1034: Fat-Free Foods | Skeptical Sunday

25:47So stuff made with it has an extra-long shelf life. Ah, okay. So that doesn't sound like a winning combination for food in some ways. It's bad for you and it's been on the shelf for 18 plus months, but it's great for producers because they can put something in a crate in a warehouse like Twinkies for half a decade and still sell them and they taste like they were made yesterday. Exactly. I mean, with that stuff, who needs healthy and fresh foods? Restaurants as well use partially hydrogenated vegetable oil in their fryers because it doesn't have to be changed out as often as other oils. Unhealthy, old and fried and oil shared with 10 ,000 other French fries and fried items.

26:25That is revolting, actually. Or is it? I don't know. Fried with the taste of 10 ,000 other French fries might be good, but... Yeah, you might be right. Anyway, so with the American Heart Association's approval, trans fats became hip for all the cats. That's not a joke. That's just a good rhyme. The American Heart Association ran ads pushing vegetable... All allowed. The American Heart Association ran ads pushing vegetable oils as heart healthy, And with Ancel Keys on the AHA board, in 1961, the American Heart Association offered the first recommendation in the world for people to cut back on saturated fat and cholesterol to prevent heart attacks.

27:04And the entire country just followed this recommendation? Yeah. It's pretty weird that until the 1960s, half of Americans' calories came from fat, and then just one day, everyone just agreed to go on a low-fat. And I'm going to put quotes around this, quote, heart-healthy diet. I can't believe Americans actually ever agreed on something. But of course, of course, it was actually just disinformation. Right. But disinformation, well, I don't know which one's better, but disinformation is maybe even better than no information, which gets me to my next point, which is what we got with the Minnesota coronary experiment.

27:42And look, this experiment today would be considered pretty unethical, but the patients at five Minnesota mental hospitals were put on high and low-fat diets. The hospitals were chosen because they were highly controlled environments. The patients' diets and health were monitored from 1968 to 1973, and it was found that as cholesterol went down from a low-fat diet, heart disease and deaths went up. And here's the thing. The results? They were never published. What? Why wasn't this published? because it didn't support the Keyes low-fat diet heart hypothesis. That is not only unethical to subject people to the experiment in the first place, but also highly irresponsible and unethical to not publish the data because you don't like the results.

28:29Yeah. Ridiculous. Well, they buried the evidence, and the study actually wasn't published until decades later when a family member found it. I mean, who knows what the alien food pyramid would look like if it had been published. So our dietary guidelines are just basically a failed experiment based on marketing? No, our dietary guidelines are based on ignored experiments. Look, man, Jack Spratt was dead wrong to eat no fat, and his wife was onto something by eating no lean. She knew that fat is essential. Stop. Look around for a second. Look at the average size of a person in our society. Clearly something is wrong.

29:15It's the wrong advice or being sold the wrong things. You know who won't slowly kill you and your entire family in exchange for corporate donations? The fine sponsors that support this show. We'll be right back. Once again, the deals are all at jordanharbinger.com slash deals. You can also email me jordan at jordanharbinger.com. I'll find the code for you. If you can't remember the name of the sponsor, you're too lazy to find it. That's how important it is for you to support those who support the show. Now for the rest of Skeptical Sunday. It's obvious it's having a devastating effect on our health.

29:44I mean, the stats are awful, but also you see young kids getting diabetes at like age 17 from eating nothing but Twinkies and pizza. Oh, younger than that. And that gets me to my next point, that this obesity epidemic goes hand in hand with that other huge epidemic we're having, which is diabetes. All those years of getting fat out of food has caused the diabetes epidemic. Type 2 diabetes is brought on by insulin spikes and crashes. And it's proven that of the three macronutrients, carbs spike insulin. Proteins give a slight rise and fats do not raise insulin levels at all. Really? There's no rise?

30:26You know, actually, I kind of knew that. We have a sponsor called NutriSense and it's a glucose monitor that you put in your skin. And diabetic people are probably laughing at me for using it, but I found it really interesting because you can eat something like sashimi, and it shows your blood sugar, and there's barely any change, and then you can eat something else like rice, and you just watch it go straight up into the red zone like you're about to croak, and it's that insulin spike, which is, it's actually not that big of a deal. You try and temper it by adding protein or whatever it is. NutriSense, they give you like nutrition coaching inside the app, which is pretty cool, but I would imagine if you're just eating nonstop simple sugars and junk, you stay really high all the time and then your insulin spikes and then eventually your pancreas is like, I give up or whatever.

31:10Right. Well, it's not even just keeping it up all the time. It's the going way up and then the crashing and then you crash. I see. And so you have to eat more carbs to get back up. It's this rollercoaster effect. Because if your insulin is not skyrocketing every time you eat, it's just easier to not overeat. But like I said, that happens when you remove the fat and you add sugar and carbs. You overeat. In the 80s, the American Heart Association actually cashed in on the fat-free craze and food companies paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to feature, and maybe you remember this, a heart healthy check symbol on their product.

31:46Oh, I do remember this. Right. And all you had to do was have no fat. So if cookie crisps are fat-free, they were labeled heart healthy, even if the sugar content was like through the roof. To be fair, that was the catchphrase of cookie crisps. Now with sugar content that's through the roof. Yeah, that's because they're great. Let's not go down the memory lane of breakfast cereal catchphrases because we'll be here all day. But I love breakfast cereal catchphrases. You might even say, I dig them. Ooh, good deep cut. Deep cut. Yeah, thanks. Let's not forget the original cornflakes slogan. Keep cornflakes on your shelf and keep your hands off yourself.

32:24Yeah, or you might go blind or get diabetes, which, by the way, as it turns out, is caused by not eating fat. Right. There is basically no relationship between eating fat and diabetes. But all the sugar on the shelves is related to why one in three Medicare dollars today is spent on diabetes, because 38 % of adult Americans have diabetes or are pre-diabetic. That is so, wow, 38%. I mean, damn, that's almost, we're on our way to half the country being diabetic or pre-diabetic. That's crazy. Right. And we all know people that are pre-diabetic. Sure. Sadly, they're not hard to spot. I mean, it's people that are dealing with weight problems.

33:09That's one of the first things that the doctor will tell you as you start getting heavier and heavier, you are now pre-diabetic. You have to watch the weight. And type 2 diabetes comes because of those insulin spikes and crashes, which is actually really the proper measure of food. It's not how much cholesterol, it should be how much it raises your insulin response. So what exactly is insulin? Is insulin a hormone? Yes, of course, yeah. Insulin is our fat storage hormone, and it keeps cells from burning their stored fat. High insulin levels are problematic, and carbs spike our insulin levels. The carbs are like kindling on a fire.

33:49They burn really fast, spiking your blood sugar, and then they go out dropping your blood sugar, and then you need more carbs. Whereas fat is like putting logs on a fire. They burn long and steady. Diabetes is a condition caused by raised blood sugar. So it's a bad idea to eat the one thing that spikes it. And this has led to an enormous surge in type 2 diabetes. In just one generation, we've gotten ridiculously less healthy. There has been more heart attacks, more strokes, blindness, and amputations than ever. Well, I will say, Dr. Kellogg was trying to prevent strokes. Man, that Corn Flakes fact has just dominated this episode.

34:32I mean, if people are going to take one thing away from this, it's that cereal was invented to stop people from whacking it. What about all the diabetes medications? Are those making a dent in things at all? I mean, we have, like, That's got to be the main thing, Ozempic and stuff everywhere, all these peptides. Right, no, because, and you can put this one in the bank, you can't throw drugs at a dietary disease. And this is worth repeating, you cannot throw drugs at a dietary disease. You can tell that a disease is misunderstood if we just can't prevent it or properly treat it. But there are tons of treatments for diabetes, though, that's what I'm saying.

35:06There's all kinds of medications and stuff like that, or is that not what you're getting at? No, you're 100 % right. And watching cable news, which I love to do, that's all you see is ads for diabetes medications. I think we've probably all fallen asleep at least once to the Ozempic song, which you don't make me sing the Ozempic song. Right. Which, by the way, now the music snob in me needs to jump in and say it's not the Ozempic song that was magic by the Scottish pop group Pilot. it. But fine. Ozempic is a good example, though, of how we treat diabetes. The idea that just take these pills and change nothing else about yourself.

35:42By the way, if you haven't gotten the Ozempic song in your head, let me help you with that. Oh, oh, oh, Ozempic. That's the one, man. I don't know the rest. Yeah. The American Diabetes Association used to recommend diabetics eat a carb-based diet, which was literally the cause of the problem. But fortunately, things are changing. I was actually just on their website and they have a lot of low-carb options and a really good explanation of how carbs spike insulin levels. Diabetes is a state of carbohydrate toxicity. Insulin resistance is a state of carbohydrate intolerance. Carb intake is the biggest factor in your blood sugar levels.

36:23By the way, a little side note here. The American Diabetes Association seems to care about people not getting diabetes or learning how to manage diabetes, but the American Heart Association seems to be primarily concerned with getting money from brands and really just not giving a crap at all about the health of Americans' hearts, which is really disappointing. That would be like finding out the American Dental Association endorses Jolly Ranchers or some other hard candy that rots your teeth out. And they're just like, oh, yeah, no, we just sell the label on the toothbrush. We don't actually care about your teeth.

36:57It's really disheartening. Yeah, I mean, it's turning the battleship around. It's a slow, I mean, people have had this idea, and they're not just in our heads, but in the heads of the American Medical Association and other, that this correlation between cholesterol and heart health, and it's changing, though. It is changing. It's really gross. You mentioned carbon take is the single biggest factor in our blood sugar level. So is there anything we can really do about diabetes? I mean, I know you can take insulin, but that's not what I'm going for here. Right. Well, I mean, there's type 1 and type 2.

37:28Type 1, which runs in my family, that's a genetic, and there's really nothing you can do about it. But type 2, which is brought on by the sugars and the carbs, it can go into remission. It can't be reversed. You can't get rid of it, but it can go into remission, which means people can go off insulin, which is good news. Since in recent years, a lot of the people becoming diabetic, as you said, are children and really young children. I've read about this. Yeah. Like as young as six, I read. Oh man, that's really a shame. That's almost, I would say almost child abuse at that point, depending on if it's, they're just really unlucky or if it's caused by the diet period, like a ridiculous diet.

38:08Right. And look, anywhere that this USDA diet is followed, there are weight and health issues. And there's pretty much no better example of this than in the public schools. Yeah. The USDA recommended school lunches were never appetizing. I mean, I'm talking about like gross bread that's burned to the side of the carton with some cheese and pepperoni slices that are definitely, and that was the pizza. And kids ate that every day. Yeah, for sure. And it's not just your observation, but I mean, there's the actual rates of obesity among children are going up, up, up. Health problems in kids is just really sad to me.

38:43And it's not just the kids though. There's these, we're having the same problems in the military. And in fact, it's the largest disqualifier for entering the military right now is obesity. In fact, there was a report issued by the, I think it was the Army. The title of the report was Too Fat to Fight. And that was the official report. Yeah, that's scary. This is supposed to be our strongest people defending us, which is, so that's, yeah, unbelievable. And look, not to mention, as you mentioned, that the American Heart Association is taking money from these organizations. They take money from big pharmaceuticals, they take money from sugar, and they are still maintaining that saturated fats are bad and vegetable oils are good.

39:25Why do they insist that this is a good guideline? I mean, Ansel Hees has to be, that guy probably died back in the 70s or the 80s. Why are we still dying on this hill? Why are they still so adamant that this is a good guideline? Well, I mean, the USDA is also in on this a little bit because they were founded in 1862 to provide information to the American public about healthy eating. but a lot of people accuse them of supporting the American agricultural industry. And look, the fact is our top crops, wheat, corn, sugar, and soy, they're just not that good for you. So basically the things we produce domestically are not good for our diet, but the USDA has to support the farmers.

40:04And so they try and get those things included in stuff like cereal and then say, yeah, you have to eat 12 bowls of this every day because we got to do something with these crops so we can keep subsidizing this voting block or whatever. I mean, I looked for a direct link to this like we have with Keys, ignoring data, and with the AHA accepting money from Procter & Gamble and whatnot. And it's really more speculation that the USDA is supporting American agriculture, but it does seem that way. And as a result of the USDA guidelines, Americans have increased their consumption of seed oils made from our biggest crops by nearly 90 % from 1970 to 2014.

40:44They label vegetable oils as heart healthy because they lack fat, but vegetable oil is made in a factory and they use heat and chemicals. And when you eat oxidized oils, they create free radicals, which are highly inflammatory. And inflammation is probably at the root of most of the conditions that affect Americans nowadays. And free radicals and inflammation cause heart disease? Right. So you're seeing the disconnect here. But it is connected to many other dietary trends, like the popularity of antioxidants, which combat free radicals. When vegetable oils and seed oils are heated and reheated in deep fryers, restaurants compound these issues.

41:26They've actually taken fries from fast food places and looked at it in the lab, and they are just covered in toxic particles. Oh, they told me that was truffle powder. The fact is, you can literally power a car with this crap. Yeah, eating these oils is bad. So, okay, avoid fast food. I think we all understand that. Is there a better solution? And this is where I guess we don't want to give out medical advice, but what's on the table from anyone but the American Heart Association? Okay, well, I've seen testimonials and there are statistics about the keto diet and diabetics. there are many instances of type 2 diabetics going on keto and losing a ton of weight and getting completely off insulin.

42:11Low carb diets in general have similar positive effects. Right, okay. So here's where my lawyer brain says to make a little bit of a note. So one, if you want to try a diet like keto and you're diabetic or not, for that matter, anyone, talk to your doctor because this stuff, it's not for everybody and they have better insurance than I do. And two, yes, our body can make glucose or carbs. I don't want, you know, people are going to be like, wow, you're wrong. You do need carbs. Yes, you can make the carbs. We don't need to eat carbs to survive. But that doesn't mean that you should just never have any carbs at all.

42:46You can drink water from a puddle outside, right, if you're dying of thirst. But I recommend the faucet over the puddle any day if that analogy makes sense. So if you're going to change your diet up, go see your doctor, basically. Anyway, it sounds like things are getting maybe a little bit better these days? Yes, there are baby steps. In fact, in 2015, the American Heart Association did drop much of their concern with cholesterol. In 2019, the American Diabetes Association updated their website to start talking about low carbs. And I would, like I said, I was just there and it's pretty good. They are definitely all on board with the low carb thing.

43:19Are people trying to get the word out? Because I know I've seen stuff like this on Instagram or whatever, but that's different than, hey, we need to overhaul our entire education system when it comes to food and nutrition. Right. I didn't actually see it, but there is apparently a South Park episode about flipping the food pyramid. Oh, well, good. That's how it starts, right? It always starts with Trey and Matt. Yeah. And there's another organization, Low Carb USA. They're a company promoting to flip the food pyramid. But what we need to do is we got to get doctors to implement it in their practice.

43:51Rates of obesity and diabetes are not sustainable. And if we change the foods, we could pretty much solve the problem. With all the fad diets and ever-changing opinions, I just, I sometimes wonder if nutrition, all this nutrition stuff isn't a bit of a scam. I mean, not that nutrition itself is a scam, but there's so much scammy stuff involved in it. Right. Which is why I got to look at the science because science is not a scam. Right. How the human body interacts with food is really complex, you know, so people can be forgiven for trying to figure this stuff out. We are literally powering an incredibly complex supercomputer robot with the stuff that grows out of the ground.

44:29So it's a miracle to me that this works at all. Yeah, that's a good way to look at it. We really are like a supercomputer robot eating things that are made from dirt, which is, yeah, impressive. Low fat was a dietary mistake. How do we know that low carb isn't another dietary mistake? Because the low-fat diet became popular because the evidence was ignored. The low-carb diet is seeing the light of day because the evidence is kind of irrefutable. And I'm not saying low-carbs as we understand it now will be the ultimate understanding of nutrition, but I bet you it's a step on the ladder up the knowledge tree.

45:09Should we expect institutional change at some point soon? Well, in 2006, the Journal of the American Medical Association delivered a blow to the theory of low-fat nutrition, and they published the results of the Women's Health Initiative trial. The results of the trial showed that a low-fat diet failed to prevent cardiovascular disease or cancer in women, even when followed continuously for eight years. If eight years of study doesn't convince you, why are institutions so resistant to this? Well, they have a lot of reasons to be resistant, like billions of reasons, which is how much in corporate donations the American Heart Association receives.

45:49Ah, right. Money. That always explains it. Well, thanks for telling the confusing story of how we went low-fat and fatless. And if we were to name that story, I would call it fatless shrugged. All right. Well, let's go eat a wheel of cheese, Regilio. Brie on me. Thanks, Michael. Thank you all for listening. Topic suggestions for future episodes can come straight to me. Jordan at jordanharbinger.com. Show notes at jordanharbinger.com. Transcripts are in the show notes. Advertisers, deals, discounts, ways to support the show. Once again, at jordanharbinger.com slash deals. I'm at jordanharbinger on Twitter and Instagram.

46:24You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. Michael Regilio is at michaelregilio on Instagram. Tour date's up now there as well. And we will have that linked in the show notes because nobody can spell Regilio. This show is created in association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Ian Baird, Milio Campo, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Our advice and opinions are our own, and I am a lawyer, but I am not your lawyer. Do your own research before implementing anything you hear on the show. Also, we might get a few things wrong here and there, especially on Skeptical Sunday.

46:55If you think we really dropped the ball or something, please do let us know we're pretty receptive to that. Y 'all know how to reach me, Jordan, at jordanharbinger.com. Remember, we rise by lifting others. Share the show with those you love. And if you found the episode useful, please share it with somebody else who could use a good dose of the skepticism we doled out today. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn. And we'll see you next time. Want to master the art of communication? Charles Duhigg, author of Super Communicators, reveals key strategies for enhancing your connections and conversations in this enlightening podcast episode.

47:28Why do some people manage to connect with everyone else so effortlessly? And then there's times when I'm talking to my wife, and like we cannot connect with each other. And it turns out it's just a set of skills, right? Like it's just literally a set of skills that super communicators know and that any of us can learn and become super communicators ourselves. Looping for understanding and has three steps. The first is ask a question, preferably a deep question. Secondly, repeat back what you just heard the person say in your own words. And thirdly, and this is the one everyone always forgets, ask if you got it right.

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48:36It's because we're basically in a conversation and we're saying to someone, I want to connect with you. Nobody is born a super communicator. That's what feels tiring is when you feel like you want to connect and you can't. Right? This isn't a behavior. This isn't a personality type. This is a tool that once we learn, we can use when we want to use it. Learn how to categorize conversations, improve active listening, and overcome communication barriers to build stronger relationships. Tune in and transform your interactions into meaningful connections on episode 963 of The Jordan Harbinger Show.

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