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  • Let me tell you the story of how one man accidentally gave us the obesity epidemic, kept cardiovascular

  • disease growing, made billions for the pharmaceutical industry and programmed us to be afraid of

  • fat and cholesterol.

  • All the benefits from skim milk, low fat snacks, and cholesterol lowering Cheerios that were

  • sold to you are based on hypotheses made by a man named Ancel Keys.

  • The idea that we should avoid saturated fat and cholesterol at all costs comes from the

  • Keys’ “Diet-Heart HypothesisandLipid Hypothesis”.

  • These ideas come from him analyzing the data from 7 countries which showed that when you

  • plotted incidence of heart attacks against fat consumption you see that the countries

  • that ate more fat had more heart attacks.

  • It was simple, you could draw a straight line through the data points which showed more

  • fat equaled more heart attacks.

  • Pretty straight forward, you eat more fat, you get fat, your cholesterol rises, your

  • arteries get clogged, and you have a heart attack.

  • Ancel Keys got this accepted by the USDA, the American Medical Association, the American

  • Diabetes Association, the American Heart Association and off went the anti-fat anti-cholesterol

  • movement.

  • The only catch here is that there weren’t only 7 countries for which data was available,

  • there were 22 countries.

  • When you factor in the remaining countries there is no straight line to be drawn.

  • Maybe Keys had access to the remaining data, maybe he didn’t, but he sure worked fast

  • to have his recommendations put in place.

  • The lack of good evidence didn’t go unnoticed, though: Dr. George Mann, one of the researchers

  • on the Framingham study which was actually supposed to bolster this cholesterol theory,

  • said, “Dietary fat is not the determinant of either high cholesterol or coronary heart

  • diseaseand ‘”the diet heart hypothesis is the greatest scam ever perpetrated on the

  • American public.“

  • That’s a bold claim but by the way, it’s still calledhypothesisbecause it’s

  • never been proven.

  • Youre probably up to date with recent health information and maybe even OK with the idea

  • of a low carb diet, but chances are youre still not completely comfortable with fat.

  • After all, weve been programmed to associate saturated fats withArtery Clogging

  • and weve seen the commercials where they do something like clog a drain with bacon

  • fat.

  • Also Butter, Lard and Coconut Oil solidify at room temperature so it’s pretty easy

  • logic that those solid fats will clog your arteries.

  • The problem with these images is that you can melt those saturated fats easily in your

  • hand, like I'm doing here, and the temperature in your body is much hotter; and the thing

  • that clogs your arteries resulting in a heart attack is not an accumulation of fat.

  • Fat doesn’t even stay intact in the body- your stomach bile works kind of like the dish

  • liquid I’m dropping here.

  • It breaks the fat up into these small droplets..

  • Then it gets wrapped inside carrier molecules called lipoproteins.

  • Fat is never technically even in the bloodstream, it’s always transported inside of a lipoprotein

  • shell.

  • When you look at health from an evolutionary standpoint, the concept of engineering fat

  • out of our foods for our health doesn’t make much sense.

  • Our brains, which is what got us so far, are the most metabolically expensive organs that

  • we have: consuming 25% of the adult metabolic budget.

  • To adjust for the high energy cost of a large brain, our guts had to shrink because they

  • too required a lot of energy to run.

  • So, our gut became less efficient at getting enough energy from fibrous foods and was more

  • dependent on more bio-available, nutrient-dense and energy dense foods.

  • Cooking food of course was an important development for us too, but fat still takes first place

  • for most calorie dense nutrient at 9 calories per gram.

  • So fat would then be a very valuable macronutrient that we would get as much of as our environment

  • allowed.

  • There is even evidence that suggests homo sapiens may have eaten most of the fat on

  • an animal before even touching the meat.

  • Sure we have plenty of fruits and vegetables that have been cultivated to be more nutrient

  • and calorie dense and we spend much less time moving around, so ravenously eating fat is

  • hardly necessary.

  • However it’s not very plausible that a macronutrient that used to be so important to us is now

  • killing so many of us .

  • Timothy Olsen showcases the efficiency of fat in spectacular fashion.

  • He holds the record for the Western 100 Endurance run, a 100 mile ultra distance race in California

  • that includes an 18,000 feet climb and 23,000 feet descent.

  • He said he used to consume dozens of sports gels throughout his races to keep him going,

  • but switched to a low carb, high fat diet for more stable energy;

  • "Towards the end of the race y'know after lots of heat and lots of gels and whatnot,

  • I ended up taking a crap in the woods like 20 some times.

  • That's when I switched to more primal like grain free diet, I had huge success with it"

  • You might have stopped and thoughtHow can fat not be the problem?

  • I ate a plant based diet and reversed my atherosclerosis!”Living in Japan, I’m very aware of how healthy

  • a high carbohydrate diet can be, especially a primarily plant based one like the Okinawan

  • people’s who frequently live to be 100 while less than 8% of their calories come from fat.

  • Don’t worry, well get to this.

  • Despite our bodies preferring the energy dense fat, this idea that saturated fat and cholesterol

  • needs to be reduced at all costs became medical dogma.

  • However, not only does our body want fat, it doesn’t want to reduce cholesterol.

  • Cholesterol is incredibly important: we need it for the membranes of our cells, we need

  • it to make brain cells, we need it to make several important hormones like estrogen,

  • progesterone and testosterone.

  • Probably due to things like that bacon fat commercial, the common assumption is that

  • fat and cholesterol build up on the arterial wall.

  • This isn’t quite how it works.

  • Where the build up takes place is actually under the arterial wall.

  • The process leading up to a heart attack starts with a damaged, inflamed arterial wall and

  • then the body wants to mend that damage, much like it would want to mend a cut you might

  • have, so it sends cholesterol and other things like calcium, and fibrin in an attempt to

  • seal up the hole.

  • Sure cholesterol is found inside this inflamed area, but you would blame getting burned for

  • your blister, not the fluid that builds up.

  • Blaming cholesterol instead of the inflammation is like blaming one of the firemen instead

  • of the fire.

  • Back to the Okinawan people: they have such a low incidence of heart disease because theyre

  • not eating foods that cause inflammation so atherosclerosis never develops.

  • Of course they live long: they eat locally grown, organic, fiber rich vegetables designed

  • to nourish them, not optimized for profit and laden with pesticides.

  • Keep in mind by the way that the saturated fat our homo sapien ancestors were getting

  • was from wild animals, (cage free, pasture raised, organic - that is)not from highly

  • processed ham slices in Kraft Food’s “Lunchables” , and certainly not from the butter of cows

  • pumped with hormones while living in cow jail and eating processed corn scrap.

  • Also they were getting their unsaturated fat in the form of omega-3’s from fish and omega-6’s

  • from nuts, not mostly from Canola seeds that had to be washed in hexane solvent & sodium

  • hydroxide, bleached and then steam injected.

  • Wait a minute, but What if you have too much cholesterol?

  • It doesn’t really matter.

  • One of the authors of theThe Great Cholesterol Myth,” Dr. Johnny Bowden explained in this

  • lecture that in the Lyon Diet Heart Study they had a group of 605 people with high cholesterol

  • and a very high risk of heart disease.

  • In one group they put them on the Mediterranean diet and in another they recommended they

  • cut saturated fat, reduce cholesterol intake to 300mg per day and follow thehealthy

  • western diet.

  • The results?

  • Cardiac death and all cause mortality on the Mediterranean diet was significantly lower

  • than on the low saturated fat diet.

  • After explaining this, Dr. Bowden saysWhat do you think happened to the cholesterol of

  • the people on the Mediterranean diet?

  • Their cholesterol didn’t budge.

  • They just stopped dying.

  • Cholesterol had nothing to do with it.”

  • OK so total cholesterol is not a useful piece of information.

  • But what about the HDLgoodcholesterol and the LDLbadcholesterol?

  • This concept is also outdated.

  • In Peter Attia’s wonderfully long and technical talk about cholesterol he explains...

  • We were taught that LDL cholesterol is the big risk right, if your LDL cholesterol

  • is high, you are at risk for heart disease.

  • And yet we're seeing that some of the time that turns out to be patently false.

  • This is a study that looked at 136,000 patients admitted to the hospital for a coronary artery

  • event.

  • And in these patients they looked at LDL cholesterol level and you can see that nearly 50% of them

  • had what you would consider a low LDL cholesterol level

  • There are a number of different types and sizes of HDL and LDL particles, and what is

  • actually important is to avoid having too many triglycerides sitting in your bloodstream,

  • which are also transported by lipoproteins.

  • Peter cites studies that show an increase in processed carbohydrates and sugar leads

  • to an increase in the triglyceride concentration.

  • The best way for the subjects to decrease their triglyceride concentration was ironically

  • to go on a higher fat, low carbohydrate diet.

  • Therefore these low-fat products marketed to health conscious people that switch fat

  • for more carbohydrates are directly increasing your risk for heart disease.

  • We trusted you, Snackwell's

  • One quick thing: If that last part had you thinkinghow in the world could sugar,

  • instead of fat, lead to a higher triglyceride concentration?”

  • Take a moment to look at Doug McGuff’s thorough explanation of glucose metabolism here or

  • you can see my cliffnotes version here.

  • It wasn’t like nobody knew that the culprit behind our health problems wasn’t so much

  • fat, but sugar.

  • British physiologist John Yudkin wrote a book in 1972 “Pure, White and Deadly: The Problem

  • of Sugarwhich correctly warned that the consumption of sugar is what is really dangerous

  • to our health, an argument he had made since at least 1957.

  • Nonetheless, in 1977, the US government gave us our new low fat healthy guidelines.

  • and What’s happened since then?

  • Hospitalizations for Heart Failure went up and heart disease is still the leading cause

  • of death in the world.

  • In fact, when it comes to weight gain, the data suggests people started gaining weight

  • immediately after the guidelines came out.

  • "Hey Clinton, get back to work!"

  • "Make me!"

  • We now understand that:

  • 1 Knowing total cholesterol as well asgoodandbadcholesterol are virtually irrelevant

  • to your health

  • 2 Reducing inflammation, and triglyceride concentration in the blood is what is actually

  • important for avoiding heart disease

  • and 3 The real things you need to limit are sugar and processed carbohydrates.

  • Despite all this, the same guidelines are still in place.

  • What is worse than that is were still being prescribed Statin drugs, whose harmful effects

  • are a constant testament to how important cholesterol is for the body.

  • Some of you might even have been prescribed a statin.

  • If so, you might want to ask your doctor what the number needed to treat for statin drugs

  • is.

  • Neuroscientist Daniel Levitin explains that the number needed to treat is the number of

  • people that have to take the drug before one person actually benefits from it.

  • “…So The number needed to treat for the most widely prescribed statin, what do you

  • suppose it is?

  • How many people have to take it before one person is helped?

  • Three hundred.

  • 300 people have to take the drug for a year before one heart attack, stroke or other adverse

  • event is prevented.

  • So for this particular drug, the side effects occur in 5 percent of the patients and they

  • include terrible thingsdebilitating muscle and joint pain.

  • But now you're thinking well 5%, not very likely it's going to happen to me, I'll still

  • take the drug.

  • but wait a minute.

  • 300 people take the drug, right?

  • One person’s helped, five percent of those 300 have side effects, that’s 15 people.

  • You are 15 times more likely to be harmed by the drug than you are to be helped by the

  • drug.“

  • By the way, remember how I said cholesterol is important for producing sex hormones like

  • testosterone and estrogen?

  • What do you think the second highest revenue prescription drug is for Pfizer after Lipitor,

  • which is the #1 prescribed statin?

  • Viagra comes in right after Lipitor.

  • There’s only an 8% difference between the two.

  • Let me end this video with a rule of thumb you can use to pick out your food:

  • Just think about how much something has been screwed with before you make the decision

  • to eat that.

  • For example: coca Leaves in their natural state are quite harmless, the farmers in the

  • Andes have chewed on them for hundreds of years for a small boost in energy.

  • However, when you process the hell out of them, you get cocaine.

  • Eating a lot of sugar beets probably isn’t so bad for you, but if you boil them in water

  • to make a crude syrup, then wash that solution with calcium hydroxide and proceed to refine

  • it with 6 different boilersmaybe you shouldn’t put the resulting white powder in your coffee

  • every day.

  • You can apply this idea to anything from processed cheese to packages of so calledwhole wheat

  • bread”.

  • This goes for fats and meat too.

  • If Jack the cow just had to walk around and eat grass, the food that comes from him is

  • going to be more nutritional than Jeff the cow’s if Jeff had to be confined to a tiny

  • space, given all sorts of antibiotics, and fed corn all his life.

  • Here’s a fun fact: Livestock consume 70% of the antibiotics in the united states.

  • They need these antibiotics to survive the ill health effects caused by confinement and

  • the acidosis that results from a corn based diet - a diet which is completely unnatural

  • for a cow to eat.

  • I’m not here to sell you on any one diet or argue what macronutrient ratio is best.

  • However, I can tell you for certain that this sugary processed crap that has somehow found

  • its way into every store on the planet isn’t what our bodies need.

  • It’s more likely that our recent health problems came from the nutritional sacrifices

  • that were made for better profits, and not from a basic macronutrient like fat that we

  • have been eating for centuries.

  • If you liked this, be sure to Subscribe.

  • I’m putting out videos as frequently as I can, so stay tuned.

  • You can see my last video on health and why I eat once a day here.

Let me tell you the story of how one man accidentally gave us the obesity epidemic, kept cardiovascular

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