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Hey everyone, it's Mikki here, you're listening to Mikkipedia and this week on the podcast I speak to Nina Teicholz, a science journalist, bestselling author of The Big Fat Surprise and executive director of The Nutrition Coalition. So in this conversation, Nina sheds light on one of the most under-acknowledged crises in public health, the fragile scientific foundation of the US dietary guidelines, from which

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Many of the countries in the Western world base their own dietary guidelines around, including Australia and New Zealand. In essence, nutrition science continues to shape national policy despite being built on weak, inconsistent, and sometimes fundamentally flawed science. We discuss a recent paper published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, which found the systematic reviews used to support the guidelines to be of critically low quality.

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Nina breaks down why this matters, how key types of research have been excluded, and why the process lacks transparency and rigor. We explore how industry influence, institutional bias, and intellectual legacy all contribute to a status quo that continues to recommend reductions in red meat and saturated fat, despite the absence of robust evidence to support these claims.

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Nina also explains how these guidelines, which legally shape everything from school lunches to military rations, may be doing more harm than good when it comes to public health, particularly in the face of rising rates of obesity, diabetes and heart disease. So if you've ever wondered why nutrition policy seems so out of sync with both emerging science and common sense, or what it would take to fix it, this is an episode not to miss.

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I'm pretty sure a lot of you will be familiar with Nina. Nina is a science journalist and author of the New York Times bestseller, The Big Fat Surprise. She's been a pioneer in challenging the conventional wisdom on saturated fats, vegetable seed oils, the health halo around the Mediterranean diet, and the reliability of the US National Dietary Guidelines, of which we discuss today. Her work has been favorably reviewed by top medical journals, including The Lancet,

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her own writing has been published in academic journals such as the British Medical Journal, Nutrients and a journal of the National Academy of Sciences, as well as media outlets such as New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic and Economist. Tycult has also appeared on most major TV networks and many podcasts from NPR to Joe Rogan. She is a graduate of Stanford and Oxford universities.

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and in 2024 she received a PhD in nutrition focused on evidence-based nutrition policy. For years she ran a non-profit called the Nutrition Coalition aimed at updating US dietary guidelines with the current science. Her work can now be found in the column on Substack called Unsettled Science. I'm a subscriber, it is awesome for anyone who is really interested in the politics around nutrition science and also nutrition policy.

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Also, Nina has no commercial ties and has never received support from any industry for her work. So before we crack on into the show, I would like to remind you that the best place to support this podcast is to hit the subscribe button on your favorite podcast listening platform that increases the visibility of Micopedia in the midst of literally thousands of other podcasts out there. So more people get to learn from the experts that I have on the show.

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like Nina Thai Cult. Alright guys, enjoy the conversation.

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Nina, thank you so much for taking the time to speak to me this morning, your afternoon. I really appreciate it. And I see how much you do both behind the scenes and also I see it a lot on X as well in your sort of, I guess, fight towards both better nutrition communication. I see that as part of what you do, but also a better understanding of the science and the misrepresentation of it, I guess.

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Just to kick us off, because I do want to talk about the guidelines, I know you've shared this before, but I would love it if you could just share with us how you even got into nutrition, because whilst you have a PhD now, I'm pretty sure that's not your background. Yes, I really didn't know anything about nutrition. And in fact, my own diet, I was a vegetarian, I didn't eat meat, I thought butter was bad for me.

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but I am a journalist and I was assigned a series of stories in a magazine here called Gourmet on food. And it was like really one of the first series of stories really looking at the food industry critically. Cause talking about communications, know, diet has been treated as like a lifestyle light issue and there's very little investigation into the politics and the money.

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in the food industry and also the pharmaceutical industry behind the science and the messaging that we get around food. So this was a series of articles that I wrote. One of them was about trans fats. And I had no idea what those were. This is the early 2000s. Really, they were not well known. I did a story that was truly astonishing to me in that I started calling around to what's called, well,

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seed oil scientists. So now we know that the term seed oils, but I actually I brought that to the general public, the lay, you know, the lay public, because they had always been called vegetable oils. And I started and trans fats are created when you harden seed oils. So they're a byproduct of that hardening process, which is called hydrogenation. And they made oils which are otherwise largely useless in the food industry, they made them usable.

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because it made allowed products to be shelf stable, last a long time, the oil wouldn't go rancid. So in talking to these scientists, I realized just astonishing things. I spoke to scientists who were hired by the seed oil trade industry to go around and pector and criticize

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other scientists on stage presenting critical findings on seed oils. I talked to the head of the seed oil association who said, yes, that's we do everything we can to keep negative views out of the news. spoke to an early pioneer in investigating seed oils, woman named Mary Enoch, who talked about being slandered and attacked, having

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representatives of the margarine industry come to an editor's office where she had submitted a paper and tried to get it yanked. Just phenomenal stories and I couldn't believe my ears. I I grew up in a household where my father's an engineer. I always thought that science was like the kind of measured rational process of like hypothesis and antithesis and, you know, in basing your ideas on empirical observations. And here was a world

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of corruption politics, bullying tactics that really continue to this day. But that was my entree into this. That article got me a book contract. I was supposed to write a book about trans fats, but I started taking this deep dive into cholesterol, dietary fat, and

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as anybody who's looked at these topics, it's just a rabbit hole. It took me nine years reading thousands of papers, interviewing hundreds and hundreds of experts all over the world to then write a book that includes, part of it is about trans fats, but it really was about the whole story about dietary fat. I good fats, bad fats, how we had gotten that wrong, the history of the low-fat diet, how that had come to be our recommendation.

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the politics of it. I have a chapter on the Mediterranean diet because that's about olive oil and the misconceptions about that. So it turned out to be a totally different book than I had originally intended. But that's how I got into it. And now I haven't been able to separate myself because it continues to be so fascinating. Yeah. Well, it's good at least that you're still continue to be as passionate now as you were back then. And it's not that you just can't extract yourself because you're too deep in. So Nina,

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in terms of a timeline, because of course, Gary Torbs, a really good friend of yours, and a journalist as well, was also uncovering information around carbohydrates. So were you and Gary aware of each other? How does that timeline work? I'm just quite curious. So I was working on my book while he was writing Good Calories, Bad Calories, and he had

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We used to get together, he was then living in New York City, we would get together every once in while and have lunch and he would say, you're the only person I can talk to about LDL cholesterol. And we would talk about really nitty-gritty topics. mean, there just was not the community, anything like, there was no community on these topics. There were a few researchers like Eric Westman, Steve Finney, Jeff Rollock. There was just nobody.

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So we were friends. I read early versions of his book and edited it for him. And his book came out in 2007, mine, and then he helped me with, continued to help me with my book. His book really influenced mine. And well, really what his, his work coming up to his book influenced mine. I write about him in his book. think, you know, I was accused of plagiarizing his book by somebody or other. And the reality is,

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I mean, I not only acknowledge him, but I think I'm the only person to really profile him and his landmark groundbreaking role in really bringing the carbohydrate insulin hypothesis to life. mean, it had existed, but he really compiled the data in a way to make that compelling to researchers. So I give him, as best I could, his place in history.

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And then my book came out in 2014. And the difference between our books, mine was really if there's a main through line in my book, it's the story of saturated fats, how we got saturated fats wrong and why it was wrong to replace them with seed oils. What are the problems with seed oils? Yeah, okay. Now that's super interesting because of course they're both so interwoven. But as you point out, they're, you know, they're different issues of sort of of the same big issue.

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What I, how I feel Nina is like, cause I'm a nutritionist who studied at a university and you know, where you get the really good information. And I almost feel like for the first 10 years of my career or 15, I really had my blinkers on to any other information that was out there because I had that sort of background university. You get very arrogant about where you learn your information. And for,

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I mean, there is a number of reasons which made me sort of change my view or my mind, but I feel like this is the issue almost in nutrition. There's real protection of the patch. Like people can't appreciate how someone outside of nutrition originally can actually uncover a lot of what you had because you don't have the training, which is just so misguided. Cause I feel like the training itself actually blinds you to what's in front of

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Yeah, I actually think it's fair for experts who studied something to believe that they are experts and that outsiders don't relatively don't know, don't have the training, don't have the science. I I don't think that's unfair. I just think that every field that I have studied and obviously including nutrition there once a hypothesis becomes accepted as the dominant hypothesis, it becomes sort of like crystallized and it

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it's almost like it becomes set in concrete because then you have funding institutions will only fund that. You don't want to be a dissident because you will be disinvited from conferences. Your papers won't get published. You'll fall out of your professional community. So there are a lot of disincentives to challenging that conventional wisdom. In nutrition, I just think it's so obvious that our preferred

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advice on a healthy diet is not working. I mean, it's just obvious to anyone. And so it really demands examining. I mean, as a note about nutritionists, I remember the story somebody said, who was a nutritionist in the United States. And she said, Well, you know, in my field, like all the women in their 20s are slim and look great. And she said, then you go to the meetings of the nutrition association and

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the leadership is all huge and fat. And in fact, when you go to search that leadership, you cannot find any pictures of them. Like all their pictures are cropped like this, you know, because you can't find any full body pictures of the leadership because they look terrible. there's, you know, many are over or I guess most are overweight. And so even inside the community,

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those observations are like right in front of your eyes. These are the people who are have to be following their own advice because they truly believe in it and yet they are not healthy. um, you know, and now we live in a time where we, there is a larger distrust in general of public health institutions. Um, so there's a kind of opening up of rethinking things, which I think is healthy in this field. It really has become too entrenched.

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Yeah, no, I completely agree. it's, it is interesting what you say about the guideline. Like it's quite clear that the guidelines aren't working because if they were, we wouldn't have the health crisis, the global health crisis that we have. Or be it, I do see some, you know, some of the detractors or people who criticize the likes of this type of thinking. They're like, well, you know, if you look at the timeline for the obesity crisis, for example, it sort of hits it about

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I don't know, it starts to go up at about 1980 or thereabouts when the dietary guidelines were 77 or something when they came in. of the criticisms is, well, it hasn't been in place long enough to have that type of effect on obesity at that point. So it can't possibly have been the guidelines that sort of kick started off. what would you say to that?

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Let's look at the facts. Obesity in America was 13, 12, 13 % is going along at 12 or 13%. The dietary comes in as a policy in 1980. So it starts to be implemented in 1980. And in that very year, the curve turns upward sharply. now, I mean, the latest number that we have is 2016 when the obesity rate was 43%.

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So it must be much higher now, right? Just consider the lockdowns, COVID. So we might be at 50 % obesity and that huge increase has happened under the guidelines. So I mean, the idea that we haven't reduced obesity, the more reasonable explanation is that the guidelines caused obesity. The other argument that is commonly used against the guidelines is to say, well, people just don't follow them.

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That's the most common argument that I hear. But if you look at the best available government data on Americans, and I've also looked for Canada and the UK, and it's the same story, we have in every category of food measured, we have followed the guidelines. So from 1970 to 2014, which is the only data we have. Americans reduced red meat by 28%, beef by 35%, whole milk by 78%.

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9%, butter is down 15%, eggs are down. No matter what category you look at, we've done the right thing. And we've increased by 20 to 30 % fruits and vegetables. We increased seed oils by almost 90%. So we've done a pretty good job. We've increased whole grains. I mean, we have done a pretty good job of following the guidelines according to the best available government data. So

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I think there really isn't an argument to be made that people aren't following the guidelines. I guess also for what it's worth, we've got 50 % of the population is being obese, then the guidelines aren't appropriate for close to the majority, well, close to the majority, but for at least half of the population. So surely the population-based guidelines should change according to the health issues that people are experiencing as a whole.

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Yeah, mean, let's say is obesity, chronic diseases related to diet is up at 88%. That's from a few years ago. And then another more recent estimate is 93 % have markers of metabolic dysfunction. So the vast majority of our population has a diet related disease. And yet our guidelines are only for prevention, not for treatment. they really, so the expert committees

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don't even look at the science on weight loss, on type 2 diabetes reversal, on reversal of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. That does not even inform their formulation of the guidelines. Even if you looked at prevention only, their guidelines don't prevent disease. But I'm just saying, there's actually not even a consideration of the science. So that's why they've never considered the science on low carbohydrate diets. I mean, they did, but then they buried it.

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So, and then, well, they did once, then they buried that science. have Freedom of Information Act obtained emails from people saying we should try to stick that finding on low carbohydrate diets, showing them to be better for weight loss compared to low fat. We should put that in the methodology section where it won't be considered part of the results. And the Harvard expert on this email thread pipes up and says, I don't think we should be burying the data.

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So then they said they reviewed low carb diets again in 2020 and they couldn't find a single study on low carbohydrate diets at a time when there were maybe 100 studies on low carbohydrate diets, including one authored by a member of the expert committee herself had been an author, but they decided they couldn't find any studies. I mean, I think

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Evidence like that suggests there's really active suppression of low carbohydrate diet science going on. I guess the big question is, why would they do that? So what is the end goal? Well, there are numerous possibilities. You can only speculate. One is that they've been recommending one diet, low carbohydrate is

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very different, if not diametrically opposed to what they've been recommending, they would be in a position of having to say, we got it terribly wrong and we may have caused all your diseases. In fact, there's some language that I've been able to dig up in the expert reports about the dangers of low fat diet, how it increases the risk of heart disease, and yet the diet that they recommend is still de facto low fat. So there may be this real nervousness about

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being so very wrong, it increases distrust in our public institutions. There are many reasons that a large federal agency would not want to reverse itself. I think it's undeniable that the food and drug industries must have some kind of influence there. I mean, I did with a team of authors the only ever systematic peer-reviewed paper on the conflicts of interest on the Dietary Guideline Committee. That was the one in 2020.

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We found that 95 % of the 20 person committee had a conflict with food or pharma. Over half the committee had 30 such conflicts or more, and one person on the committee had 152 conflicts. We also unearthed, or I did, that the very office that runs the dietary guidelines has partnerships with more than 100 food companies, like direct partnerships where they agree to collaborate. So, you know, I...

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It's undeniable. has to be, there's influence of food and pharma at the US Department of Agriculture. Yeah. And what about at universities as well? Like I feel like it's well known in sort of the low carb space, if you like, that Harvard University, for example, is very, it feels very biased towards plant-based nutrition. Or be it, if you sort of talk to maybe someone who has a general interest in nutrition, they almost possibly can't.

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the idea that such a well-revered university would have such sort of bias. So is it just, again, money? Is it just money? Well, Harvard is interesting because the head of the nutrition department there is somebody named, or was for more than 20 years, somebody named Walter Willett. And for those of you who are interested, I write a column on a platform called Substack.

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My column is called Unsettled Science and I did a very deep dive into Walter Willett. I think he's quite interesting because there are more than one thing going on with him. Since 1998, he said he believed everybody should adopt a vegetarian, if not a vegan diet and everybody should stop eating meat. I believe he was influenced by

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the Seventh Day Adventist studies, which are famous studies in the US that seem to show that vegetarians were healthier than, Seventh Day Adventists were healthier than non-vegetarians. That was a very, very flawed study. And I go into that in my book quite a bit. But I think that was the influence. again, I'm just, oh, he also was very influenced by Ansel Keys, who many people know was the original kind of founder of

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Mediterranean diet and the idea that we should limit saturated fats. In fact, in Walter Willett's office when I interviewed him, he had a picture on the wall of him shaking hands with Ansel Keys. That was like the one featured picture he had. I think he just had this bias that he and when he talked about it, he talked about going vegetarian as he did.

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and the superiority of that diet. He really didn't have any data on which it was based. So it wasn't based on a foundation. It certainly wasn't based on his own research. It was not his own findings or... But then, you know, as his career goes on, and I I discovered at the Harvard School of Public Health, massive conflicts of interest. mean, they get money from a ton of money from the nut.

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Companies they get money. I can't remember now all the different food companies they get from they also get a lot of money from the climate change folks like Gates Foundation and other Groups that are trying to fight climate change by reducing meat so You could say he's taking money and it's sort of a

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pay to play thing. But I think in this case, it's probably that they were accepting money that was aligned with their views and they did not see it particularly as a conflict. I mean, I did find out that they took maybe half a million dollars from various nut industry interests and in that same period of time, published papers finding that nuts are better for health than something else, whatever they compared it to. So

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You know, there may be a direct kind of pay for play science going on there, but I think the larger picture is that they really, at least Walter Willett truly believes in this way of eating. Yeah, yeah. So interesting. And Christopher Gardner, I'm not sure where he sits. I can't recall actually what university. Yeah, Stanford. So I feel like there's similarities there actually. Yeah, actually I also did a column on him.

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And it's sort of around, the opening is all about his vegan twin study with Netflix, which was clearly, I mean, I have to say that was a rigged study. It was funded by animal rights interest groups. It was his entire center at Stanford is underwritten by Beyond Meat. he's also a case, and this is why it's interesting to try to understand motivations.

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He's motivated by animal rights. was involved or interested in animal rights before he was even in nutrition research. And then there is this, I think, almost like tribal factor of wanting to join the cool group. Who are the cool kids with all the money? Where do you get invited to climate activist galas and events? Where do you get, you know, where it's, it's the elites, the money elites in our country are

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interested in, you know, far more interested in animal rights, climate change and the vegetarian diet. And he, you know, I think he felt like he wanted to feel like he's doing good with his diet, right? Being an activist, now likes that's what he lectures on is sort of the activism angle, including labor rights issues. So he's really interested in diet as a vehicle for social change and, and, and is able to move in this much more chic

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you know, fun, well, well moneyed machine. I mean, similarly, like you take a guy like Dari Mozaffarian at Tufts. I've also written a lot about him. But you know, he's he was he takes tons of money from food companies, he aligned squarely with their interests. And then he's invited to participate in the whatever the global food policy elite group.

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World Economic Forum. So he's hobnobbing at DeVos. So it really opens doors for you in a major way if you get on board, not only with the corporate interests, but the associated ideologies that go along with that. By the way, the other people that are on that panel with him is like the CEO of Unilever, the CEO of Pepsi. mean, what you see here, not to go too far down this rabbit hole, but I mean, what you see here is an alignment of

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corporate interests with these social or planetary justice issues that are convenient to their products. They have a whole series of issues that are now help save the planet and do that by eating Unilever products. Yeah, it's super interesting because of course people listening to this, if this is news to them, it might sound

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conspiracy theory like, you know, like, because that's, anything that's outside what you think you know, or believe or what that, what the, the sort of consensus if you like is, sounds like it's conspiracy like, albeit I subscribe to your sub stack, Nina, and I have read your, your articles and, and your books. So I, you know, and understand more, but actually having that conversation with people, it's quite challenging. Yeah.

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I mean, I'm very sensitive to that. Even though now, you know, we've had a lot of conspiracy theories in the past couple of years that have turned out to be true. But so but I, you know, I and I'm aware that I have a lot of academics following me and reading my work and a lot of nutrition scientists who are, I assume, in, you know, liberal and liberal universities. And so I've tried very hard.

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not to make allegations and to be very conservative in what I say and to document everything like crazy. Like when I say that about the World Economic Forum, I have all the links and I've backed them up and I have screenshots of everything. So I try not to speculate about people's motivations or why they're doing. I just try to lay out the facts. Yeah. And then you just leave it for for individuals reading it.

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to sort of draw their own conclusions essentially. Yeah, I mean, I try. I would say like maybe I'm not always successful. And it's easy to feel angry about the degree of wrongheadedness, bad science, corruption, you name it. I try to keep that out of my writing. And it's difficult as well when you've got the likes of really big money behind animal rights and behind fake meat and vegetarian diets and they bring

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to the public these very compelling and very well curated documentaries on Netflix. No one should get their nutrition information from Netflix, but it's very hard not to be swayed by some of the, like the vegan twins study, like that movie, The Game Changers and things like that. Like people are very easily sort of led by those messages.

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Yeah, I think people are getting to be a little more savvy about that. It's clear that documentaries are used for propaganda purposes and they appear to be even handed. I think my awakening to that was the movie What the Health. Oh, yes. Which for Diet Doctor, the post is still there for Diet Doctor, I went through every single scientific claim that they made and documented it and showed that the studies that they were citing did not say what they did or they weren't, you know,

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controlled or it was just finding all the flaws in the science. And there really wasn't a single claim that they made that was grounded in any scientific fact. And that really woke me up. mean, and everybody knows in the PR business that storytelling is how you reach people's minds.

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people's hearts open up through storytelling and then you reach their minds and that's the way to do it. I mean, I'd like to think this conversation would influence people more, but that is not the way that people change their mind as much. Yeah. And you know, Nina, some, I mean, if I go back to the dietary guidelines, some people would even argue that there's no require, why is there a requirement for guidelines in the first place? can you sort of just describe why it actually is important to

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have a fundamental look at what we're basing these on? Well, if the question is why should we have dietary guidelines, I would say the world would have been a much better place if we had never had them. And the US was the first to launch that idea, again, in 1980. Now that we have had them for so long and they've been so wrong, I think in response to people who argue that we should just get rid of them today, I say this reluctantly, but I think there's a role to get

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the guidelines right and to use the power of government to inform people about a truly healthy diet, which you have to reverse 65 years of misinformation. So actually, if you go back to the original wrong guideline by the American Heart Association, we're talking 85 years. So there and the nutrition information landscape is so confusing.

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and it's so hard to know whom to trust. I think there is a role for a credible guidelines based on good science to try to reverse that misinformation. And then once you do that, I'm all for abolishing them. Well, it's hard, like particularly with regards to, I believe there was like a recent paper in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition that looked at systematic reviews under the US dietary guidelines. And to your point,

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found that pretty much the evidence was critically low quality evidence. Yes, actually, my group, the Nutrition Coalition, funded that paper. Oh, I see. Okay, yes. It came out of a conversation that I was having with a nutrition, a former dietary guideline committee member saying, you know, the hallmark of good, there have been a lot of criticisms of the guidelines that have now been published, and I've been on a lot of those papers.

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and including a report by the National Academy of Sciences, but the hallmark of good science is being able to replicate it. So we sort of hatched this idea, let's try to replicate some of the systematic reviews that are used to support the dietary guidelines. So this nutrition scientist, so I just funded it, I didn't have anything to do with the design or anything of the study, but they went off and they selected eight key reviews on the dietary guidelines that are,

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called our dietary patterns that we have. he looked at, do these dietary patterns prevent obesity, heart disease, or any other kind of disease, diabetes? They could not even get past the very first step of the literature search, which is when you go out calling papers, looking for papers to review. So they found three times more papers using the same search strings as the

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USDA, the agency that does this work, they found three times more papers than the USDA had using the same search strings. Actually, they found all kinds of problems with the search strings, like they were missing quotation marks and they were, you know, they just weren't doing a proper search. Well, imagine trying, so that's the first stage of replication. You can't go any further. Like imagine making a recipe, you've got three times more ingredients.

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than you had previously, there's no way that's going to come out to be the same. So they found those eight systematic reviews to be of critically low quality for various reasons. And also the other quote is subpar. So that really confirms what the National Academy of Sciences already found about the USDA methodology. It's just not good science in whichever way you cut it. It's not good science.

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Yeah, and Nina, as I understand it, because here in New Zealand, I mean, they barely bother thinking about diet and guidelines and never put any money. The last time we had a national nutrition survey was in 2008. And then there was a submission back in 2011 that they updated the guidelines, but anyone who submitted, and we were a part of a group that submitted the change according to the type of diet principles that we're familiar with, and it was just like thrown out.

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But how effective is the process in the states where they come out with the evidence for the guidelines that haven't yet been set, and then you have the opportunity to comment? How effective is that process? Well, I just want to say the Australian dietary guidelines are being revised right now. And that process is going on. The public comment period, I have found to be

37:12
like little more than window dressing. In the sense that I once, when I was working as the director of the nutrition coalition, we organized thousands and thousands of people to send in comments for that. And basically the main message was we need a review of low carbohydrate diets. When the USDA reported on the number of comments, the desire for low carb was the top most commented point issue.

37:42
And yet they didn't do a review on low carbohydrate diets. So they just ignored, they ignored us even. mean, this was the voice of the people, you know, and this is not, you know, a huge part of those comments come from industry, the food industry submits them. And then there's all the robo comments. But our comments, each and every one of them different and individual.

38:08
and honestly submitted were completely ignored. So after that, I still submit a comment myself just to participate in the process, but I don't think it has any meaningful impact. Yeah, that's so interesting. How do they get away with burying the science for low carb diets? Like how does that actually happen? Well, I mean, I think what we're seeing is the collapse of our media.

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in reporting on science. mean, there has never been in the United States a mainstream media story about low carbohydrate diets and their power to reverse type two diabetes and hypertension. Never. I see. and you know, and you see the same thing, actually you see the same thing in the media on the right, although that's changing a little bit. I mean, you can only speculate but something like

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70 % of the media is funded by pharma. What is pharma's interest? is not in, you know, its main profit centers are those, it's chronic disease. It's somebody that you get on four or five medications for the rest of their life and they become a profit center for you. So they're not interested in reversal of chronic disease. So our media has collapsed and maybe equally disturbing is the fact that there's nobody inside the world of nutrition science

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who's calling each other out. So part of that is what I told you earlier, stepping out of line in your professional community means that you get ostracized in very meaningful ways. Like you don't get research funds, you get disinvited from conferences, you lose your status and even your ability to do science. Much of the nutrition research in the US is funded by the government, including a lot of nutrition.

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science centers are actually USDA centers. So that's the same agency that runs the guidelines. So those people are in danger of losing their jobs by speaking out. I think there's, mean, I know that there's, because all the papers that I've written with these top scientists who are willing to speak out, they're doing it at the

40:29
end of their careers, they're not expecting to try to move up the ladder, they're secure in their funding in one way or the other, or they're from outside of our country. I mean, it's really hard to pull together scientists themselves. There's just a lot of fear and trepidation. actually, that was part of the work in the Nutrition Coalition was to find the tiny band of courageous scientists who was willing to do something.

40:56
Yeah, and they've all been punished in one way or another for it, or I'd say most of them. I one, here's just another story for you. When I started the Nutrition Coalition, I had top notch expert scientists on my board. And, and they were all like, a lot of them were former Dietary Guideline committee members. So a

41:21
something called the Center for Science and the Public Interest in the US, which is a vegetarian leaning group. They called up all the board members, they threatened them, they put them under pressure. The one board member who didn't resign immediately, which was Ron Krause, had a hit-top article on him in the Hill newspaper in DC, listing all of his conflicts of interest. Like just imagine why you would want to step out of line when you know that will be the punishment. Yeah, yeah. That is just...

41:51
Yeah, that's just crazy. Nina, with the change in administration, do you have any hope that there will be a shift in the diet guidelines? I think there's a lot of energy there with the movement that Secretary Kennedy started, Make America Healthy Again. What will come of that, I truly do not know yet. I just, I don't know what the energy will be.

42:19
the political will to change the dietary guidelines at this point because it threatens so, so much. There's many food industries that are threatened. Um, I really don't know at this point what they'll do. Yeah. It's, I follow someone called Vinay Prasad, who I'm sure you're, yeah. And he did a pretty good piece earlier this year saying, despite the best of intentions, he would be

42:49
surprise if Senator Kennedy got anywhere because of the number of blocks that he might be up against over the next four years, which is, which I can imagine that seems like an almost likely scenario, I guess. Yeah, I mean, the corruption is really deep. And it's been around for decades. And those folks are not just going to walk away. I think it's extraordinary.

43:15
that Trump was able to get in so many of his cabinet picks given the opposition. mean, Secretary Kennedy's hearings. mean, anybody should listen to them because half of our senators seem like they're just spouting big pharma lines right out of a big pharma propaganda department or their PR department. It's shocking to see that. So I don't know, you know, it's going to be a fight.

43:44
And we really don't know what will come out of it. think there are in the food area. mean, so Senator Kennedy heads up HHS, the Department of Health and Human Services, and that addresses. So under him is all the health care services that we receive and drug administration. But the food part is at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, where he is not. And so he does not have any direct control over that agency.

44:14
So that is a bigger unknown to me. Yeah, yeah. Well, that's super interesting. Nina, you mentioned in passing-ish seed oils. And I've got to say, of all of the things that people tend to fight about the most in nutrition is carbohydrate and of course seed oils. And I follow a lot of people, a lot of smart people, some of whom will just argue to their bloom in the face that

44:44
Seed oils are not dangerous and in fact, if anything, they've been found to enhance health. But of course I know the likes of the work of yourself, of Dr. Kate Shanahan and I mean, others as well would argue against that. not to spend too much time, but I am interested to know sort of what your thoughts are and I mean, I know what your thoughts are, but for you to describe, to explain it for people.

45:14
I, this is a little bit of boasting, but I was, you know, I put the term seed oils on the map and was the first person to write about their history in our food supply and also the first person to put together all the studies and issues around oxidation of seed oils and why and how that drives inflammation. I also found all the data from clinical trials showing that they cause higher death rates from cancer. So

45:44
anybody interested in that, I'm not suggesting you buy my book, but it's there. There's also an excerpt called Toxic Oil. I think it's called Toxic Oils on the Weston A. Price Foundation website, which you can read for free, although the references aren't there. So the idea that seed oils are beneficial for human health really all rests on their ability to lower your LDL cholesterol. And there's a few problems with

46:13
that, I mean, there's a paper, a great paper by Zoe Harcombe showing that yes, it lowers LDL cholesterol because it just replaces that cholesterol in your cell membrane wall, which actually has also been shown to lead to heart failure. So, and also as we know from the work, there's really good work on this now, but I mean, LDL cholesterol, I mean, just as many people have high

46:39
LDL cholesterol is low LDL cholesterol end up having a heart attack. It's not the most predictive risk so called risk factor for heart disease far like 7x more predictive is your your state of insulin resistance. So the reliance on LDL is a like why we're so focused on that as a whole conversation, but um,

47:03
That's the only mechanism by which seed oils are supposed to work, is this ability to lower cholesterol. Even so, in all the studies, the large randomized control clinical trials called the core trials, they, from the 1960s and 70s all over the world, where they replaced saturated fats with seed oils, these are intervention studies on human beings, they found that it had no effect

47:33
on cardiovascular or total mortality. So that's the most rigorous kind of data on humans in large, relatively long-term clinical trials. There was also little to no effect on cardiovascular disease. And the more, the greater the saturated, the people who were in the high saturated fat group had lower risk of stroke. That's also been...

48:01
found in epidemiological studies. So the big trials to test seed oils did not show benefit. you have to look at things like cardiovascular events and mortality because those are the health outcomes. And the reason that people keep arguing for seed oils is their ability to lower LDL. LDL is just a predictor of...

48:27
those other outcomes. If you have the actual outcomes yourself, that is much more rigorous data, right? So, and meanwhile, in all those core trials, well, there's six of them, they found that people on the seed oil diet died of higher rates from cancer. So again, rigorous data showing cause and effect causation, showing that people eating more seed oils died at higher rates of cancer. That's pretty rigorous data.

48:57
So where I think the argument gets a little, where the data is squidgier, less firm, is it's not that there's nothing there, but I just don't think it's quite conclusive yet for, especially not for a population-wide recommendation, but I'm not sure that seed oils cause obesity and diabetes. You can reverse diabetes by going on a low carbohydrate diet, even if it has seed oils.

49:24
there's another experiment where they this is Isabella is her last name Cooper in the UK where she she she actually gave people unhealthy diets she could make people I may be getting this wrong I think she could make people become more insulin resistance with carbohydrates but not seed oils so that that kind of data work but it's you know it's not a lot of data but it just works against this idea that that

49:54
Seed oils is the cause of all chronic diseases. And do you think that it's possibly the reason why it feels like it's everywhere in social media? And this is a big argument is because those people who are opposed to seed oils are arguing that they are the root of all evil. And they're the thing that we should be focused on rather than actually focusing on the facts as you laid out in your book and is that you've just sort of described to us. Like are they just too far down, too extreme, I guess, in their view?

50:25
Yeah, I mean, I think people like to latch on to like single explanations for everything or they make their careers off of it. Like they can go on TV or they can. I mean, it's a platform for certain of our in our influencer community. Seed Oils is their main platform and they've done very well by it and they talk all over the world. And so I'm not, that sounds...

50:51
like I'm being cynical, but I just think that people like to latch onto a single explanation or they base their brand on it in some way. And there are people who experience disease remission just by going off of seed oils. I just don't think that's what the scientific data show for the rest of us to assume that's true. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

51:20
Yeah, super interesting. Like I was, I was listening actually to Dr. Kate Shanahan's book on, on a few on, and I just was listening to it. Um, also was out on a run, so I didn't do the whole thing, but there was a lot of, uh, what she describes is exactly what you pointed out in your work as to the, um, the scientists who are employed to sort of heckle those other scientists.

51:48
who actually show the increased levels of inflammation and oxidation and also the creation of these other things which are carcinogenic or whatever. I think where people get confused is that, as we've said, that people just hang their hat on this one thing. And in fact, diet quality itself across the board isn't great. And that's, guess, what other people argue. It's not the seed oils. It's actually seed oils are part of ultra processed food.

52:18
And too many of us have too much of our diets that are based on octoprosis. Yeah, I think that's a deflection argument. I yeah, interesting. There's rigorous data to show they probably cause cancer. I think the data is strong to show that they probably contribute to heart disease through oxidation, which drives inflammation and other diseases of inflammation, which are more than just heart disease. I think the other data is not strong.

52:48
And the people defending seed oils are trying, I mean, there's many deflection tactics out there in the media. You know, I'm trained to spot them now, but they're trying to take the attention away from what the main body of science tells us, which is that total carbohydrate reduction is what reverses disease, diet-related disease.

53:17
total carbohydrates. what are, let's just, I'll give you a few of those, those, I guess, propaganda or deflection techniques, right? So good carbs, bad carbs, bunch of experts talking like some carbs are good. Well, you know, the reality is they all turn to sugar at the moment that you eat them or, you know, fruit is healthy or,

53:42
I actually think, and this is an unpopular view, but I'm going to say it anyway, I think the term ultra processed food is a corporate technique to deflect attention away again from the total carbohydrate science. And the reason that I say that is number one, when you have multiple articles on the same topic in every major news media all the time, every week, the only way it gets there is corporate money. You know, that's just the reality.

54:12
And this is from long, long time media observation. The other thing is that what is ultra processed food? There's no good definition, so you can't test it. So you'll never have really good data on ultra processed food. And third, what are news stories illustrated with talking on ultra processed food? Almost always ultra processed meats. So I think it's a term that could be weaponized against processed meats, which you know,

54:41
It's good to have meat of any kind of any food product without a lot of ingredients, but let's face it. I cured processed meats is how people have been eating meat on the go in school, you know, for a very long time. It's the main source of protein for our kids in the US in schools. So, but if you can replace that with your crackers or your whatever grain based food, that's a win for the food industry.

55:12
So I'm not saying that's happening, but I can say like that's a potential motive. Yeah. Oh, that's so interesting. And that's such a good point. And I think about it from how Coca-Cola is able to deflect their role in obesity by sponsoring school sports and doing their bit and getting people more active, know, distracting people from the fact that they're,

55:37
They're part of the problem, basically. Soda Science, think, is a book that I've brought on my shelf ready to read about that whole thing. You can never underestimate the power of these companies to come up with good ideas. And Ultra Processed Food has been incredibly successful. mean, everybody loves it. Nobody knows exactly what they're talking about. It's like, you you'll know it when you see it, but is it?

56:04
I mean, you can't, there's no definition that makes any sense. And I've written about that in my sub stack too, if anybody wants to go read that. Yeah. Oh, interesting Nina. And of course I'll put links to your sub stack and to where people can buy your book in the show notes. what's your focus this year? Nina, do you have like a bit of a plan for where you're putting your attentions to? Yeah. Well, I think, you know, given that there is this potential opportunity to change food policy,

56:34
I'm just going to train my efforts as much as possible into doing whatever we can. I'm with a group of people and we're coming up with ideas and we're trying to, and we want to do pilot projects to reverse type two diabetes in Medicaid patients. We want to try getting a few school lunch programs, like this pilot projects to show that they can be fixed and trying to use that to feed up to our dietary guideline federal policy.

57:04
um, to, uh, you know, to enact nationwide change. I mean, it's just, I don't know what will happen, but it's just too big of an opportunity to let it pass. Oh, well, Nina, it's awesome. And it's so great to see you do all of the work. mean, it takes a, it takes a really strong individual to do all of the things that you do and to like lead the people that you lead. So, um, but without you and people like you.

57:33
like nothing would change. So I'm really appreciative of everything you do. thank I'm lucky I'm low carb because you know, I it makes me happier. I think it makes me a happier person. I'm not dissuaded. Which is great. Otherwise you're right. You'd be irritable and you'd have no energy to do anything. I totally agree. Nina, so can you just let people know where to find your sub stack actually? I think that would be such a great resource. Yes. It's you just search

58:01
Substack and then you search unsettled science and you'll find it. I have to say apologies in advance I don't write that frequently because I just have so much else going on but that's a place to find me. I'm also on Twitter And Those are the main places that I hang out when I can. Yeah. No, that's great Nina. Thank you so much for your time I really appreciate it Mickey. It's a delight to talk to you. Thank you

58:40
Anyway, hopefully you really enjoyed diving deep into nutrition, science and policy with Nina and I really love chatting to her. She was so generous with her time and information and she's just so smart. I 100 % recommend both her book, The Big Fat Surprise and of course her sub-stack, Unsettled Science. It's a really great way to sort of keep up to date and I've...

59:08
got links in the show notes to where you can find Nina, which also links to both her book and her sub stack column. Next week on the podcast, I speak to Cliff, Cliff Harvey on ketogenic diets, and we have a good riff on nutrition as we always do. Love my conversations with Cliff. Until then though, you can catch me over on Facebook at @MikkiWillidennutrition.

59:38
Instagram, threads and X @MikkiWilliden or head to my website MikkiWilliden.com I have a vegetarian webinar coming up to help those people who follow a plant-based diet optimize their diet for protein and micronutrients. Super important, particularly in the face of needing more protein. It's harder to get when you don't have access to the most bioavailable forms.

01:00:07
Alright team, have a great week, talk to you soon. Bye.