#186: The Big Fat Surprise featuring Nina Teicholz
Nina, thank you so much for joining me.
Nina:It's really great to be here.
Brett:Yeah. This is my first in person episode without my partner in crime too. Oh, wow. Yeah. But Flying solo.
Brett:We are flying solo. But it's it's fun every once in a while just to do, like, the solo episodes because it just gives the guest and the listener a different dynamic too.
Nina:You won't get to play, like, Cheech and Chong off of each other. I know. We'll try to do that ourselves.
Brett:Exactly. Well, we can we can do it. But, I was saying this before we recorded. You've been a huge bucket list guest for us, and we've wanted to had you on the podcast since we started the show in March of last year.
Nina:Thank you.
Brett:And it's so it's cool when you identify, like, your list of dream guests and you start to, like, check them off and build relationships with them. It's one of the cool things about social media if you do it the right way. Twitter for us was such an amazing connection point And how I first got acclimated with you and your work through the big fat surprises, I had my experience going carnivore in 02/2019. I had some really bad gut issues that I was trying to heal. And by eating animal protein and saturated fat, I felt the best that I'd ever felt, and I had gotten off all the drugs and the medication I was on.
Brett:And I remember thinking to myself, okay. Everyone is telling me not to eat red meat, to eat more carbohydrates, sugars, things like that. I felt terrible. I got really sick doing it. And then when I'm running towards these animal foods that are demonized, I feel really good.
Brett:Why is that? And then I started coming across some of the podcast appearances that you had been on. I then read the big fat surprise, and you did such an amazing job really, like, exploring the early roots of the demonization of these products, particularly meat, saturated fat, etcetera. So your book was really the thing that gave me, like, the science, the evidence, and the stories behind why our food system is the way it is and why meat is so currently demonized.
Nina:Well, that's great to hear. Yeah. I'm happy. Thank you.
Brett:Yeah.
Nina:I think it is important for people to see all the science amassed in one place Mhmm. And then have it also be readable. Mhmm. Right? Like, I mean, back when my book came out, The Economist called it a nutrition thriller, and I was like, isn't that an oxymoron?
Brett:Yeah. Yeah. Totally.
Nina:But it needs to be a story for people to real to understand it, and then it needs to really be documented so people can trust it.
Brett:Mhmm.
Nina:You know, mine is not the only book, but I I mean, I think it does do both those things.
Brett:Yeah. Well, the the interesting thing about you is, like, the carnivore movement has definitely gained a ton of speed the last few years, which is amazing. That's true. In 2019, it was a totally different environment. Now there are a ton of people that are going carnivore.
Brett:They're getting off all their medications. They're sharing their stories. That's amazing. Seed oils is so popularized. It seems like every time someone writes something about seed oils now, it gets so popular on Twitter, it blows up.
Brett:But you were I view you as, like, a decade ahead of everyone else because you started going down this rabbit hole in 02/2004 before anyone was talking about seed oils, anyone was talking about saturated fat. You were really the first person that brought a lot of this stuff publicly like that. Right? Started 02/2004. Right?
Brett:Well, 02/2004 is when I actually, I published an article. I mean, I wrote
Nina:an article on trans fats that I had been assigned by Gourmet magazine, and that became the magazine's most ever read piece in recent history, led to me getting a book contract. And that I was going to write a book on trans fats initially. And so I spent the first few years of my research talking to, oil chemists. Okay. So those are the people who study seed oils.
Nina:Mainly, they're in industry. I joined their professional society, and that's because trans fats are a byproduct of hydrogenating seed oils, which we used to do in this country now no longer. But it hardens those oils and stabilizes them. So I spent literally a couple years just going down the rabbit hole of seed oils. And I think that my book really was the first, really, the first effort to try to pull all the information together about where do seed oils come from, how did they go from being machine lubricants for the industrial revolution to a foodstuff in the form of Crisco starting in 1911.
Nina:How did they grow to become the fastest growing, item in our food supply over the twentieth century? Mhmm. And then I think I was the first to really document about the the fact of oxidation that they oxidize even at room temperature, but especially when heated, and that that oxidation then creates hundreds of, derivative oxidation products which drive inflammation. Mhmm. So all of that about seed oils being inflammatory, about them potentially causing, heart disease and cancer, the formation of aquiline, which is, you know, a known toxin that's in cigarettes, also aldehydes, another very scary known toxin that all of those are are kind of downstream oxidation products from seed oils.
Nina:Yes. So that was that became part of my book because, you know, if you take out saturated fats, what do we replace them with? It's these highly oxidizing inflammatory seed oils.
Brett:Is it true that, kind of how you really started going down the rabbit hole around, like, trans fats, saturated fats, seed oils, Like, you were eating at a lot of, like, French restaurants or you were eating a lot of, like, meat and cheese and butters, and you thought that you were gonna not feel great, but then you started noticing when you were incorporating these meals, you actually felt really good. Is that true? I feel like I heard that somewhere.
Nina:Yeah. So that story is that when I first moved to New York City, I sort of inherited this column to be a restaurant reviewer Mhmm. Where it was a little one of those throwaway papers that you get for free, so it had no budget. Yeah. So I would just have to I would eat whatever the restaurant or the chef decided to send out to me.
Nina:They knew I was a reviewer. I was not lying to them. So what did chefs this is, in the mid 2 thousands. You know, what did chefs want to send out to customers as their favorite dishes? They were red meat, foie gras, you know, various forms of, you know, creamy sauces.
Nina:I mean, that was still something that was still somewhat in vogue, and they were considered they were the priciest items on the menu. So things I really hadn't never eaten before. Like, I hadn't eaten red meat for some twenty, twenty five years. I had never had foie gras or any of that. I thought I thought they were delicious and rich and textured and earthy, these wonderful flavors I had really never had before.
Nina:I thought I was gonna have a heart attack, of course. Of course. Yeah. I went to my doctor. He was like, look.
Nina:Your cholesterol numbers look better than ever, which was this weird mystery paradox. And I was somehow losing weight even though I was going out to these massive restaurant meals. So that was just another question mark in my mind. Like, how is this even possible? So that was all kind of coming together and feeding my mind as I was also researching about dietary fat and and, you know, different kinds of fat.
Nina:From trans fats, I branched out. Right? So I started research. What about the low fat diet? And what about good fats versus bad fats?
Nina:And why do we think these seed oils are good fats?
Brett:Yeah.
Nina:Like so I just went back to some of that, you know, the original story of, like, well, how do we even think that fat is bad for us?
Brett:Interesting. So do you think that your mindset as an investigative journalist is you're saying to yourself, okay. I'm eating these foods that are demonized. I haven't eaten it in twenty, twenty five years. I feel really good, and my blood levels, my cholesterol is improving.
Brett:Like, maybe there's a story here, and I need to go a little bit deeper. Was that kind of the mindset around that?
Nina:Yeah. It's part of what propelled me into it just opened my mind to the possibility that everything that I had thought to be true might not be. I mean, I think that's a really interesting and important kind of psychological point because our thoughts about food are so deeply, strongly ingrained in us, and then we don't even understand where they came from. Why did I not eat red meat all those years? I sort of vaguely thought, well, this is bad for me and probably it'll make me fat even while I was having enormous trouble controlling my weight and and gained a lot of weight, and and I thought, well, at least I'm not eating red meat.
Nina:It would be worse.
Brett:Yes.
Nina:But how deeply those thoughts are part of us and particularly with food, which is, you know, these are ideas that we have that we confirm two or three times a day. So it is almost like a religion to you. You practice it. You know, you only go to church once a week, but you eat three times a day. So, it it's hard to it's very hard to open your mind when you have spent your whole life doing something and practicing in one way.
Brett:Mhmm.
Nina:Yeah. So that restaurant those restaurant experiences were just one way of, like, kinda opening a chink in my mind.
Brett:It's so interesting. It's also fascinating to your point, just talking to other people about their perceptions of what is healthy food versus what is not healthy food. Because, like, similar we we had similar experiences where we both started eating more red meat. We felt really good. And then you tell other people about this, and they're like, oh, no.
Brett:I don't I don't eat red meat. And you ask them, you're like, okay. Well, why don't you eat it? And you're like they're like, oh, it's, you know, it's not healthy for you. And then you could try and take it a step deeper, and and you ask them, okay.
Brett:Well, why do you think it's not healthy? They don't really have any science or evidence. It's just, you know, society has just told them that these products are unhealthy, and therefore, they avoid it, yet they feel terrible and we're fatter and sicker than we've ever been as a society.
Nina:Yeah. I mean, now having studied as much as I have of the science and also the media around it and what I see, you know, what are the messages that I see out there, and especially the last ten years since my book has come out, I'm I think I'm I'm I'm aware that what I think is going on is just there's a tremendous propaganda campaign actually against meat. I mean, there are these articles. It's they're designed to create almost a physical revulsion in you against meat, and I see that in people. You know, friends who are like, oh, I just can't eat red meat.
Nina:I mean, they just feel repulsed by it, and that's because how many pictures have we seen in the media of the carcasses hanging on the hooks and the cows images of cows and then the rainforest burning and, like, there's and there's so many negative articles, headlines, negative images that are out there. I think that that is designed to actually create in us a kind of, like, just a an non like, a nonintellectual, just feeling that meat
Brett:is bad. Interesting.
Nina:That most that I think many or most people now have. They just feel it's wrong, bad for the planet, or something's wrong with it, and then it must be bad for your health.
Brett:Was there anything that you came across, like, earlier on in your research that started to make you think, okay. Maybe there's, like, actually a propaganda machine going on behind the scenes around, like, red meat, saturated fat, things like that?
Nina:Well, I there are some clues from my research, that made me aware that a lot of financial corporate interests are involved in nutrition science.
Brett:Yes.
Nina:Right? So, I found that going back to 1940, the then rising, what we now call ultra processed food industry, what created a foundation, the nutrition foundation, that was designed to influence science. Mhmm. To it was made up of the Standard Biscuit Company and I think Heinz and, you know, those I forget all the names of those those companies back then, but and some of them are still exist today. Their their stated aim was to influence this nutrition science.
Brett:Mhmm.
Nina:So pay for nutrition science, which we know when nutrition science is paid for by a corporation, that it's more likely to have conclusions that favor that that company's interests. Right? That was going started in 1940. I also uncovered the fact that Procter and Gamble, maker of Crisco oil, had pretty much launched the American Heart Association in 1948 by making it the beneficiary of this radio contest. American Heart Association had just been this, like, sleepy little group of the then new field of cardiology, and then Procter and Gamble stepped in.
Nina:And literally in the American Heart Association's own corporate biography of itself, says, you know, millions of dollars flowed into our coffer and turned us overnight into a powerhouse. And that was when they that was their journey to becoming the number one largest nonprofit in The United States. And then not long after that, they were endorsing seed oils, well, let's say vegetable oils like Crisco oil Mhmm. As good for health, beneficial for health, and should replace saturated fats. And in fact, there's a pretty good letter by, one of the members of the American Heart Association to the then president of the association saying, that is rank commercialism, you standing there holding up a bottle of Crisco oil Yeah.
Nina:At our conference recently. So, you know, there are clues all along the way that commercial funders have influenced the science and the debate. I mean, the one that's most famously known is when Mark Hegsted, a scientist at Harvard, was paid by the sugar industry Mhmm. To shift the blame from sugar over to fat. Mhmm.
Nina:And that's when that was reported in the New York Times, and everybody knows about that. But there are there let me give you one other example. The in the vegetable oil world, seed oil world, the early scientists investigating trans fats, so people like Mary Enig, who is from the Weston a Price Foundation, they had an inkling that there was something wrong with trans fats in the nineteen seventies. And I'm interviewed, spoke to men who were employed by the Seed Oil Industry Association, and their job was to stand up and heckle Mary Enig.
Speaker 3:Wow.
Nina:And that they were paid to do that to intimidate her and to harass harass her and get her off stage, and they did that to a number of other scientists. And they called a journal editor to try to get her to yank one of Mary Enig's, papers. People from the Margarine Association went and visited, editors of this particular journal. Anyway, you see this kind of this, it's not really just influence. It's actually, like, really heavy handed tactics by industry to manipulate the science.
Brett:Yeah. It's so it's like and you can just keep rattling example after example off, like like, it's nothing. And it's so interesting because there are a lot of people that would listen to what you're saying and just assume that we're being conspiratorial. But I think what what your superpower is is you've been able to unlock so much research and truly connect the dots on how a lot of times money really does drive incentives, which drives behavior. And it's like you've unlocked this whole system of events that's happened over the course of the last, like, fifty, sixty years that's kind of gotten us to the point where you are now as a food system.
Nina:Yeah. I mean, I think it's important not to just say to allege, like, oh, it's corrupt. I mean, it's easy. Like, we have you have a feeling maybe it is, but you really need to get down to the hard tack facts of the matter in order to establish what's going on, out there. I mean, you know, now I think that the influence of the food industry is so overt.
Nina:It's a little easier to detect. Yeah. But, yeah, it needs to be established. Like, the case and the facts need to be established.
Speaker 3:Let's take a minute to talk about some of the sponsors and brands who support the show. Who are you thinking? Perennial Pastures, another regenerative farm out of San Diego. Our experience with Kevin Munoz, the owner, we had him on the show, a young first generation rancher who's really empowered by this movement of regenerative agriculture and really wants to be a leader in the space. I think our conversation with him was so insightful just in terms of how mission focused he is and how he really thinks about his farm as a business and wanting it to be here fifty, a hundred years down the road even though he's just the first generation of it.
Speaker 3:And I think just being able to spend time with him out in San Diego was kind of the perfect indication of that where we got to go have a meal with him at his house, hang out with his wife and kids. Like, what an amazing person. And I think his mission focus around raising really high quality beef and restoring nutrients to the soil is just one of one of those rare missions that I think everyone can get around.
Brett:Yeah. He has such a commitment to really feeding the local community in San Diego in the San Diego County First and foremost, but he's also passionate about feeding the community around the country. So I know they've invested a lot of time, a lot of money, a lot of resources to being able to order beef in bulk on their website. So I now I know that they now offer quarter half whole cows directly directly off the website. They have that great ancestral blend ground beef product.
Brett:So it actually has organ grinds, mixed into the ground beef. So you're getting the benefits of, like, an ounce or so of organ meat. But because it's in the ground beef, you really can't taste it at all. And I think to your point, Harry, just an another amazing person, you know, he Kev was someone that he was following a paleo diet in college and started realizing, wow, when I nourish my body with real foods, I feel amazing. Had a really successful stint in tech, but realized that there was just something else that he was passionate about.
Brett:So he's one of those rare cases where, you know, he put his money where his mouth is and he's a first generation farmer just, you know, bootstrapping this thing, raising money, and just so passionate about feeding the community. Just an amazing guy.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Absolutely. Thanks for listening. Now we're gonna go back to the show.
Brett:Yeah. When you think about, like, how executives behave at, like, a large publicly traded big food company, Do you do you think it's safe to say that some of them are evil, or do you think that it's more so, like, incentives drive behavior? They're publicly traded. They're trying to maximize profit for their shareholders, and therefore, like, they're gonna opt for a cheaper oil or they're gonna put in a processed sugar. I know it's a really complicated question, but I think there's a lot of people that just blanket assume, oh, big food equals evil.
Brett:And I know it's more complicated that. So I'm just curious, like, just your perspective on that.
Nina:Well, I don't think we can I don't think and there's any particular generalization to be made other than the fact that a large publicly traded company, the officers of that company have a fiduciary responsibility to maximize profit? That's it. That's their job. They're and so if the head of Nestle or anybody at Nestle comes out and says, we're here to, you know, help public health, and we wanna make the world a better place. That can't possibly be true.
Nina:Mhmm. Right? I mean, they try to make their products look healthy. Yeah. And, they they put labels on them, and they try to maybe reduce sugar and put in sweeteners.
Nina:But their goal is just to create halos health halos around their products that then can sell to you for more. I mean, there's the the difficult thing about the food these publicly trade these large multinational companies is that almost none of them can create healthy food. Like, it is almost inimical to their very structure because where what makes up cheap food? Cheap food with high markups. That's all the center all those items in the center aisles of the supermarket.
Nina:Right? So it's boxes, bags of chips, and cookies, crackers, cereals. I mean, all of that is made up of cheap carbohydrates, the cheapest macronutrient Mhmm. That's out there. Right?
Nina:Seed oils and maybe some sugar and salt and all of that kinda mixed up with in various different proportions. That is the center aisle of the supermarket there. It's not fresh food. It's not whole food. It's It's not food that comes from you know, that might spoil or needs it it's food that has to be shelf stable.
Nina:Right? I mean, none of that can possibly be healthy. Yeah. And, also, they need for it to be addictive, so you keep buying more of it. And so, you know, that's why we had there's so many sugary yogurts.
Nina:Why do they need to put sugar in the yogurt? Because they want you to be addicted to it. Mhmm.
Brett:Yeah. It's, it's it's fascinating just thinking about, like, the hyperpalatability of a lot of these foods where it's like you and I can sit here and know that Doritos are not good for you. Like, I've been, you know, carnivore, have a lot have had a lot of success. But if you put a bag of Doritos in front of me, it's like, it's gonna be hard for me to not polish up the bag because they're so delicious. There's, like, the crunchiness, the savoriness of it.
Brett:Like, these food scientists know exactly what to do to get your palate dancing, so you can't stop eating the bag.
Nina:Yeah. I mean, I have to say, like, I don't know how many times I've gotten a little addicted to sugar and then have to unaddict myself to sugar. Oh my gosh. Those tortilla chips and all of those, I actually live in a household with that stuff in my house because my husband eats it, and and I have a son who's, you know, who's, like, young, super athletic, and Yeah. He just he has to eat carbs, or I don't even know how he could get enough calories in
Brett:him. Totally.
Nina:Anyway, and he likes them, and I'm not gonna tell him no. But, you know, I know where they are on the top shelf where I insist they keep them. And if Yeah. You know, there are moments when I just cannot resist. Just have to get up on the, you know, stool and, like and then it's really just they do know how to get you with those foods.
Nina:Like, they're delicious, and it's hard to stop eating them. So, I mean, that's their formula. And, I mean, and it's a little bit related to this, this question about, like, ultra ultra processed foods. Like, do we even need a word, ultra processed foods, to know what junk food is? Like, we do know what junk food is.
Nina:Yeah. Right? I mean, it's like pornography. Like, you know it when you see it. Yes.
Nina:And do you have to create multiple peer reviewed documents to try to define it? Mhmm. You know Doritos is bad for you and so are toast, you know, Tostitos and nachos and Cheetos. And then you just know that stuff's bad for you or anything in a box that is a cereal is gonna be bad for you.
Brett:Yeah. It's like processed food and porn are very similar where it's like people intuitively know you shouldn't be doing those things. Yeah. Yet it's like it feels good and and people do it. But you actually brought up a good point that I wanted to ask you about.
Brett:This concept of, like, peer reviewed science versus, like, anecdotal science, and I would love your perspective on that because I know a lot of the critique around these the alternative health movement is that it's, oh, it's anecdotal. There's not a peer reviewed, you know, research paper around that kind of stuff. So do you think to make some of these alternative diets or things around saturated fat more mainstream and accepted, do we need to get those papers actually
Nina:So that's a big question. I mean, it really depends on what you're talking about. On saturated fats, there are now more than 20 peer reviewed, either systematic reviews or meta analyses, all concluding that saturated fats have no association with or no effect on heart disease, cardiovascular mortality, or total mortality. I mean, those papers exist. One of them is in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, a very prestigious journal, and its authors include five former members of previous dietary guidelines advisory committees.
Nina:That's like the top expert committee that makes the guidelines. So they're basically saying, we recommended this to the entire US population, but we admit we got it wrong. Wow. 20 figures. Yeah.
Nina:I mean That's incredible. There's a huge body of scientific literature. The problem that we have now is that we have policymakers and public health experts, officials who refuse to look at the data. Mhmm. They refuse to acknowledge it.
Nina:The American Heart Association refuses to acknowledge any of these papers. They just pretend they don't exist. So we're sort of in a new era of science, which is that there we have moved into, just recently, I would say, the last five years into an era where, policymakers feel like they can simply ignore science. If they don't talk about it, it doesn't exist. They don't feel like they need to respond to their critics.
Nina:In the last go around of the dietary guidelines, it's the government's official nutrition policy it's issued every five years. They said, well, we're not gonna look at any outside papers. So they didn't look at any of those 20 outside review papers even though the group that I founded called the Nutrition Coalition, which is a nonprofit. We, we we actually had some of the authors from that Journal of American color the Journal of the sorry. The Journal of the American College of Cardiology paper.
Nina:Let's just call that JACC.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Nina:We had authors from the JACC paper who went and talked to people at USDA and HHS. Those are the agencies that run the guidelines and show them the papers and walk through them with them and and and yet they pretend they don't exist.
Speaker 3:Wow.
Nina:So we really have a problem in science now. I mean, this is larger than just nutrition, which is science is happening, but policymakers are just ignoring it as if it doesn't exist. And there are you know, even it's going so far as trying to censor things or not allow them on social media if they disagree with the official narrative. So that's unsaturated fats. I mean, on meat, red meat, the most rigorous reviews ever conducted on red meat, were done by a team using, a systematic methodology called GRADE, one of the top methodologies in the world used by more than a hundred public health organizations.
Nina:They could find they published four or five papers. They could find only weak to, you know, low quality, very weak evidence, that red meat caused diabetes, heart disease, any any kind of cardiometabolic, factors or obesity or anything. They're basically like, there's so little evidence here, and the quality of it is very weak. And therefore, their recommendation was, if you like meat, eat it. We can't tell you not to.
Nina:Those were the highest quality reviews that ever came out. So there is evidence for that. What happened to those papers? There was an all out assault on them by, a vegan activist group called the True Health Initiative that, sent tried to get the paper retracted before it was even published. Sort of an unprecedented move.
Nina:Had thousands of, people or bots write the editor in chief of the journal that was publishing them, the Annals of Internal Medicine. The editor of that journal said she had never had such a vitriolic response to anything that she had ever published. She said this group, the True Health Initiative, was more vitriolic than even the National Rifle Association
Brett:Oh my gosh.
Nina:When they published something on gun control.
Brett:It's insane.
Nina:So our problem is not that there's not science. I mean, in many areas, I'm not I'm not saying in all areas, but, there is science, but there is not, we we have a problem with science being actually heard by the experts who need to reckon with it. They're not reckoning with it. They're either not, experts who need to reckon with it. They're not reckoning with it.
Nina:They're either not either ignoring it or, or actively somehow trying to discredit or demolish it. But on the carnivore diet, you're right. There is not yet a clinical trial on the carnivore diet, and, we don't have you know, what we have is that two year sorry, that one year experiment by Stefansson and his colleague who had an all meat diet, at a hospital supervised for part of it in a hospital here in New York City. And, a number of papers came out about them being perfectly healthy at the end of that. So that's more than anecdotal.
Nina:Right? Because there is a lot of published evidence that they were completely healthy according to all the tests that that could be possibly measured in the day, which is, what, 1926, I think, that they came out. And there's a survey of the carnivore diet. And we do have all these n equals one spread. There is a lot of anecdotal evidence out there now, in communities of people getting healthy, people reversing disease.
Nina:I think that data is enormously valuable. Mhmm. And if you look at the original, the original thinkers who created the field of evidence based medicine, of course, they put at the very top of their evidence pyramid, you know, clinical trials or meta analysis of clinical trials. Right? That is still the gold standard of evidence.
Nina:But for them, the the clinical impressions, the the observations by doctors Mhmm. Was also very highly ranked. In other words, they felt it was important for the observations of doctors and clinicians of what they were seeing in their patients that that was very important information. That was not at the bottom of the pyramid of evidence. So if you are a doctor in your practice and you're seeing people lose a lot of weight, get healthy, all their blood factors, you know, risk factors improving, that was meaningful and important evidence that needed to be reckoned with.
Nina:Mhmm.
Brett:What is it about clinical trials that presents such a bottleneck for this movement? Is it is it expensive? Is there politics around it? I don't know much about clinical trials, so I was just curious your perspective on it.
Nina:Well, I don't know. So clinical trials a clinical trial is where you take a group of people. Ideally, you randomize them. You randomly separate them into two separate groups. You give one group the intervention, so the pill or the diet or whatever, and the other group, you try to have it be as it it gets its usual care, but you try to have it be as close as possible to the intervention group.
Nina:Meaning, like, if you give this group a pill, give this group a placebo Got it. So that they have, if you give this group a diet and you're bringing them some some extra olive oil and nuts like they did in that Mediterranean diet experiment, give some other come to somebody's house and give them some equal food in this group. Okay. Why do that? Because there's something called the intervention effect where if you if if you just have somebody doing something for your health, you know, meeting somebody to talk about diet, somebody bringing food to your house, that changes people in some ways.
Nina:They've they're kinda boosted. They feel like, oh, I should do better.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Nina:So they do. That's called the placebo effect.
Brett:Interesting.
Nina:Anyway, so you want those groups to be very equal. And, and then at the end of the experiment, you can assume any differences in these in the outcomes is due to your intervention because everything else about these two groups should be pretty much equal, sex, race, you know, weight, whatever. Drugs cannot be approved, you know, over the counter prescriptions. Sorry. Not over the prescription drugs cannot be approved without a clinical trial.
Nina:Right? That's the gold standard. And the reason that's the gold standard is the next thing down that evidence pyramid ladder are observational studies. Yes. And you follow a group of people over time.
Nina:So let's say I'd I'd follow, you know, a thousand vegetarians and a thousand carnivores. And I, you know, I try to assume at the end of ten years that the differences between them are their diet, but there are so many things that are different about those two groups. Right? They're diff they may be different in income. They may have different you know, rich people tend to be healthier no matter what they're eating.
Nina:Right? They may be, they may have different education levels. They may, you know, they may go to more social events. They may you know, they're just you can never tease out all those differences. Even those those observational scientists will say we've we've controlled for this and controlled for that.
Nina:I'll just I would tell you it's impossible to control for everything. Yeah. And, like, our major observational studies in The US, the two biggest ones or or two of the biggest ones are at Harvard, the nurses' health study and men's professionals' health study. Those were on doctors and nurses. Mhmm.
Nina:In their questionnaires, they do not they do not account for all desserts and sweets and they cannot measure sugar, basically.
Brett:Yeah.
Nina:So they cannot they cannot adjust for sugar consumption. That's Well, now we think that sugar is probably the one of the major drivers of disease. If you can't adjust for that in your study, you know, how can any of those results really be that meaningful?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Before we get into the episode, let's talk about Fawn bone broth's carnivore blend.
Brett:A %. Yeah. We've been huge fans of bone broth the last few months. It's really fueled our carnivore journey. Bone broth is incredibly nourishing, especially on a carnivore, animal based, or just any type of diet, to be honest with you.
Brett:And what's great about FON is that they're a very simple, pure product. So their product is just boiled bones, water, salt. And most of their products have spices like turmeric, cayenne, cracked pepper. But they actually just came out with their carnivore broth, which is very simple, chicken bone broth, water, and salt too. So they're eliminating all their spices and just giving you something very pure that won't disrupt the gut.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I think one of the things we talk about with the elimination diet is the fact that there's so many things that do actually affect how your body reacts to the food you put in your body. And the fact that they're just doing a pure bone broth with bones and just the minimal ingredients, I think, is huge, and the carnivore audience will love this one. Fonda's regenerative bone, so it's really high quality stuff. Go check it out.
Speaker 3:Use our promo code in the link below.
Brett:Yep. Code mafia will get you 15% off your first order.
Speaker 3:Do you
Brett:ever ask yourself like, I just think about you and, like, the work that Gary Taubes has done. I think to myself, I'm like, they're investigative journalists, and I feel like they're they've done more for the sake of nutritional scientists of nutritional science than, like, any conventional nutritional scientist has done. Do you ever think about, like, just how interesting that is, how you guys are you're both outsiders that don't have a scientific background that you actually like, you've practiced the scientific method more than any of these conventional nutritional scientists that exist currently?
Nina:Well, I first of all, I think there are some great scientists working in the field now. People like David Ludwig and Jeff Wallach are doing and have been doing great work. So but, it is true. I mean, the Gary Taubes was the first. Right?
Nina:And maybe I was the second major person to come along. Both of us are journalists. Why is that? Well, if you're inside the academic system, you have to you have to tow the line. Right?
Nina:You cannot step out of line. And if you do, you're literally punished. Right? So you're disinvited from conferences. You stop getting research grants.
Nina:I spoke to many researchers whose you know, there's famously, I spoke to George Mann, who was the researcher who who went and studied the Messiah in Africa. And he was literally told at a visit to the National Institutes of Health that if he kept up his opposition to Ancel Keys and, you know, basically contesting that meat and fat cause heart disease, if he kept that up, he would, he would stop receiving research grants.
Brett:Wow.
Nina:And in fact, he was banished from any research grants, and even though he had been one of the head of the famous Framingham study. Anyway, you you get punished. You stop being invited to conferences. You're not, you and so you can't really even be an academic. I mean, without research funds, you are you don't even really exist as a scientist.
Nina:Yeah. And then once you're punished and you've stuck your head up, other scientists see that, and they understand how careful they need to be. And they so they self censor. Right? They just don't even dare to try to speak out or say anything that might go against conventional wisdom.
Nina:And that is how dogma repeats itself. Right? People think that paradigm shift happens with, like, one funeral at a time. But in fact, the dogma is is is transferred from one generation to the next, right, in this way. So scientists cannot speak out.
Nina:It's Wow. Unless they're, you know, emeritus, a hundred years old. You know, some of them speak out at the end of their careers, and then they are retired.
Speaker 3:So, I
Nina:mean, who and who else is there, really? I mean, there's just not very many people who are willing to take risks.
Brett:Yeah.
Nina:And, honestly, Gary and I, we have suffered from we've also been attacked, and we have been a cautionary tale to other journalists out there. In fact, if you look around, there are there aren't there aren't really any investigative journalists in nutrition, going after, or maybe there's just one or two.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I think
Brett:it's really brave what you both are doing because I know that you've gotten a lot of criticism and pushback, and there's so many people that just misassume that you're getting paid off by the meat industry, which is so ridiculous. Yeah. Because I remember I remember when we first connected with you, you're like, I really wanna come on the show. I'm just worried about the name meat mafia because people literally think that I'm getting paid off by the meat industry, which is obviously factually incorrect. But it's like, that's how careful you have to be because people are coming after you.
Nina:Yeah. I mean, it's a brave name. Let me tell you. Yeah. But just for the record, no.
Nina:I do not, have not, and I will not ever take money from, not just the meat industry, but any food or pharma industry, for my work. Yeah. So that's it. But, you know, it is there are I mean, it's in the world in which you and I exist now, I mean, there are there are campaigns to smear and defame people. And, you know, I have an email from a New York Post reporter actually saying, I hear you are funded by the meat industry.
Nina:She'd she was not even a nutrition reporter. She had been given this story to write on me. Mhmm. And then she forwarded me an email from a famous nutrition professor, Mary Nestle, who had planted this idea with this reporter saying, oh, I'm not sure. I don't know.
Nina:But you you know, I think that it's it's it's said that she's so it's a whisper campaign, right, against me.
Brett:It's so interesting too because if anyone actually took the opportunity to know you, it's so clear that you're the opposite of dogmatic about any of this stuff. Like you had mentioned off camera or maybe you mentioned it early in the show, you were you weren't eating red meat for twenty, twenty five years. You had this experience, and you've done so much research. Just get to the get to the bottom line, just trying to answer the question, why are we unhealthy? Why is meat being demonized?
Brett:Why are, you know, why are we not accepting this these things? And you look at where we are now, seventy percent of Americans are overweight. I know children are like they have, like, what is it? Fatty they have fatty liveries from from sugar, and you're just trying to get to the bottom of just how can we help people get healthier, but people don't wanna listen for whatever reason and you get emotion involved. It's just it's fascinating why we've gotten ourselves to this point right now.
Nina:It is. I actually think, you know, I think I once, calculated the number of seven forty seven jumbo jets. Something like 17 a day is crashing and killing everybody on board due to diet related diseases. I mean, just think about what we went through with COVID. More people are dying daily from diet related diseases than we're ever who I don't know how much you know, and how you believe in those numbers on COVID, but more than anybody who's ever dying from COVID per day.
Nina:I mean, it's a national emergency. If those planes were crashing every day, you would say, hey. Let's land those jets and figure out what's let's get a team of engineers in here and figure out what's wrong. But instead, we, as a nation, we we do nothing. Our public health leaders, our medical leaders, they do nothing.
Nina:Instead, they find a new, you know, a new injection now, a thousand dollars a month so that you can, you know, lose some weight for a while, but only for a little while, and then you regain it all back. And then you you've I mean, it's just it's atrocious what is happening to our country.
Brett:What is the what is the deal with that injection? I saw it go viral on Twitter about, like, a month ago, but do you know who's created the injection or how it actually works? It sounds like it's a thousand dollars a month and
Nina:Yeah.
Brett:Mandate solution.
Nina:I can't really give you, like, the full in-depth treatment on, but I you know, it was so it was Novo Nordisk created Wegovy. There's a couple of them. They're called GLP one inhibitors. They, basically, they make people feel so nauseated and sick, and they slow down your your your whole intestinal tract. Mhmm.
Nina:They make you feel really nauseous so that you don't want to eat and people lose a lot of weight on them. But that kind of weight loss is mainly, or a lot of it is muscle mass. So they're finding that people are getting saggy faces and saggy skin. And it seemed the data show that people, you know, after one to two years, they stop working so that then people, they regain all the weight. So, you know, what have they gained?
Nina:They have they've gained Somebody has spent $24,000 a year or sorry. $12,000 a year to have them be on drug to feel better for a little while, and they've still got a huge problem, probably worse because most people are regaining even more weight, not to mention the long list of pretty serious side effects, including, I believe, pancreatic cancer, some kind of cancer. Wow. So but this is the pharmaceutical solution to obesity. I mean, just note for I would say for four or five years now, have we even been able to talk about obesity?
Nina:Right? It's it's not even part of our national conversation because it's considered fat shaming. You don't wanna take away people's comfort food. How can you be such a nanny, you know, to say that people should not be eating sweets? Our SNAP program, some huge portion of it that's like food stamps goes to people buying, you know, sugary drinks, and the idea is, well, we can't deprive them of their sugary drinks.
Nina:I mean, I'm talking like regular Coke.
Brett:That's insane.
Nina:Now we can talk about obesity. Why is that? Because the pharmaceutical industry has created drug for it. And so now every TV show, every, newspaper I mean, who who pays $8,000,000,000 a year in media advertising? The pharmaceutical industry.
Nina:It's not the whole foods industry. It's not so they're steering the conversation. Now we can talk about obesity because we have an injection for it.
Brett:Got it. So as long as there's a pharmaceutical drug, then you can start talking about Then
Nina:you can talk about it.
Brett:Yeah. What are the current nutritional guidelines look like today?
Nina:Well, the headlines are six servings of grains a day, including three servings of refined grains and up to 10% of your calories is sugar. So all of that adds up to, 52 to 56% of your calories is carbohydrates. And that is if you are in school lunch program actually, in school lunch programs, there's which are driven by the dietary guidelines, they actually have no limit on the amount of sugar they can feed to you, added sugar. So that's why you get waffles and orange juice for breakfast and or maybe you're you get a Lucky Charms bowl or Lucky Charms bar at lunchtime along with Tostitos, nachos, Fritos. I mean, all that food is USDA approved dietary guideline compliant foods due to our, our guidelines.
Nina:Also, five and a half teaspoons of seed oils every day, and I think it specifically says soybean oil.
Brett:Soybean oil.
Nina:Yeah. No butter. If you're gonna have you know, the protein category has been diluted now. So it you know, instead of you can have soy, instead you can have beans even though they're not nutritionally equivalent in terms of their protein content. So protein is kind of eroded, and it's always been, like, only low lean meat and low fat dairy.
Nina:So no no butter, no regular whole milk. Wow. And and and kinda no red meat because it's not lean enough.
Brett:Yeah. So we're just sucking all the nutrients out of our food. So six servings of carbs, 10% of calories can come from sugar.
Nina:Six servings of grains.
Brett:Six servings of grains. And what is it? Three of them can be refined grains?
Nina:Three of them are refined grains. Wow. And one of the reasons there, I believe, because that's so atrocious, is that only refined grains are obligated to be enriched and fortified in nutrients. So there's a bunch of vitamins and maybe minerals that are put into grains. And without those nutrients, the dietary guidelines would be even more nutritionally deficient than they already are.
Nina:They already fail on, like, choline choline, potassium, magnesium. I may not have that exactly right. We have all this information on our Nutrition Coalition website, which is nutritioncoalition.US.k. But they're nutritionally deficient, and they would be even more so if it weren't for these artificial supplemented refined grains.
Brett:Interesting.
Nina:So if you're not eating your refined grains and are following the dietary guidelines, you are definitely nutritionally deficient.
Brett:Wow. I also saw two months ago that I think Lunchables is now gonna be rolled out to a hundred thousand public schools as an option in the cafeteria. Something along the have did you see that?
Nina:Yes. That's is that a Kraft Lunchables?
Brett:Yeah. I forget.
Nina:I saw it. It's like a little package. It has crackers and I think cheese and maybe meat in there.
Brett:There might be meat in there, and I think there's a pizza version too. That's a lot. And I know that I think that, Oscar Mayer had to tweak the macros a little bit to actually make it serveable on a school lunch. But I forget what the body of public schools is, but I think it's gonna be a hundred thousand schools. So now when your kid is going through the cafeteria line, they can literally, you know, they can get Lunchables as their meal.
Nina:You know, honestly, that I mean, as bad as that is, like, you have some dairy and you have some meat in there, that is that is not as bad as if you go on to go on to PepsiCo's school website or General Mills school websites where you literally see Lucky Charms bars and and frosted Mini Wheats and what their version of lunches is, like, you know, some little packaged bean burrito. I mean, the school lunch offerings are uniformly horrendous. Like, I I don't know why lunch pulls was singled out as being particularly bad because that at least has some protein in it.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Nina:I mean, people are literally saying now, you know, we need to keep the chocolate and sugar milk in there because that's the only way kids will drink milk. I mean, the like, it's so there's it's all just like these horrible Faustian bargains and about because and the whole level of what's served in in American school lunches is just is appallingly low.
Brett:Yeah. It shows how crazy things have gotten that we're literally sitting here on this podcast, and you have to be like, well, at least Lunchables has, like, some processed cheese and deli meat in it. Like, at least there's some protein and fat in there. That's, like, the best option they have.
Nina:It's kind of amazing to me that as a nation, we have so blatantly, obviously, like, sold out our young people. Mhmm. Like, we're willing to just say, like, this is okay for our kids to eat, and this is what we're nourishing on, and this is the food that we think is gonna help them do well in school and and give them healthy bodies. Like, why are we willing to do that as a nation to, like, sell out our kids like that to have, like, a
Brett:%.
Nina:Two dollar meal?
Brett:A %. Yeah. I'm in this so I'm I'm 28. So I feel like my gen my millennial generation, when I was younger, you really started to see kids get prescribed Adderall. And it just makes you wonder, like, k.
Brett:You're sending your kids to school with, like, orange juice and a Lucky Charms bar, and then you're putting them into a desk. You're you're hopping them up on a bunch of sugar. They can't focus. You take them to a doctor, and then they just prescribe them a legal amphetamine, and then they're on that drug for the rest of their lives. Like, I have multiple friends that can't function without, you know, twenty milligrams of Adderall a day or whatever the the serving is.
Brett:And it's it's crazy to think that, like, this is the merry-go-round that a lot of people are on, and we're doing it to our children to your point.
Nina:I don't know. I just I feel like we're so far off the mark in terms of how we think about health. Totally. We and, you know, some companies like Nestle are vertically integrated in that they literally give you the sugary milk to feed your infant and then, you know, give you your toddler food, which consists of sweetened sugar cereals or whatever, and then feed you unhealthy junk food your whole life
Brett:Mhmm.
Nina:Chocolate bars, whatever. And then they have, like, a sorry.
Brett:No. It's okay.
Nina:And then sorry. They get feed you chocolate bars your whole life, and then they have diet products, liquid diet formulas, or whatever they are to help you lose weight Mhmm. After they've already made you sick. I mean, that is basically what we're doing. That is the alliance between the food industry and the pharmaceutical industry, which is that they make you fat and sick, and then they give you a bunch of pills and devices and procedures to not give you health care.
Nina:I mean, we're talking about sick care, but there you are, then you're on you're dependent on them for the rest of your slowly declining life. Right? I mean, it's the average American is on four to five medications every month. I I just just reading about Americans in 65 and older, ninety percent of them are on prescription drugs.
Brett:Mhmm.
Nina:So we this is our this is, like, this is what we're doing. We're just making people sick, and then that's a very profitable industry. And, like, nobody wants to be this cynical. I mean, I you and I, like, neither one of us would like to be talking about the world in this way as if somehow is this system that's been designed to be inhuman, if not evil.
Brett:Yes.
Nina:But you just can't help but look at all the incentives in these companies and see what's happening out there and and not conclude that the system really is, you know, is rigged against us being healthy.
Brett:In spite of all the data, all the research that you've done, everything you've written about, all the podcasts, the documentaries that you've been on, Do you when you think about, like, the future of the food system in society, do you find yourself being hopeful? Like, do you think we can pull ourselves back from the brink? Are there things that people that are listening to this show can do to influence their policymakers and push some of this stuff forward in the right direction?
Nina:Will there people like you, Grib? I mean, I do see a lot of reasons to be cynical. I'm particularly scared about what's happening at sort of the United Nations level and the World Economic Forum and efforts to what appear to be destroy our food system by taking farms, cattle, livestock out of circulation, shutting down livestock producers, trying to get rid of our food system Mhmm. And declaring it broken or bad for the planet, which is I I mean, that is very dangerous, and that is happening. Mhmm.
Nina:So, and I think all of our efforts to try to support, like, as many of us do, you know, local farmers, local you know, anything that's processed locally, particularly if there's any kind of local slaughterhouse or place where you can, like, just try to support the decentralization and not, you know, of of food production is those are things that we can all do. But I sort of think we do have to join together to fight at a larger level too in the sense that, like, I think just that the forces that are operating out there are very strong, very well funded, very powerful. There's there are many interests coming together now to try to promote fake foods, take away real foods, have those fake foods be imposed on us, maybe take away our ability to even buy the food that we want to buy. So I think we I think we as a community do have to really take that seriously and fight back. So, I guess one point of optimism I do have is just that peep there are there the numbers of people I know I'm in my little tiny universe like you, like this.
Nina:Yes. You know? But I see the numbers of people regaining their health by literally just turning the food pyramid upside down. Right? It's just burgeoning.
Nina:Mhmm. Like, all the time, I just see these incredible success stories, and I see this becoming much more commonly accepted. Carnivore, as you said, you know, keto. I mean but I think it's a fight, and I think we have to stay informed and and actually fight back.
Brett:Yeah. It's such a good point. And that really is where social media is such a double edged sword because it now gives anyone this, like, infinite platform to just broadcast their success stories. So you can now Google, you know, carnivore diet, ulcerative colitis, carnivore diet, psoriasis, arthritis. You can you can connect with thousands, if not millions of people that have had these incurable autoimmune diseases or chronic diseases that are effectively reversing their symptoms by leaning in on their diet.
Brett:And that's that's an amazing thing. I even remember when I started posting about carnivore three years ago, all of my normal friends that that were in, like, New York and Boston and more urban cities, they were like, what are you doing? This is the craziest thing I've ever seen. And now a lot of them are reaching out and being like, oh, you you seem like you're doing really well. You're really healthy.
Brett:You're not on medication. Hey. Do you have any recommendations of, like, where I can find a local farmer, like, are there any meat companies that will deliver to my front door? So that's very anecdotal, but it's like I am seeing the tide shift in my own personal life.
Nina:Mhmm.
Brett:And I think you are too and a lot of other people are. So that's a very encouraging thing.
Nina:Yeah. I do I think you're right about that. And I think it's true that it is happening largely on social media. I fear that for those people out there who've read the Twitter files that what we've seen happen, the obvious censoring of certain topics on many of the social media platforms might come might come to nutrition. Like, we are outside the official narrative still.
Nina:And so, you know, just anecdotally, like, I know somebody's TED Talk that was on protein was recently flagged by TED that, you know, the TED company would for being nonapproved. So, you know, and I I think Dean Ornish is still one of their nutrition advisers there. So, but, yeah, I do I do think that still social media platforms on this topic are pretty open, and it is it's great to see. I mean, one of the things that I noticed is, like, you know, you have more followers on Twitter than many established nutrition experts who've been out there tweeting and and doing stuff for years. But it's because you have a message that is that works for people or that it that feels more truthful or that, you know, you you I mean, all of us on Twitter Yeah.
Nina:Are enjoying a lot of success because, you know, people aren't getting their nutrition news from US World News Report or CNN or they're just not get they know that it's not quite right, those mainstream news sources.
Brett:It's why podcasting is blowing up so much and some of these Twitter accounts. Yeah. That's that's kind of my hypothesis with why I think our Twitter has done well is I'm not saying what's right or wrong. All I'm sharing is, like, this is just my perspective of what I did that's worked for me. This is these are the stories.
Brett:This is the research that I'm coming across. Like, a lot of it's inspired by a lot of the stuff that you've done where you had your own experience eating out. You felt way better, and you started kind of, like, unveiling the curtain and started finding all this research and publishing it and sharing it. And now all all these other people are coming to you for your book and the work that you've done, and they're like, wow. I feel really good eating meat and eating saturated fat.
Brett:But all my doctors telling me not to do it. They're telling me to worry about my cholesterol levels. But there's now, like, this world of decentralized medicine and information where you can get answers to the things that your doctor might not be telling you.
Nina:Yeah. I think it's hard for people to know who to trust. Mhmm. And that is, I think that's an enduring problem that we are going to have for maybe a little while. Mhmm.
Nina:You know, do I really trust Nina? Do I really trust Brett? I mean, even when people have this extraordinary transformation in their own health and their mental well-being and they lose weight and they're most of their heart disease risk factor numbers look better, They feel so much better, and even then, people will be scared away from keto. We talked about this earlier before we started taping, but, the reason it's it's so hard to be sure about information is just that the official sources of information are so, there's I mean, they're really disinformation. They're, like, actively pumping out disinformation.
Nina:So I just wrote a piece about this. I write a column on Substack, and I looked into what I consider to be the keto bashing that is going on, at the highest level. And we're talking the American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology just to give you two examples. Right? So in the past, maybe four months, there have been dozens of headlines about the keto or keto like diet being bad for your heart, maybe causing a heart attack.
Nina:Mhmm. A bunch of those headlines came out of an American College of Cardiology, which I'm not just gonna call ACC conference, where the lead researcher on that, it's an observational study, so very low quality, weak evidence to begin with. She just spoke at a conference. She didn't there was nothing in print. There was no preprint, which is like the advanced copy before something goes to print.
Nina:There was not even an abstract. That's typically the way that researchers present their work, early work. Nothing. She just stood up and spoke at the conference. I don't even know if there's a tape of what she said.
Brett:Yeah.
Nina:So that was press released by the ACC. I looked through actually all 40 of the press releases from that conference.
Brett:Of course you did.
Nina:Because I'm a nut. I could so I could find only one other instance where there wasn't, like, the it wasn't wasn't something on a clinical trial that was registered somewhere. I mean, where there was no paper trail.
Brett:Mhmm.
Nina:Only one other instance. And it wasn't just that they press released it. They were, like, pushing it out, and they were retweeting all these, and they they got into Fortune Good Morning America, CNN, like, 30 different headlines came out of this. So here's the so but it's based on nothing. Yeah.
Nina:Something that she said could be true, could just as well have been, you know, wholly made up. She had no background in doing research in this field, so she didn't know really what she was talking about. So I'm trying to get in touch with her as the researcher, and she won't answer my emails or phone calls. Nothing. And then her press representative reaches out to me in the middle of it and says, she's not taking she's not doing any press interviews.
Nina:Or it was like, we're we're not doing any more press interviews even though she hadn't done any. And, and and I said, well, can you explain to me at least why you're calling this a keto study? You know, it's all these anti keto headlines.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Nina:When when actually what she's the diet that she looked at was, like, not keto. Right? The macronutrients were all off. And, and the press representative said to me, she said, if you call it keto, I'm going to demand a correction to your story.
Brett:I was
Nina:like, well, are you demanding a correction to this researcher's own website where they're publishing just keto or Good Morning America or any of the other places that's called it keto because you issued a press release calling it keto or keto like.
Brett:A %.
Nina:So that was just weird, completely fake news based on nothing. So let's follow that up with the American Heart Association that recently came out with a scientific statement saying and all the bunch of news coverage, Washington Post, you know, big name outlet saying, keto diet is bad for your heart according to this new American Heart Association scientific statement. Well, if you look at the statement, it doesn't it all it does is it looks at a bunch of brand name diets, and it says, how much is this diet like our own American Heart Association diet? In other words, how much are you like me? Are you like me?
Nina:Yeah. Then you get a top mark. If you're not like me, we don't like you. It's like a purity test. You know?
Nina:Like, how much are you like us? That's it.
Brett:That's insane.
Nina:It didn't actually do a review of the diets or look systematically at any of the heart disease outcomes. Nothing. But in the course of that paper, it was very sneaky. It took, like, a couple paragraphs to take some potshots at keto, which it ranked very low because it's unlike the American Heart Association diet, it just put in a couple of paragraphs. You know?
Nina:Oh, keto diet, you know, causes the keto flu or, you know, things that have been I mean, for decades, these same kind of old time worn criticisms have been made. Oh, people may not be able to sustain it. Oh, my favorite was, oh, it may, it may prevent hunger while incurring weight loss.
Brett:Mhmm.
Nina:You're like, oh, that sounds bad. Yeah. I think part of
Brett:why you you trigger some people is because you're so well researched that it I think it's easy to look at some of the things that you're speaking about, and you ask yourself, okay. Is our nutritional framework really like a straw house like this? Is it really that weak? And you've done the extra research, and it just sounds like time and time again, there are just so many things that we've come to accept that just aren't true
Nina:so fast. Can do their own digging. I mean, I think the reality is, like, I just dig, and I look, and often, the facts are, like, right there.
Brett:Yeah.
Nina:And you don't have to dig very hard.
Brett:Yeah.
Nina:I mean, to give you one other example, this whole thing about TMAO, which I'm not gonna be able to trimethylite oxide, it's it's a it's a metabolite that's supposed to you're supposed to get it when you eat red meat and it causes heart disease. Well, that's a story that's been coming out for years now. If you look into that, oh, what what leads to more TMAO? Much, much more is fish. Eating fish is what leads to having much more TMAO in your body.
Nina:Right? And then it turns out if you look just a tiny bit deeper that the researchers who've been leading all this at the Cleveland Clinic have a deal, have a bunch of patents to test TMAO. So they're you know, they just wanna elevate TMAO as a metabolite that they can, you know, they're gonna make a bunch of money off of.
Brett:Interesting. I feel like there's a lot of information that would be primed for a big fat surprise part two. Do you think we could ever expect a sequel book in the future with everything that's going on?
Nina:I might. I might. I do wanna write another book, and I also I really want to write, not only about everything that I've learned in the last, you know, decade, but I I also would like to write about veganism. Mhmm. There's just so many stories to uncover there really about people being hurt and harmed and people just not I think most people really don't understand what what it's doing to people's health.
Brett:Yeah. We could probably do a whole part two on the veganist movement, the Seventh day Adventist Church, all of the things that have gone on throughout history that no one even knows about, like, the quiet influence that they've had on nutritional policy.
Nina:It's enormous. Yeah. I'll just tell you one anecdote that I learned that that I was thinking I would definitely put in a book, which is that, at the headquarters of the Seventh day Adventist Church, I know somebody who helped start a health clinic there. And a nutritionist or dietitian, she said and these people are all eating the vegan diet because they believe in it as a matter of faith. They believe and and everybody around them eats this diet.
Nina:She said that the people who came into her clinic usually with, like, horrible autoimmune issues, she said that their nutrient levels looked like numbers you would see in Rwanda or some, like, completely impoverished country. And she would just, you know, she would she'd have some of them break down and just weep when they really stayed. She'd give them, like, a continuous glucose monitor and say, look. Try to keep your blood sugars down. And people realized, like, what were the foods they couldn't eat?
Nina:What were the foods they could eat? And the conclusion that they had been eating a diet that had been given to them, like, literally by practically by God
Brett:It was a vision that she had. Right?
Nina:The founder had had. Right? That this was not serving them as a human being, I mean, was devastating.
Brett:That's insane.
Nina:So those stories need to be I think those stories need to be told because, people really don't know them.
Brett:Yes. And that's why the big fat surprise is such an amazing book because it's like you go chapter by chapter, and it's just story after story after story that, for me, it just really crystallized in my mind. Okay. This is why we are as we are, like, nutritionally as a society. But I think from this podcast, like, there is hope.
Brett:There are things that you can do. You can connect with local farmers and, you know, find functional medical clinicians that will actually work with you to talk about diet and lifestyle and share podcasts and and books like yours that actually lean in on the research and teach you about how to actually feed yourself and why we are in the current situation that we're in. So I feel like in spite of all the bleakness, I think there is a lot of hopefulness that can come, and we just need to keep leaning in. So Yeah.
Nina:And one thing that I have to I'm so obligated to mention is that people should go to nutritioncoalition.US and sign up for our newsletter. And and we're, you know, we're we've had a number of campaigns, but we're launching one to help people fight back in their local schools to get better food in their schools. And, also, there's just a lot going on in terms of what you can potentially do to call your congressman or senator. I mean, there's we've been able to mobilize enough awareness around this issue now. I mean, it is it is like an epic journey.
Nina:Right? We're turning the Titanic. We're trying to, but we have made real progress. And so if you have you know, people listeners or people who are watching this wanna be part of that, then then go to our website and sign up.
Brett:Nice. And there are a ton of amazing resources and research on that website too, nutritioncoalition.US. Is it a weekly newsletter that goes out? No. It's monthly.
Brett:Monthly newsletter. And then you have a substack too. Right?
Nina:I do. I have a substack called unsettled science.
Brett:Unsettled science.
Nina:So you can sign up for that.
Brett:So that's how you've been, like, kinda scratching the itch to keep doing more writing. Right? Yeah. Awesome.
Nina:That's really what I I want to spend more time doing. Yeah. Just be a one person news service. We need we need
Brett:to make it happen.
Nina:We need
Brett:to just keep growing the Substack. Right?
Nina:I think so. We can bring in some more writers, and I think we could. We could just start, like, the real news on nutrition.
Brett:I love that.
Nina:Should be out there.
Brett:That's really cool. Well, Nino, it's such an honor to have you in studio. Thank you so much for joining me.
Nina:Thank you for having me. It's nice to talk to you. Cool. Thanks.
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