0:01 Defeat Diabetes Low Carb Program

01:06 Nina Teicholz & Dr Brukner introduction

01:39 Nina's book "The Big Fat Surprise" 

05:04 History of the saturated fat

05:33 Ancel Keys and his diet-heart hypothesis 

06:13 The American Heart Association

07:54 Ancel Keys' Theory and the Seven Countries Study.

09:42 Questions about the Seven Countries Study

11:42 Research that emerged after Ancel Keys.

12:17 Saturated fat and heart disease 

13:12 Why some studies were ignored 

15:42 Recent studies on saturated fat and heart disease. 

17:36 Possible reasons for the resistance to change

20:23 History of vegetable oils 

22:33 Replacing saturated fat with vegetable oil

25:48 Criticism of current understanding of seed oils

28:12 Why they are called seed oils

28:28 Disconnect between science and public health recommendations 

33:28 Shaking up dietary guidelines

36:32 Nutrition Coalition and changes to dietary guidelines

37:38 Success in getting Congress to acknowledge the issue 

38:32 The power of food and pharmaceutical industries 

39:34 Resistance to considering new evidence

40:15 Good cooking oils + fat and weight gain.

44:10 Difference between Atkins, keto, and low carb

46:30 Key topics for high school nutrition education

49:57 Veganism as an eating disorder

52:30 Red meat and health

54:03 Unsettled science and future work

Dr Peter Brukner (00:02.392)
Hello and welcome to this Defeat Diabetes webinar. Wherever you may be around the world, we're delighted to have you there. And our very special guest today is Nina Teicholz, who's in New York and it's quite late in the evening in New York. So Nina, thank you for staying up and spending this time with us. Welcome.

Nina Teicholz (00:02.393)
Thank you, Peter. It's great to be here.

Dr Peter Brukner (00:02.395)
Right, well, Nina has actually been a very important person in my life and in my journey. I read this book, Big Fat Surprise, which I still think is the best book ever written on this topic. And I was horrified to realize today, it's 10 years ago, Nina, my gosh, how time flies. And this book had a huge influence on not only myself, but I think thousands of other people. And we'll talk about the journey.

We always start, by asking you to sort of tell us your journey, your story. How did you finish up writing The Big Fat Surprise?

Nina Teicholz (01:35.79)
Well, I do not have a background in nutrition or I now have a PhD as a result of all my work in this field but when I started I would I am a journalist I worked on our national public radio art and and then I was doing Freelance writing for a number of places. So I was given a story to write about trans fats in the early 2000s and this is nobody had heard of trans

Nina Teicholz (01:35.82)
Fats and I certainly hadn't and I did a story on trans fats that was hugely influential in starting the whole conversation on trans fats and landed me a book contract to write a book about trans fats, which it was almost a decade later, I produced a book and it was not all on trans fat. I mean, it was the book that Dr. Bruckner showed you, but it was I ended up writing about really all dietary fat, but because that is what I personally and all of us have so focused on, good fat, bad fat, low fat diet. mean, it's been like the hallmark of our thinking about what is a healthy diet. And what I discovered in the course of reading thousands and thousands of papers and interviewing hundreds of scientists really all over the world was we really seem to have gotten it upside down and backwards about fat. so

Blue the central my book tells kind of the whole story of how we got into thinking that, you know, fruits, vegetables, whole grains, low fat diet, why that was healthy and how that came to be, how we came to believe that really focuses on the saturated fat idea, this idea idea that saturated fats in meat and dairy are bad for your health. It really investigates that history and kind of turns it on its head. And then I also.

Really did I think the first deep dive into how vegetable oils, you we're supposed to replace saturated fats. So what did it, you know, what are these oils and why are they not as good for us as we, we've always believed in other words, like the fats we've always thought are bad or good and the good fats we've always thought are good are not so good. you know, along the way I solved my own health issues, which were not draconian, but, you know, I definitely got health error.

Healthier learning how to eat completely differently than the way I had been taught my whole life. So yeah, that book's come out almost a decade ago now. And I've done other things since having to do with trying to change dietary policy. I don't know if we want to get into that, but I'm still in the field and I'm still a journalist.

Dr Peter Brukner (03:50.476)
Yeah, we will get into that later on. But I want to go through the whole sort of the history, I guess, of the whole saturated fat saga. And that's what I want to focus on, certainly for the first part. And I want to go back to the 1950s, where people were a lot healthier than they are now. And they were eating plenty of saturated fat. And they weren't having all the issues that we have today with chronic disease and heart disease and diabetes and so on.

What changed? Where do we go wrong? Take us back...

Nina Teicholz (03:50.480)
I mean, that's a very good place to start because because really in the 1950s, what we were seeing all over the world, but especially in the United States, is the rising tide of heart disease, which had come pretty been known, but extremely rare in the early 1900s and had risen to be the number one killer in America. And in 1955, President Eisenhower has a heart attack... is out of the Oval Office, his office, for 10 days. And the whole nation is fixated on this question, what causes heart disease? Nobody knew. And there were a number of viable theories that people were proposing. Serious scientists, vitamin deficiency was one, the rising tide of auto exhaust with increasing number of cars on the road, the idea of a type A personality, somebody who runs, know, the businessman who runs around yelling at everybody and then has a heart attack.

These were all viable theories, but into this vacuum of understanding or non-understanding steps, one man, Ansel Keys, from the University of Minnesota, a professor there, and his idea was that it was saturated fat and dietary cholesterol that raised your blood cholesterol, your serum cholesterol, like hot oil down a cold stovepipe, sort of clogging your arteries and giving you a heart attack.

Nina Teicholz (05:48.758)
and that was called the diet heart hypothesis. And Ansel Keys was this incredibly persuasive, aggressive and persistent man who had an unfailingly strong belief in his own ideas. He was able to get himself onto the key committee at the American Heart Association, which is the only group in the world really dealing with this issue or the most prominent one.

Within a year he gets them to issue a statement. So this is in 1961. The American Heart Association says, people should avoid saturated fat and cholesterol cut back on meat and dairy as the best measure of prevention against heart disease. In the same year, Ansel Keys is on the cover of Time Magazine. And boom, that is the little acorn from where all of our advice today now stems was that recommendation by Ansel Keys.

Dr Peter Brukner
And did he have any science behind him?

Nina Teicholz
Yes, so at the time, what was the science? Very, very tiny amounts, very short term, tiny trials on humans. And then one big study called the Seven Country Study, which I really went into enormous in enormous detail in my book and interviewed all the people around that who are now all passed away. That was a study that followed almost 13000 men, only men in seven countries, mostly in Europe, but also in the US and Japan.

Nina Teicholz (07:21.134)
and he followed them. measured, he went out in the field. It was a pioneering study because nobody had ever done this before. And at such a scale, he went out, he measured the blood cholesterol of these men. He tried to measure their diets. It turns out not very effectively, but he thought he was measuring their diets. And then he waited to see who would die of a heart attack and who would die of other diseases. And they followed these men for 15, 20 years. So at the time of this,

American Heart Association statement, that study was really only like five years underway and had not been published. It would not be published until 1970. But he would go around talking about it. And literally scientists I interviewed said, look, there was Ansel Keys, he had 13,000 men, you know, that he was following, and the rest of us had nothing. And so he was able to really argue anybody to... to the death is what his colleagues said about him. So there was science underway, but it was incomplete. And eventually when the study was published, what they found is what Ancel Keys had intended to find because he already believed this theory very strongly, which was that there was a correlation seemingly between the amount of saturated fat these men ate and their likelihood of dying from heart disease. But the data is hugely inconsistent those findings. You know, it was not true within countries. Like it wasn't true in Corfu, but it was true in Crete. It wasn't true in one town in Finland, but it was true in another town in Finland. So it was inconsistent data. And there were a number of other problems with the study. I'd go through those and we could talk about them more if you'd like. But the main problem with this study is the same problem that exists with many of the headlines that you see in newspapers and magazines today, which is that it's a study even though it's a lot of people, seems big, but it only shows associations. It does not show cause and effect. It doesn't show that saturated fat causes heart disease. Only a randomized controlled clinical trial can do that. That's why we have those kinds of tests for drugs. So it was a weak form of evidence, and that's just the way the study was constructed and the way all these so-called observational studies are constructed.

Nina Teicholz (09:46.232)
So they only show association. It turned out in a later publication of the seven country study that sweets and sweet things, meaning, know, sugars and desserts were more strongly associated with cardiovascular deaths. So, but that finding didn't come out till much later. And everybody still writes and talks about the seven country study. As if it was saturated fat. And it remains, I think, the most highly cited study in the history of nutrition science. It was enormously influential. It was like the big boom of nutrition.

And you say from that came the diet heart hypothesis, the diet heart theory, which we've basically all been living with for last 60 years or so. But what about after that? mean, what did the science or what evidence emerged after that that might have contradicted the answer piece of theory?

Yeah, so that's a good question because what happened in the 60s and 70s is that really governments around the world adopted Ancel Keys's theory. It wasn't just the US and it was because or scientists, let's say adopt this idea strongly because again, there was just it was the only really strong theory out there, but they scientists were also aware that there wasn't any rigorous evidence to support it. So governments around the world spent

What today would be billions of dollars in large randomized controlled clinical trials on saturated fats, like exactly the kind of evidence that you would want to show cause and effect. There's altogether like 76,000 people were tested in experiments lasting up to eight or nine years. So these are big, huge experiments that were taking place. And many of them, I wouldn't say many, because...

Nina Teicholz (11:43.976)
These are called the core trials now by people in the field. But some of them were done in mental hospitals where they're controlling all the food. So it's the kind of experiment that you couldn't do today. wouldn't be considered ethical. But back then, they were able to control all the food that people were eating. And so it was a well-done experiment. It was considered quite rigorous to do it that way.

So these experiments did not have the results that were expected. What they were called, you know, inconvenient, contradictory results, which is they did not support in most cases Ancel Keys's hypothesis. So what happened? What did they do? Well, in some cases, the studies weren't published. The biggest and best study that was done in the US, funded by the US government called the Minnesota Coronary Survey on this exact question.

It wasn't published for 17 years. And when the lead investigator was interviewed, he said, there was nothing wrong with the study. We were just so disappointed in the way it turned out. So it's like a conspiracy theory. It's just, you know, it's like selection bias, right? It's just, these scientists themselves really don't believe the answer to what they found.

Dr Peter Brukner
So how did it eventually become published then?

So eventually they published it. I think they had to because it was publicly funded and they published it in a very out of the way journal called ATVB. It's just the kind of journal that nutritionists normally don't read. And so they tried to stuff their results. And then there's an interesting twist on this much later, like in 2015, a team of scientists from the National Institutes of Health

Nina Teicholz (13:33.89)
they contacted the original researcher who was his son, because this man had passed away. They went into his basement and they found the original computer tapes that had all the original data from the study. And they analyzed them and they found out the result was even worse than they had thought. So I think in the ATVB paper, they reported there was no effect of a low saturated fat diet on cardiovascular disease. But it turned out that the more these men and women had successfully lowered their cholesterol, the more likely they were to die from heart disease. And they had not published that result, and it was only published in the BMJ in, I think, 2016.

Similar study in Australia, the Sydney Diet Heart study that had a similar story of not being published.

Dr Peter Brukner
Yes, I don't remember the story of that one. Maybe you do.

Nina Teicholz (14:40.79)
Yeah, it's a similar story that it wasn't published because they weren't happy with the results and which is, know, the exact opposite of what good science should be.

It is, and know, other studies came out, but they were ignored. You know, if you look at review papers, somebody actually did this kind of systematic look at all the review papers, and it turns out they found out that the studies that did not support the diet hard hypothesis were less likely to be cited in reviews, or they would be cited incorrectly. When I came to this field and I talked to scientists, they just, they talked about the studies, but they misrepresented the results.

They thought the results were more positive in favor of, you know, diet hard hypothesis than they were. It's like they had, they just recollected them wrong or so they never had the impact that they were supposed to. And there's another wrinkles of the story that is kind of even more disappointing, which is that after my book came out and another, another book by the journalist, Gary Taubes, who I think has been on this program. So after the information came out that there were these so-called core trials, after that all came to light, scientists around the world went back and looked at all these trials. So, and they said, my gosh, there's all this data and we haven't looked at it and we need to examine it again. And as a result, there are now 24 serious systematic reviews or what's called a meta analysis or by independent teams of scientists. So like really rigorous review papers of all these trials and all these review papers almost to a T, almost all of them say, these trials actually show that saturated fats have no effect on cardiovascular disease, heart attacks or stroke or cardiovascular mortality, death. And all those papers have been ignored by our authorities. I mean, it's really quite stunning. Something that I hope to write about actually I've been... soon because even the WHO came out recently and just ignored all the results from all the clinical trials, which is the most rigorous data that we have. So we're kind of going through, if you think that they originally these trials happened, then they were sort of buried buried or not published. And now over the last decade, it's like they reemerged and now they're being some sort of suppressed or ignored again.

Nina Teicholz (17:00.278)
And it's mind-boggling to me to watch it over this past decade. These papers come out and think, we're going to have a shift in policy. And then it hasn't happened, and in fact, the opposite.

Dr Peter Brukner
Why do you think that's happening? What's your sort theory on why scientists, supposed scientists, are ignoring the evidence?

Nina Teicholz
Well, that's kind of not a simple answer because I know that through my work in policy, I know that our policymakers know about all these review papers, these 24 review papers. I've been in direct contact with the people who have done the review for the WHO and all the reviews for the US dietary guidelines. So I know they know about these. It's not like they haven't seen them.

And they have expert committees to guide them and these people know about all this work. And so the answer is not that they don't know about them. They're ignoring this work, I believe, because number one,

This is at the core of all of our nutrition recommendations now for 60 years or no. Yeah, I can't do my 60 years. It's a very long time and there's a tremendous resistance amongst all these scientists who've spent all their careers with this one idea, proving it right again and again, all these institutions that have.

Dr Peter Brukner (18:16.714)
No.

Nina Teicholz (18:33.42)
really have bet all of their resources and enshrined this in policy for 60 years, I think it's almost impossible to reverse themselves on such an enormous issue. I think that's probably the main reason, the most charitable reason, which is just cognitive dissonance and kind of the rigidities that exist in every bureaucracy and in every person's mind.

And less terribly, you might say that there's huge industries that really all depend upon our dietary recommendations staying just the way they are. all the industries that profit from them, which shares basically all the ultra-processed foods, all the packaged processed goods, the cereals, all the grains, all those, they all benefit from them. despite the fact that everybody thinks the meat

and dairy industries are so powerful. In fact, they're not because they've lost out completely. So I think those are probably the two main reasons. Now we have added to them the whole campaign again for animal rights, which means people don't ever want to readmit meat into the healthy food column or any animal foods of really of any kind. And now we have to add to that.

Climate change reasons that are a very strong reason currently that I think many intellectuals and leading people do not want to even consider that meat might be healthy for you because they believe it poses such a challenge to the environment. So there are quite a lot of ideologies and interests and a lot of barriers to change.

We might come back to that, but I just want to go back a little bit and talk about vegetable oils. What everyone's recommended is that we replace the saturated fats, the animal-based fats, these so-called vegetable oils. Tell us a little bit about how they've evolved.

Nina Teicholz (20:47.15)
Well, this is not to flog my book, it is probably the best place to go to read about the history of how vegetable oils came into our food supply, which happened really with the introduction of Crisco in early 1900s. was first it was substitute lard, and then it was substitute butter in the form of margarine, and then it was oils themselves.

They came into our food supply initially because they were cheaper and they were easier to make and they were supported by huge advertising campaigns. And then they received a huge boost from Ansel Keys and the American Heart Association. One of the little bits of investigation that I did was to find out that the American Heart Association had been virtually launched by the makers of Crisco Oil, a company called Procter & Gamble.

And that they had long been donors to the American Heart Association. The president of the American Heart Association was pictured posing next to Crisco oil like an ad and his staff or his associates were angered by that and wrote to him about it. So yeah, I mean, it became this huge industry that so first it was cheaper and then it was marketed as a health

like a health product, almost like a medicine. There are ads, you know, take this ad to your doctor to lower your cholesterol. They were marketed to people as kind of medicine. They're still, I think, portrayed as kind of medically good, positive foods. Well, in all the core trials that I explained to you, it turns out that the people who had...

In all these trials, they replaced saturated fats with some kind of oil, right? So was mainly corn oil, soybean oil, maybe safflower oil, sunflower oil, but not olive oil, because that's a different type of oil. In all these trials, not only did they not protect people from heart disease, but the people on the high vegetable oil diets, and again, this is rigorous cause and effect evidence, all those, they had much higher rates of death from cancer.

Nina Teicholz (23:06.726)
And so that's quite a solid finding. And the National Institutes of Health was so worried about these findings from multiple studies in the early 1980s that they had three or four high level meetings gathering people together like Ancel Keys and his colleagues saying, what do we do about this cancer finding? And they developed a number of explanations which didn't really satisfy anybody.

And they just sort of concluded, well, we still believe that lowering cholesterol is so important for fighting heart disease. We'll just sort of put these cancer findings to the side. And that's where they have stayed ever since. But it's still an unexplained issue and it's supported by evidence from animal studies too. Like this finding that vegetable oils... leads to cancer is quite, I think, quite strong. Less strong is something else that I found, which is that these oils, it's a little complicated here, I won't get into it too much, but the whole reason that we had trans fats for a long time, do you still have them in Australia?

No, minute amounts, but no, not really.

They're gone, like in the US. But the whole reason they existed was that they were a byproduct of a process called hydrogenation that was meant to make the oils more stable. And that hydrogenation product had to be phased out when they banned trans fats. But that was to stabilize the oil. What happens when you no longer have a process to stabilize them? And this is something that's been known since the very beginning.

Nina Teicholz (24:48.898)
They are highly unstable, voluble substances. They oxidize extremely rapidly, especially in situations of heat, like in a restaurant fire or in your home kitchen where you're cooking with any of these oils. they oxidize. Remember, oxidation is why people take antioxidants because oxidation is really bad for your body. And oxidation drives inflammation.

So, and that is a known cause of heart disease. And also some of these oxidation products, which are literally hundreds of oxidation products, they're constantly mutating and evolving. They're called peri-oxidation products. One of them is something called an aldehyde, which is a that's a known marker for cancer. So this is something that I discovered because when I was writing my book, everybody would do it.

But he was in the process of getting rid of trans fats out of their restaurant fryers. And so they were terrified of going back to these unstable oils and they were saying, the oils in the fryers, they're adhering to the walls with these polymer, like paint-like substances. They had to develop new cleaners to get them off the walls. They were accumulating on the worker uniforms and they were so unstable, all these peri-oxidation products uniforms would spontaneously combust on the way to being in the truck on the way to being cleaned. And even after they had been cleaned, they would spontaneously combust in the dryers with the heat. So in all these oxidation products are entering our bodies. They are absorbed in the food. This has all been shown by, in the published literature, they absorbed in the food as many as 200 oxidation products in a single piece of fried chicken.

Enters your body, absorbed into the blood, passes through the blood-brain barrier into your brain, has all kinds of effects on your cells. So, I mean, this was like a real blockbuster finding. And it's since it's gone wild in sort of the social media internet world. And now they're called seed oils, which is a term that I brought to it.

Nina Teicholz (27:07.854)
the conversation because they're really are more they're made from seeds. They aren't made from vegetables. mean vegetable is it sounds good, but they're really they're made from soybeans, sunflower. mean soybeans, seeds, sunflower seeds, safflower seeds. I mean they're not made from vegetables.

So I think there's understanding out there that they're bad for you and they cause inflammation. But for all the science and the literatures and the studies, mean, all those studies exist to show that this is all real and substantial. So you can, and you can read about that if you have an interest. But they're low cholesterol, so it must be good.

Yeah, they do lower cholesterol. Yeah, I mean, they do reliably lower cholesterol, but that's, know, because they have phytosterols in them and they just they just replace the cholesterol on the cell wall, which really isn't I mean, your body, know, cholesterol is essential. I'm sure you've told your listeners here how essential cholesterol is to making hormones and really so many functions in your body, you really do not want to be taking cholesterol out of your body.

Exactly. So as you say, I mean, even though it's widely acknowledged that these, these, well, certainly by by the people we we look at, listen to that seed oils are not healthy, it's not reflected in what's happening out there in the supermarkets. Process foods and ultra processed foods are all content, all basically contain these, these seed oils.

Nina Teicholz (28:43.342)
They are, there's like a sort of guerrilla campaign against them, but there's almost no recognition in the scientific community. And that's because there's very little scientific, especially very little recent scientific literature published on them. And why is that? Well, because...

When I spoke to the few researchers in this field that exist that are really serious, nobody funds them. There are no conferences. Who's going to fund a conference? You conferences are funded by the food and the pharmaceutical industries and nobody wants to, nobody wants this news. Who doesn't want it? know, ADM, Unilever, Monsanto, many of the largest companies in the world either make these oils or as you say, all the ultra processed food companies.

Rely on these oils for their packaged products. So there's virtually no interest in trying to discover more of them. And then all the public health institutions, they don't want to reverse themselves on their, you know, the advice they've been giving for decades. Scientists don't want to know. Like they're not interested in discovering they're wrong on this topic. But I don't blame scientists for not.

talking about it because there is so little scientific research on this subject. I I think that my book is the most comprehensive sort of review of the literature still that I know of. So, and that's really not enough. I mean, as much as I like my book, it's not enough to sort of wave it around to a bunch of scientists, but it should have prodded research in the field.

Absolutely.

Nina Teicholz (30:35.192)
But again, I mean, one of the fundamental things to understand about this field, and this is sort of a little lesson on science, is that, you know, I'm the daughter of an engineer and I thought, wow, science just happens rationally and if we encounter different facts, people will discuss them and change their minds. But the way science happens is so radically different than that, especially in a field like nutrition where there's so many commercial interests. And the truth is that,

that the science that's been funded and promoted really is backed by very strong commercial interests. And so the few people that have tried to research in this field, they literally, I have quotes like, I found it was so unrewarding. I mean, I talked to scientists from the vegetable oil industry whose job it was to stand up in conferences and harass scientists who were publishing findings that were negative about vegetable oils.

It was their job to bully people basically in their field. And the scientists on the receiving end of that bullying became paranoid and didn't want to publish things and the bullying worked. And so that continues. I I will tell you, I've spoken to scientists who published recently vaguely in this field and they were...

they were in no uncertain way told to stay away from it if they wanted to still have their careers. So it's really a difficult field to move knowledge forward just due to the way it's sort of been captured by corporate and even ideological interests.

Okay, so I've just been appointed president of the United States and I have appointed Lena Tyshaw as my nutrition czar and said, do what you need to do in nutrition to make this country healthier. What are you gonna do?

Nina Teicholz (32:37.422)
Well, See Peter, I think you would do very well as president and I appoint you.

I'm too young. I'm too young

Why don't we do it together? That would be more fun. as having literally made recommendations to people in positions of policy and actually been considered for that job once, but not as president, but as the running nutrition.

Nina Teicholz (33:01.586)
So first of all, should drop the cap on saturated fats because that's not supported by the evidence. No longer recommend vegetable oils to replace saturated fats. There should be, there's currently in most dietary guidelines a recommendation for six servings of grains a day. So that is...

really, well, for people with diabetes, completely insane. And even for the rest of the population, it is very likely to promote metabolic disease. So I would eliminate any required servings of grains. And I would eliminate the recommendation that the the lower, the better in salt that is also not supported by the science. What has been found is that a moderate amount of salt is the best three to five

I'm going to get this wrong, so I'm not going to give a number, but it's really a moderate amount of salt. So too low, too low, too little salt is bad. There's a sweet spot in the middle and too high salt is bad, but right in the middle is fine. And the great thing about salt is that most people get to the right amount just by taste. We're pretty good at that. So you don't even need to measure or think about it. And then I would have zero sugar recommended a day. Currently we have up to 10 % of.

Calories are allowed is sugar. And then, so I mean, that alone would do so much to resolve many of our problems. I guess I would also, and what we've asked for and argued for is to have a low carbohydrate option for people with metabolic diseases. So if you have a metabolic disease, you really have a lower... tolerance of carbohydrates, as I'm sure your listeners know by now. But there should be a low carbohydrate option. now since in the United States, 93 % of us take medication or have some kind of metabolic symptoms. So that would be really most of us that should select that option. we really tried very hard.

Nina Teicholz (35:19.234)
just consider the science on the low carbohydrate diet. And I mean, it's a wild story of what happened, but they still have not.

I know the last few years through your nutrition coalition, you've been very active in trying to get the dietary guidelines changed. And we're going through a review at the moment in Australia of the dietary guidelines. And I'm fairly pessimistic as to how that might turn out as well. But tell us some of the things that you've been doing, both yourself and your organization over the last few years to try and make things healthier for Americans.

Well, I think it's important for me to say that I no longer work with Nutrition Coalition, but I was the founder. It started in 2015 and for a while I was the director. Its goal was not to promote any one diet, but simply to try to get our guidelines based on a more evidence-based, as we say, but based on more rigorous science, the product of a more rigorous process, because currently there's kind of no recognized methodology behind the guidelines.

And also to make them more transparent because they do not disclose conflicts of interest by the expert committee that reviews the science every five years. one of the papers that we did was came out was the first really rigorous review of one of those expert committees. We found that 95 % of the 20 person committee had some tie with food or pharmaceutical industry. And more than half of that committee had 30 such ties. So...

So what we accomplished is we got Congress to recognize that this was a huge issue. They spent $2 million funding for reports by the National Academy of Sciences, which is our highest scientific body in the land, really documenting all the problems with the lack of transparency, lack of proper methodology. That report included 11 recommendations for change. Our federal agencies rejected.

Nina Teicholz (37:18.73)
did not fully adopt any of those recommendations. They did a few little things on the margins. So we have not accomplished our goal, although we have a tentative win in a piece of legislation coming up that I can't talk about at this time. we also argued for the elimination of the cap on saturated fats and we... we couldn't even get them to look at the science. And the same is true for the low carbohydrate diet. And we really, I mean, our work was, it's not that we really didn't have an impact on them in the sense that we had the most comments in the public comment period urging them to consider the low carbohydrate science. had the most, really made a huge effort. had members of Congress writing letters. I mean, we really developed a lot of... of public awareness and certainly the government agencies were aware and they, you know, ultimately they just ignored our efforts. So that's why ultimately we had to turn to Congress to try to make a difference. I think that's the only way we might have some change because the federal agencies, they're captured by industry and they're also in some ways and they're really dug in on the existing policy.

So, you know, I can't say it's been a resounding success, but it is like trying to, you know, I was sort of single-handedly trying to move the Titanic. I mean, we had lots and tons and tens of thousands of supporters, but it is a huge embedded policy that's been operating now since 1980. And it's very, very hard to change. And the forces against us are really tremendous, so formidable. Really, you're talking about the entire food industry.

ltra-processed food industry and good chunks of the pharmaceutical industry. that's, you know, those are formidable opponents.

Dr Peter Brukner (39:24.078)
They certainly are. And look, it's, and I'm good to say it's very similar in this country. I mean, not on the bigger scale, obviously, but we have very much the same issues of the dietary guidelines, people just refusing to even, you know, look at the evidence of, you know, in relation to things like saturated fat. And the last time they did the dietary guidelines, which was 10 years ago now, 11 years ago now,

They absolutely refused to look at the issue of saturated fat or low carbohydrate diets and claimed that there was no new evidence. it was just, and it was run by the dieticians group who obviously had a lot of conflicts of interest and so on. But there's a process going on now. Maybe it'll change. I'm not sure, but let's hope so. But yeah, keep up the good work. I I understand how frustrating it must be for you to do that.

Look, we've got a whole heap of questions here. So I should stop talking myself and ask you some of these questions, which I'll just start going through some of those now, So one question is, what are the good oils to cook food in? And how does eating fat and butter and things not make us fatter? But let's start with the good oils. I mean, you've talked about the the problem oils, so things like soybean oil and canola oil and taffy and so on. What are the good oils?

Nina Teicholz
Really, it's the best oil is I think olive oil. And that's because it was called a mono unsaturated fat, means it only has mono is for one double bond. It's those double bonds in the oil that they open up and attached to oxygen under conditions of heat and even just light. So those other oils we talked about like canola, sunflower, safflower, they all are poly unsaturated fats, meaning they have multiple double bonds... mean, no oil is only one type of fatty acid, but I'm speaking now in general terms. So olive oil really is the only good oil to use. And still, wouldn't fry or it's not even great to use that in conditions of heat because that one double bond will oxidize. So really the best oils for cooking with and in heat are saturated fats.

The reason they're called saturated means they're saturated with hydrogens. And so there are no double bonds because every bond is saturated with hydrogen. there's no possibility of oxidation. So that's why tallow lard has more of those polyunsaturated fats or monounsaturated fats, but it's more saturated. So lard is good. But tallow, suet are good for... cooking coconut oil very high in saturates. So that one is good for using butter, ghee, are duck fat. Those are all good fats for cooking with.

So you think we can get McDonald's to go back to using their beef tallow the way they used to in the good old days?

Yeah, not maybe in our lifetimes, but.

Nina Teicholz (42:52.43)
You know, there was a taste test, I think they did a taste test and the tallow fried french fries won out over the ones cooked in vegetables. if that's a surprise.

Exactly. Surprise, surprise. mean, the good thing, saturated fat is tasty and good fats are tasty anyway. okay. Lynn wants to know what's the difference between Atkins and keto and low carb. I mean, do you have, you know, do you have a particular one you sort of, you know, follow yourself or, or advise or, it's just that you're all part of the same sort of spectrum really.

Well, there are differences in the terminology. So low carb is less restrictive and low carb sort of encompasses like this whole universe. Low carb is under about 100 grams of carbohydrates a day. Ketogenic and the early stages of the Atkin that's diet, which are ketogenic, we're supposed to start that way.

Are under 20 grams of carbohydrates a day, so it's much less. And really, how many carbs you can eat depends on your metabolic health and what you can tolerate and still lose weight or stay weight stable. There's another reason to go ketogenic and that is to... really completely shift over the body's fuel to ketone bodies, which are fat, you do use fat and then really, that the, normally your body functions on the glucose fuel, but if you're like a hybrid car, you can also function on these ketone bodies. And once you develop the capacity to be in ketosis, which takes a little while, and there, and what they've discovered is that being in ketosis has its own benefits.

Nina Teicholz (44:51.806)
And I know you've had Georgia eat on that's a particularly powerful fuel source that changes up things for people who with psychological issues. mean, it's, it's been kind of spectacular in helping people reduce depression, anxiety, even schizophrenia, bipolar disorder. I mean, it's had some remarkable early pilot at the stage of like early studies, but still it's very, it's really striking how powerful it seems to be for people's mental health. then it the other, turns out these ketone bodies have other signaling mechanisms to other cells that may help with cancer. So I think, you know, I think there's kind of no reason not to go ketogenic except for not people don't want to eat that. Many people don't want to eat that way and they want to keep some carbohydrates in their diet. And if your body can tolerate that, I think that's fine.

Sure. Okay, here's an interesting one from Ryan who's a high school nutrition education teacher. What are the top three topics or concepts I should teach my students? High school students.

Well, that's such a great question. I think it's really important for young people to learn how important animal foods are because there's such strong messages out there, especially for young girls to just stop eating meat. It's virtuous. Look, it's, you know, why eat meat? I didn't eat meat for 25 years when I was a teenager and I know the pressure is much greater now.

I so wish that I knew now what I did then as a young person. the fact that just the absolute importance of all the nutrients in animal foods, how you cannot obtain them from plant foods, how crucial those nutrients are to the basic health of your body. I mean, it's...

Nina Teicholz (46:54.072)
Like you will suffer from neurological problems, all kinds of problems and eventually chronic disease if you're not getting all these nutrients. telling kids that meat and regular dairy and eggs are really crucial to their health. I think those messages are absolutely crucial. Making sure they're getting enough protein, especially for growing young people, especially boys. But I mean, all young people need more.

Probably double the recommended amount of protein every day. And then telling them not to fear fat. Fat is crucial and important for health. And then the last thing I would teach kids is to, would put glucose monitors on all of them. I would tell them to try to avoid spiking their blood sugar because that's the way that you understand. I those blood sugar spikes, are indicative of so many bad things that are happening when you put sugars and starches in your body. And, you know, for kids, you can tell them if you reduce your, you if you bring down those carbohydrates, people's acne goes away. That's motivating. They'll lose weight. That's motivating to some people. I mean, you can speak to them as a love, but at the level that they, you know, they're the way that's important to them, but also people who, you know, it helps improve... improve focus, mental focus, get rid of brain fog, improve mood. So all those things can be motivating. And that all happens when you take down carbohydrates a little bit, which, you know, saying reducing blood sugar spikes is just a way of saying, bring down carbohydrates.

One of the arguments that people use in teenage, particularly female teenagers, young girls, is, you know, now we can't restrict any food groups because that's going to lead to eating disorders.

Nina Teicholz (48:51.256)
I think, yeah, I mean, I just think that's completely unfounded. Tell me that veganism is not an eating disorder. That's a nutritionally deficient, insufficient diet. If that is an eating disorder, I don't know what is. I I think that's just a made up, there's no evidence for that. And you know, what causes eating disorders is people worrying and thinking about food all the time. Really, that's, know having, been one of those people, like obsessing about food because you're hungry. That's what happens when you try to restrict calories, eat a low fat diet. If you tell people to eat meat, full fat dairy, regular dairy, eggs, cooked in butter, they're not going to get hungry. Hunger is what, and so they're not going to obsess about food. The key reason to go on this diet is to not obsess about food so you don't have to... think that way anymore, the way that people's minds are obsessed about food, what am I going to eat next all day long? That is what causes eating disorders. So I think a diet that eliminates hunger is the greatest thing for liberating people from eating problems.

And just finally on red meat. Red meat gets a bad run at the moment. mean, you know, it causes cancer, it causes this, it causes that and so on. What's the evidence?

There's no rigorous clinical trial evidence to show that meat is bad for health period. Those clinical trials haven't been done. It's all this weak associational evidence. don't care how many studies it is. It's, you know, if they're all weak, it's bias repeated over and over and over and over again is not evidence. So there, there simply are no rigorous studies. And I, you know, just an analysis of the red meat and cancer decision. I mean,

Nina Teicholz (50:45.09)
That decision was made by a group of people who had collectively, they had been publishing for 25 years on average, anti-meat papers, almost every single person on that panel. All the people who ran that for the WHO, one participant estimated, he said one quarter of them by his estimate were all vegetarians. I mean, there's no rigorous evidence there. And that is really a shocking story.

I mean, red meat has been has really been so thoroughly vilified that even if I talk about the evidence, people don't hear it because they've just absorbed so much negativity about meat. I think it's kind of beyond repair. And if you say meat is actually a super health food, that's something that people can't really even process. You know, it's incredibly nutrient dense. There's no sugar glucose in it.

Readily efficient way to get your day's protein. it really has, it's, the way that it red meat has been vilified is kind of a fascinating and horrifying story, but really it's a very, very healthy food. That's sort of the bottom line.

Yeah, it seems crazy to blame, you all the modern diseases on an ancient food. I mean, surely it's some of the modern foods that are causing all these issues at the moment. But anyway, we won't convince some people... quote from a British sea captain from like the 1700s, or Dr. Keith. Actually, he was a doctor who was on an expedition. He traveled around and he visited all these kind of remote populations and none of them had any disease. And then he came back to his home in England where everybody was putting sugar and tea four times, five times a day. And he said, it's crazy to blame all these modern diseases.

Nina Teicholz (52:42.987)
On an ancient food. Some things never change. Look, we're nearly out of time there. There's a couple of things. mean, tell us a little bit about what you're doing now. I love your substack you do with Gary Taubes, Unsettled Science. How did that come about?

Well, when I decided to try to do more journalism, I wanted just a place to publish. There's a platform called Substack, which has really stood up and is not allowing itself to be censored at all. So there are quite a few journalists there whose work is less welcome in the mainstream press, even though I've published in the New Yorker and the...

New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Economist. I I've had a lot of work in mainstream publications, but it's a hard, long road to get there. And I just want to be able to publish things more efficiently. So I started doing this column. It's called Unsettled Science. It's about weekly, we cover the news of the week. A study comes out saying something causes heart disease, and we review it.

And then we also published pieces about, well, Gary tends to write more about sort of the nature of scientific evidence. And I'll do something like, why chicken is not good to eat, not better than red meat or more practical things. But I've done a lot of the investigative pieces too, sort of pulling back the curtain on where the money is, who's funding, which scientists, why their work is turning out like this, if they happen to be funded by Beyond Meat.

Nina Teicholz (54:27.246)
Or, you know, I do, try to reveal the forces behind some of our nutrition headlines because nobody else is doing that work. I mean, in every other field of journalism, sort of you're taught to follow the money, just doesn't happen in nutrition. So I feel like it's really important to get some of this work out there.

Yeah, I can certainly recommend it. love whatever pops up in my and my email. I have a smile and look forward to reading. It's fascinating reading both yourself and Gary and others. have other experts as well doing things. It's terrific. So what is the next couple of years hold for? You mentioned a book. Is that going to happen or you're too busy doing your politicking?

No, no, no, I'm not doing anything more in Washington, D.C., but I am, I might write a book about the of the whole story about how red meat has been vilified just to stick my head onto the third rail and then I'll be gone forever.

Dr Peter Brukner
Very brave. I mean, think, you know, anyone who's written on the topics you've written on needs a lot of courage. And that's what journalism always used to be. Unfortunately, nowadays, you as you say, it's it's followed the money. But, you know, thank you for everything that you've done. I mean, for me personally, you know, it helped change my life. But, you know, much bigger than that, the effect you're having on literally thousands of people around the world. And I'm sure you'll continue to do so.

Thank you so much for staying up late in New York and we'll let you get off to bed now. you know, just can't thank you enough, Nina. It's been a pleasure.

Nina Teicholz (56:09.336)
Peter, it's really wonderful to see you and thank you for having me on and thanks to everybody who's listening or watching out there. I really appreciate it. And thank you for what you're doing in Australia.

Dr Peter Brukner
We're making some progress. As I mentioned to you a few weeks ago, we've just signed an exciting partnership with Diabetes Australia. It's the first time they've partnered with a diet group. So, yep, we're pushing on.

Nina Teicholz
We wrote about it in Unsettled Science.

Dr Peter Brukner
That must be why I like it so much. you very much. It's been a pleasure. Thank you. See you soon. night. Bye bye.