 12 years with meticulous analysis and what do they find well again they find that vegans have the lowest weight they find funny enough when you look at weight that meat is one of the biggest indicators of gaining weight and you know what meat is the biggest indicator of gaining weight chicken chicken is the biggest risk of caning weight which be in America I tell patients that they’re like what what are you talking about chickens are health food yeah we eat a lot of chicken in this country right we’ve more chickens than any other country in the world how’s it working for us and why is that I don’t you know it might be the growth hormones they’re feeding the chickens it might be that there’s changes in the microbiome it might be the estrogens but all I know is we’re eating a lot of chicken and we’re getting fatter and there’s pretty good evidence that chicken is associated with weight gain chickens also associated incidentally with lymphoma risk and you could see that again because as our chicken consumption has gone up so as our lymphoma

Diabetes

the other thing they found was that meat was very strongly correlated with diabetes specifically animal protein plant protein not so much as you see there the red line stays stable animal protein the more animal protein you ate the increased risk of getting diabetes because meat is actually a very big risk factor for diabetes it’s probably the biggest risk factor for diabetes now in these studies again they control for weight which is kind of crazy because weight is a big indicator for diabetes and we know that vegans have the lowest weight but still people have the wrong concept of what causes diabetes diabetes is caused because of intra Maya cellular lipids which means fat gets into the muscle cells when they get into the muscle cells they block the ability of the muscle cell to create insulin receptors if you don’t have insulin receptors you can’t process insulin if you can’t process insulin sugar can’t get into the cell you can’t utilize sugar so you eat something with sugar your sugar goes shooting up and you say sugar is the problem sugar is not the problem your body’s ability to process the sugar is the problem and the body can’t process the sugar because there’s too much fat in the muscle

so in the

Epic Study

study in the epic study they looked at it as a whole and they said if you decrease your saturated fatty acid consumption by just 5% and replace that 5% with fructose which we think is poison here in America you drop your risk of developing diabetes by 30% a 5% reduction substitute with fructose 30% glucose consumption you would they were studying this big group of people I say whoever ate the most glucose you would think would have the most diabetes no the opposite they had less of a risk of diabetes starches and sucrose are neutral so it’s absolutely opposite of what we think but you got to remember what we think isn’t working very well and it’s a pretty good study and you could see it in real-world examples like if you look at China their diabetes risk is going through the roof and you know what else is going through their roof their meat consumption

the Pima Indians were a great example of this the Pima Indians lived in Arizona on a river and that river was dammed up now before that rivers dammed up that grew starches they ate but squash and potatoes and beans and they didn’t have any diabetes we dammed up their river and we said or sorry here is some meat subsidy and some junk food and now they have the highest rate of diabetes anywhere and if you look at their genetic relatives in Mexico they don’t have diabetes because they’re still eating squash in maize and things like that

now in any kind of thing there’s

Neal Barnard Study

epidemiologic studies but you’ve got to take those epidemiologic studies and then you got to have a mechanism of action so with diabetes we said okay look there seems to be that there’s a correlation between meat and diabetes and we think that’s because there’s fat inside the muscle cell but can we do a randomized controlled trial to prove that and so Neal Barnard did a study boy that’s not coming through really well but he did a study and he randomized people and he gave them like for breakfast here for breakfast they’re eating toast oatmeal and a cantaloupe I mean that’s like the opposite of what the American hard I attaked edek Association would eat and he’s giving them a lunch with fruit and brown rice and vegetarian chili dinners minestrone snack is an apple an apple and a banana and and so um yeah he’s giving them fruit in grains and this is exactly opposite and then he compared them to people that were on the American Dietetic Association and interestingly there’s been a lot of studies showing fruit is excellent for diabetes actually improves diabetes in cereal fibers actually excellent and improves diabetes

and so when he does a randomized control trial what does he find well the blue line are the people on the that diet the vegan diet the red line are the people on the American Dietetic Association you could see there’s a significantly more drop in blood sugar in the group that’s on a vegan diet

so the epic study concluded with they had a great study that kind of try to tie everything together I had mentioned this yesterday five servings of fruit and vegetables saves you four years not smoking saves you five years you do moderate exercise it gives you three you do all of those you at 10:00 without alcohol 14 years of added healthy life