#25 Gary Taubes: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us

It seems that nowadays, aside from religion and politics, one of the most hotly debated topics is that of nutrition. Should we eat high carb diets? Low carb? High fat? High protein? What about wheat or gluten? Should we eat meat or adopt a vegan diet? There are as many opinions as there are people — and books, magazines and websites are overflowing with information showing you the “right” way to eat and exercise to lose weight. But if “eating less and moving more” is all it takes to lose weight and enjoy a healthy lifestyle, why are so many of us fat and getting fatter? In this episode, I chat with Gary Taubes, bestselling author of three books, The Case Against Sugar (2016), Why We Get Fat and What to Do About It (2011) and Good Calories, Bad Calories (2007). We talk about the sharp rise of obesity and diabetes in America, the structural hurdles to effective nutrition research, and explore the common myth that a calorie is just a calorie. Here are a few other things you’ll learn in this interview: How diets shifted in the last century, and what impact it’s having on our bodies today. Why a carb isn’t just a carb — and why you should know the difference Is the sugar industry the new Big Tobacco? What role genetics play in our health, and how much is under our control Why humans are so attracted to sugar and how to break the habit Gary’s suggestions to improve your health, drop body fat and feel terrific The benefits of fasting and how you can try it out yourself And a bunch more. If you think at all about your health, give this podcast a listen. Go Premium: Members get early access, ad-free episodes, hand-edited transcripts, searchable transcripts, member-only episodes, and more. Sign up at: https://fs.blog/membership/ Every Sunday our newsletter shares timeless insights and ideas that you can use at work and home. Add it to your inbox: https://fs.blog/newsletter/ Follow Shane on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/ShaneAParrish Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:07Shane Parrish?

  Welcome to The Knowledge Project. I'm your host, Shane Parrish, the curator behind the Farnham Street Blog, which is an online community focused on mastering the best of what other people have already figured out. The Knowledge Project is a podcast where we look at interesting people and uncover the frameworks they use to make better decisions, live life, and make an impact. On this episode, I have the fascinating Gary Taubes. Gary is an award-winning science journalist who has written Good Calories, Bad Calories, and Why We Get Fat. You're going to learn about the role of sugar, carbohydrates, and fiber, how breakfast became the most important meal of the day, what science is and the state of nutritional science, why he says wine is okay,

• 0:50Shane Parrish?

  his next book project, and so much more. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did.

• 1:08Shane Parrish?

  One of the questions that I have when I think about you is I wonder what your daily diet looks like. How do you think about the food that you consume?

• 1:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's funny. When we talked about the things that I didn't want to talk about, one of the things I was thinking, can I say, I don't want to talk about my daily diet. Then I thought, I probably can't say that because it'll probably come up at some point in the interview. Easiest way to think about it is I don't eat cranes and starches and sugars anymore because I think they make me fat and unhealthy. And I replace them, for the most part, with fat animal products. So not good for the animals, but I think it's good for me physically. And I'm one of these people who have convinced myself that butter and bacon are health foods, and I hope I'm right.

• 2:03Shane Parrish?

  Why do you think nutritional science is in such a poor state compared to other areas of medical science? What is it about nutrition that's led to such vast misunderstandings?

• 2:14Speaker 01

  Well, first of all, we don't know that it's actually better than other areas of medical science. One of the questions I'm always... We know what we see, right? So I study nutrition science. I write about nutrition science. I know nutrition science is, to me, almost not a functional science. But I've never had the opportunity to put that effort, investigation, into other areas of medicine or other areas of science, who just hope they're better. My take on this is sort of historical, and I'm gonna... The way I see it, science was sort of honed to a very fine edge as a, you know, methodology for establishing reliable knowledge.

• 2:58Speaker 01

  The universe in Europe, it's by, you know, was at its height in Germany and Austria pre-World War II. And the sort of, these people really understood the rigor necessary to do good science, the skepticism necessary, this idea that Richard Feynman later encapsulated by saying, you know, "The first principles of science is you must not fool yourself, and you're the easiest person to fool." And this culture of science began to evaporate with World War II. And it crossed the Atlantic in fields like physics because we embraced these European

• 3:39Speaker 01

  researchers, many of whom were Jews, and the leading scientists in the world, the leading physicists in the world post-World War II in the US tended to be these European emigres or their students. And many of the key players in the Manhattan Project were European emigres. And so you had this very rigorous approach to science being done in fields like physics. And you could do it in fields like physics, because if you think of science as hypothesis and test, the tests were relatively simple, relatively simple to do. You could come up with an idea, you could build a small, you know, a cyclotron like

• 4:24Speaker 01

  Lawrence did here at Berkeley, you could then test the ideas, and you know that other people are gonna do the same all around the world, and if you're wrong, it's gonna be very embarrassing. So there was also sort of a relatively quick feedback between hypothesis and test. And in fields like nutrition and public health, not only did we not embrace these European emigres, and in fact, in many cases, we wanted nothing to do with these people. The hypothesis and test by definition was much harder to do. Or the testing aspect of the hypothesis is much harder to do. So now, instead of dealing with subatomic particles or every particle for all intents and purposes as alike, and you know, you could do these experiments in days, you're now dealing with

• 5:07Speaker 01

  these messy humans who think for themselves and chronic diseases that take decades to manifest themselves. And you can no longer, even if you could do the testing of the hypotheses, it takes a long time to do, it's very expensive and it's very difficult, if not impossible, to do right. And so what the nutrition and public health research communities did is they just lowered their standards for what they would consider reliable knowledge. And this just became sort of inculcated throughout the entire community such that these people

• 5:50Speaker 01

  almost, to me, I feel like they almost forget what it takes to do reliable knowledge. And they say, they justify it by, they say the issues are so important, people are dying out there, therefore we don't have time to dot the i's and cross the t's and make sure that we're right about our hypotheses. And to me, the, the really scientific response is, well, if you don't have time to dot the i's and cross the t's, you have no idea whether you're right.

• 6:18Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 6:19Speaker 01

  And, you know, we end up in a situation today where we have, you know, these massive unprecedented epidemics of obesity and diabetes and related diseases and the medical, public health community has no idea, almost literally no idea what to do about it. And everyone insists that the science is good enough to answer these questions and yet clearly if it was good enough to answer these questions, we never would have gotten into this situation, so.

• 6:47Shane Parrish?

  What role do you think genetics plays in this?

• 6:50Speaker 01

  In obesity and diabetes epidemics?

• 6:53Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 6:53Speaker 01

  Or in obese, I think, uh, clearly genetics.

• 6:58Speaker 01

  Well, we know that obesity runs in families and that's been known for, you know, hundreds of years, body type runs in families, you know, identical twins don't just have the same facial features, they have the same body types. Clearly, genetics plays a huge role in whether, you know, someone's gonna be tall and thin, or short and squat, or some combination of the two. Um, and if it's playing a role in obesity, it's gonna play a role in diabetes as well. And I don't actually know the data for diabetes, but I'm sure there's a strong, uh, genetic component there as well. But then the question is, and this is the question I addressed in my last book, The Case Against Sugar.

• 7:38Speaker 01

  We have these diabetes and obesity epidemics that manifest themselves pretty similarly worldwide, independent of the genetic, you know, the genotype, the genetic ancestry of the population. So, you know, Inuits near the Arctic Circle, or Native Americans, or First Nations people, or, uh, you know, African, uh, populations, or South Pacific Islanders, or Middle Eastern populations, or Southeast Asians, they all experience obesity and diabetes epidemics when their environment changes from their traditional diet and lifestyle to a Western diet and lifestyle. And they manifest these epidemics pretty similarly.

• 8:23Speaker 01

  So clearly, the underlying genetics are not the key factor there. You know, it doesn't matter what type of human, you know, where your, your, your ancestors came from. You get dumped in a modern Western lifestyle, you're likely to become obese and, and diabetic. And so the question I was asking in my book is what's the, what's, what is it about the Western diet and lifestyle that? Is the agent of these diseases.

• 8:52Shane Parrish?

  So what do you think about like the Mediterranean diet and the French diet and all of this stuff? Like, are there diets suited to cultures or types of people that grow up in a certain region? Or?

• 9:03Speaker 01

  The Mediterranean diet may or may not be healthier than, for instance, an Inuit diet. Like, if you took the Inuits and gave them a Mediterranean diet, they may do just as well as the Greeks do, or they may do more poorly because they haven't had time to adapt to, I don't know, olive oil or a lot of green vegetables or, you know, whatever the grains they're consuming in this diet. It's sort of, you know, it's one of the ways people tend to confuse the fundamental issue. So to me, the really important issue, the critical issue is these epidemics. And the numbers are just out of, I mean, almost unimaginable.

• 9:45Speaker 01

  In the US, and according to the Centers for Disease Control, in the US since the late 1950s, diabetes prevalence has increased 700%. Okay, so 1 in 11 Americans now have diabetes when the number might have been closer to 1 in 1,000 or 1 in 3,000 at the beginning of the 20th century. That's almost incomprehensible. And nobody really, I mean, the fact that there aren't sort of teams of investigative scientists, you know, and then task force on every street corner walking around with, you know, I don't know, detectors of some sort, trying to figure out what the cause of this disorder is, you know, why we have this out of control epidemic is another question.

• 10:29Speaker 01

  But that's the question you have to keep on asking yourself. What's causing these epidemics? Because we're not going to be able to reverse or prevent them until we identify the fundamental cause. And it gets confused with issues of, well, should we be eating the Mediterranean diet to prevent heart disease? Or should we be eating the dash diet to lower blood pressure? Or should we be eating, you know, oranges diet to reduce risk of heart disease? When the very first thing you want to know is like, what? What's causing these epidemics, man? Because this is crazy. The Director General of the UN, a woman named Margaret Chan, a year ago referred to them as slow motion disasters.

• 11:11Speaker 01

  And she predicted, this was fascinating, this was at a keynote address of the National Academies of Medicine in Washington, and she gave a number, a prediction for the likelihood that public health organizations will prevent these slow motion disasters from getting worse. And the likelihood of even making, preventing them from getting worse, she said, was virtually zero. So you've got these slow motion disasters worldwide, you've got the head of the greatest public health organization in the world predicting that they will fail to control them. And so the question you want to ask is what's the cause, not whether we should be eating a Mediterranean diet or a French diet, or, you know.

• 11:54Speaker 01

  And then you can further ask the question, is there something about the Mediterranean diet, or about the French diet, or about these blue zone diets that happens to shed light on this question of what's, what's causing obesity and diabetes, and then the conditions that associate with it.

• 12:15Shane Parrish?

  Can you quickly walk listeners through your beliefs on what is causing this?

• 12:21Speaker 01

  Okay, so, again, if you think of it as a criminal case, the first question is what's the crime being committed? And in this case, it's, it's, like I said, it's obesity and diabetes epidemic showing up everywhere in the world after they transition to a Western diet. So that's, that's, that's the crime, that's what we want. We want to find out who the perpetrator is. We know what the agent, what the, the vector is. The vector is the Western diet and lifestyle. You know, it's commercialism and urbanism, and, and maybe it's processed foods, these are all sort of vectors of the disease. But what's the agent and the vector? And the point I make in my book is...

• 13:05Speaker 01

  You can chart these, go back in time and actually, which you would do if, again, if it was a criminal case, you would, you would wanna know, you know, when the crime was committed, when it, the earliest sign of the crime. And, and so you could do this using hospital records and the medical literature. And you find out, for instance, in the US, that diabetes rates in, were virtually nonexistent, even though it was a very, relatively easy disease to diagnose. You saw very little sign of it pre-1850 and even, for the most part, pre-1870s. And then the numbers in hospitals, and you could see this in hospital

• 13:45Speaker 01

  records, and in Boston, in Mass General, or in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Hospital. The diabetes diagnoses in hospitals go from, like, literally zero a year. Remember today, one in 11 Americans are considered to have diabetes, and their major, the major city hospitals would see in some years, zero cases. And then you could see the numbers go to, you know, one to two to three a year, to five a year, to 10. And then by the early years of the 20th century, you're in double digits, and then they just shoot up from there. And you could find experts back then, you know, the head of the New York City Department

• 14:27Speaker 01

  of Public Health, saying it just attracts so closely with sugar consumption from population to population, that we seriously have to consider that sugar is the cause. And you look at the, the industries that evolved in that period, and, and sugar, over the course of 19th century, went from being a sort of expensive luxury in the beginning of the 19th century, when Americans, for instance, probably consumed less, in the neighborhood of five pounds per person per year. So that's the equivalent of maybe, you know, I don't know, four ounces of sugary beverage. Per day, probably less.

• 15:09Speaker 01

  To, by the end of the 19th century, consuming the neighborhood of 80 or 90 pounds per person per year. Oh, wow. So, you know, the neighborhood of a 20-fold increase. And in the, all the ways that we consume sugar today were virtually nonexistent as industries in the early 19th century. So, in the 1840s, you've got, uh, the candy industry is created, the chocolate industry is created, and the ice cream industry are all created. And then, in the 1870s and 80s, you see the soft drink industry with Dr. Pepper first, and then Coca-Cola and Pepsi. And by the early 20th century, that these foods have just exploded, and they're everywhere.

• 15:51Speaker 01

  And all the major food producers that we deal with today, that, sugar purveyors that we deal with today are already sort of in place and selling nationally and marketing nationally and, you know, sort of pioneering their marketing approaches. At one point, in around 1905, a congressman asked the, uh, brother of, I think it was one of the founders of, uh, you know, one of the main players in Coca-Cola, you know, what, if he could describe the items on which Coca-Cola was advertised. And he said, the everyday items, and he said it would be easier to describe the items on which it's not.

• 16:36Speaker 01

  So, and the, the goal of Coke, which Coca-Cola always was basically to make sure that everyone in the world, I mean, everyone in the world has easy access to Coca-Cola and is drinking it regularly. And at one point, the CEO of Coca-Cola even complains that the human body needs, you know, so many ounces of water, liquid, a day, and only like 20% of it is coming from Coca-Cola, and that's just completely unacceptable. So, yeah, anyway, you see these, the one industry that's now a major, well, there's a few industries that are major purveyors of sugar that took a while longer to come about, so that fruit juice industry doesn't really show up until the 1930s, and then explodes post-World War II.

• 17:20Speaker 01

  And the cereal industry, cereal was basically, you know, Kellogg and Post and those folks were health. Fanatics and they were running sanitariums in Minnesota for dyspeptic wealthy people and they were for the most part anti-sugar. So cereal was a way to get fiber into the diet and they didn't really want sugar in their products and they had nutritionists working for these companies that didn't want people eating sugar. But post-World War II, right around 1948, Post, with I think it was Sugar Crisp, finally breaks down the barrier and starts selling a sugar-coated cereal and suddenly every other cereal producer has to give in or go out of business. And you

• 18:04Speaker 01

  could see these struggles between their nutritionists and their marketing people. And in every case, the marketing people won. And by the 1960s, the American breakfast had been transformed into a basically a dead dessert with fiber.

• 18:21Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 18:22Speaker 01

  For lack of a better, you know, so we're drinking fruit juices, we're eating sugar-coated cereals. And then when the low-fat movement comes in in the 1960s, you know, you're adding sort of low-fat or no-fat yogurt with sugar and skim milk and it's, you know, it's sugar from beginning to end. So the people while this was happening are arguing, look, you know, obesity and diabetes is exploding, sugar consumption's exploding, clearly that's the prime suspect. And then there's a, as we began to understand the physiology of how sugars metabolize, that clearly made sugar a prime suspect as well. And, you know, in actually causing type 2 diabetes and a condition called

• 19:06Speaker 01

  insulin resistance, that's, we should probably talk about. So there's a-

• 19:11Shane Parrish?

  Yeah, why don't you walk me through the physiology of sugar?

• 19:15Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 19:16Shane Parrish?

  The response it generates in our body.

• 19:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. So when we're talking about added sugars, particularly sucrose, which is the white powdered stuff, and high fructose corn syrup, these are simple carbohydrates that are combinations of two simpler carbs. So glucose, which is the, when we consume grains and starchy vegetables like potatoes are broken down in our body into glucose and the glucose is- Transport into the bloodstream and it's blood when we talk about blood sugar, we're talking about glucose, blood glucose. So the glucose gets into bloodstream, the glucose level rises, so your blood sugar rises and that glucose is metabolized by every

• 20:03Speaker 01

  cell in the body.

• 20:04Shane Parrish?

  And this is the glycemic index, kind of like the response?

• 20:07Speaker 01

  When we talk about the glycemic index, exactly, that's the response of your blood sugar to the foods you're consuming. So if you're consuming a food that's almost pure glucose and is easy to digest, like white bread, you will have a quick rise in blood sugar. And it's one reason why white bread was usually considered sort of the standard by which you would then compare other foods to in the glycemic index. But there's another half of the sugar molecule, or in the case of high fructose corn syrup, another 55% of it, which is this molecule fructose. So any molecule that ends in O

• 20:49Speaker 01

  S A is a carbohydrate. So fructose is the sweetest of the carbohydrates. So it's what makes sugar sweet. But the fructose is metabolized not by every cell in our body. It's transported through the portal vein to our liver and some huge proportion of it is metabolized by liver cells. And, you know, this stuff was worked out by biochemists back as early as the early 20th century, but biochemists weren't doctors and they weren't studying treating diabetes or obese patients. And the doctors, even if they were getting biochemistry, might not have gotten this level of biochemistry. So the physicians treating diabetes never

• 21:33Speaker 01

  really understood what sugar was or what made it different than other starches. So when you began to have debates about whether sugar was the cause of diabetes, the diabetes specialists tended to say no.

• 21:50Speaker 01

  Because they thought sugar is the same as rice and they're all carbohydrates. And look, we know that the Japanese eat a lot of rice and they have low levels of diabetes. Ergo, it's not about sugar or rice. They also thought that once you start giving diabetics insulin, which begins in the early 1920s, it's easy to, hard to dose the insulin properly. So the diabetics would often experience episodes of very low blood sugar where they could go into hypoglycemic shock and die. And they had to be rescued from these episodes and the easiest way to do it was with candy. Ergo, sugar must be good for you. That's how they thought and you could see this in the literature.

• 22:32Speaker 01

  But physiology, so when we're talking about diabetes, we're talking about it particularly type 2 diabetes, which is the common form that associates with obesity and age.

• 22:43Shane Parrish?

  That's the one you're not born with, but you develop later in life.

• 22:46Speaker 01

  Well, you don't, yeah, it's not the acute form that hits in childhood, which is type 1, or that typically appears in childhood, which is type 1. So it's about 5% of all diabetes. And then type 2, there are variations now, but for type 2 is effectively about 95% of diabetes. So when we're talking about the diabetes epidemic, it's type 2 diabetes we're talking about. And because it associates so closely with excess weight, the assumption of the diabetes experts going back to the 1920s is it's caused by being fat. And you get fat because you eat too many calories, you don't exercise enough, and we'll probably talk about that shortly.

• 23:31Speaker 01

  But by the early 1960s, once the scientists had a tool that allowed them to measure hormones in the blood accurately, they realized that type 2 diabetes was a disorder of what's called insulin resistance. So with type 1 diabetes, you don't have enough insulin or no insulin at all, and you can't properly metabolize the carbohydrates you eat. And in effect, no matter how much you eat, you kind of starve to death because you can't use these fuels for food. With type 2 diabetes, and the assumption was all diabetes was a disorder of insulin deficit until the 1960s, when they could really measure insulin levels in the bloodstream

• 24:14Speaker 01

  and the research community realized that type 2 diabetics actually have Both high insulin and high blood sugar. So the insulin must not be working. So they're resistant to the insulin they're secreting. Or it's not working well enough, so they have to secrete more insulin. So since the early 1960s, we've been aware that type 2 diabetes is a disease of insulin resistance. And then this went along with the observation that obese people also tended to be insulin resistant. They had high blood sugar and high insulin levels. And that there's a condition that's now known as metabolic syndrome, which is a cluster

• 24:55Speaker 01

  of abnormalities that in sort of basically insulin resistant syndrome. So this is, you know, elevated blood sugar with glucose intolerance, it's called. It's also, you know, you're getting heavier or your waist size is increasing, so you're getting fatter and you've got an elevated level of what are called triglycerides, which are a form that fat appears in the blood and you've got low HDL cholesterol, which is the good cholesterol and your blood pressure is elevated. So it's this whole sort of cluster of metabolic abnormalities that not only sort of include obesity and diabetes in them, but also associated with heart disease and stroke and all these

• 25:38Speaker 01

  other chronic diseases. So when you start thinking of this whole cluster of insulin resistant conditions, then you're asking the question, whatever causes insulin resistance causes obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, stroke, cancer, Alzheimer's, virtually every chronic disease has a link to insulin resistance. And the best research on what causes insulin resistance suggests that it starts in the liver and it starts with the accumulation of fat in the liver. And in fact, there's another epidemic going on at the moment of not what's called non-alcoholic fatty lipin and it associates with obesity and diabetes and metabolic syndrome.

• 26:23Speaker 01

  So everything is targeting the liver and there you've got the fructose. Now I'm bringing it back to the case against sugar. Now you've got the fructose component of sugar being metabolized in the liver.

• 26:35Speaker 01

  And the liver didn't evolve to metabolize at the levels we see today. So, you know, throughout the last two million years, you would only see sugar in small quantities in fruit. It's what makes, you know, fructose in small quantities. It's what makes fruit sweet and you'd see it in even smaller quantities in green vegetables. But nothing like the amount you would see in like a Coca-Cola or a glass of apple juice, or a candy bar, an ice cream cone, or any of those foods where you're really just dumping fructose on the liver. And by the 1960s, the biochemistry had pretty clearly worked out that when you dump fructose on the liver, it converts it to fat. And on the other side, you'd have these insulin resistance researchers saying, hey, insulin resistance seems to be caused

• 27:20Speaker 01

  by the accumulation of fat in liver cells. And all I'm saying is, you know, that you've got 150 years of history of people saying when diabetes appears, it does so after sugar consumption goes up. And then you've got this, all these biological mechanisms suggesting that sugar is literally at the scene of the crime in the human body when insulin resistance begins. And when insulin resistance begins, it's, you know, you're on your road to this whole slew of chronic disorders that are now becoming epidemic, or already epidemic.

• 27:58Shane Parrish?

  Why are we so attracted to sugar?

• 28:00Speaker 01

  Uh, that's a good question. Um, you know, if you ask that question about any, uh, drug of abuse, or any addictive substance, nicotine, caffeine, uh, alcohol, heroin, cocaine, I mean, it's sort of, so that on one level, the idea is we become addicted to foods because there's an area of our brain called the nucleus accumbens, the reward center that rewards, is there to reward behaviors that are good for the species. So when you have an orgasm during sex, you've, the nucleus accumbens responds by like dosing your body with dopamine and it feels great and you want to repeat it. And when you eat foods,

• 28:45Speaker 01

  you know, which we have to do to food, foods that taste good also stimulate a dopamine response in the nucleus accumbens. So you want to continue eating, which means you'll continue to stay alive and you'll continue to replicate. And so drugs of abuse just happen to be things that... For whatever reason, just by chance, you know, over the course of human history, we sample 10 million leaves, twigs, starches, you know, foods, animals, and low and behold, there's a few things that happen to sort of overstimulate the nucleus accumbens and overstimulate dopamine, and those become addictive substances that we then want to

• 29:27Speaker 01

  repeat and repeat and repeat. And so there is evidence that sugar stimulates dopamine secretion, the nucleus accumbens, just like these other drugs of abuse. And in animals at least, so rats and mice, we could do these experiments, you could demonstrate that they are, they will be more addicted to sugar than to cocaine or heroin. So these experiments, some of them were done in France, are sort of perversely fascinating. You basically addict your lab rats to a daily bolus of cocaine or of heroin, and then you give it a choice between either sugar or the cocaine. And if it chooses sugar, it can't go back to

• 30:10Speaker 01

  the cocaine, it can't go both. Yeah, over the course of a couple of days, the rat will switch from sugar to, from cocaine to sugar. Takes a little longer before making the switch from heroin. That's fascinating. Yeah, I mean, clearly you can't do these experiments with children. But if you have kids, you probably don't need to. The, so there's a lot of, clearly sugar's a psychoactive substance. You know, we give it to newborns to, when they get circumcisions, you know, a couple of drops of sugar water on the tongue, and you could take, remove the foreskin,

• 30:51Speaker 01

  and it doesn't bother them, or at least not in the short run. Yeah, sugar's always been considered a painkiller, and it actually entered Europe in the 13th, 14th century or 12th post crusades, more as a medicinal, and perceived as having medicinal uses than as a food or a spice. But, you know, my best, my favorite saying on this was from Charles Mann, the journalist historian, who's a friend of mine, and somebody who just awes me with how good his work is. And

• 31:28Speaker 01

  He said in his book, 1493, he was discussing the sugar industry. And he said, scientists today debate amongst themselves whether or not sugar is an addictive substance, or we just act like it is. And it's like, you know, clearly, I, again, I think, I have kids. I don't need scientific research to tell me that this substance has power over my children than no other food does. And, you know, even the sort of ardent defenders of sugar in the, you know, historians and journalists would say, well, of course, parents still have to ration their children's behavior. I mean, they're sugar eating. You can't allow them to eat all the sugar they want.

• 32:13Speaker 01

  So there's clearly, you know, whether it's this effect in the nucleus accumbens, or there's an interesting effect that might drive sugar consumption in, also in the liver. It's a little more technical, but I've always wondered how much role that play, but something about it, clearly, it just becomes something we like because it affects our brain and our body in a way that we want more of it. You know, we want to repeat the experience.

• 32:39Shane Parrish?

  A lot of people seem to think it's just simply a matter of calories in, calories out. What, what do you say to that argument?

• 32:48Speaker 01

  Um, bish. No. This is, this was.

• 32:54Shane Parrish?

  This is the most common thing I read, right?

• 32:56Speaker 01

  So when I started my research, okay, journalistic research on this subject, and if you go back to the very first infamous New York Times Magazine cover story I had in 2002, that was called, What If It's All Big Fat Lie? I had a line in there where I said, you know, I was speculating that dietary fat doesn't make people fat and it's carbohydrates that do, but so I had a line where it said, clearly, it's excess calories that cause us to eat too much. And then I actually, you know, I get a big book advance and I could spend five years of my life doing research and the internet at this point in time made it possible for me to learn, you know, to, it was like a new technology had come along and suddenly

• 33:39Speaker 01

  I can, you know, sit in my office, which was then in New York, and I can get every primary source on obesity, whether it's in the academic literature or books or conference proceedings, um, you know, going back to the 19th century and, um, I mean, back then, nowadays you could virtually download them. Back then, 2002 to 2006, you could, I had students all around the country whose job was to go to their local medical libraries and, you know, make copies of the 50 or 100 references I would send to them and then I would buy books. So I, I actually started doing my research and I realized that this,

• 34:17Speaker 01

  this idea that excess calories is what makes us fat is the, and I, I'm embarrassed that I ever, never thought of this, but it's logically equivalent to saying, you know, excess money makes us rich. Or, uh, I don't know, scoring excess points in a football game will make you win. Um, you know, it's just, it's almost unbelie- incomprehensibly naive to me. And I now understand where it comes from because I've read all this literature and I, I, to this day, I'm still sort of mystified. Um, so I'm in a pet peeve time, you know, my sugar book came out. I got sort of almost universally wonderful reviews and then Jerome

• 35:01Speaker 01

  Grobman in The New Yorker sort of condescendingly dismissed the book as the work of a sort of, you know, wannabe investigative journalist. Um, and in the, his review, he said, makes a statement that the one undeniable fact about nutrition research is the importance of calories.

• 35:21Speaker 01

  And, you know, excess calories makes you fat. And I thought, you know, if this was a James Sariyaki writing about economics, and he said, "The one undeniable factor in the science of wealth is about the importance of dollars." You know, David Remnick or one of his crew would say, "James, are you out of your, are you kidding us? Are you out of your mind?" Like, what, of course, dollars are, you know, if, I mean, if I, we were discussing wealth accumulation, I just kept telling you, you, you know, you said, "Gary, why is, you know, let's talk about why, why is Bill Gates so rich?" And I said, "Well, because he makes more money than he spends." You know, you'd be going, "I just, why did I book this guy?" And if we were talking about climate change, you said, "Why is

• 36:06Speaker 01

  the atmosphere heating up?" Assuming it's heating up, which I'm beginning to believe, since we just had 100-degree weather here in Oakland a couple of weeks ago. And I said, "Well, clearly, the atmosphere is heating up because it's taking in more energy than it's letting out." You know, I've just, in one sentence, sort of nullified billions of dollars' worth of research into what it is about the atmosphere and various, you know, that, and greenhouse gases and the wavelengths of light, they reflect or, you know, transmit. And, I mean, all the intricacies of climate change science would be nullified by this statement that the atmosphere is heating up because it's taking in more energy

• 36:48Speaker 01

  than it's letting out, which it has to be doing. So, the point is back, nutrition science from the 1860s to the 1920s was completely dominated by, as all sciences are, by what they could measure, the technologies available to make observations. And all they had were they had devices called calorimeters, where they could measure the energy content of a food, and then they could measure the energy expended by humans by putting them in these room-sized calorimeters, or dogs.

• 37:21Speaker 01

  And then they had, they could do experiments with animals where you, you know, give them vitamin or mineral deficiencies and see what kind of diseases manifest. So from there, so all of nutrition science was calorimetry, energy in and energy out, and vitamins and minerals. And when people started talking about what the cause of obesity might be, it made absolutely perfect sense to think in terms of calories because that's all they could look at. That's all they had. And so by 1910, 1920, they had this very simplistic idea with some, you know, five dollar words attached to it to make it seem more complicated, that said that people get fatter because they consume too many calories

• 38:02Speaker 01

  or they don't expend enough. And it seemed to coincide with what we see in the environment, which is you're likely, you're unlikely to see obese people running marathons or doing hard physical labor. So you tend to think of them as sedentary or lazy. And you often see obese people and we have this sort of motto of Falstaff and Shakespeare's, you know, they're gluttons, even if they're not. You pay attention to them. You'll notice them when they are. And when you see an obese person sitting at a restaurant, eating a tiny salad, you don't think, it just doesn't cross your consciousness as refuting your belief that they're gluttons. So it seemed to go along with what seemed to be conventional

• 38:43Speaker 01

  wisdom and it was easy to believe. And then the weird thing is the research community just bought into it and locked into it in a way that, again, part of it can be explained by, so not all the research community locked in. The German and Austrian clinicians, and Germany and Austria was, you know, these people were doing far and away the best medical science in the world at the time. And they pioneered all the fields of science relevant to obesity. So metabolism, genetics, endocrinology, the science of hormones, nutrition, all sort of came out of Germany and Austria. These hair professor doctor types who would

• 39:22Speaker 01

  both see patients and, you know, theorize about what the cause of the disorders might be. And they had concluded that obesity had to be a hormonal disorder. It had to be. Because there are all these manifestations of it, sort of a hormonal regulatory disorder. You know, they would say things like, you know, look, men and women fat and differently. Therefore, sex hormones are involved with obesity. You know, we know when people are insulin deficient, they don't have insulin. They can't store body fat. So insulin must play a role in, I mean, these people get emaciated, no matter how much you feed them. Type one diabetic, so insulin must play a role in storing body fat.

• 40:03Speaker 01

  We know that there are, you know, tumors, fatty tumors called lipomas that are independent of how much the people are eating and exercising. If you have a lipoma, it could starve someone. The lipoma is not going to go away. It's still going to be this cluster of fat. And there are even cases in the literature where people had skin grafts. You know, a graft of skin taken from their stomach and put on like the back of their hand to, to cover a burn. And then they get older and they get obese and one hand is got no body fat on it. You know, if you look at the back of your hand, it's a place we just don't store, tend to store body fat. And the other hand will have this huge tuft of fat on it.

• 40:45Speaker 01

  So they would say there's clearly regulatory enzymes in the skin itself that are determining whether or not this area of the body will accumulate fat. And it's all got to be hormonally and maybe regulated to the central nervous system as well. And then the German and Austrian school just evaporates with the Second World War. Literally, you know, these people immigrate to the US and end up in, you know, one of the great endocrinologists from the University of Vienna ends up living in Los Angeles, writing articles and working for the Hospital of Medical Evangelists because nobody else wants to hire these European emigres, particularly the Jews.

• 41:28Speaker 01

  And then after the war, the European researchers have many things to think about more important than obesity.

• 41:37Speaker 01

  And in America, they just glom onto this idea that it's all about how much you eat and exercise, you know, a lot of lean research. They don't want to read the German literature anymore. So the lingua franca of medicine pre-World War II was German. But post-World War II, you have a lot of young German doctors and, I mean, excuse me, young American researchers who had fought in the war, who have just are now, they, you know, justifiably have this natural antipathy to the Germans and Austrians. You're not going to read the literature. They don't cite the pre-World War II studies and they just recreate the science of obesity as a gluttony and sloth disorder. And by the 1960s, the major figures in the field

• 42:21Speaker 01

  are psychologists who are trying to change the behavior of the fat person to make them eat less. My favorite example was one idea where you would get the obese man's wife to withhold sex if he didn't lose weight that week. [laughing] You know, and it's just suddenly eating, obesity becomes an eating disorder. And then later it becomes a sedentary behavior disorder by the 1970s. And none of these people, you know, if you've got psychologists studying it, well, their specialty is psychology. It's not endocrinology. It's not hormones. It's behavior. So you get this sort of what

• 42:59Speaker 01

  you see is all there is phenomenon, from Kahneman. And it never went away. And even today, you know, the great themes in obesity research are this idea that the obesity is caused by highly palatable or rewarding foods. And the implication is there's something about the brains of obese people that can't control their appetite in the onslaught of all the, you know, the bliss points created by salt, fat, and as opposed to the simple idea that there's something about the foods we eat that trigger a hormonal response that tells the body either to store fat or, you know, mobilize and use it for fuel. And then bringing this all back to insulin resistance.

• 43:46Speaker 01

  By the early 1960s, it was clear that insulin, the hormone insulin, was the primary regulator of fat accumulation in the human body. So what it does is, you secrete it in response to the carbohydrate content. So your blood sugar starts to go up and the body puts insulin out to signal your lean tissue to take up the glucose from the blood and burn it for fuel. The insulin facilitate, the technical ways it facilitates the uptake of sugar, of glucose. But it also signals the fat tissue to hold on to any fat and to store whatever fat you've eaten. So it's sort of partitioning the fuel use to say, look, the immediate problem is we

• 44:29Speaker 01

  have this rising tide of blood sugar and high blood sugar is toxic. So the way we're going to deal with that is we're going to store fat, get that out of the way, and then we're going to burn the blood sugar as quickly as we can. And as blood sugar starts coming down, insulin starts coming down, and then you could mobilize the fat you've stored and use that fat for fuel, which is how your body's supposed to work. So there's a term called metabolic flexibility, where when blood sugar starts coming down, fat's coming up, you just switch over from burning glucose to burning fat. Your cells should be perfectly happy to do that. But if you're insulin resistant, your insulin stays high and you never successfully make that switch.

• 45:13Speaker 01

  So blood sugar comes down, but you continue to lock away fat and sort of like a ratchet wrench, day to day it only goes in one direction. You just store fat and that's all you do. So, you know, that's the, again, long-winded way to say, as long as people believe about, it's about calories, you're not even paying attention to the hormones and enzymes that regulate fat accumulation. And what stuns me, so the last February, there's an article in the New England Journal on the pathogenesis and mechanisms of obesity. And you could read that article and it's sort of, this is the premier medical journal in the world, and there's actually no discussion of the mechanisms, other than an assumption that people eat too much.

• 45:57Speaker 01

  And so, you know, that's, that's the implicit, and you can go to the leading textbook in the world. And the medical textbook, the most seminal textbook, and the Harrison's Principles of Medicine, I think it's called, and the chapter on obesity is written by the, you know, a very, very smart researcher named Jeff Flyer, who just, until recently, was dean of Harvard Medical School, and his wife, who's equally smart and talented, Terry Marito's Flyer, and they do research together, and if you actually look for what it is that causes obesity, they just, in that chapter, though, the assumption is it's the overconsumption of calories, it's eating too much, it's a behavioral problem, and there's no discussion

• 46:42Speaker 01

  of what's been a very well-worked-out science on the sort of hormonal regulatory, you know, system that controls both the use of fatty acids for fuel and the storage of fat in the fat cells. And to me, I'm, I don't see how that can be defended. And it's, like I said, it's almost mystifying, and I've spent 20 years trying to understand it, and I kind of understand every step along the way, how it happened and when it happened. And I still want to say to people, you're talking about a disorder of excess fat accumulation. Don't you have to discuss the regulatory system that controls fat accumulation, the

• 47:25Speaker 01

  hormones and enzymes in the fat cells, on the fat cell membranes, elsewhere in the body, you know, the very beautiful system worked out by millions of years to regulate this, and it's clearly dysregulated.

• 47:38Shane Parrish?

  Well, one thing I haven't heard you mention that I'm curious about is what is the role of fiber?

• 47:46Speaker 01

  That's a very good question. Again, it's intra-historic, I have to talk about these things historically, and I apologize, I think about that.

• 47:56Shane Parrish?

  No, this is amazing.

• 47:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, to understand the role, you have to know where it came from. So, in the 1960s, several British researchers start focusing in on this idea that it's either sugar, or sugar and refined grains, that cause obesity and diabetes and heart disease. And so these two, one of them is John Yudkin, who's the leading British nutritionist, and then one is a fellow named Peter Cleve, who was a British naval researcher, and Cleve had the advantage that- As a Navy man, he had traveled around the world and he had seen that there are all these disparities in chronic disease rates all around the world, wherever you go. So,

• 48:39Speaker 01

  you know, urban, westernized urban centers had high rates of obesity and diabetes and heart disease, but, you know, less westernized areas and non-urban areas had low rates. So the question is, is what was driving that? And he concluded it was the refinement of the grains we were consuming, including sugar. And so by the 1960s, Cleve had written, Yudkin was publishing in the medical journals, and Cleve had written a book called The Saccharine Disease, explaining that it was refined grains and sugars that causes this cluster of diseases. And then into this walks a guy named Dennis Burkett, who was a missionary

• 49:22Speaker 01

  physician in Africa, in, I forget where was Edi, I mean Uganda. And Burkett was famous for a medical investigation he did that led to the identification of the first virus that causes the cancer that's known as Burkett's lymphoma after Burkett. So he was a very well-known, very famous physician. And Edi Amin comes into power in Uganda, and he has to flee back to the UK, and he's looking for things to do. And the leading British epidemiologist in the world, a guy named Sir Richard Dahl, who was famous for identifying cigarettes as the cause of lung cancer, Richard Dahl gives him Cleve's book and says, you should read this. I don't know how much is right, but there's a lot of it that's

• 50:07Speaker 01

  brilliant. And Burkett reads it, and he thinks it's brilliant, but then he kind of thinks, we're never going to convince the world to give up sugar and white bread and beer. And he's also obsessed, being a Brit, with constipation.

• 50:23Speaker 01

  Completely obsessed with constipation. So he decides that the problem isn't the presence of the sugar in the white bread and the beer, it's the refinement of the fiber, the absence of the fiber. When you refine these products, so you take wheat and you refine it into a white bread, you get rid of all the fiber in the process and that's, he knows that fiber helps with constipation and constipation is a disease that's often seen with, you know, and he's along with this cluster of western diseases. So by the 1970s, Burkitt starts saying, publishing articles with another former missionary physician from Africa named Hugh Trow, saying, "The problem is the absence of fiber, not the

• 51:08Speaker 01

  presence of sugar and highly refined, high glycemic index grains." And you can reconcile this fiber hypothesis with the dietary fat idea that's growing along through the 60s as well. So over the course of 1960s, the bulk of the heart disease nutrition community had decided dietary fat caused heart disease, and if it caused heart disease, it also caused obesity. And then you had Cleve saying, "No, no, no, it's not dietary..." Cleve and Yudkin saying, "It's not dietary fat, it's sugar and refined grains." And these were seen as competing hypotheses that couldn't be resolved. In parts, if you told people to eat less fat, the question is, what were they going

• 51:50Speaker 01

  to eat if not sugar and grains? So those two hypotheses couldn't be reconciled, but then Burkitt comes along and says, "No, no, no, it's not the sugar and refined grains, it's the absence of fiber." So they should eat low-fat diets that are high in fiber. And everyone goes, "That's it." You know, the bran muffin craze appears, like bran muffins start appearing on the market, you know, a year after Burkitt's first publication. And that becomes a conventional wisdom ever since. And the problem is, these are hypotheses, right? And we've talked about how people do a lousy job of testing hypotheses, they're very hard to test, but by the early 2000s, it was pretty clear that both these hypotheses

• 52:35Speaker 01

  couldn't be confirmed in experiment. In fact, one of the things I talked to, I talked to Richard Dahl a few years before he died for my research, and Dahl said to me, "Yeah, you know, that turns out the only thing fiber actually cures is constipation." And I said, "Well, could Cleve have been right all along?" And he said, "Yeah, it's a good point. Cleve really hit on something." And all I did in my books is say, "Hey, it looks like Cleve and Yudkin were probably right all along, or more right, and then a few other peoples too, like Hatkins." But, um, so there, that's the story. I don't, you know, fiber, we're still obsessed about

• 53:16Speaker 01

  fiber, the idea that, so, you know, again, I said, "Science progresses when new technologies come along that allow you to observe new things." So, the obesity/diabetes science is completely botched. You know, they've made no progress. They can't explain it. Even articles, there was recently a review, an Endocrine Science Society review of obesity, uh, written by some of the leading figures in the field. It was kind of a response to my work and that of others, in which they said, you know, "Clearly, obesity is caused by eating excess calories, and a calorie is a calorie." And then they kind of said, "But we don't really know what makes people fat, or how to make them thin."

• 54:00Speaker 01

  So, these people are clearly lost. And I'm saying, one of the reasons why they're lost is because they just, the revolution in endocrinology was, obesity research nullified that, passed it by, never took advantage of, and that was 1960's era science. So, then obesity becomes a kind of real science to the medical community in 1993, when the hormone leptin is discovered, and then it becomes a sub-discipline of molecular biology, and then genomics, and proteomics. But this 1960's era endocrinology, which kind of solved it, is just left behind. So, now, another new technology comes along. Now, you can suddenly sequence the genome of the bacteria in your gut.

• 54:45Speaker 01

  So, new technology, you get to see new things, and now you assume you could learn new things, and we're desperate for a theory of obesity, right? Because we can't, we don't know what caused it or prevents it, so the gut biome explodes. And people say, well, clearly, Westerners who are obese and diabetic have different gut biomes than, you know, hunter-gatherer populations. In Africa, what's the difference? Well, the hunter-gatherers eat more fiber. I don't know. So then you get this focus goes back on fiber. And then there are people like me saying, wait a minute, what about this 1960s endocrinology? Remember that? So, you know, that's, I don't.

• 55:30Speaker 01

  It's me, I'm afraid of what happened in the 1970s. You add fiber, you can slow down the digestion of the carbohydrates, you can even slow down the digestion of the sugars. So that would probably help, but you've paid attention to the wrong thing. It's not the absence of the fiber, it's the presence of those other foods. And you could help more by getting the right answer rather than coming up with another wrong answer.

• 55:59Shane Parrish?

  What have you kind of changed your mind about, or where have your thoughts significantly shifted since you first started to develop your, your alternative hypotheses, I guess, of obesity, that carbohydrates promote insulin response, which promotes body fat? I mean, what's surprised you the most as you dove into this?

• 56:18Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, again, when I started this, I thought that calorie, that excess calories cause obesity. So, you know, but we're assuming you're asking basically after I shed myself of that belief. So the question is, is there anything that I used to believe that is just that I'm now convinced is wrong?

• 56:38Shane Parrish?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 56:39Speaker 01

  Put simply, and, um, uh, not substantially, no. Um, I mean, there is so, we could tell, one of the things I did in all this, in the course of this, is I co-founded this not-for-profit called The Nutrition Science.

• 57:00Shane Parrish?

  NewSci, yeah.

• 57:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. We call it NewSci, although it could be NewSci, I guess. So, NewSci, I co-founded it with Dr. Peter Attia, who's a very, you know, the talented physician with

• 57:16Speaker 01

  Also a business background and our assumption was particularly with this energy balance issue. Is obesity an energy balance issue or is it a hormonal regulatory issue? And the implication is, is the factor in foods that cause obesity, the caloric content or the effect of those foods on underlying hormonal states.

• 57:42Speaker 01

  And again, on some level, I think I shouldn't have to even, you shouldn't have to do the experiments to demonstrate it. Because, you know, I find the energy balance thing now so naive, but we'll accept that I just talk about it too much. I've convinced myself that it's easy to see the naivete. So we thought if we can get the research community to do the experiments themselves and to understand the competing hypotheses and to understand, you know, our arguments, and then we could raise the money for them to do the research. This would have a profound effect on their thinking. And if anything, at this point in time, we have done more harm than good.

• 58:27Shane Parrish?

  How so?

• 58:28Speaker 01

  So of the studies we funded, the first one was a pilot study with some very influential obesity researchers. And it was a learning experience for me also. So in my first book, Good Calories, Bad Calories, I do discuss the epilogue is a, in part a meditation on how I don't believe nutrition science is a functioning science. That it lacks many of the characteristics that a functioning science has to have, particularly the sort of critical, rigorous back and forth between scientists where they're attacking each other's ideas and, and being used by each other to understand how they might be fooling themselves.

• 59:15Speaker 01

  You know, Robert Martin, a philosopher of science, said that this kind of critical back and forth in sciences makes a mother's, you know, parenting of her child look like child's play in comparison. You know, they're supposed to be sort of... Francis Crick said a functioning collaboration doesn't work unless you can be rude to each other. Hmm. You know, you have to critically attack and what I've seen in these nutrition, public health communities are it's too easy to attack each other's work, so they don't do it. And then they just allow the substandard work to go by. So I discussed that in the epilogue of Good Calories, Bad Calories. It's one place where my editor really let me sort of express my dismay.

• 1:00:01Speaker 01

  But it was on a macro level. I had no idea how hard it was to do these experiments on a micro level. In fact, because I am not a scientist or an experimental scientist, and my only experience was with, you know, my first two books being sort of mentored by some of the great physicists in the world and seeing how they did their work. I wasn't aware of how easy it is to screw up an experiment and how unintended consequences or unintended phenomena will appear that will make the interpretation of your experiment almost impossible.

• 1:00:41Speaker 01

  And again, if you're working in a world where like, you know, you could do your cyclotron experiment on Monday, have results on Wednesday, and have your colleagues explain what you screwed up on on Friday, and then you could repeat it on Monday, this isn't a huge problem. Right. And the history of science is full of those kinds of, you know, examples and discussions. But if you're working in a world where the experiment costs you five million bucks. Yep. And you're never going to get five million dollars to do it again. That's so tough, yeah. That's, that's difficult. And so my, and same kind of problems come up. It's not like the physicists are any better at this than the nutritionists, because if you're

• 1:01:22Speaker 01

  doing something new, it's never been done before. You have no idea how your equipment or your subjects or your, the purveyors of your diets or whatever are going to screw it up. You can't plan for everything. But the, so the, the part of my revelation was on this micro level, how, not just how easily the science could be derailed by just bad luck or, you know, unforeseen, what was it, you know, unknown unknowns.

• 1:01:59Speaker 01

  But the tendency among the researchers to pretend it didn't happen, or to ignore it, because if they actually confront it, they're basically saying, here's a paper I've just written that isn't worth reading. So I'm going to pretend that it is, and the only way I can pretend that it is is by not mentioning all the ways that it isn't. And you're supposed to publish negative data, but the truth is, it's very hard to get it published, and nobody wants to put in the time to finally get an article published in some fourth-rate journal because it's negative. So a lot of issues came up actually getting to be involved that I'm wondering, you know, how naive was I? And will we ever solve these problems?

• 1:02:44Shane Parrish?

  What do you think it's going to take for the nutritional research community to get a lot more rigorous? It seems like, I mean, the influence of the epidemiology makes this difficult. Such a large percentage of nutritional studies are based on correlative measures rather than causative ones, leading people to believe that, you know, just about every food either causes or prevents cancer. Like, how does this get fixed?

• 1:03:10Speaker 01

  Well, that's, that's the question. The, I'm involved now. I'm supposed to be co-authoring an article with the, for the British Medical Journal on nutrition policy. They're running a series on nutrition policy. So one of the articles on dietary fat, and I'm honored that they think enough of my work that they've asked me to be a co-author, with two epidemiologists. One of them is at Harvard and has not liked my work for 10 years since I wrote a New York Times Magazine cover article about the science of epidemiology using the Harvard cohort study as a case study of a pseudoscience. So I can understand why he might be angry at me

• 1:03:54Speaker 01

  and disagree with my way of thinking. So the conflict in this article is that the nutrition community, driven by these epidemiologists, think in the context of saturated fat that if all of us out there in the lay population were to replace the saturated fats we eat with polyunsaturated fats, we'll live longer and be healthier. We'll have less heart disease, less diabetes, maybe less obesity, less insulin resistance.

• 1:04:24Speaker 01

  So this means, in effect, replacing, I don't know if they think this far into advance, but it means, in effect, replacing foods we've been consuming for millions of years as a species, so, and mostly animal fats, with vegetable oils that are relatively new to the human diet, and particularly like soy oil and canola oil and corn oil. And, well, the argument I've been making in emails, not successfully, is that if you're going, what you're assuming is that these vegetable oils are inherently healthy, that they're beneficial, they're the equivalent of statins. We give vegetable oils to everyone, they will be healthier if they consume these things.

• 1:05:06Speaker 01

  And this is an idea that if it was a drug, you would never be able to do without long-term clinical trials to establish that you're not going to do more harm than good, or in fact, that you're not going to do any harm at all. It's not good enough to say eighty percent of the people are going to live longer if we find out that twenty percent are going to be killed or get diabetes. You know, it's one thing for a doctor to say, "I think you should be on a statin." Here's the, you know, the proside is, "I think we'll get your LDL down and your inflammation down, and we're going to reduce your risk of heart disease." There is a small chance you'll become diabetic, or, you know, have muscle aches, in which case we'll discontinue the statin or switch to a different drug.

• 1:05:47Speaker 01

  It's another thing for public health organizations and governments to say the whole nation should be on statins and not care if one out of thirty of the population gets diabetes because the other twenty-nine might live longer. So these are two entirely different scenarios, and if the vegetable oils are supposed to be beneficial, we should, we have to do those kinds of tests, we just have to do them. And what I wrote in an email to the lead author is, you know, "You're telling me that if I cook my son's, eleven-year-old son's salmon in canola oil instead of butter, they will live longer.

• 1:06:32Speaker 01

  My eleven-year-old son will live longer, and there will be no negative consequences."

• 1:06:38Speaker 01

  I need to know you have better evidence than you do before I accept that. Because canola oil scares me. Olive oil, maybe I'll give in. Canola oil, corn oil, soy oil, brand new foods to the human population. So their response, the Harvard response is, we'll never get these studies done. What you're asking for are virtually impossible. They're very expensive, maybe half a billion dollars or a hundred million dollars. You're asking, what you need to test these is maybe forty thousand people that you can randomize to eat either canola oil or butter

• 1:07:20Speaker 01

  or soy oil or coconut fat, pick your... And they're gonna have to keep doing it for ten years and they're gonna have to comply pretty well because at the end of ten years, we're gonna wanna be able to compare what are called heart endpoints. More heart disease or less, not just risk factors like cholesterol levels, but do they actually get more heart disease, you know, more cancers, more diabetes? Are they heavy or do they have better or worse cognitive function? I mean, there's a whole slew of things that could happen if you feed people a completely new food. And they're arguing because it can't be done, we have to go with the evidence we have. It's just too hard to do this trial.

• 1:08:03Speaker 01

  It's too expensive and the people aren't gonna follow our advice and the people we put on canola oil are gonna get bored and switch to butter and the people we put on butter are gonna get health conscious and switch to canola and it's just gonna... And we'll find out as we have in the past that we've spent half a billion dollars and we either don't know the answer or we don't like the answer. And so we should go with what we have. And the broken system. So my, let me just give you my counter to the counter, which is in physics, the physicists have decided en masse that they wanna know, they wanted to know whether the Higgs boson existed and they wanna know if there's science behind the standard model and the only, the best way they know how to do that is to build a huge accelerator which costs ten billion dollars.

• 1:08:49Speaker 01

  And then it costs a billion dollars a year to run. So they did that. And then society funded, we funded that because society thinks that's an important question. And we're a better society if we spend money trying to answer that than if we don't. Um, and then they have collaborations of fifteen hundred scientists on, you know, four detectors on this huge atom smasher, fifteen hundred scientists on each detector. The papers have lists of names that are longer than the papers itself. But that's what you do because you want to know the answer. You know, in nuclear fusion. So we think as a society, we're gonna run into some serious energy problems with or without

• 1:09:31Speaker 01

  climate change involved, but we're just gonna have to fuel the lives of ten billion people by twenty fifty. That's gonna take an enormous amount of energy. Our, you know, fossil fuel reserves are gonna run dry. Can't do it with renewables. It's just not practical. We need nuclear power and ideally nuclear fusion as opposed to nuclear fission. And fusion power is hard to achieve. And so far, we spent fifty billion dollars on nuclear fusion research worldwide. It'll probably cost another fifty billion before we find out, either get to a, you know, working fusion reaction, reactor, or find out it's not possible. But we do it. We spend the money because we think it's important to our species and the survival of our species.

• 1:10:16Speaker 01

  So my counterargument is, I mean, these destroyers that ran into ships in the Sea of Japan, and two of them in the past six months, those are billion dollar ships. If we spend a billion dollars, obesity and diabetes cost, the healthcare system in the US, the estimate is a billion dollars in direct medical costs a day. If we spend one day's worth of medical costs, I think we could probably answer every one of these studies. But we have to be willing to do it. We have to decide as a society that it's worth it. That epidemiologists and the public health people have to stop arguing that it's just too impractical and it'll never get done and instead argue to do it.

• 1:11:00Speaker 01

  And, you know, if people decide it's all doable, you could even do these studies in a way, if you, they actually tried, they could, they know how studies have screwed up in the past, you could figure out ways to do it that'll give you the answers. And then you have to have patience to get the answers.

• 1:11:17Shane Parrish?

  You've taken a very public stand in, you know, what seems to be a somewhat heated debate. How do you strive to remain intellectually honest?

• 1:11:27Speaker 01

  Um, intellectually honest is easy, you just, I mean, you just do it. Although my critics would probably argue that I don't, um.

• 1:11:37Shane Parrish?

  What would your harshest critic say to you about your intellectual honesty?

• 1:11:41Speaker 01

  Um, I don't know, I mean, there's some bloggers out there who, I mean, there may be, do you have bloggers who hate you?

• 1:11:48Shane Parrish?

  Oh, yeah, I get hate mail all the time.

• 1:11:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it's sort of, you know, I mean, the blogosphere just selects for people who, and the more, uh, I mean, there are websites that exist in part to argue that I'm an idiot. Um, and they, you know, the, the more fiercely they argue that, the, you know, the more hits they get. Uh, the, in the community at large, that I'm still fighting this tendency to just, you know, it's easier to just ignore me. Or, um, where you see shifts to, you know, to pay, you don't really have to pay attention to my work because it's, you know, it's published in books and it's only a few peer-reviewed articles in the literature. So, um, it's easier to just ignore me than to confront the arguments.

• 1:12:36Speaker 01

  And again, one of the problems I feel with these field, nutrition, epidemiology, public health for 50 years is they found it easier to just ignore skeptics and to confront the issues and see if the skeptics are right and the critics are right and what they have to do if it's possible to fix these problems. So, you know, and then, but I do have, for instance, I have an email, um, I'm having an email exchange with the, uh, head of the, uh, Department of Nutrition at Tufts and he sent me an article that was written by Tom Frieden of the former head of the CDC that was in the New England Journal of Medicine arguing that observational epidemiologic studies often have to be the base of decisions

• 1:13:20Speaker 01

  about public health and medical, public health recommendations and medical treatments. And we can't hold clinical trials on this pedestal. We do because the observational studies are clearly good enough in some cases. And he sent me that just to say that this sort of brilliant article put his position in words better than he could. And so I read the article and I said, well, needless to say, I don't find it's brilliant. And here are all the reasons why. And, and he responded with, well, you're cherry picking your data. You know, you're being intellectually dishonest. And it's an easy accusation to make. And if I have time, I will respond saying, I'm not actually cherry picking my data. Look at

• 1:14:05Speaker 01

  the study you sent me. It doesn't actually make the point that you're using it to make. And I'm asking for evidence that does. So it's sort of, that kind of accusation is very easy to make. When you do what I do, I mean, it's, it's a problem. You know, you've got a journalist coming along and condemning an entire field, several entire fields of research that are staffed by very smart people who have done very well in their careers, who've gotten enormous amount of positive feedback, who believe they're doing good for the world. Any one of them could have gone into, you know, the commercial sector and made more money. I mean, these are really well meaning people. And some journalist comes

• 1:14:50Speaker 01

  along and says, you're, you know, you just, you missed it. You botched it. You did lousy science. That's, who's going to accept that? I mean, I couldn't do it. I can't expect them to do it. So part of my job is to weather the criticisms and just keep making the arguments as honestly as I can. And I do have one advantage that they don't have. What's that? So, you know, the implications are these chronic diseases are caused by the carbohydrates in the diet. And that's the context. And if you remove the carbs and replace them with fat, the chronic diseases will go away. Not for everybody, but for most people.

• 1:15:34Speaker 01

  So this is an effect, this argument that if, you know, people eat very low carb, high fat diets, the lowest carb, highest fat would be ketogenic, that's the extreme example, they'll get healthier. And the world is now full of people who have done that and gotten healthier. And if there's one thing that I and others like Nina Teichold have been able to accomplish is we've broken down the resistance to these diets as, on some level fads, but alternative also as deadly. So the medical community thought they were deadly. So now you've got a whole world of people, diabetic, obese individuals, people

• 1:16:13Speaker 01

  with neurological disorders and, you know, who go on these diets and they get healthy. In the short, you know, maybe they're raising their, oh, cholesterol and they're gonna die earlier of heart disease, but this one woman put it in an Instagram post, you know, I lost a hundred pounds and you're telling me that bacon is gonna kill me? Like, being a hundred pounds lighter and eating bacon is worse than being the way I used to be? So they, this sort of growing movement, and physicians do this as well, because they have the same health problems and issues as the rest of us. So if they do it and it works, they become passionate about it. And they put their patients on it. And their

• 1:16:57Speaker 01

  patients become passionate about it, if it works. If it doesn't, you just lose them. And unfortunately, that's the sort of cognitive bias with what I'm describing. But you've got this movement that people would like to talk about as a fuel, but it's basically fueled as a fad, but it's fueled by this very profound clinical phenomena, the clinical efficacy of these diets to reverse diabetes or reverse obesity or, you know, and that's hard to stop. I was just, I'm interviewing these practitioners for my next book, kind of solipsistic exercise, but it's fascinating.

• 1:17:41Speaker 01

  And I was talking to a South African physician who's now working in British Columbia, who's just incredibly passionate about these low carb, high fat diets. And he communicates this to all his patients. And I said, why are you so passionate about it? And he said, it's because I can't unsee what I've seen. You know, I put the diabetic patient on this diet. I get him to follow it. And this is a person who's, you know, he's on insulin and overweight and obese. His, the rest of his life, if he eats the way he does, or the way the diabetes associations want him to eat, all we're doing is basically, you know, adding drugs and modulating his insulin injections. And you put him on this diet and he becomes healthy.

• 1:18:24Shane Parrish?

  And that's a low carb, high fat diet?

• 1:18:26Speaker 01

  A low carb, high fat. And it's an easy diet because he's not hungry. He's not, he's true, he's not getting donuts and french fries and cereal anymore, but he's replacing it with some pretty, so that kind of clinical observation. You know, there's a startup in San Francisco called Verta Health that's doing this on a sort of, on a larger scale with smartphones and health coaches and doctors. And, you know, until recently, people believed that even type 2 diabetes was irreversible. Once on insulin, always on insulin, basically, until you get taken down by the, the side effects.

• 1:19:06Speaker 01

  And now people are showing that on these diets, and maybe others as well, but they're showing that this is a reversible disease, a disease that can be controlled without drugs. So that alone is going to change the discussion. And I could see it already happening.

• 1:19:24Shane Parrish?

  Do you think that the sugar industry will be eventually treated like akin to the tobacco industry in terms of how it's vilified?

• 1:19:34Speaker 01

  On some level, that's already happening, much to the sugar industry's dismay.

• 1:19:41Speaker 01

  It's funny, I did a NPR thing a few weeks ago with Michael Moss, the author of Sugar, Salt, Fat, or Fat, Salt, Sugar, whatever it's called, and the president of the Sugar Association, who's a young woman, former college basketball player named Courtney Peterson, no Courtney, I forget her last name. And anyway, afterwards, I just yesterday, I got a nice card from Courtney thanking me for being on the show with her and discussing it. So, actually, it was really nice to do, but it's sort of like getting a nice card

• 1:20:19Speaker 01

  from the president of Tobacco Foundation. They are being vilified. They know it. They see the writing on the wall. They're, you know, the soft drink industry, the purveyors of sugar-rich foods. On one level, they know they have a product that's going to continue to sell. So, they can't, they're not going to get rid of it because people are going to continue to consume it, just like some, I don't know, I think 17% of Americans still smoke. So, the percentage has come way down, but it's some people, kids are going to start doing it, just like kids are going to continue consuming sugary beverages. And, but they

• 1:21:03Speaker 01

  see the writing on the wall. They know where it's going, and they're diversifying like mad. You could see them diversifying. And, you know, they're in a bad position because, as I've argued in press, unlike the tobacco industry, so the tobacco industry's job was to somehow try to convince the world that the research community was wrong and to sow confusion about what the research community was saying. What the sugar industry had to do was remind the research community that what they believed in general was true of sugar in particular. So, the obesity researchers were saying a calorie is a calorie is a calorie when it comes to obesity. And if that's true, then sugar is harmless. You can't vilify

• 1:21:48Speaker 01

  a food for being too good to eat.

• 1:21:50Shane Parrish?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:21:51Speaker 01

  You know, if it's all about calories. And then the nutritionists and cardiologists were saying dietary fat causes heart disease. So, the sugar industry paid nutritionists and cardiologists to write articles saying, "We believe dietary fat caused heart disease" because they did. And then they, you know, had to remind people that the conventional wisdom is a calorie is a calorie. So you almost can blame them. And I don't really blame them because had the nutritionists and the obesity researchers gotten it right, the sugar, they would have put the sugar industry in a position where they had to change.

• 1:22:32Speaker 01

  Rather than where all they had to do was argue that, hey, look, guys, we're harmless. The community says we're harmless, don't blame us. So, but now again, there's been, you know, once you have epidemics of obesity and diabetes, and it's clearly not being caused by dietary fat consumption, then, you know, sugar is the likely cause, whether it's just because people consume too much of it, whatever that means, or because it's toxic. And it's a different world. So now when they fight back, people point out how they're fighting back. Even if they're fighting back is only a delaying tactic to give them time to, you know, diversify.

• 1:23:13Shane Parrish?

  What practical tips would you offer somebody who wants to know, like, if I want to do something about this, what's a step that I can take?

• 1:23:22Speaker 01

  You mean about the epidemics in general or about?

• 1:23:25Shane Parrish?

  About my health, my personal health.

• 1:23:28Speaker 01

  Okay, so, and it's interesting, this is what I've spent the last two months talking to researchers about. So, you know, I clearly think that of all the, so the problem is the carbohydrate content of the diet. And I think the fat content, for the most part, is benign, if not healthful. So, and this is just, this is what I would tell my family and my kids would tell you that I would tell it to them too much.

• 1:23:54Speaker 01

  So, worst of the carbohydrates is the sugars and the worst of the sugars is the liquid sugars because we consume them and digest them so quickly. So you get rid of sugary beverages and ideally switch to non-sweetened beverages, which means for the most part, water or red wine. And if you're going to drink it all day long, water is probably the better choice. Or, I'm in a caffeine addict, so I'm fine with coffee, whether I'm right or wrong.

• 1:24:25Shane Parrish?

  I just want to go back there for a second, wine's okay?

• 1:24:28Speaker 01

  Um, wine is the one area where, or alcohol, where I talk about, where I think moderation is meaningful.

• 1:24:36Shane Parrish?

  Okay.

• 1:24:37Speaker 01

  So.

• 1:24:39Speaker 01

  You know, life, this is one of the lessons that came away from the sugar book. So in what I'm doing, and particularly when I go after sugar, there's clearly a Grinch who stole Christmas aspect to it. I'm taking away people's joy, or I'm suggesting that their joy is killing them and they should get rid of it themselves. You know, it was my wife who, like, C.C.'s part of her job in life is to sort of squelch my Grinch-like tendencies, and she may be right. So, in doing the book, you know, one of the revelations was basically like, the human existence is not all that great. It's getting better because television's getting better.

• 1:25:19Speaker 01

  But, you know, for the most part, and for most people, it's hard, it's laborious, it's tiresome, and there isn't a lot of pots of gold at the end of the rainbow. And so for the great bulk of humanity, intoxicants, something we can do to intoxicate us, makes it worthwhile, gets us through the day. And, you know, that's what addictive substances do. That's why, you know, when I was a smoker, I looked forward to my next cigarette. That literally carried me through the day. With the caffeine addiction, by about six o'clock at night, I'm thinking about the first cup of coffee in the morning, and how good that's gonna taste. We need intoxicants.

• 1:26:04Speaker 01

  We, you know, the drugs of abuse, their side effects are too severe, and they occur too quickly for most people, and they create behavior that's also dangerous. You've gotta have something. And if it's not sugar, you know, a lot of us self-medicate with sugar. I mean, I'm depressed, I'm gonna go get a, I want a donut, let's be serious.

• 1:26:30Speaker 01

  What do you do with that? And then the question is, you know, there are people who can tolerate it. There are people who are relatively healthy, who are not, you know, prediabetic or diabetic or overweight or obese and aren't gonna become, aren't gonna get metabolic syndrome and can eat, you know, cupcakes twice a day their whole life and be absolutely fine and happy. And I, I think they're the luckiest people on earth. Problem is, they don't know when they're eating the donuts. Like smokers don't know whether the cigarette's gonna get lung cancer until it's too late. With sweets, you probably have time to reverse it with these strict diets. But all that said, I would get rid of sugar. And because I'm an

• 1:27:14Speaker 01

  ex-smoker, I could say that when I was a smoker, I couldn't imagine life without cigarettes. And cigarettes, like I said, I live for my next cigarette on some fundamental level. And you smoked after everything, you know, after a meal, after a workout, after sex. Like, most of us don't eat dessert or have a lollipop after sex. But you, smoking after sex was like, that's what you did. It just made your life worth living. And then you give it up for three months, you're miserable. For a year, you're unhappy. And you're hoping at the end of a year, you haven't lost all your friends. Because you overreact to everything. You kind of have cigarettes to like, moderate your emotional responses. And then after

• 1:27:58Speaker 01

  a couple, three years, you get to the point you can't imagine why you ever smoked.

• 1:28:02Shane Parrish?

  Hmm.

• 1:28:03Speaker 01

  So you can give up sugar, I believe. And I've gotten there where it's like, I don't need sugar to make my life worth living. And I think that can be true for most people. But maybe I'm just lucky that I have a particularly challenging, interesting life. So that's the first thing. Second thing is high glycemic index grains, and starchy vegetables.

• 1:28:25Shane Parrish?

  What are the worst in terms of starchy vegetables?

• 1:28:29Speaker 01

  Well, it's hard to say. And I don't really know. You know, the- There are people who would say wheat is clearly the worst grain because of the gluten and these other issues that Bill Davis describes in Wheat Belly and that starchy vegetables are fine, or sweet potatoes are fine, or if you only eat potatoes and nothing else, you'll be healthy and lean and happy. And I don't know if any of that is true.

• 1:28:55Shane Parrish?

  What's your take on gluten?

• 1:28:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't know. I really don't know. It would be, the way I think is, I mean, I know a lot of people have gone gluten free. People used to sort of make fun of my low-carb lifestyle who are now gluten free and proud of it, talk about it too much. But when they give up gluten, they end up giving up most carbs.

• 1:29:19Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 1:29:20Speaker 01

  And then you find out that even, you know, Wheat Belly where it recommends and Grain Brain, they say, give up wheat because of gluten, that's the prime problem, but don't eat sugar either.

• 1:29:30Shane Parrish?

  Hmm.

• 1:29:31Speaker 01

  And other starches can be problematic because they stimulate insulin secretion. So people who go gluten, clearly people get healthier. And there are clearly people who, you know, gluten-related disorders, who, when they don't eat gluten, you know, don't have those disorders. It's that simple. So, and that's supposedly about 5% of the population, if I'm remembering correctly. But the, these other people have these sort of general issues. I don't know if they're getting better because they're giving up gluten, or giving up all carbs, or giving up sugar with the gluten, or...

• 1:30:07Shane Parrish?

  Well, often when you give up gluten, you give up a whole bunch of packaged foods. I mean, your food selection just totally changes.

• 1:30:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, you, basically, you have to give up many processed foods. So, it would be an easy experiment to do. That's the fascinating thing. And I know one, very high-level self-experimenter who did this, who said he basically gave up wheat, 400 calories a day of wheat, and replaced it with 400 calories of rice, and got healthier. And I believe, in his case, he did. So the question is, with this, what makes it a relatively easy experiment, nutrition experiment, to do, is you just have to replace gluten-free, gluten-rich foods with gluten-free versions of them.

• 1:30:54Speaker 01

  So say four hundred, can one, you take your thousand subjects and five hundred get, you know, uh, regular wheat bread.

• 1:31:03Shane Parrish?

  Hmm.

• 1:31:03Speaker 01

  And they're supposed to eat four slices a day and the other get gluten free bread. And they're supposed to eat four slices a day and those are the only sources of gluten. And then you run it out for a few years and you see.

• 1:31:17Shane Parrish?

  The effect on that.

• 1:31:18Speaker 01

  The effect. So you're not having to worry about that. One of the big problems with nutrition studies, if I want to study sugar, I'm going to remove the eighteen percent of our calories that come from sugar. I have to replace it with something.

• 1:31:32Shane Parrish?

  Hmm.

• 1:31:33Speaker 01

  Do I replace it? I can't replace with diet soda because then I'm not getting the calories that the sugar has. Uh, I could replace with glucose. I could replace it, you know, with starch. I could replace it with fat. I could replace it with protein. All of those will have a different effect and you won't know if the, any benefit or detriment you see is caused by the absence of the sugar or the presence of whatever you replaced it with. But gluten, it would be easy to do the study if anybody wanted to just, um, at which point I would know what, I would have more confidence that, uh, I know what to believe.

• 1:32:12Shane Parrish?

  Talk to me about fasting.

• 1:32:15Speaker 01

  Um, fasting is another way to approach metabolic disorder that's come on the scene in the last three or four years. Driven by a British clinician named Michael Mosley and then Jason Fung, a nephrologist in Toronto and Walter Longo, I think, at UCLA. So, um, you know, to interest, so the, the idea used to be if you're obese, breakfast was the most important meal of the day. And the reason breakfast was the most important meal of the day was one of these typical sort of simplistic nutrition, obesity thinking.

• 1:32:56Speaker 01

  So obesity researchers noticed that obese individuals tended to skip breakfast and have most of their calories from early afternoon on into the evening. And, uh, this, they decided that if they skip breakfast and they're obese, maybe they're obese because they're skipping breakfast and therefore they should eat breakfast, so we should all eat breakfast. You know, mistaking an association for causality and never really testing it.

• 1:33:24Speaker 01

  So somewhere along the line, and I have to read Jason Fung's work more closely, or Michael Mosley's, people start thinking, what if you actually do skip meals? So the idea behind the carbohydrate insulin hypothesis is that as long as you're keeping insulin levels low, you're mobilizing fat and using it for fuel. So you're actually getting fat out of your fat tissue, which is literally what you want to do when you want to lose weight, and you're burning that fat for fuel. So if you extend the periods, you know, in the morning before breakfast, when you're fasting, that's when your insulin levels are lowest. And the reason you don't get up to every three or four hours to eat during the night,

• 1:34:06Speaker 01

  or every two hours, is because your insulin levels have dropped and you're living off the fat you stored, you're burning fatty acids for fuel at night. So the idea is, as long as you haven't eaten in the morning, your insulin will stay low, you'll continue to burn fat, you can extend the period between meals, and you'll burn more fat, you know, and it'll be, it's gotta be the fat that you've stored because you're not eating anything. So I don't know if that was the original logic, that's why I think it could work, but people found out that if they, you know, extend the period between meals from like 12 hours to say 18, so you have dinner at 7 o'clock at night, you don't have any snack

• 1:34:48Speaker 01

  that night, you skip breakfast the next morning, and your first meal is at noon, your lunch at noon or 1:00, you might accelerate fat burning, to use a cliche, and it might not be that hard to do, because as long as your insulin is low, you're gonna be mobilizing fat and burning it, and it does turn out to be relatively easy for people to do. And then some people, particularly Jason Fung, have realized that, you know, not only can people on low carb diets pretty easily do 18-hour fasts, they could actually pretty easily do three-day fasts, or even three-week fasts, and now we're, you know, whatever I mean by pretty easily is clearly relative.

• 1:35:29Speaker 01

  And this is a way to get diabetes under control, to sort of rest the pancreas.

• 1:35:36Speaker 01

  So that when it does start dealing with food again, it's it's maybe restocked some of maybe you've given the beta cells, it's a creatine insulin time to, you know, get their biological act together. Um, there's a lot of things we don't know and a lot of things I would like to see clinical trials to document. But again, talking to these practitioners, clearly a lot of them are embracing intermittent fasting as a way to get people, you know, who go on low carb diets and they tend to lose a lot of weight to begin with, but then they plateau. You can use intermittent fasting or longer fasting as a way to break through plateaus or to accelerate fat burning. Um, I worry that it's a fad.

• 1:36:19Shane Parrish?

  Hmm.

• 1:36:20Speaker 01

  And that it'll turn out that it's harder, you know, that people just get bored of doing it after a while. And if they get bored and go back to the way they used to eat, they're likely to go back to being obese and or diabetic.

• 1:36:34Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 1:36:35Speaker 01

  But there's no way to tell. I've actually been experimenting with it myself recently because just I've been talking to people about it so much. And it is remarkably easy. Yeah, I'm I'm surprised at how easy it is to skip breakfast. And I was just gonna say it's 1240 here in California and I haven't eaten since dinner last night and I'm clearly energized talking to you.

• 1:36:59Shane Parrish?

  Hmm.

• 1:37:00Speaker 01

  And, um.

• 1:37:01Shane Parrish?

  That has that has more to do with me though, right?

• 1:37:03Speaker 01

  It does. It does. But also that I clearly like talking about this stuff to someone interested.

• 1:37:10Shane Parrish?

  You've written about the history of nutritional sciences, about alternative hypotheses of obesity and why we get fat, about the herms of sugar. What's the next thing you're writing about?

• 1:37:22Speaker 01

  Well, I have to write, uh, I, again, I'm interviewing practitioners around the world who, uh, you know, have transitioned to using low carb, high fat or paleo diets to, uh, you know, prescribe to their patients for obesity or diabetes or other disorders. So that's going to become a book, although I have no idea at the moment how I'm going to write it. It's been fascinating talking to these people. And I would also like to, if there are any listeners, I would like to talk to doctors who are prescribing vegan and vegetarian diets now or Mediterranean diets to try and understand their.

• 1:38:01Speaker 01

  What they're seeing with their patients and the feedback they're getting and try to take care of the sort of selection bias of, you know, me interviewing people who follow my Twitter feed, kind of that kind of stuff.

• 1:38:15Shane Parrish?

  How can they get ahold of you?

• 1:38:16Speaker 01

  Uh, my website, G A Taubes at gmail dot com. I don't look at Twitter, I don't understand Twitter enough to know when people tweet at me. I don't see how people have time in their lives to pay attention to Twitter feeds or Facebook, even though I do tweet. I would like to write a book, and you and I have talked about this, about how science should be done, sort of functional trench science. So there's a lot of books and a lot of courses on the philosophy of science over the, you know, millennia, literally.

• 1:38:55Speaker 01

  And they're fascinating, but it's, all my books have been about this sort of idea that that Richard Feynman encapsulized when he said the first principle of science is you must not fool yourself, you're the easiest person to fool. And I think we've gotten away from that, and the incentives of science today are about, hey, fool yourself if you can fool other people and get funding, all that's, you know, that's a-

• 1:39:22Shane Parrish?

  So much the better-

• 1:39:23Speaker 01

  Glimpse and facetious way to phrase it, but, you know, so a lot of it is about the kinds of learning to recognize or being aware of the kind of cognitive biases that your blog posts or happen discussing and how they manifest in science and scientific experiments. But that's, and when I did my first book, so I lived at CERN for 10 months back in 1984, 85, and I was embedded with these physicists who discovered nonexistent elementary particles, and then had to realize how they had screwed up. And that became my obsession, this question of how easy it is to get the wrong answer in science and how hard it is to do it right.

• 1:40:08Speaker 01

  And that's the book I want to write and interview, you know, experimental scientists who have thought about these issues their whole career. Theorists are a different species entirely. But, you know, and from them and the history and the literature, I'm reading memoirs of scientists now and, you know, how you have to think and how you have to approach this, because I think a lot of the problems with modern science, when people talk about the reproducibility crisis, I think we're kind of putting Band-Aids on the fundamental problem, which is that the research community really isn't, doesn't get the mentoring that

• 1:40:51Speaker 01

  they need to truly understand the nature of this scientific endeavor and what it takes to get the right answer and how you have to act and communicate steps along the way. So that's, that's the book I want to write.

• 1:41:08Shane Parrish?

  Well, if it's half as good as the books you've already written, it's going to be phenomenal and I look forward to reading it. Listen, Gary, this has been an excellent conversation. I want to thank you so much for taking the time.

• 1:41:20Speaker 01

  Well, thank you, Shane. You know, I'm a, I'm a fan of your website and one of the few newsletters I still look forward to receiving.

• 1:41:30Shane Parrish?

  Oh, that's generous of you. Thank you.

• 1:41:36Shane Parrish?

  Hey, guys. This is Shane again. Just a few more things before we wrap up. You can find show notes at farnamstreetblog.com/podcast. That's F-A-R-N-A-M-S-T-R-E-E-T-B-L-O-G dot com slash podcast. You can also find information there on how to get a transcript. And if you'd like to receive a weekly email from me filled with all sorts of brain food, go to farnamstreetblog.com/newsletter. This is all the good stuff I've found on the web that week that I've read and shared with close friends, books I'm reading, and so much more. Thank you for listening.