A very good sign that you've
misunderstood the cause of a disorder is your
inability to treat or prevent it.
You look at the data of ever increasing obesity
and diabetes and you just think,
how is it possible the whole world
has failed to eat healthfully?
Maybe we're being told the wrong advice.
Since the 1960's
the American Heart Association
has been saying saturated fat
is detrimental to cardiovascular health.
You need to get it out of the diet.
It's hard to think of another policy
that has caused so much harm that has been so wrong.
You know the chief killer
of Americans is cardiovascular disease.
I mean, the manipulation
of the data and the idea and the push for low fat,
really got us in trouble.
I think the low fat diet is genocide.
Saturated fat increases cardiovascular risk.
We've been told forever that fat's gonna kill you.
This started because incontrovertible evidence
that saturated fat is bad.
Over and over and over.
The more animal protein, particularly red meat you eat,
the more likely you are to get sick
from all kinds of different things.
You're fat because you eat too much fat.
So, low fat, low fat, low fat, low fat, low fat.
For 40 years, the dietary guidelines
have set nutrition standards
for every American for our kids in school,
for food programs for the poor and the elderly,
for rations for our nation's military,
for doctors, nutritionists and dieticians.
We've had it hammered into our heads that fat is bad.
Especially saturated fat, the kind found in meat, dairy,
and some tropical oils like coconut and palm.
The base of the pyramid, carbohydrates.
The food pyramid codified our fat phobia,
telling us to make carbohydrates
the foundation of our food choices.
I think the food pyramid is great if you're standing
on your head because you need
to turn that pyramid upside down.
You can't be serious.
That would put butter and fat at the top of the...
Flip the damn food pyramid!
Nutrition is stabilizing.
We got the whole story wrong.
We were told to eat six to 11 servings of bread,
rice, cereal and pasta a day
by the government and the food pyramid,
it should be called the food tombstone!
I'm Dr. Mark Hyman,
a functional medicine physician
with a focus on food as medicine.
And I understand the healing power of food.
But I can tell you the low fat diet
did not make us healthy.
I think a low fat heart healthy diet is unproven.
It was essentially a huge experiment
on millions of people and it failed miserably.
Wait a minute, have you not seen,
are you not practicing medicine
to see who is coming into your clinic?
To see the problems that this idea has caused?
I mean, it's just to me, unbelievable.
For years, even I believed
that eating fat would make me fat,
and that eating saturated fat
would cause heart disease and kill me.
But now a growing group of experts reveal
that the science against saturated fat was never there.
I was astonished to find
that there simply was no evidence.
It was just an idea, but it was launched as a policy
for all Americans based really on no evidence at all.
What is the evidence?
A big, big zero.
Our federal dietary guidelines,
the official government advice for how
we should all eat to stay healthy tell us
to limit saturated fat to just a couple of bites a day
and make carbohydrates more than half our daily calories.
I'm here to tell you that advice
is upside down and backwards.
The idea that eating fat will make you fat is wrong
and the science that says saturated fat
causes heart disease is misleading.
And instead has led our nation down
a dangerous path toward a widespread epidemic
of obesity and Type 2 diabetes.
We screwed up.
It happens all the time in science.
Medical orthodoxy latched onto the wrong explanation,
made a tragic mistake and now
we're living with the consequences.
The nation got a report card
on obesity today and the country flunked.
The battle against obesity
has been going on for years.
One in three children
in this country is overweight or obese.
An estimated $200,000,000,000 cost
to the healthcare industry continues to rise.
The search for weight loss and health
may be a little more complex than you think.
Despite all attempts
to attack the problem,
the adult obesity rate increased in 23 states last year.
Why is it that Americans
keep getting fatter in spite of government efforts ranging
from calorie posting to new school lunch programs?
A lot of things with science
is about seeing whether things
that make sense are really right or not.
In this case it sounded reasonable but happened to be wrong.
I'm not happy about a lot of years of bein'
at different doctors and every time
that I'd go in there was just here's another injection,
here's a different kind of an injectable.
This is the injectable that is supposed
to help you make your own insulin.
The list of side effects were longer than your arm
and it never made you feel better.
And certainly didn't help at all with weight.
Judi has been Type 2 diabetic
for most of her adult life.
So has her dad.
When she was a teenager he died
from complications of the disease.
Judi's tried for decades to get
her blood sugar under control.
When I did everything they told me to do,
I'd still gain weight and so then you just give up.
This health epidemic
- is weighing on Americans. - Judi is not alone.
Reports show the U.S. obesity epidemic
is only getting worse.
Americans are not winning their battle against obesity.
Obesity among children doubled over the past two decades.
Today, 75% of the country
is overweight or obese and one in two of us
is either pre-diabetic or Type 2 diabetic.
Type 2 diabetes is crushing us financially.
Crushing us.
It currently costs a person
with diabetes in America $900 a month for insulin.
Direct cost to our healthcare system,
is about a billion dollars a day.
There isn't enough money in the health care system
to be able to afford this.
The cost in terms of money is huge,
the cost in terms of human suffering
is like 10 times more than that.
In the space of a single generation,
we've gone from this,
to this.
Watching the footage of the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11,
I was struck by how not fat everyone in the crowd was.
We look like a completely different race of people.
The heart attacks, the strokes, the cancer, the blindness,
the amputations, all of that,
I think is unnecessary suffering that we're causing people.
The question is, where did this
come from and why is it occurring?
When I was in medical school,
Type 2 diabetes happened only in older adults.
Now we see it in kids as young as three years old.
And the more we try to medicate our way out of the disease,
the worse it seems to get.
Ya can't throw drugs at a dietary disease
and expect to make it better.
But that's the medical teaching.
"Hey, you have Type 2 Diabetes, let me give you some pills."
The model doesn't work.
We're not making people healthy,
we're just treating disease.
But if you give people good nutrition,
they become very healthy.
He introduced that keto diet,
and six weeks later, it was like a miracle.
No diabetes.
And it was like magic,
and I got off, completely off of insulin.
Two years later I had lost 197 pounds.
Problem is we've been confused
and downright brainwashed by decades of nutritional dogma.
The almost religious conviction
that fat is bad, especially saturated animal fats.
You can lose weight on these animal protein,
Atkins type diets but you're mortgaging
your health in the process.
We still operate under this idea of dogmatic principles.
We've always done it that way,
that's what we've always said,
we're gonna continue to say it.
And unfortunately, nothing is holding back progress
in nutrition science like dogma.
Alternative ideas have been attacked
and physicians labeled us quacks
for ignoring guidelines against fats
and telling patients to cut carbs instead.
In South Africa, Dr. Tim Noakes went through
a four year ordeal that threatened his medical license
for recommending a low carbohydrate,
high fat diet to a young mother.
The reason why the low carbohydrate diet
has become demonized is because it works
and it has a huge impact on
the financial return of the medical profession.
I'm an internal medicine specialist.
I can treat all of the conditions that I used to treat
with medications just by changing the food.
It's remarkable.
It's completely free, there's no special equipment,
there's no special surgeries.
It's completely natural and it's
been used for thousands of years.
I can treat not only obesity
but I can treat Type 2 diabetes,
high blood pressure,
in fact I have to take away medications
from people as they get better.
This is as big as the discovery of insulin or antibiotics.
It clearly is.
My interpretation is that low-fat diets can work
but low carb diets work better
and that's what the science says.
Nick Brown is a pretty typical American
when it comes to his diet.
- Hey, how you doin'? - Good.
He eats a variety of protein,
vegetables and grains.
He enjoys beer now and then.
And one of his favorite foods...
- Thank you, Sir. - Have a good day.
- Appreciate it.
Is pizza.
Lookin' forward to pizza.
Maybe.
If it ruins pizza for me, I'm gonna be pissed off.
Nick is participating
in a unique nutrition experiment along with Tracy.
Yeah, I've got a plan for the week.
And Cynthia.
- Thank you. - You're welcome.
Three metabolically healthy people
who take no medications, trying two different diets.
Low carb versus low fat.
Quite a few new recipes,
so I was curious about using the right thing.
Up on this smaller...
Before, during and after
the experiment they each weight in,
check their blood pressure, blood sugar and cholesterol.
Here's a little bit of alcohol...
Throughout the experiment
we'll track their blood sugar.
Are you ready?
Sure.
- Okay, here it comes. - Go.
Using a continuous glucose monitor or CGM.
It didn't bother you?
No.
Okay.
You just hit a check glucose.
And it says, "Ready to scan" and you just take it here,
and there it is.
It's 94, right now.
The first week we put them
on a low carb ketogenic diet with less
than 20 grams of carbohydrates per day.
Plenty of healthy fats and a moderate amount of protein.
A diet designed to keep blood sugars low,
but an eating pattern that is not allowed
by the U.S. dietary guidelines.
The second week, we switch them to a USDA MyPlate meal plan.
It's a 2,000 calorie a day government endorsed low fat plan
featuring whole grains, lean meats and vegetable oils
and more than half the day's calories as carbohydrates.
Week one is the low carb, high fat diet.
And then we'll keep this goin'.
This is almost ready.
I'm excited about it.
I'm excited to try the recipes and excited to see
just what a full week of doing this does.
I'm grateful to be doing it.
It's very fascinating to me.
The keto recipes are full
of healthy natural fats like eggs, butter, avocado,
olive oil and nuts and seeds and even grass fed beef.
I love new recipes, so this is really good.
Interesting.
So, these are buttered eggs
and that's what they're called in the recipe.
You actually make them with butter.
I use the grass fed butter.
And then, I decided to add a little bit of avocado,
and some tomatoes and salt and pepper and that's it.
Super simple, super easy.
I am making a keto zucchini boats.
You take out the middle of the zucchini,
cook it up with some onion, spinach.
I put in some olives, olive oil,
and then just let that saute for a little bit.
I think it's working for my body.
I'm curious to see what it does through the whole week.
These are really good.
By adding healthy fats into every meal
and cutting out processed carbs,
the three experience a sense of fullness that lasts.
Well, to be honest, I've really not been famished.
So, this is day three of the strict Keto Diet.
I am literally down three and a half pounds
from when this started.
I'm surprised by that.
I feel great.
I went mountain biking last night,
and had a lot of energy and I don't feel hungry.
I still feel full and that
was after three and a half hours.
And usually at that time, yeah,
the two, two and a half hours, I'm hungry, usually.
One way to think of carbs
is they're like kindling on a fire.
They burn quickly and then go out,
dropping your blood sugar and creating severe cravings.
The physical signal that your body needs more fuel.
To keep your metabolism burning,
you must constantly eat more and then you crash
and then you eat more and then you crash.
See how carbs like bread, pasta,
rice and yes even whole grains effect your blood sugar.
Protein has a much lower response.
It will raise blood sugar a small amount and fat,
take a look at fat.
Almost no rise in blood sugar at all.
When you eat fat it's like putting logs on the fire.
What you get is just a long, steady source of fuel.
And that's one of the reasons that I like low carb diets
so much because they don't require as much willpower
because if your hormones, your insulin isn't going
up to the sky every time that you eat,
and then crashing down making you crave a bagel
or a donut or something from the snack.
If that's not happening in your physiology all the time,
it's much easier to not overeat.
Day six, lunchtime.
Leftover Italian cabbage stir fry
with a blop of sour cream.
I'm still not quite hungry but it's time for lunch.
You know what's really great
about this is it's so easy to test your glucose.
The sensor is here.
And then, on my phone I go on the app that connects to it.
And you just put it up and it grabs it.
And it went doo bloop and then you have it.
Pretty cool.
It's really cool.
All week on the low carb, high fat diet,
their blood sugars are virtual straight lines
with no spikes or dips.
It's been steady.
It's been, typically, at the 85 to 90 range.
And I just ate and that's 83.
I just tried it a few minutes ago
and it's gone down six points.
I kinda wanna just keep it on all the time
'cause it's so interesting to see what you're doing all day.
By the end of the week
all three participants have lost weight and feel great.
How'd your week go?
Very well.
- Thanks. - Good.
You have lost about two and a half pounds of fat.
And how were your blood sugars?
Very, very even.
And look, your lean tissue, not only has it not gone down,
it's actually gone up a little bit.
Boy, you're really even.
- Yeah. - Wow,
not a lot of variation at all.
I had always a full feeling,
so I'm wondering if I ate too much maybe.
I don't know.
Well, you'll feel a lot more full
with fat and protein, - Yeah.
And less carbohydrate, for sure.
Next week, we'll flip from low carb
to low fat and follow the U.S. dietary guidelines.
I'm really curious
- to see what happens. - Yeah, me too.
I'm a little scared about what's gonna happen.
So how is it possible that we got
the story so wrong about fats?
There were religious objections to eating meat
as early as the 1800's that influenced American opinions
but a major turning point was in 1955
when a presidential health scare shocked the nation.
News of President Eisenhower's
sudden illness described by his doctors
as coronary thrombosis came as a severe shock to us all.
President Eisenhower in 1955 had a heart attack.
He was out of the oval office for 10 whole days,
and that really focused the attention
of the nation on this problem of heart disease.
Cardiovascular ailments continue
to take an increasingly heavy toll of American lives,
a million this year.
The nation was really in shock
and there was a desperate need for explanations.
And people were like,
"Whoa, what's causing all the heart disease?"
Here are vital statistics,
they show that the problem here
in America is the worst in the world.
There were a number of ideas about it.
One was that it was vitamin deficiency,
another was that it was the rising tide of auto exhaust,
more cars on the road.
Of 10 men, we can expect five to get it.
But we can't say who or when or why.
Now, you can look back now and say,
"Well, that's pretty easy to understand.
"Everybody was smoking."
Raleigh?
Oh, no thanks!
I have a pack.
More doctors smoke Camels
than any other cigarette.
In the 1950s and 60s, cigarettes were in.
Here, have a Viceroy.
Eisenhower himself smoked four packs a day.
What do you think?
This is what I was really looking for.
If you look at the trends
for cigarette smoking against
the increases in heart disease, they track together.
But at the same time the consumption
of saturated fat was falling dramatically.
Everybody was smoking.
Now we know smoking causes heart disease,
or contributes to heart disease,
but at the time, of course,
the tobacco companies were like,
"No, no, no, no, no, no.
"Tobacco smoking, it doesn't cause heart disease."
So, all the scientists were like,
"Hey, I wonder why we're getting so much heart disease?"
There was one theory that was proposed
by Ancel Benjamin Keys who was a pathologist
at the University of Minnesota.
And he said that it was saturated fat
and dietary cholesterol that caused heart disease.
It's like, okay, but how do people eat butter
for the last sort of two millennia,
and ever since 1970, it causes heart disease?
It's like it didn't cause heart disease before.
At the same time consumption of sugar,
refined oils and refined grains
were on the rise in America but Ancel Keys focused on fat
as the cause of heart disease.
And he thought that total cholesterol
in your arteries would build up
and clog your arteries and give you a heart attack,
like hot oil down a cold stove pipe.
So that was his idea.
It was just a simple idea.
To blame a sort of ancient food for a modern disease
was completely illogical, it didn't make any sense,
but you repeat things enough,
and you get it out there enough, people believe you.
As American author H.L. Mencken once said,
"For every complex problem, there is a solution
"that is simple and clear and wrong."
It's the biggest scam ever perpetrated
on the American people.
This whole notion of cholesterol.
If you have high cholesterol,
you may be at increased risk of heart attack and stroke.
Don't kid yourself.
Talk to your doctor
about your risk and about Lipitor.
It's eye-wateringly lucrative
to keep this idea going that we need to lower cholesterol.
Cholesterol has definitely become
the boogeyman of cardiology and here's what's
so interesting about cholesterol is we need it.
Our bodies cannot exist without cholesterol.
Yet once again, in simplistic thinking,
we try and lump cholesterol
in good cholesterol and bad cholesterol.
And we wanna lower the bad cholesterol,
the LDL and raise the good cholesterol and HDL.
That is incredibly simplistic.
It turns out that raising your LDL cholesterol
in diet does not translate into heart attacks and death.
It just doesn't.
When you take cholesterol out of the equation,
you go, let's just see if people
who eat more saturated fat actually die more?
Do they actually get more heart disease?
That's what we care about.
Forget that it raises cholesterol.
We know it raises cholesterol,
so let's take that out of the equation
and see what the end result is
which is what we care about and every time they do that,
the relationship dissolves.
There is no relationship between the amount
of fat you eat in your diet and getting heart disease.
We now know the chronic inflammation caused
by a diet high in sugar, refined grains,
and refined vegetable oils
is far more dangerous to our health.
Atherosclerosis is an inflammatory disease.
It's not a buildup of fat in the artery,
it's actually an inflammation that's causing the problem.
And the cholesterol then will go to that damage
to try to repair it but it didn't cause the damage.
The damage has to come first.
It's like saying that firefighters caused
the fire when they just turned up to put the fire out.
It was there by association,
but it was there to repair, not to cause harm.
Inflammation is probably the number one promoter
of every disease we don't wanna have.
And the number one inflammatory substance
in the American diet is sugar.
That's it.
I mean, put those two things together.
Inflammation makes everything worse and sugar is the number
one inflammatory substance that we consume.
End of argument.
In 1951, Ancel and Margaret took
the two oldest children to Oxford for a year's sabbatical.
The couple continued their travels,
measuring cholesterol's and conducting diet surveys
in several European and African countries.
There was a study that he presented
at the Mt. Sinai Hospital in 1953
and it was the Six Countries Graph.
He specifically looked
at six countries around the world.
And on the x-axis he plotted fat intake,
and on the y-axis coronary heart disease rates,
and he found a straight line relationship.
And he offered that as proof that there
was a linear relationship between
how much saturated fat people consumed
and how much heart disease they had.
But he chose six countries
for that perfect correlation and at the time
there was data available for 22 countries.
And when you put in all
of those countries It just looked like a scatter plot.
The trendline is nowhere near as clear-cut.
There was no clear relationship.
No correlation between fat and heart disease.
He was criticized at the time by a statisticians who said,
"Well you're obviously cherry picking your data."
He knows it's a hypothesis,
he knows he doesn't have the evidence
and he immediately starts recommending the country
go on a low fat diet which is fascinating
because there is no concern that you're gonna do harm.
There's no, the Hippocratic Oath, first do no harm.
Despite his critics, Keys was determined
to prove himself right.
He followed up with his famous seven country study,
where he traveled to the countries cherry picked
from his graph and studied eating habits
and heart disease among the people there.
For his Seven Country Study he repeated the same mistake,
I mean, he cherry-picked his countries.
I think he did cherry-pick countries
for the Seven Countries Study.
He knew from the Six Countries Graph
the countries that would be on that straight line,
so he knew, for example, that Italy would
be a sure thing and America would be a sure thing.
They would quite nicely anchor
some of the ends of the graph.
But he did not go to countries
like Switzerland, France, Germany who ate a lot
of saturated fats and also
had very low rates of heart disease.
The French were eating all kinds of saturated fat,
butter, cream, and they weren't gaining weight,
which was a paradox at the time
and they weren't getting heart disease.
They had like half the rate
of heart disease compared to Americans.
And everybody said, "Well, what a paradox, what a paradox."
There was no paradox.
The dietary fat simply wasn't causing obesity,
and it didn't cause heart disease.
So he's a very respected physiologist
and it's worth mentioning, by the way,
that Eisenhower followed the Ancel Keys advice
and cut out all saturated fat and all cholesterol
up until the day he died in 1969 of heart disease.
Just worth mentioning.
Ancel Keys diet heart hypothesis remains
the single most influential theory
in the history of nutrition science.
And here's an interesting point.
Over the past 50 years tax payers
have funded several billion dollars of research trying
to prove saturated fat causes heart disease but guess what?
It's never been proven.
To this day the diet heart hypothesis remains a hypothesis.
There is no evidence against saturated fat.
There just isn't.
Dr. Zoe Harcombe is an obesity researcher
who wrote her thesis on the lack
of evidence behind the dietary guidelines.
My thesis was born out of trying
to understand why we have an obesity epidemic.
Zoe collected all the raw data
from randomized control clinical trials,
conducted prior to the release of the dietary guidelines.
She then reanalyzed all the results
in a process called a meta analysis.
It was looking at the absolute totality of the evidence.
No cherry-picking whatsoever, no study left out.
So there's the Rose Corn Oil Trial.
There's the Research Committee Low-Fat Diet.
There's the MRC Soybean Study.
There's the LA Veterans Dayton Study.
There's Leren Oslo Study.
When she examines the results
to see which groups suffered more deaths,
there was no difference at all.
There was no health benefit for the groups assigned
to eat a low fat diet.
I was astonished to find
that there simply was no evidence.
Real food fats are not dangerous.
They are not the enemy.
It's too simplistic and reductionist
to say saturated fat is dangerous and needs to be avoided
and the evidence does not support that.
So how then without the heart science
to back it up did the diet heart hypothesis
become the foundation of our nation's dietary guidelines?
Well, it had one big thing going for it.
Ancel Benjamin Keys.
He had just a very out sized personality.
Colleagues of his told me he could
just argue anyone to the death.
And he was able to get into
the American Heart Association on their Nutrition Committee.
And in 1961, the Heart Association comes out
with the first advice anywhere
in the world telling people to cut back
on saturated fat and cholesterol
in order to prevent a heart attack.
Up until the 1960s,
Americans consumed almost half
of their daily calories as fat.
We ate butter without guilt, bacon and eggs
for breakfast and roast for dinner.
Exercise gyms were barely a thought and still,
we were relatively slim.
Conventional wisdom until the 1960s
was carbohydrates were fattening.
That's the weird thing about it.
You talk about bread, pasta, potatoes, rice,
sweets going directly to your hips.
It was what my mother's generation believed growing up.
The diet used in this study
is satisfying to the appetite
because of the use of more protein and fat.
And then in the 1960s, we come along with this idea
that dietary fat causes heart disease.
In 20 years, from the 1960s to the mid 1980s,
the carbohydrate went from fattening
to a heart healthy diet food.
The low fat diet fad had taken hold
and Keys rose to prominence within
the American Heart Association
and at the National Institutes of Health.
If you only lived in America,
you'd think this controversy was pretty settled.
That obviously saturated fat causes heart disease,
'cause it raises cholesterol
and we all know cholesterol clogs the arteries.
But there was a alternative hypothesis
going on across the pond in England.
There was always this competing theory
that it was sugar and not fat
that might cause heart disease,
and the leading proponent of that was John Yudkin
and he published about that.
And I think this is an extraordinary example
of how nutrition science did or did not really work
in America because rather than say,
"Oh this is an interesting competing theory,
"let's explore that.
"Maybe they're right, maybe we're wrong."
Their reaction instead was to just bully him,
really bully him out of the field.
And Ancel Keys literally destroyed his reputation.
He went after him.
He did everything but call his mother names.
And I think Ancel Keys knew
that this hypothesis competed with his own,
and he did not want that to succeed.
He wanted his hypothesis to be successful.
Not surprisingly the sugar industry also preferred
to point the finger at saturated fat.
Recently discovered documents reveal
that in 1965 the sugar industry paid
prominent Harvard researchers to do just that.
And they were very specifically
paid $50,000 in today's dollars,
to produce two articles that exonerated sugar
and fingered saturated fat
as the cause of cardiovascular disease.
We know that because we have the paper trail.
We have their names on the documents.
This is unconscionable.
The sugar industry's job was to get
the nutrition community to say publicly
what they believed to be true,
which was dietary fat was the problem, not sugar
and they paid researchers to do that
and they were very successful
with getting that message across.
In the 1977 a senate select committee
headed up by Senator George McGovern helped seal fats fate.
Over the objection of scientists who pleaded against it,
and with no hard evidence to back it up,
the committee recommended the low fat diet to the nation.
I have pleaded in my report
and I will plead again orally here
for more research on the problem
before we make announcements to the American public.
Well, I would only argue that Senators don't have
the luxury that a research scientist does
of waiting until every last shred of evidence is in.
McGovern just wanted to make the statement and he said,
"We haven't got time to wait for the evidence."
They recognized the science is unsettled.
And then the counterargument is,
but we cannot afford to wait.
And so they went without any evidence.
And despite the fact that many people had warned
that this is gonna cause an obesity diabetes epidemic.
They were warned but they ignored it.
In 1980, the U.S. government triggered
a radical shift in the diet of Americans
when the campaign against fat became official food policy.
The first dietary guidelines
recommended seven to 11 servings
of bread basically every day.
50 to 55% of your calories
are supposed to come from carbohydrates, mostly grains.
For the first time anywhere in the world,
our government endorsed a massive increase
in carbohydrates and slashed saturated fat consumption
to less than 10% of daily calories.
The American Guideline started with a very high carb,
low fat approach which was disastrous
for putting that out into an entire population
without evidence saying that it was healthy.
Obesity in America had been slowly creeping
up from the mid 1900s on
but 1980 you see it go sharply, turn sharply upwards.
And then it just takes off like an airplane.
So, you just want to ask well, what happened around then?
What happened in 1980 is that the U.S. government told
all Americans cut back on fat
and increase your carbohydrates.
It could be complete coincidence,
that that just happened to coincide
but it sure as anything needs looking
at to see if it is just coincidence.
When we took the fat out of the food, what did we do?
We put something in which was way worse.
Sugar.
One, two and twist.
Reduced-fat, Oreo.
Less Fat, loads of taste.
New, reduced fat browning muffin
and cake mixes from Pillsbury.
Try the new frosting, too.
Hershey's Syrup is virtually fat free.
Terrific.
I mean let's face it, fat tastes good.
We know that, and if you're gonna remove
the fat from a food, you're gonna have
to replace it with something else
that gives people pleasure.
As new Simple Pleasures
is made with all natural Simpless, instead of fat.
And what did they put in?
Refined carbohydrates, increased sugar,
and boom we've got an explosion of processed foods.
So irresistible,
people are sinking to a new low to get their hands on one.
Okay.
Continental Yogurt is non-fat,
not low-fat, non-Fat.
Zero fat?
How'd they do that?
Ultimately, sugar was a bigger problem
than saturated fat ever was.
The industry learned that if they took fat out the diet,
they had to replace it with sugar.
They then learned that sugar was addictive.
Wow!
These are really good.
These are great.
Bring 'em on.
Oh yes!
And that's the drive of the obesity epidemic.
Low fat yogurt higher in sugar.
Whoa!
Low fat peanut butter.
This is special.
Low fat salad dressing.
This is great.
All higher in sugar or carbs.
Are you sure this fat free?
All low fat foods turned out to be higher in carbs.
I don't think this was anyone's intention.
But it's what naturally happens when you remove fat,
which is natural for humans to be eating,
from their dietary choices and you put them
on things instead of tasting like cardboard,
they can at least taste like sweet cardboard.
SnackWells, Chocolate Sandwich Cookies.
These taste unbelievable.
What if I can't bake enough of them?
Those women will be after me again.
Hello, Cookie-Man, what's in the box?
We have the SnackWell phenomenon,
it was like the epitome of what happened
with the low fat food industry,
where people thought they could
just eat massive amounts of these cookies...
Don't you think you got a little carried away?
That were very high
in sugar and white flour.
Cookie-Man, you'd better make some more.
The American Heart Association
cashed in on the low fat craze.
Food companies paid hundreds of thousands of dollars
to feature this heart healthy check off symbol on a product.
So this resulted in crazy things
like heart checkoff on Cocoa Krispies,
or on Honey Nut Cheerios or on all these foods
that were super high in sugar,
but as long as they were low
in fat then it was considered healthy.
Kellogg's Fruit Loops Cereal,
part of this nutritious breakfast.
Now that's the seal of approval.
Heart healthy low fat Fruit Loops anyone?
There's a kind of conventional explanation
that it's really the fault of Americans
for not following the guidelines,
there's nothing wrong with our guidelines,
it's just that Americans fail to follow them.
But government consumption data
confirms Americans did as they were told
and dutifully cut back on natural fats found
in red meat, whole milk, eggs, animal fats and butter.
But we still gained weight.
One of the analogies that I like to use
is imagine you had a baseball team
that lost every single game for the last 50, 60 years.
Strike three, strike three!
And you're like, "Well those players,
"they just don't know how to play.
"None of my players know how to play."
Well at some point you'd have to say,
maybe we should take a look at our coaching strategy.
It can't be the fault of all of those players for decades.
But that's basically our explanation for why Americans
are getting fatter and sicker, it's their fault.
They just can't do it right.
I think the dietary guidelines have been
a tremendous failed experiment.
It's a good question of whether they just need
to be changed or whether they
just need to be scrapped and start over.
I genuinely believe that people now
are hanging onto the saturated fat myth
because they don't want to admit that they were wrong.
I don't think the governments
will ever admit they were wrong about saturated fat.
And we are paying a hell of a price
for a few public health people wanting
to protect their own reputation, not wanting to look silly.
I used to fantasize about
the American Heart Association press release that would say,
"Okay yes we know for the past almost 60 years
"we've been giving you the wrong advice
"and we apologize if we killed
"any of your loved ones prematurely and we apologize
"if we gave you heart disease
"with the advice we did give you.
"We were just telling you what we thought was true then
"and we were best of intentioned and now we know better."
That apology may never come
and the largest health organizations dedicated
to preventing obesity and Type 2 Diabetes continue
to spread advice that makes it worse.
Type 2 diabetes we were always taught is a chronic
and irreversible disease, inevitably progressive.
I flatly rejected that.
I flatly reject it.
So it is chronic, irreversible,
and inevitably progressive if you take
the guidelines currently in place
and utilize them as your treatment plan.
For years the American Diabetes Association
has promoted low fat diets.
They use this handy graphic illustration called
the Diabetic Plate which features limited amounts
of lean meat, non fat dairy products,
and 50% or more of daily calories as carbohydrates.
I think the Diabetic Plate is a prescription
for worsening of the disease.
If you really look at the Diabetic Plate,
it is three-fourths carbohydrates, which makes no sense.
It also is lean protein,
so when we look at the diabetic plate as a whole,
there's almost no fats.
This is a way to make people sicker and fatter.
This is the advice I was giving,
this is the advice that doesn't work.
This is the advice that prescribes more medications,
this is the advice that increases insulin.
But really it's a metabolic shift
when you burn fat instead of burning sugar.
Alyssa Gallager is Judi's dietician.
She was initially trained in a low fat paradigm.
When I first started exploring the low-carb approach...
That's really low carb.
I can use that.
I helped people genuinely,
for the first time in my career.
I'm going for real food now,
so I can get rid of all of this.
In the old days, I was frustrated that the advice
I was giving wasn't working for people.
Oh, chips and crackers, where's that garbage can?
I was taught, essentially what
the American Diabetes Association teaches is carbohydrates,
consistent carbohydrates, more whole grain.
No oatmeal.
They used to tell us that was good for you.
I was taught saturated fat is bad for you.
Saturated fat is something
to be avoided and limited at all costs.
The problem is when
you remove fat from a diet you have
to eat something else instead.
And that something else is often carbohydrates.
At first I didn't understand why the advice
I was giving wasn't working.
It's what I learned in school.
I'm the nutrition expert, right?
It should be working.
And then eventually it started not making sense to me.
Why am I telling somebody with diabetes
that they must eat carbohydrates?
It didn't make any sense.
Carbohydrates raise blood sugar,
when you have higher blood sugars,
we need to give you more medication.
When we give you more medication, you gain weight.
When you gain weight, you need more medication,
you want to eat more carbs.
It became a vicious cycle.
Okay, I think I'm done cleanin' out my pantry.
And insulin resistance is essentially
a state of carbohydrate intolerance.
So why oh why do we want to continue
to recommend to people to eat them?
Sarah Hallberg is a physician leading arguably
the most promising trial
ever conducted for Type 2 diabetics.
She's helped hundreds of patients safely
and sustainably reverse their diabetes diagnosis,
often getting off all medications
by cutting carbs and increasing their fat intake a lot
to as much as 70 to 80% of daily calories.
The solution to the diabetes epidemic
in my clinic is exceedingly clear.
Stop using medicine to treat food.
Her TED Talk on this unconventional approach
has nearly 5,000,000 views.
The title?
"Reversing Type 2 Diabetes Starts
"with Ignoring the Guidelines."
Fat is central to any science-based nutrition
recommendation for anyone
who struggles with Type 2 diabetes.
Carbohydrates cause our insulin and glucose to go up.
Proteins much less and with fat,
there's no glucose or insulin reaction.
And given the fact that Type 2 diabetes
is a problem with elevated glucose, wait a minute,
we can't be recommending the macro nutrient
that's gonna cause glucose and insulin to go up.
But that's exactly what MyPlate and the ADA guidelines do.
They recommend us to eat
the macro nutrient that's causing the problem.
In here clinical trial of nearly 500 patients,
60% of the intervention group reversed
their diagnosis of diabetes.
That's more than half the patients
whose blood sugars normalized.
94% have their insulin doses decreased
or totally eliminated with no increase
in their LDL or lousy cholesterol.
By comparison, the American Diabetes Association
reports a less than 1% success rate
at reversing diabetes when following
their own low fat advice.
So if we want people to really get help,
we have to start giving them advice that actually works.
It's hard when you have, let alone been hearing something
for decades but been saying something for decades.
It's difficult to turn that ship around.
Because to turn that ship around you have to be vulnerable.
You have to say, I was wrong.
And this involves a lot of organizations,
a lot of people saying I was wrong and I think that's hard.
I think that's a big deal.
After years of following
the guidelines and getting nowhere,
Judi has decided to ignore the ADA's advice
and try to reverse her Type 2 diabetes
with a low carb, high fat nutrition plan.
The health professionals that were givin'
us all that advice through the years
just kinda bounced us back and forth
and we never really had any answers.
I really like just unsweetened coconut chips...
I feel like what I'm learning now is a way toward health
and a way toward a better size that I'll feel good about
which to me is hand in hand with my health.
The U.S. military is now facing a new threat.
It's not North Korea, it is actually the U.S. diet.
The single biggest disqualifier is obesity.
Wait?
We're talkin' about young people?
Right, youth obesity.
25% of all potential recruits
are turned away because of their weight.
At this point in time, we can't field an army,
because they are quote, "Too fat to fight."
That's not my words, that's the U.S. Army's words.
A few months ago, the Army missed its recruitment goals
for the first time in 13 years.
We've gotten to a point where
we're too fat to defend ourselves.
Captain Brian Gaudette
is an Apache helicopter pilot,
an entrepreneur and a living example
of why the U.S. dietary guidelines matter.
Flying Apache helicopters is probably one
of the most fun things on the planet,
but it's also very high stakes.
You need all of your faculties to stay safe.
On high stakes missions often
on the other side of the world,
Brian was confined to Army food.
A diet dictated by the dietary guidelines.
I always had sandwiches for lunch,
lots of noodle-based dishes, lots of rice-based dishes.
I was running about three or four times a week,
between three and five miles,
but the weight was still coming on.
One day I was in the cockpit, and I put my head down,
and it felt like the world was moving,
like the aircraft was moving.
I looked up really quick and then I put my head down again.
I felt it again.
And so I kinda had to raise my hand and say,
"Hey, we have a problem here."
Brian knew he was sick but he didn't know why.
He was grounded from flying.
For the next eight months I went to every specialist.
Do you have a brain tumor?
Is it an inner ear thing?
Is there a cardiac issue?
Is there a neurological issue?
And they said, "You know, Brian, sometimes stress does
"weird stuff to the body,"
and handed me a card for mental health.
Not one medical specialist
asked Brian about his nutrition.
And they were just like, "Sorry."
You know?
"That's about all we can do for you."
So, there was a turning point where I was like, "Okay.
"Well, we've got to figure this out on our own."
Brian decided to try an elimination diet
and he cut out all grains and sugar.
For really, just efficiency and for taste,
I made these giant batches of bone broth, vegetable,
and meat soups and I just ate them pretty much every day.
And that's where sort
of the nickname Captain Soup came from.
In about six weeks, I got my brain back.
I got my energy back.
I lost about 25 pounds.
I started to see my husband come back.
I started to see my children's father come back.
It's miraculous to me what just food can do.
Just by changing what he ate,
Brian's health problems resolved.
He no longer takes any medication,
he's back to - Nice, throw dude.
- His high school weight, - Ready?
And the Army - Whoa!
Has reinstated his flight status.
And now he's sharing his recipe for health with the world.
Now we make just super clean keto soups,
and we ship 'em frozen all over the country.
These days when Brian goes
on deployment he ships ahead cases of soup.
He no longer relies on the Army food that made him so sick.
When my son was born, I was really sick.
And I look back at photos from that time,
and I barely remember anything about that year,
because I was so out of it.
Sorry.
And when you don't have energy
and you don't have your health,
like you don't really have anything.
I have my brain back, I have my energy back,
and I can show up and be there
for my kids and for my wife like I wanna be.
Today, less than 20% of medical schools
require nutrition training for physicians.
That's slowly changing but a widespread lack
of nutrition knowledge means many physicians misunderstand
the root causes of chronic and metabolic diseases
which are often driven by diet.
When a physician preaches low-fat
and a physician preaches reducing calories
and they try that themselves, it doesn't take long
for some of them to realize, "This isn't working for me,
"maybe it's not working for my patients, either."
- Ali! - Hi.
How are you doin'?
Good, it's nice to see you.
Physicians are not immune to obesity.
Plenty of them struggle with their own health challenges.
It's been gettin' a lot better.
Until two years ago, I was tryin'
to do the American Diabetes Association diet,
the American Heart Association,
trying to eat a low fat diet,
eating small meals throughout
the day and I'm gaining weight.
Up, two!
Up, three!
I was working out six days a week
because I would say I gotta work out
if I want to lose weight,
I want to be an example to my patients.
You're exercising but like they say,
you can't outrun your fork.
So, I had a huge...
Like many docs, Brian Lenzkes
was trained in the low fat paradigm
and that's what he practiced with his patients for decades.
But the struggle with his own weight
was getting out of control.
Yeah at that point I was around 260 pounds.
And at that time I was also pre diabetic.
Clearly what I was doing wasn't working.
I was following the government guidelines
and I was getting sicker and sicker.
And it's not working for me.
Well, were my patients not listening to me
or was I giving them bad advice?
And it turns out we were giving bad advice.
Honey, I got a mixture of chicken,
Italian seasoned sausage and a spicy pork.
So when I cut carbohydrates the interesting thing for me,
if I had eggs for breakfast for instance,
my 10 o'clock snack that I was gonna have,
I wasn't hungry and I would skip right through it.
- I got grease on my fingers. - Super good.
Within the first six months I was down
about 28 pounds, 30 pounds.
I was putting on muscle mass and I was feeling really good.
My energy, my mental clarity, my focus, my fatigue levels,
all those things got better.
I was like, wow.
Pretty interesting.
How many of you guys have lost 10 pounds
or more doing low carb or Keto?
And he's been a fantastic ambassador
for low-carb lifestyle because he's seen it personally
and now he's seen it with hundreds of his patients.
- Hey, how ya doin'? - Fine, thanks.
- So good to see ya. - Thank you.
How's things?
In all my years of practice, I never saw anyone cured
of diabetes by going on a low fat diet.
Never, not one time.
No one came off of insulin.
Since switching his practice
to a low carb ketogenic approach nearly a dozen
of Brian's patients have reversed
their Type 2 diabetes and come off insulin all together.
Man, I was just Lookin' at your numbers
and it's like, I think of anyone I've ever seen,
you have come off insulin faster than anyone.
I feel brand new, brand new, brand new.
So I'm stickin' with the diet.
At three months, I went from insulin five times a day
to no insulin and was able to maintain normal blood sugars.
- I don't remember if Dr. - Lenzkes suggested keto
specifically for the weight loss
or if it wasn't for the other issues that I had.
I started it, and I do love butter,
and I do love cream and I do love bacon.
So, it sounded really pretty good to me.
I ate less, and what I ate, I enjoyed more.
Since last March, a year ago,
I've lost between 50 and 60 pounds,
but I've gained a lot of strength,
I've gained a lot of muscle as well.
So, I've lost over 200 pounds.
It's just mind boggling.
He hadn't taken any patients off insulin ever
in his entire career and in five months,
he got 11 patients off insulin completely.
How can you not acknowledge that?
You've done incredible things.
I mean, just two years ago you were
on insulin five times a day, huge doses and you asked me
can I come off this insulin?
I'm gaining weight, I'm tired, I'm fatigued all the time,
and now seeing you, where you're at now,
it's pretty remarkable what you've accomplished
just by making some lifestyle changes.
They're empowered now to get themselves off insulin.
So, now they're seeing it.
Now my patients are telling their patients
and they're going to them to saying,
"Hey, how come this person came off insulin?
"I thought it couldn't happen."
It can happen.
It does happen, right?
And we're excited about that.
I don't know anyone else who
has lost as much weight as you have,
even with gastric bypass surgery I've never seen it.
The fact that you are coming down off
your diabetes medications, you're off them all now,
your blood pressure came down.
All these things are getting better
and we're just slowly getting you off the medications.
You are making progress and you're making a ton of progress,
more than anyone that I've ever seen.
That shift that he saw in his patients,
being able to actually remove medications
and make them healthier
at the same time was just tremendous.
And it all started with his own personal journey.
Maybe, eventually,
the government will come around.
Maybe, possibly so.
If not, it's your health, right?
- Absolutely, absolutely. - We can do it as individuals
and when people are seeing people have benefits,
they're gonna wanna go into that lifestyle,
and what you're doing and what we're seeing day after day
- is super exciting. - Yeah.
- Yeah, so thank you. - Thank you so much.
Thank you
- for encouraging me too! - Thank you.
Oh no.
You're wonderful, you are absolutely the best.
You're awesome, thank you.
So the three main macro nutrients
in food are carbohydrate, protein and fat,
and here's an important point.
There are essential fats and essential proteins,
but there are no essential carbohydrates.
Essential means the nutrients
are required to sustain human life.
We must eat these to survive.
But there is no physical or biological need
for us to consume any carbohydrates at all.
I was an ultra distance runner.
Not an elite athlete, but I was pretty good and finished
in the top 100 out of a field of about 14, 15,000.
By the time he was 30 years old,
Doug Reynolds had run over almost
100 marathons and ultra marathons.
He was in the best shape of his life
but something wasn't right.
And I would be incredibly fit,
and yet on the day of the race,
I would be standing there thinking,
"I've got to run up that mountain for 55 miles.
"I can't even get to the corner."
I felt terrible.
I used to think it was just nerves.
Like many people, Doug thought athletes
couldn't function without carbohydrates.
He would binge on carbs in the days leading up to the race.
But it wasn't the nerves.
It was the fact that three days before,
I'd just gorge myself on all these pastas
and potatoes and all these carbohydrates and it was toxic.
It's a familiar story to Dr. Tim Noakes,
the man who wrote the book on carb loading.
So the first four chapters are all
on high carbohydrate diets and how
the most important determinant of your success
in running is how much carbohydrates you're eating.
So I promoted this and all the time while I was writing
this I was getting fatter, less healthy and my running
was getting slower and slower and slower,
to the point where I was really hating running.
Even though they were exercising
a lot more than most people,
both men suffered from their low fat, high carb diets.
I started to put on a little bit of weight
and I never used to weigh myself
because I was always a runner, I was fine.
And I got on the scale
and I was like thirty-five pounds overweight?
I thought the scale was broken!
And then, much more interestingly,
I discovered I had Type 2 diabetes,
which was predictable because my dad
had died from the disease and my dad took 10 years
to die and I figured I've
got 10 years to sort this problem out.
Both Tim and Doug decided
to break the convention and try a low carb diet.
They cut carbs to less than 20 grams a day,
ate moderate amounts of protein and began eating 70
to 80% of daily calories as fat.
Nutrition is actually pretty simple.
Your body needs protein and protein comes first.
That's essential.
But then you can choose to run
your body on carbohydrates including sugars
and starches or fats and it's your choice.
If you quit eating carbs, sugars and starches,
your body is forced to use an alternative fuel source, fat.
Burning fat produces substance called ketones
that provide all the energy you need
to fuel your body and your brain.
That's why the low carb high fat diet
has been given the name Keto.
For most of human history there's been
very little sugar or starches in the diet.
In fact if you put all of human history into one year,
it's only in the last day that people
started eating grains or bread and it's only
in the last hour that people have been eating sugar.
In fact we know that keeping people in ketosis,
keeping the carbs very low may actually
be the preferred way for people to be.
Eventually, I dropped right down 44 pounds
and I went back to my weight
that I had when I was running in 1972.
And I'm glad to say, after seven years,
my blood glucose control is as good
as it could be expected for someone of my age of 69.
I'm not completely normal, but I'm 99% normal.
Tim famously tore out
the pages on carb loading from his "Lore of Running" book
that promotes ketogenic diets for athletes.
Two, three weeks after I started on this keto diet,
I was jumping out of bed and going
for a run in the morning and enjoying it.
It's just been the most amazing transformation in my life.
Doug started a company called LowCarb USA
dedicated to education and nutrition support.
His logo?
Our nation's food pyramid turned upside down.
Well, yeah, I mean the whole idea
was that the reason we're in
this terrible metabolic dilemma
in this country is because of the food pyramid.
What we are advocating is pretty much 180 degrees opposite
to what the food pyramid tries to teach.
We now understand that our bodies,
even the bodies of elite athletes
don't eat carbohydrates to survive.
We can convert fat into ketones for fuel,
but early nutritional scientists
did not understand nutritional ketosis.
Scientists simply thought that since fat
has nine calories per gram while protein
and carbs have only four calories per gram,
we should just cut back on fat to lower
our calories consumption and lose weight.
I met with people who helped with the initial guidelines
and they were well-intentioned.
They reasoned that because calories lead to obesity,
reduce the food that has the most calories which is fat.
We've been counting calories ever since
in every way imaginable on food labels,
in menus, online and in apps and lately even on our bodies.
For years we've been told it's a simple equation.
If we could just balance the number of calories
we consume against the number of calories we burn,
the calories in versus calories out,
our weight will stay in balance.
Everything on the level, right?
Actually, not so right.
The calories in, calories out model
is fundamentally flawed because the body
doesn't account for the fat that way.
That's not how we gain fat.
It's not a physics problem.
It's a biology problem.
It's a physiology problem.
The alternative theory is called
the carbohydrate insulin hypothesis of weight gain.
Remember how carbohydrates
raise blood sugar but fat doesn't?
That's the key to the insulin carbohydrate hypothesis.
It's really not that hard to understand.
So if you take 100 calories of brownies
and 100 calories of salmon,
and you eat the two, all the insulin hypothesis says
is that one food is going to raise insulin a lot,
the other food is not.
So we know that as soon as you put
those foods in your mouth,
the hormonal effect of those foods
is completely and utterly different.
So we really need to pay attention
to hormones at least as much if not more than calories.
So, what raises insulin?
Well, carbohydrates number one with a bullet.
It's like in real estate, location, location, location,
with insulin it's carbohydrate, carbohydrate, carbohydrate.
Protein is a distant second,
so protein can raise insulin as well.
You know what doesn't raise it at all?
Fat.
Zero.
Not a drop.
Doesn't move the needle.
So, what is the irony of us telling people
to eat a diet that is absent of the one macro nutrient
that has no effect on the fat storage hormone?
It's total sheer madness.
Insulin essentially acts as a lock
that gets clamped down on all of our fat stores
and prevents us from using our stored fat as energy.
But, when we restrict carbohydrates
and we can therefore bring the insulin levels down,
the locks come off and all of sudden we have access
to all of our fat stores for energy.
That's right.
Insulin is a fat storage hormone.
Lower insulin by cutting out sugar and carbs
and the weight comes off or never
comes on in the first place.
We tell patients to think of their body
as a bowl of sugar, right?
So over time, that bowl fills up.
If you're eating a lot of processed foods
and sugar and so on, that bowl fills up,
and eventually that sugar, as you add more sugar in,
spills out, and that's what Type 2 diabetes is.
Your cells can't hold anymore sugar,
it simply spills out into the blood.
The wrong thing to do is to take the insulin
and keep cramming that sugar back into the body,
the body takes it, takes it, takes it until it rots.
Right?
It would be much smarter to simply say,
"Hey, I have too much sugar.
"Let me just burn it all off by intermittent fasting,
"or not putting anymore sugar in."
A low-carbohydrate diet, and guess what?
It works exactly as you would expect it to work.
I've been using the keto diet for about 13 years
in a university clinical practice and the results
in treating diabetes are quite remarkable.
I've had some people get off insulin within just a few days
of changing from eating carbohydrates
to not eating carbohydrates.
I think my record that I can recall
is I took someone off 180 units
of insulin a day in just two days.
Come on in and take a seat.
Sure.
If Judi were to have walked into my Office 10 years ago
when I started, I would have thought, I can help you.
You just need to eat less.
You need to exercise more.
We need to start measuring your food.
You can do this, I believe in you.
And I thought that to be true.
Why don't you go ahead and get
your blood sugar meter out for me too.
Okay.
Take a look at that.
Over the course of the following five years,
I realized it wasn't working
and either no one was following my advice
or I was giving terrible advice.
I've been writing down each day...
Thankfully Judi didn't come into my office 10 years ago.
She came into my office this year.
And I was able to offer hope.
I was able to offer an opportunity.
I knew that she could be successful
and success wasn't just measured on a scale,
it was measured with blood sugar reduction,
insulin reduction, anti-inflammatory markers,
blood pressure as well as insulin.
Yeah.
Looks like you did an awesome job.
- Yeah. - And you are down 12 pounds.
Wow.
Since our last visit, yeah.
I can report that this is the second week
and I have normal blood sugars now in the morning.
I'm still doing my injectables, but it's gotten leveled.
It's leveled and I know that I'm in ketosis.
And the weight is starting to drop off.
What was the dose you were taking
when you walked out of the door?
- It was 120 units. - Okay.
And now I'm doing 100.
In just two weeks on a ketogenic diet,
Judi has cut her blood sugar in half and lost 12 pounds.
Changing her nutrition has done more
to improve her health than any medication ever did.
The difference is more fat,
and that gives a lot more energy.
It's amazing.
I'm happy I come to work again,
and there was really a time when I thought, I have to quit.
I can't do this, this is miserable.
It's hopeless.
Diabetes is a hopeless disease.
And I felt that way.
I really, truly felt that way and I knew
that there had to be another answer,
and I don't feel that way anymore.
In results from more than 50 controlled clinical trials
comparing high fat and low fat diets for weight loss,
the high fat diets won every time.
The higher the fat the higher the weight loss.
That's because eating fat speeds up
your metabolism and helps you burn body fat,
carbs slow down your metabolism and cause weight gain.
It's week two of our nutrition experiment.
This time it's the low fat diet.
So today's breakfast was oatmeal
with raisins and brown sugar.
We're following a USDA MyPlate 2,000 calorie
a day meal plan downloaded from the USDA website.
Do you have a leaner ham?
It calls for low fat meats, non fat dairy,
including non fat sugar sweetened chocolate milk
and plenty of carbohydrates, things like lasagna,
bread and even pizza.
This looks like stuff you would take
to a college dorm, right?
This is what
our government says we should eat.
We have some shredded wheat here.
And then I'm adding a whole half cup of sliced banana.
And half a cup of fat free milk.
Oh, then toast.
And one cup of chocolate milk, fat free.
This breakfast alone contains 150 grams
of carbohydrates and 50 grams of sugar.
Two teaspoons of jelly.
Instead of eating bacon and eggs in the morning,
which keeps you full until well past lunch for example,
now you're eating a couple of slices of bread and jam,
and of course by the time you metabolize it,
the sugar goes way up and then it goes way down,
at 10:30 you're looking for a low-fat muffin.
Day one of the new diet has begun
and I have to admit, I'm not likin' it.
Hungry all day.
So instead of eating sorta three meals a day,
which is a standard since in the '60s, '50s, '60s, '70s,
now all of a sudden, people are getting hungry,
like ravenous at 10:30 and they're saying,
"Oh, yeah, I need to eat six times a day."
Today I was hungry again so I needed the snack,
and I also got really tired after the meal.
So not only are you eating foods
that stimulate a lot of insulin,
you're doing it constantly,
six times a day versus three times a day,
and it's like, well, what's gonna happen?
Lunch was a ham sandwich with some mayo,
some grapes and the milk.
And I went off the chart, I went over 200.
And it just kept going up and up
and up and up and up and up and up and then it hit over 200,
206, I think was it?
Then it started coming down.
That was crazy to me and it was almost a little scary.
It's a recipe for diabetes.
How long is it gonna be before everybody
becomes diabetic because that's the outcome of that advice?
I never even got that close to that last week,
not even close.
So it's gonna be an interesting week
and gosh I hope I last all week, I'm not kidding!
Hi this is Cynthia, fifth day on the low-fat diet.
It is barely 12 but I'm hungry so I'm digging in my lunch.
I'm hungry again so I will dig into my daily snack.
Last week I was barely hungry at two
and now I'm very hungry so I will eat.
I was hungry the entire time.
I would eat, that would feel good for about 30,
40 minutes and then I would start just feelin' hungry.
I definitely liked last week...
When you compare the flat
and steady blood sugars from the high fat week
to the roller coaster readings from this low fat week,
it's hard to believe that
our government thinks this is good for us.
The USDA put together a guideline
that seems to me was really to market
the food that America makes.
It wasn't based on health.
The dietary guidelines are not guidelines.
The dietary guidelines are guidance.
They're guidance for the food industry
to be able to sell food.
They have nothing to do with health.
And the fact that the USDA is
in charge of our health is already a problem.
The USDA when it was founded had two mandates.
Not one, two.
Mandate number one was to provide information
to the American public about healthy eating.
Mandate number two was to support,
encourage and grow the American agricultural industry.
Those two mandates are not always congruent
with one another because if you were really being honest
with the American people you would say,
"Wheat, corn, sugar and soy are not health foods."
And if you're congregant with the other mandate
of the USDA which is to support and encourage
and grow American agriculture
you ain't telling people to not eat four
of the five biggest crops that are made in America.
Trouble.
That's the contradiction and that's
why I don't think you're gonna
see much change in dietary recommendations.
So Nick, tell me about your experiences
these past two weeks.
So it's been really, really interesting.
Yeah, so it was interesting.
Well, it was really interesting.
The low carb, high fat,
I had a really good experience with.
I loved all the food, and I found it very easy.
I liked the high fat a little better
because I felt more energetic.
The following week on the low fat,
high carb, I was bonkin'.
I'd just be tired and maybe hangry
is probably the best word.
Insulin is a big driver
of carbohydrate craving and hunger.
That hangry feeling that you mentioned
is often when someone's insulin levels
are high but their blood sugar is low.
It's that insulin roller coaster we talked
about when you eat carbs and your insulin levels go up.
And I got foggy during the high carb week.
A little groggy.
I was even just sayin' things backwards
and I noticed that I wasn't, there wasn't the,
I wasn't clicking like I normally do.
I'd love to see
your graphs at some time, too.
Like kind of see - Oh, okay.
The whole progression of them.
Do you have them with you?
Yeah, sure.
Let me see here.
Just look at the difference
between the two diets.
Everyone of our participants experienced similar reactions
to the low carb versus low fat diets.
Wow, what a difference
- between the two weeks. - Yeah, it's huge.
Yeah.
From the first week I was almost a flat line.
- Yeah. - I was averaging 84.
Much more stable.
It was fascinating.
- Yeah, it's interesting. - It was really interesting
being a part of this.
I'm really excited about
- this changing my life. - Yeah.
It's cool to see.
For many people, fat is a super food.
Not only does it help you feel full and lose weight,
your body uses it as the building blocks
for cellular membranes and fat makes
up the myelin sheath that forms around
your nerves and allows electrical impulses
to transmit quickly and efficiently.
Fat makes up more than half our brain tissue.
Human breast milk is more than half fat,
much of which is saturated fat.
We need healthy fats to be healthy humans.
Unfortunately what we've been told
about which fats are good for us
and which fats are bad is dead wrong.
Everybody just thinks,
oh, don't eat fat, don't eat fat,
and it's actually more tragic than that.
The story is actually much worse.
As people turned away from saturated fats,
like butter and animal fats, we were told to eat margarine.
Imperial.
Only our taste deserves the crown.
It turns out, and this is what's so tragic about it,
it was deadly advice.
Many doctors have recommended corn oil margarine's
to help lower the saturated fat in a reduced fat diet.
So if you remember margarine is vegetable oils,
and then they partially hydrogenate them
to make them solid, so they look like butter.
Partially hydrogenated fats are actually trans-fats.
It's best to replace spreads high in saturated fats.
So we went from eating natural foods
and butter to trans-fats which we now know was super,
super, super deadly for heart attacks.
For the family you love,
serve delicious, new Mazola Margarine.
And love it's light delicate flavor everyday.
That is mind-blowing that we told people
to stop eating butter and eat this poison instead,
and it would be good for you and we all did it.
This is Mazola 100% corn oil margarine
made from 100% corn oil goodness.
Well there's really no doubt
that the American Heart Association endorsement
of vegetable oils was a great thing for that industry.
This is Ralph Edwards
of "Truth or Consequences" and congratulations
on your fine entry statement
of why we should all support the American Heart Association.
The American Heart Association started
in the 1920s as a sleepy little organization
that could barely keep its doors open,
but in 1948 Proctor and Gamble,
maker of Crisco or shortening staged
a nationwide fundraiser and the AHA hit the jackpot.
Thanks to Jack Benny,
the American Heart Association has
a million and a half dollars there.
Alright, this is Ralph Edwards saying goodnight, everybody!
Overnight millions of dollars flowed into their coffers.
I mean literally from one week to the next
they started opening up chapters all over the country,
all thanks to Proctor and Gamble.
New Crisco Oil stays blended longer,
makes salads taste great.
New Crisco Oil blends better than other oils.
The American Heart Association
has endorsed special oils ever since.
It's not nice to fool Mother Nature.
They then were able to publish advertisements saying,
lowers cholesterol.
Take this ad to your doctor and get them
to prescribe to you vegetable oils for your health.
Vegetable oils are a fascinating topic
because they've become labeled as heart healthy
which drives me a little crazy
because the label was granted
to them simply by lowering LDL cholesterol.
But, the broader question is, what else are they doing?
These are not real food products.
These are products made in factories.
These are products that require heat and chemicals
and high pressure to extract what little oil there is.
The heat and chemicals used
in the manufacturing process oxidizes
these delicate seed oils.
When you eat oxidized vegetable oils like soy,
canola, corn and seed flower or sunflower,
they create free radicals throughout
your body that are highly inflammatory
and known to cause heart disease and cancer.
Why are we always trying to eat more antioxidants?
To combat free radicals like the ones found
in refined vegetable oils.
And then they're used by restaurants
in the most carcinogenic way possible.
They heat them, reheat them, cool them off,
heat them again and use 'em for a week.
So, switching to vegetable oils,
the seed oils was probably
a terrible idea in the first place.
One researcher from the University
of Minnesota went to a variety of fast food restaurants
in her neighborhood and purchased french fries
and then took them back to her lab for testing.
She found numerous compounds
of toxic aldehydes in the fries.
Aldehydes are known to cause gene mutation,
alter RNA and DNA and trigger massive inflammation
in the body.
Vegetable oil is highly toxic
and anyone who advises people
to eat vegetable oils is also giving misinformation.
I tell my clients to avoid
the industrial seed oils as much as possible.
Vegetable oils belong in the engines of cars,
not in your food.
Refined vegetable oils are one more reason
you should avoid fast food and processed food.
If it comes in a bottle or a box
it probably contains vegetable oils.
From crackers to cookies, mayonnaise to salad dressings,
baby food and even baby formula.
They're not natural.
They've been shown to be pro-inflammatory
and in some studies like the Minnesota Coronary Experiment,
the Sydney Diet Heart Study,
they've shown that, yes, they lower LDL
but they actually do nothing
or they worsen all-cause mortality.
The Minnesota Coronary Survey which took place
in the 1960s was the biggest
ever test of Ancel Keys' hypothesis.
The Minnesota Coronary Experiment
is a fascinating study both from a science standpoint
and sort of a detective standpoint.
So it took place in five Minnesota mental hospitals
which is a kind of experiment
you can't do anymore because it's considered unethical.
But back then it has the benefit of being highly controlled,
which means that you're feeding people all their food,
so you know what they're eating,
and they can't get outside food so they can't cheat.
In the diet, they replaced saturated fat
with polyunsaturated fat, in the intervention.
And the diet was similar in all
the other nutrients that they deemed to be important.
And what they found was that with the intervention,
cholesterol levels went down,
which is what you would expect,
but mortality actually trended up.
It turned out that people who were
on the cholesterol lowering diet had more heart disease
and more deaths than the people eating the controlled diet,
which was the exact opposite of what they wanted.
So it did not support the diet-heart hypothesis.
But they never published the results.
If you do a very long study going into
that study thinking that you know what the end in mind
is going to be and then it isn't the end in mind,
I can understand that you don't wanna publish the results,
but it is scientific fraud.
Yeah, that is totally unacceptable
to not publish your data like that.
It wasn't published until decades later
that a relative of the author went digging for the results
and this is the detective part that's kind of crazy,
that he had to go looking through the basements
to find these data and re-crunch the data
and reanalyze it and then bring it out to publish it to say,
"Hey, look, this diet higher in omega-6 oils, lowered LDL,
"but it increased cardiovascular risk
"and it increased mortality."
When you are making recommendations
that are not evidence-based,
and evidence comes out that's contrary
to those recommendations, wait a minute,
that's a problem, right?
And so what has been the standard approach
to dealing with that situation,
which has come up a number of times?
Bury the new evidence.
And that's exactly what's happened,
and the Minnesota Coronary study
is a perfect example of this.
The Heart Foundation didn't come out and say,
"Sorry, we're wrong."
They just ignored it as if it didn't happen
and they continued to promote vegetable oils
and poly-unsaturated fats.
If that had been published,
almost certainly what we eat today would be different.
This is a reason for everyone
to be outraged beyond concern.
Controlled clinical trials like
the Minnesota Coronary Survey are considered
the gold standard of research.
The type of experiment where you can control
every bite of food and change just one thing,
like swapping butter for margarine
to find out if it has an effect on our health.
But trials like these are expensive,
and some even considered unethical.
Cheaper observational trials are far more common.
How many times have
you had oatmeal in the last year?
I have no clue.
Oh my gosh.
Observational trials often rely
on food frequency questionnaires
that rely on people's memories.
And people's memories aren't that great.
How many times have
you had orange juice in the last year?
I wouldn't know a number.
Last year?
I'm gonna say...
If I was to put a number on it, upwards of 20?
In the last year, 20 times?
- Oh yeah, yes. - Okay.
So you think you've had it only about two times a month?
Oh, oh darn, yeah, you're right.
I have no idea how many ounces...
Well, if I had to break it up into ounces...
Probably about the same as you.
I don't know how many ounces.
See what I mean?
Observational trials generate unreliable data
and are the reason
why nutritional recommendations constantly flip and flop.
Setting nutritional food policy based
on unreliable data is largely what got
us into this big fat mess.
How hard do you think
it is to remember what you ate?
Impossible, unless you have some ridiculous ability
to remember everything which nobody does.
Nobody remembers things accurately.
No one person may represent
the antithesis of the low fat diet better than Dave Asprey.
His company, Bulletproof has made
a morning ritual out of adding spoonfuls of fat to coffee.
You take anywhere from a teaspoon
to a tablespoon of grass-fed butter.
Add to that a few more teaspoons
of purified coconut oil.
And then add your brewed black coffee,
and you blend it.
You can see, it looks an awful lot like a latte.
You drink this you're just not hungry for hours and hours,
and you're energized in a way
that you'll never get from a piece of toast.
It was through his own discovery
of a high fat, low carb diet that Dave Asprey lost
more than 100 pounds and he's kept it off for 10 years.
In 2004, after I lost a bunch of the weight
I wanted to lose, I decided to go to Tibet
to learn meditation from the masters.
And I'm at 18,000 feet elevation
in a very remote part of Tibet.
10 degrees below zero, 30 mile an hour winds,
and I'm feeling kind of wrecked
'cause there's no air and it's cold.
And this little Tibetan woman gave me a bowl
of yak butter tea, which is yak butter, mixed with tea,
and a pinch of salt.
All right, fine, I'm hungry.
I drank it.
It didn't taste great, it didn't taste bad.
But a minute later I'm like, "I feel really good.
"In fact, I haven't felt this good in days.
"What is happening?"
And I wrote a little note in my journal, how could this be?
And that day, I had another 20 cups of it,
and I just felt like I got my life back.
Dave came back to the States
and adapted his yak butter tea experience to coffee.
Bulletproof is now a multi million dollar company
which Dave operates alongside his small,
organic farm where he grows grass-fed sheep and pigs.
Hey guys, hey Riley.
Dave believes the quality
of the fats we consume is critical.
If you're not sure whether fats
are good or bad, it's okay.
Some fats are bad, and some fats are good.
No wonder it's confusing.
Short version, grass-fed butter, egg yolks,
coconut oil, avocados, olive oil.
Those are the good fats.
While there is much debate over
the role played by animal agriculture in climate change,
raising grass-fed animals on organic pastures
like Dave's actually helps capture carbon
and can be a sustainable piece of the climate's solution.
And the meat you eat must be higher quality.
And guess what high quality animals make?
High quality poop.
Guess what high quality poop makes?
High quality vegetables.
The vegetables you're eating that don't come
from farms like this are vegetables devoid of nutrients
and if we allow that to continue, there will be no topsoil.
This is how you make topsoil.
And the Tibetans figured out a long time ago,
saturated fat helps your brain.
They were using it for meditation,
they were using it to help their metabolism work
in very harsh conditions that are high stress.
So it's time to throw away the seed oils.
They are not fit for human consumption.
If you're eating bad fats, it's going to kill you.
And this is where The American Heart Association,
and the American Diabetes Association just got it wrong.
They told you to eat bad fats because
of industrial interests and it's time that we change that.
The science is very, very clear.
Yeah, it's...
So how much weight have you lost total?
I, 30 pounds.
- That's great. - Yeah.
And my goal was 50, so I think it's very doable.
And you're down another five pounds.
I am?
Yeah.
- Yay! - Yeah.
In two months Judi has lost weight
and cut her insulin medications by 60%.
I think you have to look inside yourself
and just determine that nobody
is gonna take care of you the way that you can.
I don't feel like anyone could
go wrong with making an attempt at this
but you can't attempt it for a week.
You have to set your mind and set yourself
to it for a period of time.
Judi is inspired by thousands
of other patients who reversed their Type 2 diabetes
getting off all medications with a high fat,
low carb nutrition plan.
We reversed my Type 2 Diabetes, after one month.
I couldn't be prouder.
No more insulin injections for me,
and no more metformin, and even statins.
I completely reversed
my Type 2 Diabetes in just three months.
Before I changed my diet, I weighed 212 pounds.
Now I weigh 165 pounds and I take zero medications.
Before I started, I weighed about 265 pounds,
I now weigh 130 pounds.
Now I can enjoy my family,
I can do everything that you should do to live a life.
It's just been a total change.
I have seen so many individual transformative patients,
what an honor that is to share that journey with a patient.
I feel like if a person just is determined
and sets their goals that there isn't anything you can't do.
You just have to decide that feeling good
and being healthy is more important than
the things you used to like to eat.
It isn't very long before
your tastes change and you really like it.
When I first started exploring low-carb,
I tried to keep it very quiet
because it had been and maybe still is
a very controversial subject.
In other countries dietitians were losing
their licensure over practicing low-carb,
let alone medical doctors as well.
Professor Noakes, on a charge of unprofessional conduct,
the majority of this committee find you not guilty.
The controversy over low carb
may be slowly, quietly changing.
In the long drawn out case of Dr. Tim Noakes,
the final ruling found in his favor.
So as far as we're concerned,
we made the point that this diet is safe.
That's all we really set out to do.
The low carb, ketogenic diet is a low inflammation diet.
More and more brave practitioners
are going against the dietary guidelines
to help their patients find better health.
Like Brian Lenzkes, who also teaches low carb nutrition
classes at his church.
So far, Brian's congregation
has lost more than 2,000 pounds.
Our results are in purple here.
Low carb.
The two year findings
from Sarah Hallberg's clinical trial show
that a low carb, high fat diet is equally
as effective as bariatric surgery
in reversing Type 2 diabetes.
So your assessment of the vilification
of saturated fat after your experience in this trial?
Well, I'll tell you, what we say is that
we do not restrict saturated fat in these patients,
and yet they're having these remarkable results.
In April of 2019,
the American Diabetes Association
issued an update to its long standing position
that diets lower than 130 grams of carbs a day are unsafe.
I was thrilled, it felt like Christmas morning to me.
It was the very first time in writing
from a huge organization that said
what I was doing was okay.
What I was doing was an approach
that was helping my patients.
And while it was something that I have known for years,
it was the first time I felt safe.
It was the first time I felt safe
to give these recommendations.
In 2015 after more than 50 years
of condemning foods like eggs, lobster and shrimp,
the American Heart Association quietly dropped
their long standing recommendation
against dietary cholesterol saying
it's no longer a nutrient of concern.
That same year, the U.S. Dietary Guidelines Committee
removed the cap on dietary fat consumption,
admitting there's no evidence
that eating fat is bad for health.
But the cap on saturated fat remains.
The hypothesis that saturated fats
are bad for health has been the most tested hypothesis
in the history of nutrition science.
There has been no hypothesis that has been more tested.
Some 75,000 people, 65,000 somewhere in that range,
depending on which studies you include,
and none of them could show that saturated fats
had any effect on total or cardiovascular mortality.
There's no evidence for it.
Even so the American Heart Association
who takes much of its funding from big food
and big pharma continues to stand behind
its long held position that saturated fats
are the cause of heart disease
and that refined vegetable oils are heart healthy.
But there is so much politics and so much money,
and big pharma and the sugar industry
behind trying to keep those guidelines
as they are right now.
I feel like eventually they will change, but when?
It could be 50 years.
We can't wait 50 years.
Millions of people have died already because of this mess.
Doug Reynolds isn't waiting any longer.
His company, LowCarb USA is partnering
with dozens of physicians, nutritionists
and dieticians to create a set of global,
clinical guidelines that teach medical professionals
how to safely and effectively practice low carb nutrition.
Now It gives a lot of them confidence
to maybe start implementing it in their practice,
where before, they weren't quite sure how to do it
or they were afraid that other doctors weren't doing it.
Now, they're actually following
some kind of set of guidelines.
And what about
the official dietary guidelines for Americans?
The three main eating patterns recommended
by the USDA all feature more than 50%
of daily calories as carbohydrates.
According to the dietary guidelines,
low carbohydrate, high fat diets are still not an option.
It smells so good.
In 2017, the National Academy of Sciences and Medicine
perform the first ever outside scientific review
of the U.S. dietary guidelines
and found that the process lacked transparency
and scientific rigor.
Recommending a signal dietary pattern
to an entire population was a huge mistake.
Not only did the low fat diet not work,
it did us harm and resulted in greater obesity and disease.
The lesson of the low fat diet may be
that nutrition science is deeply flawed
and our nation's dietary guidelines
have been heavily influenced by the food industry
and the enormous amount of money at stake.
What we are living now is just
so completely unsustainable.
These unsustainable rates of obesity
and diabetes were bankrupting our nation,
it's destroying people's lives,
it's destroying our country, and it has to stop.
We are not treating the disease,
we're treating the symptoms of the disease.
And so it should be of no surprise
to anyone that we're not getting better.
And we're not going to get better
until we recognize what the real problem is.
If we changed the food, we could solve this problem.
We get so many mixed messages about diet and...
Does the government have a role
in telling people how to eat?
We kind of have to find what really works for us
but we still need to know the truth.
It's a fascinating question
that has a lot of different opinions.
And certainly, the past 30, 40 years
of experience would say, no,
they probably shouldn't be in that role.
The people at the top are not going to change,
so we have to get this going as a bottom up revolution
and get more and more people on board until they're shamed
into changing the guidelines
because the swell of the population is just ignoring them.
The change is coming from the people,
because they've changed.
They're forcing the doctors to change if we can change
the medical profession, I think we'll do something.
If you're pre diabetic or Type 2 diabetic,
there is a way out, a path forward to health
and vitality to fewer drugs and more energy.
You can get your life back
and all you have to do is eat real food.
If somebody has Type 2 diabetes,
they can go online right now,
they can watch your movie,
they can read up on something,
they can buy a book and start reversing their disease today.
What I see on a day-to-day basis
with my individual patients as well
as my own family and my own friends,
I think it's missed in some of this research,
and what that is is freedom.
It's freedom from being hangry.
It's freedom from cravings.
It's freedom from headaches.
Whoa!
It's freedom from reactive hypoglycemia.
It's freedom from mood swings.
It's better quality of sleep.
It's better quality of life.
I feel great.
I feel really good.
Hi girls.