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They were all in agreement about what
we could do for Charlie, what the treatment
options were, there was drugs,
and there was brain surgery
and you're out of luck, and so,
It was a while ago but [chokes],
So Charlie was born March 11th, 1992,
and he had a pretty normal first year
and then right around his first birthday a little before his first birthday
I was actually pushing him in a swing one day
and he kind of threw his arm up in the air
and twitched his head a little bit
and I didn't even think much of it
and I asked my wife Nancy, I said,
have you seen anything like that
and she said yeah, I've seen a bunch of it,
So that was the beginning and we
started seeing neurologists,
[woman] Okay, Charlie, okay,
[Matt] The seizures increased in intensity
and in duration, he wound up having seizures
in the arms of the Chief of pediatric Neurology
at Boston Children's Hospital, Seattle
Children's Hospital, UCLA, LA Children's Hospital
so we tried all the drugs that were available
at the time, Charlie had a brain surgery
a horrendous brain surgery and nothing
really stopped his seizures and we lost hope
we were basically told there was no hope,
And one day after the visit, I stopped
at the Medical Library, As soon as I started researching
pediatric epilepsy, one of the first things
that came up was a ketogenic diet
and was kinda shocking to me because
what it said was, uh, that about a third
of the kids with epilepsy as bad as Charlie
um, who go on a ketogenic diet have
their seizures go away, and another third
are significantly improved, and for a third
it doesn't work, and yet all of these folks
that we had taken Charlie to see
never mentioned a word about diet,
[Vinnie] Nutrition information can be so confusing and as advanced as we are medically
and scientifically, the question remains what foods should we eat to achieve good health?
[dramatic music]
[Vinnie] We're in a war for information
and the fallout affects all of us,
[trumpets blare]
The media's just gonna sell what
people are gonna buy and if people
knew the truth, they would know what to ask for,
My name is Vinnie Tortorich and I've been
in the health and fitness game
for the better part of 40 years,
specializing in weight loss,
Over the years, I've seen everything come and go
at least a hundred times, but as a country,
we've only gotten fatter,
What should I eat, what pills should I take,
should I take a pill, what about those protein shakes?
We all know someone who's trying to lose weight
and most of those people don't realize
simply losing weight doesn't mean good health,
My mother, for instance, she was always
on some diet, one week it was the Cambridge Diet
the next week it was the Scarsdale diet,
the next week it was the Cabbage Soup diet,
But wait a minute, the next week
she ate nothing but bananas,
Where did that come from?
I always wonder about things like eight,
eight ounce glasses of water per day,
Really, where did that come from?
High blood pressure, your doctor will say
oh, you have high blood pressure,
stop drinking coffee, really?
These are all just myths,
[dramatic music]
The myths have become ingrained
in our society far too strongly
for people to realize they're myths,
[Vinnie] What are some of the health myths we hear every day?
Grains are good for you and fat is bad for you,
Obesity is an energy balance disorder,
Calorie in, calorie out,
Calories in, calories out
as long as you're burning enough calories,
you can ingest whatever you want,
That you have to exercise to have better health,
Saturated fat is the cause of heart disease,
A low fat diet is a healthy diet,
We saw fat in the coronary arteries
and that must come from ingested fat,
[overlapping chatter]
A growing number of doctors are learning
that almost everything we're taught about nutrition is wrong,
And I realize there was this incredible story
that we had gotten it pretty much
completely upside down and backward on fat,
[Vinnie] Believe it or not, the story of how we got to where we are today, started in
the 1860s, with the Seventh-day Adventist Church
and a woman named Ellen White,
Ellen was a higher up in the church
and she would have these premonitions
and one night she had a dream, that God came to her
and said that we shouldn't eat anything
-with a face, - I was taken to another place
high above this world and I
I-- I heard a voice,
There started modern-day veganism,
It really didn't exist before then, there were other religious groups
who were more vegetarian, they would eat eggs
and dairy and so on and so forth
and as a matter of fact, God also told her
that coffee and tea were bad, which made no sense
because both of those are vegetation,
Not long after in our history, there was
a man named Vilhjalmur Stefansson,
He also believed, to a certain extent
that a vegetable heavy diet was mandatory
for good health, he was an explorer
who ended up living with Inuits in Canada in 1906 and in that time and place
he was forced to adopt a new diet due to the lack of options,
He made a discovery that will change the way you look at food,
Now this raises the whole question of food, then,
You yourself must have longed for a green
-vegetable once in a while, - Well, I did at first,
At first his preconceived notion is
I'm gonna die, there is nothing green here,
There is no vegetation, they simply
eat fish and drink water,
[Nina] It was unlike anything that he'd experienced, right?
Completely unlike the Western diet,
it was probably 70 to 80% fat, the Inuit lived
half the year on caribou [gunshot]
And half the year on whatever they could fish out of the sea,
For four and a half months, I lived on literally nothing but fish and water
and at the end of four and a half months, I was healthier than I'd ever been before,
And this is on an exclusive meat diet?
[Stefansson] That was exclusive fish in this case,
On this diet, they were perfectly healthy,
I mean, Stefansson was somebody from
the medical world and he knew what cancer
looked like, he knew what heart disease looked like
and he did not see anyone suffering
from ill health in that community,
When he came back to the United States,
no one believed him, of course,
what, people eating nothing but meat and fat,
how could that be, they certainly would die,
[narrator] Dr, Charles Norris, Chief Medical Examiner
does not approve of an all meat diet,
We have a weakness of not learning
from the natives, but rather teaching them,
You see everything through the colored spectacles
of your education, your bringing up,
We go through this whole idea of green good
red bad, Greenpeace, a light turns green
it means go, eat your greens, yet when you look
at red, well red means stop, blood is red,
it doesn't take long for media to pick up
on these thing and we don't realize it's happening
but it's happening right in front of us,
[upbeat music]
[announcer] It's 10 p.m. do you know where
your children are?
[people yell and punch]
[Vinnie] Back to Ellen White and her visions,
Ellen was having these premonitions
and all of this was happening, the rioting's
were happening, in the mid-1860s,
but ten years earlier in 1856, a 12 year old boy
came to work with the church, his family
was in a church and that was John Kellogg,
John, by the time he was 16, was writing
and putting out literature for the church,
He would go on to share some of the most bizarre
beliefs that Ellen White and the church had
including the idea that masturbation
and sex were off limits,
Excuse me, Ricky,
To stave off these sins of the flesh,
you should never eat meat because meat
increases sexual desire, Well, this is what
eventually led to Cornflakes,
That's right, Cornflakes were created
by Seventh-day Adventists to curb sexual desires,
He was the guy who figured out something
that he termed dextrinization, it's when
you cook down grains so much it turns
into dextrose, it turns into a sugar,
[drum beats]
Today when you see dextrose in a product
you should run in the opposite direction,
It's as bad as seeing high-fructose corn syrup,
It's used for bacon, it's used in salami,
all the luncheon meats that you get
includes dextrose nowadays because
it gives it a shelf life, it's a way
to cure it fast, it's cheap, it's easy to do
so something that John Kellogg started
way back in the day has also seeped
across to the other side, into the meat industry,
[Gary] There are two issues, there's always
multiple questions, one is if you switch from
a standard American diet of processed foods
and sugary beverages and, you know, for lack
of a better word, we'll call it junk
and switch to a vegan diet with healthy
vegetables and beans and legumes and fruit
you're getting rid of a lot of crap
that's probably bad for you, which is the sugar
and the highly refined processed foods,
You would expect somebody to feel better
if they did that, the second question is
if you did that and switched to
a whole food diet that was animal food based
rather than plant based, would you be would they be healthier?
I have spent aggregated more than six years
on red meat that is seal meat, caribou meat,
muskox meat, polar bear, grizzly bear, so on,
[Vinnie] The Stefansson diet was considered
an all meat diet, so what he did
in 1928, was subjected himself and a friend of his
to living in a hospital, being monitored
for an entire year eating nothing but meat
fish and water, and that became the famous Bellevue Study,
[narrator] The studies on Stefansson, which were intensively made
from every clinical angle, started on February 13th, 1928.
Stefansson was tested during the experiment
with an excessively high protein, minimal fat diet
and as a result, became ill.
Stefansson said the only time that he felt ill
was when he ate too much lean meat
not accompanied by the fat, but that some thick steaks
made him feel better again [laughs],
You have to have fat with the lean
as lean and fat together make a perfect diet,
At the end, there were six publications that came out of that experiment
by different doctors looking at whether or not they got enough vitamins and minerals
and everything they could possibly measure and they were found
to be in perfect health,
I wanted to try to dispel from the world
the same misconceptions which I had
of the Arctic when I went north,
I used to think that I was well-informed
on the Arctic before I went north,
and-- but I concluded eventually that out of
ten things that I believed about the Arctic
before I went north, about six were wrong,
[piano music]
The medical community has been promoting
saturated fat as being the bad actor
for heart disease mainly and that really
came from weak science called epidemiology,
Experimental evidence that shows
that that's actually true has never been done,
For example, you could radio label
saturated fat in the food and see
if it shows up on the arteries, That's never been done,
The entire teaching about saturated fat
being bad for the heart is not really
founded in good science,
[Vinnie] It's not that the information is not out there,
I remember early on when I was in college,
I had a college professor explain to us
that fat was our body's preferred source of energy,
Okay, fat is a very good way to have energy
and that same professor a couple of weeks
later said, our bodies prefer sugar
when we do exercise, Weren't we talking
about fat just a couple of weeks ago?
Yeah, forget about all that, it's sugar,
So, the message even in top universities
right here in the United States
are a bunch of mixed messages,
[dramatic music]
[Vinnie] Do I think there's a big responsibility
for media to do the right thing?
Yes, I do, you know, we have three big networks,
the big three, ABC, CBS and NBC,
Whatever they told us, we went with,
Hell, when I was a kid, there was still
even cigarette commercials on the air,
At least we figured out that that was a bad idea,
♪ Don't settle for some of the taste ♪
♪ Some of the time ♪
It's very easy to see how someone
can think something or just say something
and that becomes a reality,
[narrator] Breakfast, no eggs or fatty meats
instead, eat grains and fiber
that actually lower cholesterol.
[Vinnie] How about the term heart healthy grains,
We've all seen it, many people believe it,
After all, the terms come from studies that prove it to be true, right?
Those were studies looking at whole grains
versus white processed flours and grains,
So of course, when you're comparing it
to something like white processed flour,
it's going to be better, but does that mean
it in and of itself is therefore heart healthy?
You could make the argument that whole grains
are less bad for you than refined grains
but that doesn't make whole grains good,
Oatmeal, or oat bread, or an oat muffin
or oat bran that can either incorporated
into some other cereal product,
It's like cigarettes, you can have
cigarettes with a filter on and they're less
bad for you perhaps than unfiltered cigarettes,
Doesn't make the filtered cigarettes good, It just means they're less bad
and the same thing is true for whole grains, They are less bad,
We should put more emphasis on our vegetables we should think about the vegetables
we're gonna have for dinner rather than the meat portion,
[Vinnie] Listen I'm not a doctor, I'm just a guy
with a physical education degree
who became a trainer and somehow
found myself in the world of modeling,
Before I became a trainer to the stars
and eventually, a best-selling author
and podcaster, but when I started modeling
in LA in the early 90s, I realized that the media will sell us anything
to make a buck, regardless of whether it's healthy or not,
Let's face it, every beer commercial
you've ever seen is a bunch of ripped-up guys
on a beach playing volleyball because
that's what beer drinkers look like,
[intense music]
If you have ripped up abs or you have
a nice set of shoulders, they want you
modeling everything in the infomercials,
It was the heyday of the infomercial,
[male announcer] If we think fat, then we are.
[woman] Fad diets, powders, pills,
still my weight's been up and down like a yo-yo
until the Ayds plan taught me how to
take off weight and help keep it off,
Just 20 minutes a day will turn
your body into a calorie burning furnace,
We were coming into this age of, hey,
if you just do what I tell you,
you can look like this guy or this woman in just a few weeks,
Dexatrim did it, I lost weight and feel great!
Nobody wanted the truth, they just wanted
a lie that they could get everyone to believe,
[man] Now you can lose weight without diets...
No, this product really doesn't work,
,..without pills.
No, that product really doesn't work,
,..without exercise.
Well, what does work?
[man] Now you can lose weight
just by watching television.
So I learned very quickly, be careful
as to what you advertise,
[upbeat music]
The 1920s and 30s it was a lot different,
we were learning a lot of things back then,
We were discovering vitamins for the first time,
Uh, we also learned that food could heal
and a lot of these therapies are what
were being used to heal people,
They were using non-starchy, non-sugary diets
to starve cancer in the 1920s and 30s,
Take Otto Warburg for instance,
He was doing cancer studies on rats,
[jaunty music]
He thought that the outcome would be
that oxygen was what was fueling
cancer cells to grow and what he learned
with rats was that it was actually the sugar,
♪ Eat an apple everyday ♪
His discovery was well known as
the Warburg Effect and it was shown to help
in somewhere near 80% of the cases
of people who had cancer, Why does it feel like
no one knows this information?
-[jaunty music] -[liquid bubbles]
We were making these discoveries,
So what else contributed to them not taking hold?
We had a Great Depression and then we had a war,
a lot of people were having trouble putting food in their mouth, period,
so I don't think people were caring that much about their health, people were just
trying to eat anything, people didn't eat out as much,
We made home-made dressings, you didn't have
dressings that were full of processed oils
and we weren't adding high-fructose corn syrup
to everything that we ate, we ate real whole foods
that were cooked at home,
Even fast food was different back
in the 1940s and 50s, If you had french fries
they were made from rendered animal fat,
Basically beef tallow, which was a better way
to cook junk food, so even our junk food
was better in the 1940s and 50s and 60s,
[dramatic music]
It wasn't until we got to the 1950s
where people start to become more prosperous,
We saw the advent of TV dinners
and other stuff and more sugar
and processed foods came from everywhere,
But what really happens happened in 1955
when one of the most popular presidents of our time,
Dwight D, Eisenhower, had a heart attack,
[reporter] News of President Eisenhower's
sudden illness, described by his doctors
as coronary thrombosis, came as a severe shock to us all.
Films of President Eisenhower made just before his heart attack
are dramatic evidence of the suddenness of the illness that shocked the nation.
[narrator] President Eisenhower's heart attack...
[typewriter clacks]
Well, if he could die, what could happen to me?
You have to understand, this is a period
in the 1950s when America is in
a complete panic about the rising tide of heart disease,
Before that, we never thought about heart attacks,
we never thought about health and fitness,
we didn't think abut the food we were eating,
No one back in the 1950s knew what
their cholesterol score was, much less
even knew what the world cholesterol meant,
[jaunty music]
Cholesterol is kind of a fat type molecule,
it's in all of our cells, 30 trillion cells,
Cholesterol is actually so important
to the body that it actually makes
the majority of cholesterol that's in your blood
right now, most of the dietary cholesterol
you eat will go through you and very little
actually gets absorbed, and of that cholesterol
you find in the blood, most of it was made by your liver,
[narrator] It is an essential of nerve tissue for instance,,,
If you eat more cholesterol, your body will make less, if you eat less
your body will make more, which makes it very interesting
that it was maligned in the past few decades,
Heart disease had been rare in
the early 1900s and had really risen
since the late 1920s to be the number one
killer disease by the 1950s,
We took a collective gasp in this country,
We didn't wanna have another president die in office,
Just imagine your president not being
in the Oval Office for ten days and he's in bed,
Besides, this guy was very popular,
people wanted to find out what caused it,
Could it have been his diet, and if so,
what was he eating and how can we change it?
This is also the time when the media was more prevalent,
[narrator] Motion picture cameras join newspaper reporters
in the old State Department building
for an historic Presidential press conference.
The first ever filmed in sound by newsreel cameramen.
I see we're trying a new experiment
this morning, I hope it doesn't prove
to be a disturbing influence,
[jaunty music]
The power of media, you can't really
tell that story without telling the story of Oprah Winfrey,
It was 1993 and by happenstance, I was put up for an appearance on Oprah,
They needed someone the next day, They were looking for younger men who were dating
older women and since my girlfriend was seven years older at the time, I was invited on,
I wasn't into it, I had no idea what really happened on Oprah,
but I was told no, you have to do it,
it'll be great for your career,
So they fly me to Chicago and I get
to the green room, I was introduced
to a woman named Doe,
The theme of the show was younger men
who were dating older women,
Older women having the courage
to live their dreams and fulfill
their fantasies and live their lives
exactly the way they wanted to,
including dating younger men,
Doe said that I would have to pretend
that I was dating her and I said what are you talking about?
My guests today, they're all members
of a provocative new kind of dating service,
[Vinnie] I told her that I would not go on stage
and lie, that I would go on stage
and sit next to Doe, but I would not say
that we dated, I quickly realized
that I had been bamboozled, because Doe
introduced me as her boyfriend,
I'd like you meet Vinnie Tortorich,
he's a Beverly Hills fitness expert,
he's hot, sweet, he loves women
and he's emotionally accessible,
- Ah, get out of here, -[audience laughs]
I couldn't believe what was happening
and at that moment, I said to myself,
I'm gonna turn this into not the Oprah show but the Vinnie show,
Number one, women don't even hit
their sexual prime until they hit 40,
they don't even know what's going on until they're 40!
[audience cheers]
I've been dating older women--
- Gee, I'm only 39! -[audience laughs]
I'm gonna make this show so bad that they won't possibly
be able to run it on national television,
You wanna be with an older woman, it's the difference between riding in
a Volkswagen and a Cadillac, If you wanna ride in a Volkswagen,
go right ahead, if you want the Cadillac,
-go for an older woman, - Well, now--
[audience cheers]
It turned into a circus, the people
in the audience actually believed all this,
Doe and I had just met,
It was like the audience was participating
in this huge game of Mad Libs,
Two different generations,
How was school, oh I learned arithmetic,
I don't see how two people can have something in common
if they're not the same age,
It seems like people are treating this
like some sort of fetish,
What could you possible
have in common?
Let's say Cher
walked into the room
and said she had to have you,
[audience laughs and cheers]
Sally, get Cher on the phone!
I ended up asking Cher out on a date
-during the show, - Cher is on the phone,
Cher, my name is Vinnie Tortorich and,,,
[audience laughs]
I wanna say this in front of the whole country,
- Is the camera on me? - Yeah, the cameras on you,
Cher, I live in Beverly Hills, let's get together
and have lunch, I'll have my agent call your agent, and we'll do it
because we'll have a great time,
No matter how outlandish I got,
they seemed to enjoy it more and more,
What I wanna know is from the ladies
in the audience, should I have lunch with this guy?
As a matter of fact, you can see Oprah,
Oprah started dancing in the aisles,
[audience cheers]
The show ended and I went back to LA
and I just assumed, well that show's gonna bomb,
As of last year, it was the seventh
highest rated show in Oprah's history,
people still recognize me for it today
and virtually none of it was true,
I took that realization that media
can change everything,
Eisenhower has a heart attack and he wants
the whole country to know that this
-was a real issue, - I am happy the doctors
have given me at least a parole if not a pardon
and I expect to be back at my accustomed duties
although they say I must ease my way
into 'em and not bulldoze my way into 'em,
But the media had other ideas,
They have their own agenda, ah,
he had the common cold of heart attacks,
he didn't really have a bad one,
The media was trying to show him
on the golf course, having a great round of golf,
[balls whack]
It was thought that diet was the cause, He was also like a four pack a day smoker,
[laughs] Which may very well have given him his heart attack,
[narrator] Yes, according to this survey,
more doctors smoke Camel than any other cigarette.
Try Camels yourself.
Right around that time, enters Ancel Keys,
[Nina] Ancel Keys was a pathologist
at the University of Minnesota,
He got the idea in the 1950s that saturated fat
and cholesterol were what caused heart diseases,
It strikes without warning, Of ten men, we can expect five to get it,
[thuds]
But we can't say who or when or why,
Ancel Keys was this incredibly persuasive person,
He had a really outsized belief in his own ideas,
[Ancel] The facts are simple, you know the chief killer
of Americans is cardiovascular disease.
Disorders and degeneration of the heart and blood vessels.
Here are vital statistics.
They show that this problem here in America is the worst in the world,
Ancel Keys was famous for something
called the Seven Countries Study,
This is where he went and studied
seven different countries and came up with
this hypothesis as to how we're supposed to eat
based on correlation,
Ancel Keys is the one who proposed
what he called the Diet Heart Hypothesis
and that was that saturated fat and cholesterol,
dietary cholesterol would give you a heart attack,
especially saturated fat, like hot oil
down a cold stove pipe, it would just
clog up your arteries and give you a heart attack,
The problem is, he cherry picked
these countries to fit what he was
trying to hypothesize and set out
to prove that the more calories you got
from fat, the better chance you had
of getting heart disease,
It seemed like a straight line between
the least fat consumed and the most fat consumed
with the US at the top,
The only problem is, Key studied 22 countries
and if you factor in all of those countries,
the results are all over the place,
He just took the seven countries
that proved his point that fat causes heart disease,
This study made Keys the temporary savior
of the medical community, and therefore, the world,
Such that he was able to get on
to the American Heart Association Nutrition Committee
and he turned the whole Association around
in one year and got them, in 1961
to recommend that all Americans
restrict saturated fat and cholesterol
in their diets in order to fight heart disease,
This is the first advice anywhere in the world
telling people not to eat saturated fat
and cholesterol to fight heart attacks
that's like the beginning of it all,
That is what just blossomed, bloomed,
grew into the giant oak tree of advice that we have now,
We have no credible evidence to say
that saturated fat causes heart disease
and that sounds crazy to say when you look
at our Government guidelines and our dietary guidelines,
but there is no high level, credible evidence
to show that saturated fat causes heart disease,
The interesting thing about Key's
he got virtually everything wrong,
but it never infected his humility,
[epic music]
We're living in a time right now
when we've had a narcissistic term
people are very primitive and narcissistic
a lot of injuries in childhood,
and it has caused us to, umm, perhaps not
have the most secure sense of self
and identity, people attach themselves
to one particular approach to diet
and it develops into an identity
around which people maintain a religious
intensity, they defend it as though
any question in their dogma is like
you're questioning their religious dogma
or threatening their very sense of the fabric of reality and so
we start looking around for things to attach ourselves to and political groups,
religious organizations, different diet fads,
We attach ourselves to these groups
and we look to the groups for our identity
so our going forward in life is somehow
threatened by somebody saying,
hey maybe fat's not so bad for you,
It's positively comedic but it's becoming ridiculous,
The United States' coronary heart disease
is so common that you all wanna have to do
to study the complete natural history
of the disease is to take a sample of men,
any sample of men that are known healthy follow them, wait a little while,
and a lot of them will have coronary heart disease,
But it wasn't very long before it appeared
there was some connection between
coronary heart disease and cholesterol in the blood,
No question, we hear over and over and over again
that cholesterol equals mortality,
We've seen it in the commercials,
Fleischmann's margarine!
It's the only leading margarine made
from 100% corn oil, it has no cholesterol!
[Dave] We've heard about it from our doctor,
[Doctor] Over time, the build up on the walls of veins and arteries
helping to clog them, restricting blood flow,
it's what causes heart attacks and strokes,
We've heard about it plenty of times from our friends and our family,
and because of that, we tend to think it's just simply the truth,
It certainly has the degree of repetition that we would expect,
In the 60s and 70s we were focusing
more on the specific types of cholesterol,
LDL and HDL and LDL became known as the bad cholesterol
and all of a sudden, medicine was focused on LDL,
It was noticed that higher cholesterol
in the blood appeared to correlate
or track with higher heart disease rates,
[man] Cholesterol is carried in the blood by proteins called low density lipoproteins,
or LDLs, the more cholesterol we eat
the more the number of LDLs, and that's dangerous.
So essentially, the idea was developed
that the higher cholesterol was getting
in to your arteries and was causing
the arterial disease,
Because the higher that lipoprotein level goes
the greater the risk of heart disease,
There are some studies that show a correlation,
Does that mean causation, and this
is a very important differentiation
that is too infrequently made,
Because something is correlated,
doesn't mean it is the cause,
So if high cholesterol is present
in people who are having heart disease
we have to look a little further
as to why that is and if there are other factors,
When you really look at the studies
and you crunch the data, LDL is not
the best marker for heart disease,
What's even more powerful, are your ratios,
So whether it's your total cholesterol to HDL ratio
or your triglyceride to HDL ratio,
Those have better predictive value than LDL itself,
The ratios indicate your level
of insulin sensitivity or insulin resistance
so the best cholesterol measures
are not actually even talking about
a cholesterol thing, they are indirectly
talking about insulin resistance and health,
A lot of the fat research, well look we saw fat in the coronary arteries
and we thought that fat must be coming from somewhere, it must come from
circulating fat and that must come from
ingested fat, it was a very simplistic kind of idea,
The contrary opinion, the alternative hypothesis
which has been around for, ooh, a couple
of hundred years, is that we get fat
because we eat carbohydrates like pasta
potatoes, bread, they used to be called
simple carbohydrates, uhm, now the terminology
is changing to adjust to the fact
that a lot of people think maybe these
starches as my mother called them
are not quite so good for us,
We focused in, just by timing and bad luck
on this idea that saturated fat causes heart disease
and we bought into it even though
the evidence ultimately didn't really support it
and we made everything else we believed
about diet have to be reconciled with that,
[narrator] Dr. Keys singling out of excessive...
In front of us, day by day, are
increasingly more and more very tempting foods,
In the mid-1960s, John Yudkin comes on the scene, he's a British scientist,
He thinks sugar's the problem,
[jaunty music]
When people have heart disease, they don't just have elevated cholesterol,
In fact they often don't have elevated cholesterol,
they have a whole cluster of metabolic abnormalities,
10, 15, 20 things you could measure
and Yudkin was saying if I feed animals sugar
or I feed college students that I'm using
in my experiments, sugar, I could cause
pretty much all of these things
just by giving them a lot of sugar,
[jaunty music]
So you're apt to say 2 or 300 years ago,
the average consumption
of sugar in this country was about
four pounds a year and that's splendid,
I'd be very happy if everybody had
four pounds of sugar a year,
They eat a hundred pounds,
[typewriter clacks]
[narrator] Moreover, many sugar containing foods, cakes, candies, cookies,
chocolate, ice cream, various kinds
of puddings, also contain fat.
You always eat some fat, so if you eat
high carb foods, you raise your blood glucose
you raise your fat storing hormone insulin
and you're gonna store the fat that you eat,
It's all individual how much
you can tolerate, but if you eat more
than your body can tolerate, then you will
most likely gain weight, gain fat,
[typewriter clacks]
And instead of looking at it,
Ancel Keys just jumps right on top of it
in the media and turns this guy into a nut job,
Keys was really a bully when it came to
trying to quash anybody who opposed him,
Ancel Keys wasn't gonna let anyone
come in and rain on his parade,
He published a nine page rebuttal
in a journal called Atherosclerosis,
in print, he said Yudkin is a "mountain of nonsense,"
[typewriter clacks]
...in the etiology of heart disease.
Keys and his colleagues managed
to paint Yudkin as a quack and portray Yudkin
and his sugar theory as quackery
and to say there is absolutely no evidence to support it,
[typewriter clacks]
Keys was more-- had more political influence and more savvy maybe
than Yudkin and somehow, this dietary, and we were
spending money testing the dietary fat hypothesis
so even though the tests weren't confirming it,
the more money they spent, the more people
were wedded to the hypothesis having to be right,
These studies are extremely expensive
and there have been enough good studies done
to support our moderate approach,
which is looking at balanced foods,
vegetables, fruits, grains, and lean meat and dairy products,
The argument once again is it has to be tested
when you believe it's wrong, prima facie,
you're not gonna spend the money to test it,
Why are these nutrition scientist
just not more curious about other ideas?
I was at a conference recently
where we talked about a low carb study
where they reversed the diagnosis
of diabetes for, it was a large university-based study
in just one year, on a very low-carb diet
and one of them said wait what, diabetes reversal,
wow, how'd you do that, can you just explain your study a little bit to us
because that's what we, as nutrition experts
we really need to do in America,
[laughs] And I actually got up to ask
a question from the audience I said--
I said, did you hear that, that was 60% reversal
of diabetes, should that not be headline news
and should you not be curious?
Why are you not even curious about these ideas?
[Vinnie] You know it makes you think of stories
like the McKenzie family,
parents in South Dakota who realized
they had to take matters into their own hands
when their son lost five pounds in five days,
I called the doctor that morning and I explained that I thought my son
had rapidly lost weight and something was wrong
and we knew within five minutes
of him doing a urine analysis test
that there was sugar in his urine
and we were escorted to the hospital
to learn how to manage our new life,
[upbeat music]
[Matt] We both concluded that we were
gonna make drastic changes in our diet,
reducing carbohydrate intake,
Shortly thereafter, we were told
that we didn't need to do that,
that we could feed our son recently diagnosed
with Type 1 diabetes whatever he wanted to eat,
Take a look,
[Bethany] I'm trusting these people, who are now
in charge of caring for my son,
and they're telling me give him pancakes
and give him french fries and cupcakes
and pizza, because now that your kid
has this disease, his life is pretty crummy already
and the worst thing you could do
as a parent is to try and change his food,
I fed my kid the exact prescribed amount
of carbohydrates, I pre-bolused his insulin
I put a continuous glucose monitor on him
I bought him a diabetes alert dog,
I literally did everything in my own capacity
to follow the guidelines and manage his disease
and I failed miserably,
-[Matt] Riv? -[kid wails]
Do you want the yogurt, the tablets, or the gel?
[Bethany] I put a big message out in the social media groups
that I'm connected to in the diabetes community
and I asked, how are you people achieving
normal blood sugars, what are you doing?
And about every fifth answer I got
was that these people were changing
their children's diet and implementing
a very, very low carb diet,
We removed all the processed carbs,
the flour, the sugar, the grains, the fruit
anything that would spike his blood sugar
and so the next appointment we had
with our endocrinologist I skipped in there
like I had won the lottery,
Oh my goodness, I stumbled upon
a low-carb diet and look at my son's blood sugars
and during that appointment, our very
kind-hearted doctor looked at me
and told me my son was going to resent me
for the rest of his life, that this way
of eating is not sustainable, that I'm
subjecting my son to an eating disorder
and he also handed me a business card
to go see a therapist, uhm, because he thought
maybe I was struggling with some things
and had some issues for wanting to do this
for my son and to change his diet,
And I'm told to follow these guidelines
because without those carbohydrates,
my child won't grow properly and his brain function
will be compromised, so when you're a parent
of a Type 1 and you're told
the American Diabetes Association,
this large governing body, that must know
exactly what we're up against,
they're recommending this, that's intimidating,
We either had to either make a change
or accept mediocre care,
I'm an orthopedic surgeon, it seems now
as if it's the patients that are trying
to make the medical community aware
of what they already know of what
the patients know, because they have tried
to follow the rules as given to them and they failed,
When somebody comes to me with the belief
that they-- and they tell me, I believe your son
is gonna do better if you feed them
more carbohydrates, I know they're wrong,
And when it comes to my son, I'm gonna do
what I know as opposed to what they believe,
Our son went from taking 45 to 50
units of insulin every day to maybe 15 units of insulin,
If you extrapolate that over every child
with this disease, you're gonna understand
that that's gonna have a marked effect
on the profitability of the disease,
I think we underestimate peoples ability
to make a change, and I think if there were
doctors and nurses and dieticians
who were willing to give patients
that option, I think the face
of diabetes would be different,
We're a very weird culture, because
we have an endless amount of energy
to talk about almost everything,
but when it comes to the core issues
and the ones that just effect everything,
such as family or such as diet,
we have-- you know, just went through an election,
We talked about everything, but no one
ever talked about diet or family or any of this stuff,
Now you have kids with Type 2 diabetes you have fatty liver disease,
you have sleep apnea, none of this stuff
existed before and if you think it's just old people
using this, it's getting younger and younger
-and younger, - It's an epidemic
and it's one of those things, like hey,
powers that be, hey folks in charge,
let's, this is gonna break the bank,
How do people scream all day about Medicare
-and this doesn't come up? - It never comes up,
Because it's not sexy, it doesn't work,
You want votes, telling people
like hard news, like, hey mom, you're poisoning your kid
get your shit together, no votes for you,
The current recommendations, it started in
the late 60s in response to a documentary
that aired on CBS News called Hunger in America,
[reporter] This spring, a private agency,
The Citizens' Board of Inquiry,
released an exhaustive report claiming
that serious hunger exists many places
in the United States, out of a total population
of 200 million, the report states,
30 million Americans are impoverished,
With family income below $3000 a year,
Five million of these people are helped
by two existing Federal food programs,
Now, a new figure must be added,
Of the 30 million who are impoverished,
10 million Americans, whether or not
they are reached by Federal aid, are hungry,
The Federal food program might be
better administered by the Department
of Health, Education and Welfare
or by a special commission whose only concern
would be to see that hungry Americans are fed,
This leads right to 1968 and the McGovern Committee,
public calls to address the issue
of hunger had been building, ever since
Robert F. Kennedy had toured the devastated
slums of Mississippi,
It's obviously as great a poverty
as we've had and they're going to lead
a very difficult, unhappy life
for the rest of their existence,
[Vinnie] But it was George McGovern, the Senator
from South Dakota who would head a committee
that started in 1968, privy to the poverty
that the nation was now aware of,
the former director of Food for peace
in JFK's administration was intent
on bringing change that would eventually effect all of us,
It's always bothered me to see hungry people
in the world, I like to eat,
If we are to save ourselves in this country
it seems to me that a radical restructuring
of our policies and priorities is absolutely necessary.
[solemn music]
[narrator] There is nothing more to say, really.
Senator Kennedy died at 1.44 this evening.
[gunshots]
We've got to draw the line at violence,
so I have mixed emotions, I'm supporting
the president as he tries to bring this war to a close,
[Paul] It was quite sad, really, to break up
with the Beatles, 'cause to see it just fall apart was sad,
[reporter] We have a mystery story
out of Washington, five people
have been arrested and charged with breaking
into the headquarters of the Democratic National
Committee in the middle of the night.
When you think of 1972, 1973,
we're still in Vietnam, it's not a popular war,
-[crowd chanting] - Then 1972 comes around and we have Watergate,
people have got to know whether or not
their president's a crook, well I'm not a crook,
people were just in a haze about diet,
No one was really paying attention to this McGovern Committee,
we had bigger problems,
-[crowd cheers] - This complacency at the time
is what allowed these health myths to seep in,
As you know, I represent all sorts
of delicious things, greasy bacon,
potato chips, french fries, potatoes,
fatty meats and gobs of butter on everything,
-[crowd cheers] - Now as you know, us fats
separately are just little guys,
but put us all together and what do you have?
You have millions of calories,
that's what, I have to store those
calories as fat and I can't take it anymore,
I'm getting bigger and bigger and bigger!
And the bigger he gets, the harder
his heart cells have to work, Mr, Fat,
you're a real killer!
[Vinnie] You know, I don't know the answer, but why is it
whenever a new study comes out, it's always
talking about how food is gonna kill you?
I think that's a major misdirection
to what we should be focused on,
Food should be used to prevent illness,
not to just help reverse it once it's too late,
One of the areas we haven't talked about
until recently, is how food can affect
your brain health,
[Dr. Ede] I became interested in mental health
and the connection between mental health
and diet after I had developed a lot
of my own health problems and had changed
my diet and discovered that diet
had a lot more to do with health
and mental health than I had ever been taught that it had,
In my early 40s, about ten years ago,
I developed a number of mysterious symptoms
that I think a lot of people, especially
middle aged women will identify with,
so things like chronic pain, fibromyalgia,
IBS, chronic fatigue, migraines,
uh, lots of different symptoms that all
of my very smart Harvard-affiliated doctors
couldn't help me with, After about six months
of trial and error, I arrived at this diet
that was completely upside down
from what I had been taught was good for me,
It was basically a mostly meat diet,
high in meat and fat and cholesterol
and when I arrived at that diet,
all of the symptoms that I had been
struggling with completely went away
and I thought, you know, this diet actually is also
improving my mental health and I'm
a psychiatrist, the most powerful way
to change your brain chemistry
would be through food, because that's where
brain chemicals come from in the first place,
If you're getting most of your sugar
and most of your glucose from the
outside of the body, you run the risk
of getting spikes, uh, peaks and troughs
in your blood sugar and insulin level
and those can destabilize brain chemistry,
so those can create mood swings,
insomnia, irritability, changes
in appetite throughout the course of the day,
When you eat a ketogenic diet,
you're using fat primarily for energy
and the brain is using, to a large extent,
ketones instead of glucose,
Today, if you're anywhere near Google
you will learn that [laughs]
This is known as dietary ketosis,
[somber music]
Most healthcare professionals are familiar with ketoacidosis, and that's a state
where the body is out of control,
Diabetes it out of control,
Blood glucose is through the roof,
insulin is not able to keep up with
this glucose derangement and so that's
a life threatening state when you're
a Type 2 diabetic of control,
Nutritional ketosis is quite a different scenario,
Blood sugar's absolutely under control,
the patient is healthy in every single way
electrolytes, insulin, glucose, perfectly, perfectly controlled,
We have now trained the body to switch over
from burning carbohydrate as the primary fuel,
Now the individual becomes fat adapted
and they use fat as the primary source of energy
and that's really the difference between
a very unhealthy and a very healthy state,
[beeps and breathing]
We had a scientific question in the 1960s where the researchers asked the wrong question,
but they were questions we needed answered,
We know that the way you gain weight
is you take in more calories than you don't-- than you burn,
And those calories can be fat or they
can be carbohydrate,
And so they get this hypothesis
which sounds reasonable that fat people
get fat because they accumulate a little
of extra calories every day and we could get
back to this by not asking how much
extra calories, they don't have to really
confront the problems with the hypothesis
and that becomes the theory ever since,
The history of science once again,
is full of common sensical facts
that turned out to be dead wrong when we did the science,
You're certain, you use words like it proves
when you look at the data, it either isn't there, or we just didn't do the experiment,
[Vinnie] Speaking of experiments, here's a timeline
of events that happened with the McGovern Committee,
After a year of fighting for funding,
the committee operations began in 1969,
There were Democrats and Republicans
including future presidential candidates,
George McGovern, Walter Mondale and Bob Dole,
The initial goals of the committee
centered around hunger and malnutrition
and this led to the legislation in 1970
with principles of free food stamps
and nationwide standards for eligibility,
It was in 1971 that the committee expanded
to focus on eating habits in poor neighborhoods,
but in 1972, this extremely pressing issue
was put on hold so that McGovern
could run for president, When he lost 49 States
to Richard Nixon, who would eventually
resign and be replaced by this guy,
it was back to fixing America's health,
Unfortunately, dietary guidelines, were based
on the singular focus to lower cholesterol,
Why we're treating heart disease
by supposedly lowering bad cholesterol,
we're gonna help people lose weight,
[Vinnie] If you tell a public of 250 million people
what they're eating is gonna kill em
they're gonna probably listen,
And the unintended consequence is that
someone is gonna step in and take advantage
of these people when it doesn't work, right?
[dramatic music]
Coincidentally, drug companies were spending
millions of dollars developing drugs to target LBL,
[Ivor] In the 80s and 90s, a class of drugs
was invented called the statins,
and these drugs did lower the cholesterol
very effectively and they also were shown
to lower heart disease rates,
But the question that's probably more
interesting to me, that I think should be
more interesting to you, is does it help you live longer?
It might reduce heart attacks
by 20 or 30 percent at best, and it doesn't
really reduce mortality much,
We like simple answers that we have
treatments for, but that's not where
the best evaluation and treatment for heart disease is,
[Vinnie] It's absolutely amazing to me,
the trajectory of statins and low fat diets
with everything we have today stem
from a Committee that was focused
on poverty and people who weren't
getting enough to eat, And somehow
cholesterol got into the mix, thanks to Ancel Keys,
- And in a complete U-turn,,, -[car screeches]
,,,in 1974, they expanded the committee
to focus on overnutrition,
The very recommendations made
led to people eating way too much
of the wrong kind of food, so now we have
just the opposite problem, we don't have
a hunger problem, we have an obesity epidemic,
-[solemn music] [narrator] The Senate Committee
finally issued a set of dietary goals
in December 1977, the McGovern Committee
issued a set of nutritional guidelines
for all Americans, intended to battle
heart disease, cancers, strokes,
high blood pressure, obesity.
In the dietary guidelines for Americans,
they recommend fewer calories, less fat,
less saturated fat, less cholesterol,
more poly-unsaturated fat.
All in favor of nominating vegetable oils, say aye,
[all] Aye,
[narrator] Less sugar, less salt,
more fiber, more starchy food.
The Committee's original report
urged Americans to reduce the risk
of heart attacks by reducing their intake
of cholesterol, down to the equivalent of about one egg a day,
[Vinnie] This great experiment we were doing
with tax dollars seemed to have one idea
repeated over and over, cholesterol is bad, cholesterol is bad,
On its own or in conjunction with other things,
One way to look at it, is that
saturated fats are healthy when you're not
eating carbohydrates, or that saturated fat
was never unhealthy all along,
but that gets you into the realm
of you're telling people that what they've believed, is wrong,
[Vinnie] As time has gone on, both doctors
and private citizens have done their own experiments,
As a software engineer, I look a lot
at networks, Networks are basically
objects talking to each other and a lot
of understanding a network is kind of like
understanding a brain, no one cell in the brain
controls your whole body, and actually
cholesterol was part of a larger
network of objects and how it is
that they can move about to provide us with what we need,
[Vinnie] Another thing we don't talk about
is how complicated the human body is,
For the Government to even recommend
what you should be eating in the first place
is one thing, but for them to do it
in such a simplistic way, is another,
There were certain scientists that
had some hypothesis and they said
well some of the stuff we're looking at
is leaning towards red meat might be
bad for your heart, the Commission would say well, what do you think?
[reporter] Doctors took issue with that at the hearing
saying that eight studies involving
five thousand patients failed to show
hard medical evidence that diet
has anything to do with heart attacks.
I pleaded in my report and will plead again
orally here for more research on the problem
before we make announcements to the American public,
[Vinnie] Yes, before you make announcements to the public, you should have data
that proves what you're saying, Maybe like Dave Feldman did,
My story's a bit interesting, I found that I could move my cholesterol
up and down with the dietary fat that I ate,
The more fat I ate, the lower my LDL-C,
The less fat I ate, the higher my LDL-C,
[dramatic music]
[Vinnie] On a three day diet of over
5000 calories and 450 grams of fat,
he lowered every marker of cholesterol,
I eventually got a number of other people
to replicate this, the success rate
is somewhere around 85% of those people
when on a low carb high fat diet,
Fatty cheeses, fatty meats, fatty nuts
and in doing so, even though their calories
increase substantially, even though
their saturated fat just jumps through the roof,
their LDL-C and their total cholesterol plummeted,
It's a very unintuitive, but sure enough
the more fat they would eat, the lower their LDL-C,
[Vinnie] Dave Feldman is not a doctor at all,
This guy took all of the science that was available
and figured it out, yet members
of a publicly funded Committee
took ten years to find nothing and when
they were pressured to change recommendations
with no science to back it up
they ran around in circles for a while
and came out with the same report
but this time they said, oh, you can
have some meat and some salt,
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,
[Vinnie] So there you have it, the national advice
that everything you see today is based on,
That report was then taken over
to become Government-- official Government policy
so it went over to the US Department of Agriculture
and by 1980, they came out with the policy
which was the dietary guidelines for all Americans,
I think it's audacious that the Government
based on very weak evidence should tell
Americans what to eat, a healthy population at the time,
[Vinnie] How do you tell some guy from the Midwest
who's been living on beef his entire life
to start eating vegetables, especially at that time
you couldn't get em year round, you couldn't
get fruit year round, it wasn't like it is today
where we refrigerate and ship fruits and vegetables around the world,
You're telling people from different parts
of the United States what to do,
how to do it and everyone's just
throwing their hands up, going,
I'm gonna do the best I can,
Do I think the Government was complicit
in causing this problem, yes,
Do I think they meant to do it, absolutely not,
I think McGovern's heart was in the right place,
they just went the wrong way about it,
But we went on that experiment and the Government put us
on that experiment, they didn't ask us about it, they didn't
ask our advice, they just told us how to eat, then they told the food industry,
uh, asked the food industry to produce low fat food products,
[narrator] Industry slowly is responding
to it, producing foods that are lower
in salt and fat and so on and people
are beginning to get the message,
Low cholesterol, no cholesterol,
- lowers cholesterol, - Good fat, bad fat,
- low fat, non-fat, - Milk suddenly came
in, you know, a bewildering number of varieties
all of them reduced in fat and whether or not
it was a result of the experiment,
this coincided with the obesity explosions
in obesity and diabetes we've been seeing today,
[dramatic music]
The 1980s brought in all sorts of brand new foods,
[commercial] There's a Dannon body in everybody.
Unlike some yogurts, it's low in fat.
[All] Wow!
The whole thought pattern was,
if you didn't eat fat, you couldn't get fat,
Not having fat does not automatically
make something health food and that's where
we get into this debate about is it just
calories in, calories out, does it not matter
what we eat as long as we're burning
enough calories to burn it off?
We still don't know if eating a low fat diet
is a good thing, some of the smartest scientists
and the president of the National Academy of Sciences
in the late 1970s called this a huge experiment
in which the American public were the subjects,
[typewriter clacks]
Let's examine why there is so much
confusion about good nutrition,
One reason is that we have been given
a lot of misinformation, usually
by those looking to make a profit,
-[jaunty music] - Today, there are still
many unusual ideas as to what you should eat,
people tend to believe that just because
it's in print or on television, it must be true,
The 80s also brought in all sorts
of new fitness trends,
[upbeat music]
[commercial] Make the commitment now
and watch how fast you see results.
Are you ready to do the workout?
We couldn't get enough of fitness in the 1980s,
but although we were doing all of this,
we weren't getting any thinner,
Sugar consumption increases
in part with the introduction of
high-fructose corn syrup and that's
an unintended consequence of these
Government actions, it's arguably the case
if they had done nothing, we wouldn't
have had this epidemic, we might have had
it anyway, but they probably,
almost assuredly, made it worse,
For 25 years we've been pushing
a low fat dogma, that said eat less fat
first it said eat less total fat and you'll have less heart disease,
- less cancer and you'll weigh less, - But that's not exactly true,
This started because there's incontrovertible
evidence that saturated fat is bad
and that is well established in long-term trials,
You build up in a community, institutions
organizations, everybody collects to them,
people who think just like they do,
Like we like each other, we respect each other
'cause we think alike [laughs] you know,
I know nothing about you other than that
you think like I do, so I respect
the way you think and institutions do this
and then somebody else comes along
from the outside and says, oh you guys
all got it wrong, look, here's the evidence,
all these obese diabetic people neck-deep
in obesity and diabetes, we got to change everything,
It's hard to accept, it's hard to back out of,
There's no way to back out of it
that doesn't destroy your credibility,
[woman] In this country, we have freedom of choice
to say what we wanna say, we have freedom
of choice to print what we wanna print
we have freedom of choice to think
what we wanna think, but we do not
have freedom of choice for our own healthcare,
Why, I guess profit and politics and power,
The MDs and nutritionists and all people
need to work together for the total benefit
of this country's health,
So in 1992, we did the most brilliant
thing we've ever done as a country,
We started the food pyramid,
Now, this is so ridiculous that I can't even
ever remember-- because in my own mind
it makes no sense, I always have to
read it off of a piece of paper,
The pyramid at the base, the biggest part
was bread, cereal and rice, six
to eleven servings, not per week,
hang on folks, per day!
If you went to the maximum vegetables,
that's five vegetables a day,
Five servings, and fruit, if you went
to the max, that's four, that's 20 servings
of carbohydrates every day and then
when you get into milk and dairy,
milk has carbohydrates, there's lactose in milk
that's like drinking sugar, and on meat?
The most you can have in any given day
is three servings, Now it gets even worse
because we start wondering this,
what's a serving, what's a serving of meat?
They didn't tell you how many ounces,
Well I could tell you it was two to three
ounces per serving, but who knew that?
[Timon] You got to eat the right stuff.
Start with a little meat, a little dairy,
you got to add a bunch of fruit.
You have Timon and pumba telling people
-to eat more grains! - Bread, cereal, rice,
-noodles. - And eat a whole lot less fat
and if you thought that was ridiculous,
the servings ad they did give us
with the food pyramid did not match
what the Government told us that servings should be
on the packages of food, those servings,
which are also mandated by the Government,
were completely different from the servings
that we heard about when it came to
what was on the pyramid,
The new food label represents nothing less than a major victory for the consumer
and for the public health,
[man] When you're given a percentage
and you see that this is 50% or this is 10%
of your expected daily total
then you know very quickly that this food
either contributes a lot of fat
or a little bit of fat and how to plan
the rest of your diet around this particular food,
This food label which will be on virtually
all foods, will be a benchmark for nutrition
information well into the 21st century,
[Vinnie] The Government makes the manufacturers
put the product ingredient list and the amount
in which it appears on the package, If the number one thing is grains,
you will rice first, if the second thing is sugar you will see sugar second,
These companies got really smart at some point
and figured out hey, wait a minute
we can't do it this way because people
are seeing sugar, sugar, sugar, sugar,
so what they do is they name the sugars other things,
At last count, we were at 70 names,
70 different names for sugar on packages,
Let's say you're diabetic, Type 1, Type 2
it doesn't matter, if you don't know how
to read these labels, your life hangs in the balance,
This is the world we live in, this is
our society, this is our community
and if we don't fix it, who will? No one will,
The food label has become a veritable minefield
of misleading and downright false claims,
And many in Congress feel the same way
they're concerned that any confusion
over the truthfulness of health claims
could be dangerous because the potential benefit
of displaying important health information
on food labels would be lost if consumers
lose confidence in what they're being told,
When I was a kid in the late 70s,
the term metabolic syndrome did not exist at all,
Metabolic syndrome is not one thing
it's several things, it's fatty liver disease
it's Type 2 diabetes, something else
that barely existed in the 70s, we have people
on statins and metformin, none of this
existed in this quantity in the 70s,
We've gone from here to here in just a few short years,
So the same foods in my mother's generation
grew up believing would go right to their hips,
You know, by the 1980s, we were being told
to eat six to eleven servings per day
they were the base of the food diet pyramid
in the 1990s and they coincided with this obesity epidemic,
I mean we couldn't have screwed up
the science of obesity more if we had tried,
We don't know what to do,
Nutrition experts, the establishment,
the orthodoxy, just doesn't know what to do
so they continue raising money
for the American Heart Association,
the American Diabetes Association,
but they don't have any new ideas,
They keep saying just keep applying the advice that we've given you
and somehow, it'll turn out different this time,
One of the things that I always say is
why not just be open to new ideas?
Like, here's some other ideas coming along
let's just consider them, Don't we have
an obligation to the public to consider
at least, other ideas?
[reporter] You're about to meet a father who refused to give up, a man who defied
the doctors and went looking for a miracle.
[Vinnie] My generation remembers Jim Abrahams quite well,
He did some of our favorite movies
like Airplane! and Hot Shots! and all
of these funny movies in the 70s and 80s,
Well it wasn't very funny when Jim Abrahams
had a 16 month old son who was having
seizure after seizure after seizure
and he was going-- because he was a big producer
and he had the means, he went to the top
doctors In the United States,
And at the time, Charlie was averaging
about a dozen seizures a day,
He was on four anti-epileptic medicines,
If you have a critically ill kid,
what would your choice be?
Do you wanna drug him, do you wanna cut his brain
or do you wanna change what he eats?
And it just seems obvious to me,
This is not to blame doctors,
Doctors are spread really thin and they have
to try to do the best they can,
but it was Jim who figured out on his own
by going to a library in the hospital
and just happened to open a book
to a page that showed the ketogenic diet
as being the best way to deal with seizures in infants,
The book claimed that experts here
in Baltimore were perfecting something called
the ketogenic diet, a diet consisting
largely of something most doctors
-tell us to avoid, - I called Dr, Freeman
from Johns Hopkins, told him about Charlie
and he said, send his medical records,
we did and he said, well bring Charlie
out to Hopkins and we'll try the diet
and we started the diet and in two days
his seizures were gone,
-[interviewer] Two days? - Two days,
[reporter] Jim was angry and puzzled that none
of the six doctors he went to for help ever mentioned the diet,
What has stopped Charlie's seizures
has been in existence for 70 years,
it's been sitting there, it was waiting for him,
You had some knowledge that this diet
was probably working back at Johns Hopkins
and yet you dissuaded the Abrahams from attempting it, How come?
Well, because I don't think we had exhausted all of the medical approaches yet,
Uh,,, There were actually still other medications that we hadn't tried yet,
Dr, Freeman tells us that 50 to 70%
of the patients that come through his doors
and get put on a diet have success,
Can you think of any drugs in these hard cases
that have 50 to 70% success rates,
probably not anything that comes up to that level,
In another month, Dr, Freeman weaned him off
all four anti-epileptic medicines and
Charlie went from a prognosis of a lifetime
of seizures and what they call "progressive retardation"
to we got our son back and his smile is back
and he was happy again, and our family
could go on with life,
This is Charlie Abrahams and his mom, Nancy,
I've known him since birth, I watched
his delightful personality emerge
through a normal first year, I witnessed
his debilitating battle with seizures
and medicines, I rejoiced with his family
when the ketogenic diet stopped his epilepsy
and now I derive strength and joy
like so many of his other friends
as we watch him begin to develop again,
It's too early to tell whether the nine months
of pummeling from seizures and medicines
did any permanent damage to Charlie's brain,
If he has anything to say on that matter
I know they won't, however, it's not too early
to tell that had Charlie's parents
been informed about the existence of
the ketogenic diet when he first got sick,
and about the success they've had with it
at Johns Hopkins, a vast majority
of Charlie's seizures would not have occurred,
And most of his $100,000 worth of medical,
surgical and drug treatment would not have been necessary,
[solemn music]
Even today, 1,5 out of every 10,000 people
with epilepsy who would benefit from a ketogenic diet
are using it today, Doctors are not taught
diet therapy or even nutrition in medical school,
they just simply aren't, Try an informal
survey on your own, next time you see
a doctor, your doctor, any doctor,
say, "When you were in medical school,
how long were you, how much time
did you spend investigating and learning
about nutrition and diet therapy?"
I didn't really have much nutritional training like most doctors,
In four years of psychiatry training,
we didn't talk about food once,
The extent of my training, I got in nutrition,
let's see, year one, two, three, four
then four years of residency, zero,
Zero, I got zero in addiction too,
Zero in nutrition, zero in addiction,
We were-- we were so damn busy taking care of sick
taking care of illness and trying
to push that back and save lives
that trying to prevent illness
was not really on our radar,
I feel anger, I'm pissed off
and again, I think that part-- that the reasons
that the diet hasn't become more popular
has nothing to do with efficacy at all,
It has to do with revenue sources
that are more lucrative, The ketogenic diet
isn't that expensive, the problem is
it doesn't generate revenue for the medical world,
There are powerful forces at work
in our medical system that have nothing
to do with good health,
My patients have been getting fatter
and sicker over the last few decades
and in particular, we're starting to see
diabetes out of control, and that changes everything,
I used to see the occasional person
who needed diabetic foot ulcer management
and needing an amputation, and it started becoming virtually weekly,
When you come into a clinic and there's patients
with, you know, rotting flesh and it is rotting flesh
and it smells bad, it looks bad
and all you're doing is just trimming
off a little bit of foot, starts with a toe,
starts with an ulcer, then it moves up the foot
and sometimes you know, you get to a point after doing two or three operations
it's been going a couple of months and then the decision is you've actually
got to chop that leg off,
[sawing through bone]
There's something which really upsets me
and that's when you actually amputate
someone's limb, there's a sound of actually
dropping that leg into a bucket,
[thump]
I don't want anyone to hear that, you know, that noise,
it's just,,, Yeah it's just sickening, I started talking
to my patients about reducing sugar
and the benefits were immediate,
Not only would the peoples fatty liver disease
get better, not only would all of their blood
numbers get better, but in fact,
he would not have to end up chopping off a foot or a leg,
I then went to the hospital dieticians
and said hang on, this is really exciting
this stuff about sugar, started talking about it
to the staff and then I started implementing
a sugar reduction for my patients,
only to find out that I was starting
to tread on some big toes,
The dieticians then started kicking up
a stink about that involving their parent organization,
the Dieticians Association of Australia
who started becoming involved into pressuring
the hospital into silencing me,
We received evidence in Sydney
from a medical practitioner in Tasmania,
Dr, Gary Fettke, he gave the evidence to
the Committee in the morning of our hearing
in Sydney, three hours later, he received
an official caution from APRA,
The first time I heard this story,
I just thought it was a joke,
The Boards actual statement requires
that doctors double check that their personal beliefs
don't compromise care, that they don't put
their commercial interest in front of patients
and lastly, doctors should provide
appropriate dietary advice,
Ultimately, the Medical Board made a ruling
that I am now the only doctor as far as we know
in the world to be banned from advising
his patients to reduce their sugar and junk food intake,
And if that sounds crazy, then that's what it is,
We recognize that uh, the-- being subject
to the notifications process for a practitioner
can be an extraordinarily stressful, uh, thing
because there are pretty serious issues at stake
ultimately in terms of their practice
-of their profession and-- - And their reputation,
And their reputation and, uh, despite the fact
that we are not punitive in our focus,
we are protective in our focus
and our mandate is a public protection focus
we understand and appreciate that it may not
feel like that for the practitioner
involved in the process,
For a long time, I couldn't actually
work out why there was anything actually
against what I was talking about,
everything about reducing sugar and carbohydrate
is basic biochemistry, it's in the first
hundred pages of textbooks, so there's nothing
extreme about it, once you see the results
of reducing sugar and carbs, particularly in diabetes,
you can't unsee them,
You know, at this point, I think there is active
suppression of this science,
and this has been going on since the 60s,
One of the things I found in my research,
the biggest ever test of Ancel Keys' hypothesis
was something called The Minnesota Coronary Survey
it was on more than nine thousand men and women
in five Minnesota mental hospitals, which was a really well-controlled study
because somebody in a hospital, you can control everything they're eating,
They gave half the people what was considered the normal amount of saturated fat,
regular milk, regular meat, cheese, butter etcetera,
The other half they gave 9% saturated fats
soy-filled milk, soy-filled cheese,
soy-filled burgers, they found that the people
on the vegetable oil, soy-filled diets
there was no effect on cardiovascular mortality
or total mortality, That study
was not published for 16 years,
One of the principle investigators,
Ivan Frantz was asked by a journalist
why did you not publish this study?
He said well, there was really nothing wrong with it
we were just so disappointed in the way it came out,
Well that's basically scientific fraud,
not publishing your results,
I started to ask the question what got in the way?
What's withholding the message?
Well, there is a pharmaceutical and medical
device industry that makes billions
selling their products to doctors
who have no interest in diet therapy,
There, uh, is a sugar industry that adds
sugar to all of our processed foods
that has no interest in promoting a sugar-free diet,
There is a cardiology community led by
the American Heart Association
that has been spreading misinformation
about a high-fat diet based on flawed science
for over 70 years,
Those diets have been used in children
for many years who have epilepsy
and those children show definite
cognitive dysfunction, also those diets,
Which means they don't think as clearly,
- That's right, - Those children are also
children who have as many, they're intransigent
childhood epilepsy, they have as many
as 400 seizures a month, they're untreatable
by drugs, they go on the diet, and the diets
I think it cures 33% of them, cures them,
The epilepsy and then they aren't able to think,
Today Charlie is a elementary school teacher
a certificate in early childhood education,
he boxes, he plays piano, and we are
beyond grateful every day for his outcome,
I'm not sure what would have become of me
if my family hadn't found the ketogenic diet,
But I doubt that today, I would be an A student
in high school with lots of friends,
I doubt I would have been playing piano
for the last eight years and I doubt
I could hit an 8 iron a 160 yards,
And they just couldn't accept that they were dealing with these
intractable conditions and not just pediatric
epilepsy, but obesity is an intractable condition,
diabetes, Type 2 diabetes is an intractable condition,
Type 1 is, and here you have this diet
that appears to put these conditions into remission,
The establishment here, represented
by our friends, its a little too dogmatic
and that we may never know the truth
unless we acknowledge that there is a counter-theory
that has never been tested and that
that theory more and more people
are beginning to accept parts of the theory,
as being legitimate and that it could
answer a lot of problems and it could
even make it easier for Americans to lose weight,
people are able to reverse diabetes,
people are able to lose weight sustainably,
Most, if not all cardiovascular risk factors
are improved along the way on a lower
carbohydrate diet, That diet ought to be at least considered,
If it turns out to be true, I'll be the first
to change my mind, but show me the data,
[Vinnie] Well, here's just one study that says
that long term ketosis reduces body weight,
triglycerides, LDL, and blood glucose
and shows that it's safe to use a long term
-ketogenic diet, - You can lose weight on
a plant-based diet, you can lose weight
on a ketogenic diet, but are you
mortgaging your health when you do that,
and the answer is yes, the ketogenic diet
when you look at the arteries of people
or animals that go on a ketogenic diet
they tend to be more clogged,
even though,,, [music drowns out talking],
[Gary] Imagine someone who spent his whole career getting the wrong answer,
and not only getting the wrong answer, getting the wrong
answer that dangerous, that actually
may have killed tens of thousands
of hundreds of thousands of people,
Millions of people prematurely, there's no
way to tell, then these outsiders
come along and say you're wrong,
not only are you wrong, you're completely wrong
or not even wrong it's so senseless
what you've been doing and you're killing people
and you have to switch, I don't think
any human being, I mean were just not wired
to be able to say oh yeah, that's a good point
I get it, I see what you're saying
and I'm sorry, And if you're an institution
like the American Heart Association,
I mean imagine the press release
you would have to write, "Dear American public
we're sorry if we killed prematurely
your loved ones and your parents
and maybe we're killing you, but in retrospect
we shouldn't have given the advice we did,"
-[somber music] - You know, we think
about corporations are-- our Government
which is a corporation, and the first question is
do we blame them? Well, you can't hurt
the Government's feelings, you can't hurt
the corporations' feeling because
corporations and governments are not people,
They're machines, they're just big giant machines
and any person in that machine is just a cog
and there's no way to hurt anyone's feelings
or to get on anyone's bad side,
It's just a machine that keeps running,
[Dwight D, Eisenhower] Decisions of a nation, and of a Government
that at one time could tolerate
three or four weeks of study, now demand
almost instantaneous a reaction,
The people of the United States
recognize one by one, thousand by thousand,
million by million that this I a problem
which solution is long overdue,
[Lyndon B. Johnson] Long before Lyndon Johnson came into position
of power, our leaders were recommending
great advances in the field of civil rights
and great advances in the field of health
and things of that nature,
Uh, I just happened to be the catalyst,
We're living in a fast age and all of us
are rather impatient,
I am proposing today a new national health strategy,
Emphasizes keeping people well,
not just making people well,
I do envision the day when we may use
the private health insurance system,
to offer more middle income families
high quality health services at prices they can afford
and shield them also from their catastrophic illnesses,
Today I'm proposing to the Congress
a national health plan, this major initiative
will meet the most urgent needs
in health care of the American people,
Our Administration will propose to Congress
a comprehensive plan to cover catastrophic illnesses,
I am proud to have been part of an Administration
that passed the first Catastrophic Health Bill,
Whatever form it takes,
a catastrophic illness costs money,
[Bill Clinton] There are some little known but very important
provisions in this new balanced budget
that will take us a tremendous step
forward in our fight against diabetes,
These investments total more than
two billion dollars over the next five years,
We must remember that the best health care decisions
are not made by Government and insurance companies
but by patients and their doctors,
[audience applauds]
[Barack Obama] Because you're eating healthy,
and you're out there active and you're playing
sports and you're out in the playground
and doing all those things, not only
are you gonna have a better life,
but you're also helping to create
a stronger, healthier America,
and that saves us money, it means people
are not sick as much, it means that
our health care costs go down,
When you roll up at a McDonalds, what does Donald Trump order?
A Fish-O-Filet sometimes, right,
The Big Macs are great, the Quarter pounder with cheese, I mean there's great stuff,
Do people at the windows be like, "What?"
I think all of those places, Burger King
McDonalds, I can live with them,
I had the other night, I had Kentucky Fried Chicken,
not the worst thing in the world,
If you think it's up to Government, you're wrong,
if you think it's up to industry,
you're wrong, it's up to you, And if you're gonna
make a change, if you're watching this,
change right now, tonight, don't wait
until tomorrow, if it's a Friday night
don't say Monday you're gonna start,
start now, there's no time better than right now
to get your life in order,
[dramatic music]
[somber music]
I've been doing a podcast with Anna Vocino for about seven years,
When we first started the podcast, uh, nobody was listening,
Someone's gone, alright, I wanna lose weight
wait, that steak is 1200 calories,
This bowl of pasta is 500 calories less?
And, as a woman, you're told
don't eat more than 1200 calories a day
if you wanna lose weight, so you think
oh, I can't have that steak, because that's my whole day!
We started attracting the attention
of people in the low carb community,
doctors, authors, like Gary Taubes
and Nina Teicholz, it's important for us
to have the experts on, 'cause we're like see
what that guy said [laughs],
Anna also, turns out, is a great cook,
[Anna] As a person who works with food a lot,
I get asked many questions about
fake sweeteners or fake this or fake that
and I personally think it's gonna have to
go in an even more natural direction
to where we just have this return to just
eating food in its most natural state,
Vinnie and I are very passionate
about this topic, let's say you watched
this documentary, let's say you watched
the others and you're like, this is it,
I'm gonna do this, I am going to give up
the processed sugars and grains
and I'm gonna go for a high-fat, low-carb diet
and which you should, do it, try it,
It can't hurt to not have sugars and grains,
Like just try it, When that happens
and there's an adjustment phase,
all of us in this country, myself included,
have been in the diet mentality,
If we can peel back that diet mentality,
it would be amazing,
♪ ♪