Everything You Know About Nutrition Is Wrong with Nina Teicholz

0:03When did making plans get this complicated? It's time to streamline with WhatsApp. The secure messaging app that brings the whole group together. Use polls to settle dinner plans. Send event invites and pin messages so no one forgets mom's 60th. And never miss a meme or milestone. All protected with end-to-end encryption. It's time for WhatsApp. Message privately with everyone. Learn more at whatsapp.com. Dude, like, what did you do? You look great. Like you're lean. You look younger. You're happier. I'm struggling. What can I do? I go, that's very easy. High protein, high fats. Oh no, I need rice.

0:39I need rice to survive. I'm 280 pounds. I'm like, no, you think you do. Really, the foundation of my work in this space started with a book that I wrote called The Big Fat Surprise. People have received so much misinformation and from the highest levels. The American Heart Association, our own U.S. dietary guidelines, people's minds are full of received ideas that turn out not to be supported by science. That's a whole other story. Why are all our trusted health authorities delivering incorrect information to us? Is it money?

1:17So Nina, thank you for joining us today. You have an amazing resume as far as, you know, you're a PhD in nutrition. You really put out some controversial topics out there about what nutrition should be, what to consume, and I'm into it, right? And I just super happy to have you here today. So thank you. Well, thanks for having me. It's great to be here. Yeah. I mean, not, not a bad Monday, right? Yeah. So talk to us a little bit about coffee. Yeah. I'm always drinking coffee. It's like one of those things where it's, uh, if I'm not drinking coffee for the first part of the day, I'm really not living.

1:58So, you know, I love it. Do you drink your coffee, coffee black or? Yeah. Here's my coffee and uh it's black it's black same or sometimes my son will make me a latte with with whole milk or cream and and and that is really good and i would drink that that tastes like nutty wonderful it's like yeah it's so good you know let's segue because you know you know dairy products are often demonized meat is often demonized so walk us through you know like there's people listening right now. I'm like, Oh, I'm allowed to put cream or milk in my coffee. That's not going to kill me. Right. Yeah. Well, so really the foundation of my work in this space started with a book that I wrote called the big fat surprise.

2:49I'm not here to sell my book, but I do have a copy. No, please do hold that thing up. Um, so that came out in 2014. It was a result of almost a decade of research and work. It's very intensely researched, documented. There are 150 pages of footnotes. And there were two major arguments that I put forward in that book. The first one was, we got it wrong on saturated fats. Saturated fats, the fear that saturated fats cause heart disease is why... Rinse takes your laundry and hand delivers it to your door, expertly cleaned and folded so you could take the time once spent folding and sorting and waiting to finally pursue a whole new version of you like tea time you or this tea time you or even this tea time you said you hear about Dave or even tea time tea time tea time you so update on Dave it's up to you we'll take the laundry rinse it's time to be great we avoid red meat full fat dairy butter cheese uh you know and and some people think there's a lot of saturated fat and eggs which is not true but sort of the whole history of the hypothesis saturated fat and dietary cholesterol cause heart disease that goes back to the 1950s and we can talk about that but i really lay out that whole history all the science the clinical trials the personalities and um and so my book was really the first to really put out this idea we in a very comprehensive way we wrongly demonized saturated fats and number two we were very wrong to replace those fats with seed oils so my book was also the first to really go into the history of seed oils the idea that they're machine lubricant they were started as machine lubricants is and the problems of oxidation and potential problems of inflammation and the various ways, the toxins that are in them or that they are produced when they oxidize.

4:57So that was also all my work from this book. And so now a lot of this is just kind of out there as common knowledge, which is fantastic. I mean, we have the FDA commissioner, Marty McCary, talking about how we got it wrong on saturated fats, citing my work. I was just like, it's amazing to see this finally get up to the level of recognition by our public health authorities. So yeah, we could talk about a lot of this. No, I love this. I love this. And it's so funny because when we talk about fats in general, predominantly saturated fats, there was a long period of time where everybody's like, When it comes to what your family eats and drinks, you know your choices matter.

5:45You're the expert because you know what fits your life. And getting it right starts with good information. That's why America's beverage companies are sharing more information about our ingredients at goodtoknowfacts.org. No spin, no judgments, just the facts straight from the experts for more than 140 beverage ingredients. Visit goodtoknowfacts.org. You know, cut fat out of your diet. Fat's making you fat. and in fat really does not make you fat um those are sources of energy right they're very dense and and they help us but you know there was this massive push to remove all the fats from diets and the thing about that that drives me crazy is isn't fat essential for hormone like fat is let me explain one thing i think most people don't know all food except for sugar is made up of the three macronutrients that is in all our food, carbohydrate, protein, and fat.

6:50One of those is not essential for you to live. And that is carbohydrate. You do not need any carbohydrate in your body. You don't need it. The amount you need, according to even the National Academy of Sciences reluctantly concluded in 2005 in a report, the essential amount of carbohydrates is zero. And that is just kind of common knowledge among people who study nutrition. Although there's a lot of incorrect messages mixed into there too. People say you have to have glucose to fill your body, but that is not true. You need protein and fat to survive. And you need a good amount of them for optimal health.

7:33Fat is used for energy. It's used for your hormones it's used for all you know many systems in your body you need you need like much more fat than you think you do and if i can just spend a moment to kind of go back to explain to people like where all these ideas come from to try to locate people i just want to give like so you're about to make a trade based on a friend's text but which you do you listen to Is it, we could buy a house in Tulum. Get optioning those options. We could lose everything. Or let's do a little research. Get your head in the trade and make the investment decision that's right for you.

8:23Learn more at FINRA.org slash trade smart. Brief history that, so it really, we did not have any of these ideas about saturated fats, about avoiding fat at all until really the 1950s when the nation was in a panic over what caused heart disease. Heart disease had risen from really out of nowhere in the early 1900s to be the number one killer in America. And the signal event was President Eisenhower himself having a heart attack in 1955 and being out of the Oval Office for 10 whole days. So all of the nation was fixated on what causes heart disease. And this one very influential, self-promoting, aggressive scientist named Ansel Keys from the University of Minnesota came out with this idea called the diet heart hypothesis.

9:19And that hypothesis held that it was saturated fat and dietary cholesterol that clogged your arteries, you know, and like hot oil down a cold stove pipe would clog them up and give you a heart attack. So it's really important to understand that at that time, there were other competing hypotheses that were put forward by top scientists of the day. Maybe it was auto exhaust, the growing number of cars on the road. Maybe it was vitamin deficiency that caused heart disease, just other valid ideas. But Ancel Keys was able to just really railroad through by force of personality. His idea, he got onto the American Heart Association Nutrition Committee in 1960, turned that whole committee around such that by 1961, the committee was saying they embraced his idea and they came out in 1961 saying, Americans, avoid saturated fat and cholesterol to prevent a heart attack.

10:20That is your number one best way to prevent a heart attack. So this was the little acorn of advice that grew into the giant oak tree of advice and guidelines and all that we have all over the world now. It all started with that in 1961. And what did that mean in practical terms? It meant replacing butter with margarine, right? And the American Heart Association at that, even early on at that point, was actively promoting seed oils, right? So the president of the AHA is posed with a bottle of Crisco in his hand in an educational film promoting seed oils. So it meant we were to start cutting back on red meat, which we did as a nation.

11:04It meant start cutting back on whole milk and replacing it with skim milk. I mean, skim milk only really came into the food supply in the 70s. So we feel like we've been living with this forever, But it's important to note this idea does have, it is located at a moment in time when this came into being. People before 1961 did not think like this the way that we do today. Chapter two is bringing in the low-fat diet, right? The low-fat diet means cut back all fat, not just saturated fat. And that was done based on the rationale that the macronutrient fat has nine calories per gram, whereas carbohydrate and protein, the other two macronutrients only have four to five calories per gram.

11:54And so it was thought at the time, as we were just starting to see obesity creep up in America in 1960s, it was really in the low teens percentages, you know, 14, 15 percent of American adults were obese in the 60s. But researchers had started to see that creeping up and saying, hey, we've got to get a handle on this. Let's tell everybody to eat a low fat diet. And that is what started in 1970, again, with the American Heart Association being the first to come out with that advice. And then it really spread into a kind of mania by the 1980s. The low fat 1980s were really the height of everybody, you know, cooking their fish in parchment and trying to trying to pretend that a salad with only vinegar was yummy.

12:46And that was something. Tastes freaking terrible. Tastes terrible. And people were obsessed with fat. And since then, there's been a rollback in this idea about that lowering your fat to very low levels is healthy or good or preferable. But people still live with this fear of fat. Fat is going to make me fat. That fat is going to put, but it's far more likely that it's that donut you're eating rather than the bacon for breakfast that is going straight to your hips. But that's the low fat diet. And that diet was extensively tested in multiple national institutes of health funded clinical trials.

13:37And it was found to protect this amount of chronic diseases. No effect on preventing weight gain, no effect on type 2 diabetes, no prevention for heart disease, and no prevention for any type of cancer. And it was tested in large, randomized, controlled clinical trials on more than 55 ,000 people. So it's been tested. It failed. And the low-fat diet, nobody should ever be avoiding fat. One of the things that the low-fat diet guidelines completely ignored, and it's only become more prominently known recently, is that fat and protein, especially together, are very satiating. They fill you up. If you have eggs and bacon for breakfast, you are not hungry.

14:28You don't need a snack mid-morning the way you do if you've had a bowl of cereal for breakfast because your blood sugar is not rising and plunging the way it does when it has a bowl of starch in the morning. Protein and fat keep your blood sugar flat and it keeps you satiated. It fills you up. And it's a much more even kind of energy. And people should also know, people who are trying to bulk up on protein, you need the fat to go. with the protein. If you have too much protein without fat, that excess protein will start to spike your blood sugar as well. So you really need to have fat in your diet.

15:11I love this. Thank you so much because I can speak from personal experience. In December, I started out and I was 230 pounds. I'm now between 186 and 190. That's great. thank you congratulations thank you the the my body fat percentage went from 30 almost 31 percent down to probably 15 to 17 percent right in such a short period of time and i was housing fats i mean i was crushing them and the thing that i did was in the morning pre-workout i would have a shake and then i would come home have another shake and then in an hour and a half i was super hungry So I'd have five eggs and four pieces of bacon.

15:59And then I was good for an extended period of time. And then for lunch, it would be mostly red meat and then dinner red meat. And if I was super hungry before bed, I would have another shake for that another protein. So I would end my day right around 2100 calories and looking at roughly 250 grams of protein and 100 grams of fat. And the weight fell off. I started getting vascular. I started feeling more satiated to your point throughout the day where when the nighttime came, I wasn't super hungry. And most people get this thing wrong, Nina. they say protein is going to satiate you in part. Yes.

16:50But if you don't couple it with the fats, you're going to be hungry. It does not matter. You need to make sure that when you're eating something, you're completely satiated. That is fats and that is protein. So from my own personal experience, you're speaking my language, like, like really truly are. It changed my life. Well, it works. I mean, it works because of the biochemistry behind it. And it works because, you know, first of all, you're cutting out carbohydrates, carbohydrates, even the healthy whole grains, the quinoa, the even the legumes that we've been told to eat more of. they contain starch starch is just sugar molecules holding hands your body doesn't care when you start that and so if you cut out carbohydrates um you're cutting out glucose and fructose and both of those by different pathways have uh contribute to fat accumulation let's say yeah and they contribute more seriously to insulin resistance which is I believe the root of chronic diseases.

18:00So diabetes, heart disease, fatty liver disease, like disease we see across the spectrum. So you're cutting out carbohydrates, you're increasing your protein, which helps your satiation. You're not shirking fat, which is really important. And I want to just put in a little note for your women readers, especially women who are a little older, like more around my age, but I'm just saying people who whose metabolisms are more likely to be broken. Like they've been overweight for a while, or they, you know, they, they don't feel well. They've eat for women. They need to eat even more fat, especially when they're getting off what we call the sad diet, the standard American diet, that transition, getting off of getting unaddicted from sugars and starches, getting off the sad diet is a big transition.

18:52And it's really important to keep fat in your diet at that point. When you're a little closer to your goal weight, then you have to maybe like be a little more careful. I would, it's my experience and what I hear from other people, when you're getting closer to your goal weight, those fat calories can make a difference for, especially for women. So, I mean, everybody's individual, but we're talking in, in general terms now, like a higher fat diet is healthier and will help you lose weight for the vast majority of people. And a low fat diet is not healthy. It actually increases the risk of heart disease and will increase your risk of insulin resistance.

19:34So like in broad terms, we know that much, right? And then people have to kind of fiddle around the margins of that. It's so funny because when people say like, dude, like, what did you do? You look great. Like you're lean, you're, you're, you look younger, you're happier. There's more life in your eyes. I'm like, I'm like, yeah, well, this is, you know, I've been locked in, man. And I go to the gym five, six days a week. Right. And like, well, I'm struggling. What can I do? I go, that's very easy. High protein, high fats. Oh no, I need rice. I need rice to survive. I'm 280 pounds. I'm like, no, you think you do.

20:09See, that's the problem. You think you do because you haven't tried anything else. And what does the body do biologically when there's no carb, there's no glycogen in your body to eat for energy. It goes straight to the fat and that's your energy source. And it's just, to me, it is, it is more of a choice, right? Like, okay, I can sit here and struggle or I can follow this plan, which is very simple. I'm going to eat a ton of protein and I'm not going to care about the fats to a certain point. Right. I mean, it's very simple. I think it is, but let's understand that people have received so much misinformation and from the highest levels.

20:50I mean, the American Heart Association, our own U.S. dietary guidelines, our top professional societies have been delivering information that is incorrect. So people, it's not just the choice. People's minds are full of received ideas that turn out not to be supported by science. And that's a whole other story. Why are all our trusted health authorities delivering incorrect information to us? That's a big part of my book. Is it money? Well, it's, yes. I mean, there's one simple explanation is there's a ton of drug and big food and big pharma money that is in all of our public health institutions.

21:36I've looked into and investigated the American Heart Association, the American Pediatric Association, the American College of Cardiology, many of our guideline committees. I mean, I did the first ever systematic review of a U.S. Dietary Guideline Committee, which is the most, the top most influential nutrition policy. 95 % of that committee, that 20 person committee had a tie with food or pharma company and half the committee had 30 such ties or more. So, yes, money is, you know, surprise, a huge factor driving this. But I want to also, and we could talk about this for a long time, but just one other factor is the cognitive dissonance that exists among the professional medical nutrition expert community.

22:27so many of them truly truly believe believed and still believe that saturated fat causes heart disease that dietary cholesterol will clog your arteries and cause heart disease that high cholesterol is the number one cause of heart disease that dietary fat makes you fat i mean they believe these things and they believe them for decades because remember it goes back to the 1950s originally. So there's so much cognitive dissonance in their minds, they cannot change their minds. And if they're a bureaucracy, it's very hard for any bureaucracy to swivel around and change its position and lose the public trust.

23:08And this is also, it's a good segue, because it's also what is going on individual people's minds and why it's hard for individual people to shift to the kind of diet you're talking about, right? Or that we are both talk about because in their mind is the message, for instance, but aren't there good carbs and bad carbs? Aren't there fast carbs and slow carbs? And the answer to that is not really. There's, um, there's, there's really all starches when you, you know, even in dark bread and pepper nickel bread, when they come into your body, they come apart. They're just sugar molecules, as I said, sugar molecules holding hands.

23:50And if you are trying to lose weight, reduce your risk for type 2 diabetes, heart disease, fatty liver disease, all of those, or you want to reverse them, you really need to cut back on total carbohydrates. That is what the scientific literature shows. And here I'm talking about the most rigorous kind of science, randomized controlled clinical trials. Now we could go down a big rabbit hole like, well, don't the Europeans eat more carbs? And what about the Japanese and rice? And what about this and that? And that's a whole conversation. I'm not denying that those populations exist on higher carb diets and they are healthy, but I will say that in clinical trials all over the world, when people reduce their total carbohydrates, their overall cardiovascular risk profile looks better.

24:39They're able to lose more weight consistently in all head-to-head diet trials. Low carb always comes out looking better. It's the only way to reverse type two diabetes. So that is what the clinical trials show us. And we have to, you know, that's the most rigorous science. So, um, or you could move to Italy and try their diet and see if you lose weight and maybe that's your diet mode. That's an expensive way to do it. Explain the mechanism so people understand. Because another message that goes through people's heads is, wait, I know that I need glucose for energy. And you started to explain this earlier, which is, no, you don't need glucose for energy.

25:22Your body is like a hybrid car. So most of us, typical American diet, we run on glucose, right we have to take in the glucose which is from sugar or or fruit or uh and we or starch and then we run on that and then when we run out of glucose your body can only have a teaspoon in circulation at any one time and so it socks it away as fat and then it can access it as fat it can bring it back into the body um when that runs out and you that's when you're like your body really hits a low and you're super tired and because your blood sugar's gone up and then it's crashed. And then you're, or if you're like in a long distance race, that's when you're bonking and you like need the goo pack to suck down more glucose or you, whatever that, that is the way most people live and with really wildly fluctuating moods and they need to eat fairly constantly to keep their glucose replenished.

26:19Okay. That's one fuel source. That's like the traditional gasoline fuel source, but your body is a hybrid car and you can use the alternative fuel source, which you get from eating fat. So, and by the way, this process of converting to be flexible and use two fuel systems that can take, that can take weeks or even months for people, Right. You're upregulating enzymes and developing this whole new metabolic pathway to use fat as fuel. And that can take a while and you can feel badly along the way. So, you know, beware of those articles like, oh, I tried low carb and it didn't work after a week.

27:04You know, I mean, it takes it's a process to change the way your body functions and what fuel it uses. But when you're fueling on fat, fat will generate something called ketone bodies. You can measure them in your bloodstream to see if you're producing them. And that's a very effective way to know when you are in what's called a ketogenic state. And by the way, you can lose weight without getting into keto becoming ketogenic. You can lose weight by just bringing down the carbs, right? Bringing down caraches, sugars, all that. Just bring it down. If you get all the way down to ketogenic, which is very, very low carbs, then you can measure your ketones.

27:47And when you're in that state, you're much, much more able to use fat as fuel. And you really, really mobilize all the fat out of your stored fat. You run on your own stored fat. It's like your stored fat. One way of thinking about it is not the thing you hate on your body. but it's like oh these are my this is my this is my granola bars like extra fat in my body and when i can't get food if i if i'm metabolically flexible in this hybrid car i can just access that for fuel i'll be like oh you know i'm running on my right hip fat right now because i haven't eaten in a while and like that's a great thing that's why people and animals generally mammals have fat.

28:32So you don't have to eat all the time. You need a source of fuel. So anyway, that's the mechanism. Sometimes it helps people to understand that and to try to get through some of the misunderstandings. And again, just to get back to the original point, I understand resistance and people not understanding. And like people have been receiving so much contrary and confusing information and it's, and, and people have been scared off this way of eating that you're, you're, you are currently have benefited from, and I've been benefiting from for years. Um, there, there's a big campaign to scare people away from it that I have documented actually quite a lot.

29:16So, I mean, I understand where people are coming from on this and that's why I like to get out and talk about it. no i love it you know it's it's funny i want to go back to something you said about you know i tried the low carb for a week it didn't work it i i think that's impossible nina like it from a standpoint of just experiencing it you know i'm in my mid to late 40s and the moment i cut out all those carbs you know i lost eight pounds the first week and now most people that's just the water weight like whatever doesn't matter i'm trending in the right direction here The main thing that I think people, and I'm assuming, okay, but the first three days when I was detoxing out of carbs, I had, I mean, my team can tell you, I had the worst headaches ever.

30:05Like, Nina, I was so effing miserable, but I also was miserable in another way. You know, it's like when you get that heavy, you're you're in and for people listening and watching right now. And if you struggle with weight, you know exactly what I'm talking about. You find two or three shirts that you feel you look the best and feel the best in and you rotate those shirts, you rotate that pair of underwear as funny as it sounds. And you rotate those pairs of shorts or those pairs of jeans. And that to me was pain in general, enough for me to keep moving through that physical pain of the head. And then after that fourth, and when that fourth day came, clear as a bell, like my vision, my mind.

30:53And so I transitioned in January to the carnivore diet. Now granted lately, I've been eating more carbs and I'm feeling bad, right? So like there's no accidents in this world. This morning I woke up, I had a bunch of ground turkey meat. I had two eggs and a half cup of egg whites. And I had a high protein breakfast. And when I, on the way home, I'll go and I'll get a steak, some steaks for the family. I'll grill those up for lunch. And that's what we'll do. So I just find like, there's a lot of people, this is a good question to ask you. a lot of people are talking about the long-term effects of carnivore what are your thoughts there okay i want to just i want to just wrap up the point about transition to low carb you were very lucky some people it takes very long longer period of time and they have something used to be called the atkins flu the keto flu they have yeah kind of flu-like symptoms i just want to let those folks know you are losing electrolytes in the first days and you are experiencing all this enzymatic regulation change in your body all you need to do is to have a couple of cups of soup broth and they can literally be from one of those soup cubes like you don't need to get fancy stuff the bouillon cubes a bouillon cube right thanks that's enough to to and that this has been known for decades.

32:21Like you just, you just have that, that will alleviate your symptoms and help with the transition. And then I want to give people who might be thinking and considering this one other tip, which is when you're having your sugar craving, eat fat instead, like whip up some whipped cream with a little artificial sweetener. It's not going to kill you and, you know, eat fat instead, and that will kill your sugar craving. So you need help when you start, because it's really hard to come off of sugar, especially. Okay, let's do the carnivore diet and long-term implications. There's been one survey that was published on carnivores and that was done with some out of Harvard.

33:06And it was one of the authors is David Ludwig. Nick Norwitz is another author. Maybe Sean Baker was on that, who's a well-known carnivore. people had been on that diet for years everybody improved in their health and felt better on that diet uh are they potentially um risking a heart attack heart disease in the long term if you look at people on ketogenic diets what you see is their overall cardiovascular risk score improves dramatically like improves their life expectancy by six or seven years There's multiple studies showing that carnivore diet due to the saturated fat content tends to increase your LDL cholesterol, which is your so-called bad cholesterol.