Your Lifestyle Is Your Medicine
“Your Life Style Is Your Medicine” is a podcast that focuses on how a person's lifestyle can be the key to health and happiness. Routed in the principles of lifestyle medicine, Ed Paget, osteopath, and exercise scientist, interviews area-specific experts on how lifestyle impacts well-being, focusing on purpose, physical activity, nutrition, sleep, and stress, which could lead to a longer, happier life. Edward now runs immersive lifestyle medicine retreats, with the purpose of helping others take back control of their lives to live longer and healthier.
Your Lifestyle Is Your Medicine
Podcast Episode 60: Chris MacAskill
Want a clearer path through the chaos of nutrition advice? We sit down with Chris McCaskill—earth scientist turned tech leader at NeXT and founder of Viva Longevity—to unpack how big data and epidemiology reveal what actually adds years of healthy life. From caddying for Jack LaLanne to building products alongside Steve Jobs, Chris traces how a scientist’s lens cuts through hype and lands on patterns that stand the test of time: mostly whole plant foods, minimal ultra-processed products, and a sharp rethink of red meat.
We dig into why some influential voices attack epidemiology, how industry-funded studies create confusion, and what the Seven Countries Study really did right—diverse cohorts, rigorous food sampling, and decades-long follow-up. Chris explains how global dietary guidelines converge because the signal in the data is strong, and he names credible researchers worth following, including Walter Willett and the Harvard team behind landmark cohorts. You’ll also hear why certain “clean” meats are functionally engineered foods: high-fat, heavily salted, and bred for the bliss point that drives overeating.
The conversation turns practical with insights on bending obesity curves, why simple advice loses to novelty online, and how to adopt plant-forward habits without dogma. We touch on sustainability, pandemics, and ethics, making the compelling case that cutting red meat is good for your body and the planet. If you’re ready to trade anecdotes for evidence and move beyond viral myths, this one gives you the tools to evaluate claims and make confident choices.
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Welcome to the Your Lifestyle Is Your Medicine podcast, where we do deep dives in topics of mind, body, and spirit. And through these conversations, you're going to hear practical advice and effective strategies to improve your health and ultimately add health span to your lifespan. I'm a page, I'm an osteopath, an exercise physiologist with a special interest in longevity. I'm so excited because today's guest is Chris McCaskill. Now, Chris started his career as an earth scientist, earning a master's from Stanford and working in oil exploration before pivoting to tech. And in the 80s, he actually worked directly for Steve Jobs at Next, where he developed a deep appreciation for innovation and storytelling. So he went on to co-found a focus sharing site, Smug Mug, and helped millions of people preserve their visual memories online. So now he's the founder of Viva Longevity. It's a YouTube channel. And Chris uses his scientific lens and personal passion to make complex health issues and nutrition topics clear and actionable for his followers. So he likes to focus on strategies that promote a longer and healthier life. So I've got Chris on the show today, and we are going to talk about all sorts of things. We're going to talk about Ansel Keys, why modern health influencers cherry pick data and use that to actually attack some of the fundamental science that nutritional strategies are formed on. We're going to take a global perspective on why some countries are healthier than others, what they're eating and why they're eating it. And by the end of this, I think we're going to come away with a new appreciation of just how difficult it is for us as regular consumers to understand the science, but how important it is to follow the good scientists. Now, if you want to find out more about Chris's work, I think you'll really like his YouTube, which I'm going to link in the description below. It's called Viva Longevity, where you'll find brilliant videos that are totally accessible, they're research-backed, and it's highly educational content. So, Chris, welcome to the show.
SPEAKER_00:Thank you. Great to be here.
SPEAKER_02:Yes. I'm so glad we're here. We had a couple of false starts and finally we got together.
SPEAKER_00:My fault. I flaked. I was so buried in editing a really important episode. I put everything on Do Not Disturb and I flaked. I'm sorry.
SPEAKER_02:No problems. We've all been there. And this editing that you're doing is all about nutrition. But what I'm interested in is how did you get from being an earth scientist and you know work rubbing shoulders with all sorts of different people, including Steve Jobs, to making videos and inf uh uh putting out tons of information on nutrition. Can you give us a real quick summary of how you got to where you are?
SPEAKER_00:Well, the funny thing is when I was a kid, uh my uh my father, I was kind of a rescue, and my father took me on um and made me earn money for everything that I owned, shirts and jeans and everything else. So I got a job caddying at the Rinda Country Club, which is a highbrow country club. And um and the caddy master and I hit it off, and so he would uh have me caddy for some celebrities because it was a rich country club, and one of those was Jack Lalane, and I probably caddied for him for two years as he came to the golf course and played with his celebrity buddies and everything. He had a Hollywood star. He was the most famous fitness and uh diet influencer, I think, who has ever lived. Had a TV show for 36 years and so on, and he had a great physique. He was like Arnold Schwarzenegger in the day. But my fat but that was in the 60s, and my father uh was all about uh Vince Gironde's steak and eggs diet and uh Carlton Frederick's low carbohydrate diet. They were all really big and popular way before Atkins. Don't ask me how history is given Atkins the credit for it. It just doesn't make any sense. Anyway, um so I would listen to Jack, he would give me some advice. The first time I met him, I was holding an orange soda in my hand and he had me pour it out and throw the can away. And um, when we went to the caddy shack uh or the halfway house, I think we called it at the 11th hole where you got a snack. Nobody wanted a caddy for Jack because he wouldn't buy you the big candy bars that everybody wanted. Instead, he would give you the choice of raisins, which were disgusting for for a kid, uh, and peanuts. And uh but then I would go home and my dad was all steak and eggs, and that's what he was raising us on. Um and I couldn't reconcile the two, so I would talk to my dad a little bit about it, and he was really entrenched. You know, you gotta have protein, you gotta be strong. He used to be captain of his hockey team at Queen's University, so and he had a deep voice, he was a very masculine guy, a hunter, and and I adored him, but talk about a difference. They were between Jack and him, they were 180 degrees out. So I got interested in it, and the most admired scientist of the day, whose books were the most credible, was Ansel Keyes. Um and so um reading what Ansel Keyes said is the same as Jack. Jack liked Ansel Keyes' Mediterranean diet. And uh so I didn't think too much about it when I got into college after I left the home, other than I wasn't gonna eat just purely steak and eggs. I was gonna eat some broccoli and all of that. But I wasn't sure how do you know? And uh my dad would always say, Jack is just a fitness guy, and I'm following doctors like Carlton Fredericks. So that landed with me, and I didn't know what to do. So then in the 80s, I graduated in geophysics, and in the 80s, for 10 years, I was in geophysics, usually out in the field, and one of the things we did was water testing. And you do water testing in mines, uh chicken farms in the Chesapeake Bay drainage area, uh, chemical plants where they're you know dumping solvents in the rivers and so on. And um and that involves epidemiology. And so we have these really great scientists, epidemiologists. They deal with big data, they deal with statistics, they really know what they're doing, and they uncovered the harm of all these things over the years: lead, mercury, asbestos, on and on and on, and they didn't have a lot of false positives, and they were very conservative people, and you and I and no one else we know is disputing that science. We're all avoiding the mercury and the lead and the asbestos and everything else because epidemiology was able to infer cause from a large uncertain database or set of data, imperfect set of data, I should say. Um, all large data sets are a little bit imperfect. And that we call it epidemiology because it's human health. The word means human health, and I'm sorry we call it that because it really boils down to inferring cause from large observational data when you can't get the data any other way, or if you can get it any other way, like a randomized control trial, which is very short term. Well, then they look at both. Randomized control trials are also epidemiology, population studies, human population studies. So I became very confident about epidemiology as a game-changing thing. Um, but I couldn't do earth science forever because uh it was too hard on my family. We had to move around a lot and we were in risky places. Um and um so I moved to the Silicon Valley without a job when I was 37 years old. My oldest son dreamed of me working for Steve Jobs, and uh I had a job at Stanford University as being a visiting scientist for a year, which was great. And during that year, I got contacted by Next Computer, which is where Steve had gone, and they offered to hire me. It's like, you're hiring a scientist. Um and I think the reason that they hired me is the machine that Steve was making was based on an operating system called Unix, which could handle uh much more powerful than the Mac had been. And you could put powerful processors in it, and you it could be a scientific computer and you could handle big data. And Steve liked to have people who had all kinds of different backgrounds and viewpoints and so on. And they had checked my background and thought it was good. Um, and so I ended up at next. And the interesting thing was most people hire people just like them or they have a job description and so on. Steve didn't do that. Like the software manager of the Macintosh, who's very famous, um, Kate Winslett got a golden globe for portraying her in the Steve Jobs movies, uh, is Joanna Hoffman, one of my dearest friends. Um, she's got a PhD in Middle East archaeology. Bill Atkinson is probably the most respected software engineer who's ever lived in Silicon Valley. Uh he's his PhD was in neurology. And they just he he brought these people with different perspectives. We would argue and debate and so on, uh, you know, not viciously, but we had different perspectives, so we would stand our ground. And um and that's the way the Macintosh and you know uh all these things came out. But what was interesting in my whole career in high-tech was watching having one foot in Earth Science because I was fascinated in it, and I attend meetings at Stanford and I'm on some advisory panels there. Um uh and watching companies like Google crush Yahoo based on them being able to infer cause from large observational, imperfect observational data better than Yahoo was able to do, because Yahoo was trying to do it with engineers, and Google was doing it with scientists, PhD scientists who knew big data and knew statistics. And watching all the confusion in America, we stand alone uh in terms of diet. We live five or six years less than all the healthy countries. We spend twice as much on health care. We roll through every kind of fad diet you can imagine, and then they keep coming around. The carnivore diets come around, what, five different times and become popular over the last 150 years, and we forget it each time and revive it again. And yet those other countries they base their dietary guidelines on actual nutrition scientists, and they all look the same. Japan, Norway, I mean, they're tailored a little bit for Nordic sensibilities and the kind of things they can grow there. Uh so it's a little different than the Mediterranean diet, which is a little different than the Asian diet, but they're still, you know, 75% whole plant foods, more is better, all the way up to a very high percentage. And so the time came for me to retire, and I thought, what am I gonna do? Um, and I thought this was a great cause, and I was gonna jump in. And the reason I thought I could do it, um, I wasn't sure about that, but the reason I thought I could do it is because I brought that different perspective that Steve coveted so much. Um, because I have a decent background in in epidemiology, and every influencer I've ever heard of discounts epidemiology largely because of corporations and celebrities making things up about it. Yeah. That's a long answer.
SPEAKER_02:That's a long answer, but but you explained it nicely, how you got from where you were to where you are. And also you did a fascinating podcast with Simon Hill. And I'm gonna link that actually below because you you go into more detail about your upbringing, your unique circumstances, which I believe is uh gave you some perspectives that perhaps other people don't have on life and work and and so on.
SPEAKER_00:Homeless as a child. How many people do you know who were homeless? Grew up on the streets of Oakland for and missed most of elementary school, homeless. It that gives you a totally different perspective.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I I can only imagine. And also how you how that homelessness sort of came back to to become one of your um insecurities, I guess, sometimes when you went to your grad school. Um, but you overcame that. We don't want to give the give the game away. That's on Simon Hill's podcast. Um okay, good. So you've built a case there for epidemiology being a fantastic um scientific method to build nutritional guidelines on, and that most countries do that. And I shared with you off camera as well, sort of one of my thoughts is that a lot of countries have traditional diets, and those traditional diets aren't far off the national recommendations using the science as well. But whereas some countries without tradition, without you know, roots that go back not just hundreds of years, but even centuries, namely the New World, so America, Canada, and so on, don't fall back on those traditional things. They look to science for the answers. But when they don't agree with science, they look somewhere else. They look to uh celebrities or influencers or someone who can make a very persuasive argument. And you mentioned, just hinted at this, that some of these influencers discount epidemiology, they discount Ansel Keys's seminal study, the seven country study, to potentially push their own agenda, maybe for profit, maybe for, you know, who knows. But can you talk a little bit more about your observation of that, that's why the population seemed to gravitate towards the person who's speaking the loudest rather than the science that's the strongest?
SPEAKER_00:Um yeah, I have several perspectives. First, the thing that really put a mark on my soul was in the 80s when I was involved in water testing and working with epidemiologists, every company whose profits are threatened by what epidemiologists are finding out will attack those sinus and try to discredit them, hound them, and try to come up with their own studies that disprove that and do PR campaigns, pay influencers money, anything they can do. So, for example, uh, we like to talk about the tobacco industry having its playbook of, you know, casting doubt on the science about tobacco. They did. Uh, and they did it very successfully for decades, and they hounded the scientists who were at Oxford, Richard Dahl and Richard Pito among them. They hounded them. It's a good thing Richard Dahl lived until he was 92, and he kept coming to America and testifying to Congress and held his ground on that landmark 50-year British smoking study that they did that that pretty much convinced people, okay, there there is a problem here. But the thing is, way before that, uh, let's go back to lead. In I think it was 1907, the French and various European countries banned lead in paint because the evidence was becoming pretty clear in 1907. And I think the the League of Nations advised all countries to ban it by something like 1926. I've mentioned it in an episode before, it's in the 20s. But in America, we kept going. And we had people, I've got coloring books around here I could bring up uh in a minute, that the uh Dutch boy paints were putting out to kids to show them how uh healthy lead really was. And for 50 years, they convinced Americans to that lead was a good thing. So we put leaded pipes in our home and we did um, you know, lead and paint, lead and gasoline, and so on. And along came Herb Needleman, who was a pediatrician. And he didn't have, he was a doctor, not a scientist. He didn't have the strongest scientific background, no doc doctor mo most doctors don't. Uh so he combined with various different doc uh scientists, and they looked at the data and found out lead is very harmful. And when you're at a school with a lead paint in it, the chips fall off the ceiling. And you know, he wrote a whole book about this. He should be a national hero. He should have but but the but the lead industry was just merciless with him. And they were doing this playbook for at least 30 years before the tobacco industry came along and ran that same playbook that they so they people say they invented. So this this happened in every industry that I was involved in in epidemiology. It doesn't matter whether it's mining, those mining companies are coming after the sinus, or foster farms and their chicken, they're coming after those epidemiologists. Or you name it. Um if it's a company, Hewlett-Packard is one exception. They they were good citizens and they would just admit their dumping problems and they would go clean it up. But Fairchild and some of those companies, they Exxon Mobil, uh, the Koch brothers, they just always, when their profits are threatened, they are going to discredit the sinus. And they publish their own crazy science. It's just awful to read it. Um and so profit and lack of regulations is what drove that in America, in my opinion. It's much more regulated in other countries. We bemoan all the time that in Europe uh they don't put things in the food that they do put in the food in America because we're less regulated. So when it's not regulated like that, companies who make a lot of profit, ExxonMobil and so on, can just run circles around the sinists. They have their PR firms, they have their talking points and everything else. So, well, it turns out with the birth of the internet, uh though though influencers can leverage those terrible papers that industry put out, and they can say, Oh no, you know, red meat's not bad for you, there's this paper over here. And then it takes someone like me, or a real epidemiologist, to go through there and say, Yeah, that paper is funded. An example is the Pure Study, which scientists refer to as the poor study that came out of Canada. It's funded by agri pharma. So the pharma industry makes a bunch of money off all the pharmaceuticals that they sell to cattle ranchers and pig farmers and everything else to keep those animals safe and alive, vaccines and antibiotics and everything else, you name it. And so, of course, they're threatened by the data that shows that beef is is harmful for you. So they did this study and they didn't account for economic differences. It was just a terrible study. Um but of course all the influencers leverage on that. And I don't think people realize how much money these influencers are making. Millions and millions of dollars. Scott Carney did a thing on um Peter Atia suing Aura Ring for$1.3 million because he didn't feel they paid him enough for him getting Aura Ring placed in scientific papers and so on. If you go to Peter Atiya's website, there's 20 different brands there. And Andrew Huberman is the same, you know, they they all just make incredible amounts of money with brand deals.
SPEAKER_02:Um, and they promote it shamelessly on their site while criticizing Sinus for taking some funding from For those of you interested, Scott Scott Connie, he's been on the show actually, done a really good uh YouTube on when the two influencers end up feeling like they're getting the wrong end of the stick, they end up suing each other. And some of those, some of that information is public records. And so if you want to watch that show, it's fascinating seeing what suing each other, how much they're suing each other for, how they're in each other's sort of um schemes where you have to continually pay to get to the top. And uh he exposed the whole thing. So there's there's Joe Rogan on there, there in there, there's uh there's a few other big names in there that he's talked about. So fascinating stuff.
SPEAKER_00:It's a little bit of a it's a hard job to be a doctor. Um there's burnout, and you're seeing patient after patient faster than you want to see them. Um you're getting denied uh health insurance claim. You You recommend that a patient gets this procedure, and then the insurance company says, No, it's a hard job being a doctor. But if you want to be a doctor, at least have an MD after your name, not necessarily having a license, not necessarily having a practice and all that, and just go on social media. You know, if you're a good storyteller and you tell people what they want to hear, you can get the house in the Hamptons and everything else. You can.
SPEAKER_02:And what is the sort of the big argument that they use against epidemiology? Because I want to sort of tee this up to do with Ansel Keys's work. Even myself, I read some of the um criticisms of his work and I started to sort of believe them. And then once I went deeper, like you did, I didn't go quite as far as you to buy his book and uh read the Mediterranean diet, which is basically what he put together. But I read some of the criticisms. I was like, huh, it seems to make sense without reading the original study. And then when I went back and actually got into it more, I understand it was a really good study.
SPEAKER_00:It's a fantastic study. I think uh I interviewed the head of the Framingham study, who, uh director Daniel Levy. Um the Framingham study's gone for 75 years. It's considered the greatest epidemiological study of all time. It's observational. But they bring people in every um, is it two years or four years, and they measure everything on them bone density and pain management and anything that can be measured, they measure. And they've been doing it for 75 years, over three generations. It's really a great study. But the weakness of that study is um, and this was known in Ansel Keyes's day, was started in 1948. The weakness of that study is they were just drawing on an American population concentrated in the Boston area, and their diets were pretty similar. So what Ansel Keyes wanted was varied diets. So he tried to find various places in the world where you could study traditional diets where people had been living them for a long, long time, and there was no invasion yet from fast food. So that generally meant rural areas, kind of poor areas. Um and he to get statistical relevance, he needed to have a thousand people in there to get um enough participation so they didn't have selection bias uh too much in there, which is a big problem with many studies. Um I'll just explain what I mean by selection bias. If you go to the UK Biobank uh study, for example, they sent questionnaires out to two million people and 500,000 responded, I think. Well, that's selection bias because and you have to adjust for that, and they're not. Um because who are those 500,000 who responded versus the two million or the million and a half who didn't respond? They may be health conscious. You don't you don't really know what the difference there is. Ansel didn't want that. So he picked communities, his whole large international team picked communities where they could get the community involved to rally over 90% of all the men who were over 40 and less than 60 in this study. They picked men because they had a higher heart attack rate in the day and they were studying heart disease. They picked older middle-aged men because um, you know, young men don't have heart attacks. They needed enough statistics, enough incidents, and so on. And they did this for 16 different areas around the world, including Asia and Yugoslavia and Norway. I mean, who does this? It's amazing that they were able to pull that off with all those scientists. And these were noted scientists. These were some of the best scientists in the world who were on the study, who studied each area. And what they did is they went into those areas every six months with a team of scientists, and they collected the sample food that they were eating. So it wasn't based on food frequency questionnaire. They were sampling the food, collecting it, what they thought, you know, was the normal diets of these people, which were very uniform in those areas in those days. And then they would freeze it and send it back to the lab for analysis so they could figure out how much polyunsaturated fat, how much saturated fat, and so on. They did this for 60 years until their cohort went extinct. And Ansel, I think, was only involved for 20 years because he was later in his career and he retired and he wrote a book in 1980, which is fantastic about it, about how this was designed. And then my buddy Henry Blackburn uh took over uh and a team of others. Henry doesn't like to take too much credit for it. So um he um and that was the next 40 years. Henry just turned 100. They had a big celebration for him, you know, at the University of Minnesota. Ansel lived almost to 101. Um Jerry Stamler lived to 102, Ansel's wife lived to 97, there were other scientists on the team who lived to 97 and 95 and uh 90 something. There's some that are still alive, you know, in their 90s. You know what? You just go ask artificial intelligence, whatever your favorite AI is, and ask what are the odds of having 16 scientists, those 16, mostly men, 15 of them are men, and have three American men uh uh born in the early 1900s, not related to each other, live to over a hundred. And what AAI will tell you is impossible. Can't happen. It's one in ten billion or less. Um but it happened because they they came up with this diet, which has now been the gold standard diet in every medical society around the world, um uh and in every country guideline, 114 of them around the world, for 70 years. It's the gold standard diet. I should say the Asian diet is a little bit different, and Ansel showed that in Japan, his two cohorts in Japan, they actually did a little better than the European cohorts did, the Mediterranean cohorts. But he felt that the sensibility of the Mediterranean diet was more likely to be adapted to American taste buds, and that's why he chose it. So um so the only way he could be discredited by a non-scientist like Nina Tychles or Gary Tobbs is to just make things up. And that's what they did. They just made things up. If you watch Nina Tyshulz's TEDx talk, I can list all the things that she just made up. Like he published in obscure German journals because he didn't want his data to get out. You know how many books he published and how many papers they published from all those scientists all over the world, independent scientists, and he never published anything in a German paper, but it remains on Ted's site as one of the criticisms. It's like, you know, if you do any kind of research into this and read what he wrote, and in fact I have more access than almost anyone because I'm buddies with Henry now. Uh so Henry gave me this book, which is uh was written by Ansel when he was 95. There he is on the back. Um I don't know if it's focusing. Yeah, I think it's written written when he was 95 for his family. And the family gave me a copy, but didn't give me permission to to make it public. It is fascinating. It's all about his career. But uh it has some heartbreaking sorrow because he had a daughter who was murdered while she was on vacation in Jamaica. That's public. Um, and she was just on the beach, and some guy came up to rob her and murdered her.
SPEAKER_01:No.
SPEAKER_00:So um, anyway, the things that he wrote in there are just unbelievably good. Two PhDs, one from Cambridge University, uh, it's just one of the greatest scientists of our day, but you know, the influencers just make things up about him.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, and there's a phrase that actually my great uncle used to use. He was a priest, and it's surprising for a priest to say this, but he said, the slightest of doubts is stronger than the strongest of faiths. And I think yeah, and I thought it was a good phrase because all Nina Taischel needs to do, or any of these influences, is say something that might not be true. And then you put a seed of doubt in the mind of people who do, you know, read it. And I think that that sort of phrase is the beginning of this kernel of sort of doubt that spreads and spreads, and then other influences pick up on what someone else says and they don't fact-check it and so on. And then it it becomes like this this Answork Keys, this body of work he did and who he was as a scientist, a fantastic scientist. It's a it's such a travesty that he's being um discredited, but he's not officially being discredited, but by discredited by you know social media uh influencers. Um by other scientists, exactly. But I want to just bring back something that you said there. You've got a fascinating video on when do diet um influencers die. And I forget exactly what the title of the video, but uh I'll link it below. I don't want to give the game away. But what Chris has done is he's put um the person who wrote a book, let's say Atkins, and when they died, and the person who did the research when they died, and how old they were when they died. And it's a very interesting, you know, I I guess I know it's a tiny tongue-in-cheek video, but it's a very interesting outcomes where the people who are recommending more the Mediterranean diet seem to do better than the people who recommend other diets, being carnivore or whatever else they come up with. And it was just fun. I listened to that and I was like, yeah, that's really good. And then I liked the way that you started with maybe cherry picking, I think, 10 or 15 in the first video, then you did another one, and you said, you know what, I'm not gonna cherry pick. Here's hundreds of them. And you did it for I thought it was really, really good.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I read the comment section, and anybody I left off, you know, they'd they'd say, Well, you didn't put this person in and they lived long. And well, yeah, they lived to 82 or something like that. But it but I had people in there who lived to 110, a man, you know, um uh in a nutrition professor in China, um, who Dr. Xi, um, and um and I had a uh pediatrician who lived to 114 and so on. You know, education played a role, income played a role, uh, and so on. What was interesting about that is a lot of people are drawn to this field because they have their own risk factors. And that partly is me. I had uh rheumatic fever as a child, which wrecked a lot of my heart. I have the the pervasive pervasive hyperlipidemia that was very hard to treat, that took my the rest of my family down way before my age. Um and um I have a hole in my heart that isn't closed, that predisposes me to strokes and things like that. So a lot of these people like Dr. McDougal, he had a stroke when he was 19, a very serious stroke, and the prognosis after you have a stroke like that is you're gonna live maybe three or four years. Maybe live till he was 77, um, which is pretty good given that background. Um so I do know um, you know, people who um yeah, uh I know the background of some of those influencers and how they got into it because of their risk factors.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, that's that's interesting. I remember reading a study on osteopaths, is what it is, what I am, similar to a physiotherapist or a chiropractor, and it was something like 90% of osteopaths have back pain. And I was like, oh like that's to do with the way we work. Uh and then when you dig a bit more, it's well, 90% of them have back pain because they had back pain and they before and they were treated by an osteopath, and that's what made them become an osteopath. That's interesting. So that's my story. I had back pain and I'd never heard of an osteopath. I heard of a chiropractor thing, tried that, tried this, went to this one guy and he fixed me right up. And so I was like, oh, so I'm I and now one of the the risk factors of future back pain is previous back pain. In fact, it's the only risk factor. You can't predict back pain from any other risk factor apart from if someone's had back pain. And so it's it's pretty common for people who bend over most of their and so on to get a tweak every now and again. And that's why a high proportion of health professionals will have back pain because they saw someone originally for their own back pain. Oh wow. Yeah, it's a different way. It is. Um let's just go back slightly to the influences again. We have people like yourself and really good and Steve, um Simon Hill, and really good information coming out, but the information, this isn't this is my personal opinion. The information is pretty standard. Like I did my first nutrition course in 2000. I did one three years ago with uh the nutritionist who works for most of the F1 drivers. Really smart lady, super interesting. And I was like, okay, tell me what I don't know. She said the same thing. Sleep more, hydrate, eat some vegetables, manage stress. And it's the same message, it always has been, but it's not sexy, it's not interesting to the you know, people who are crying out for novelty. And I think that's the biggest problem we have is how do we market, we can say, or promote a message that's pretty common sense.
SPEAKER_00:I think about that all the time. And um, I showed you a preview of an episode I'm working on now. And uh one of the things that doesn't work, we know, is to say you can't eat that and you can't eat that. It's kind of an authoritarian message. Um it never has worked with drug control uh or anything like that. This is your they're clever ads, this is your brain, this is your brain on drugs where they fry an egg and so on. None of those things ever worked. But what does work and is working is to take youth and teach them about nutrition and what it all the good things that it does for them that they want to have. They want to have a slender body, they want to have good skin, they want to have all those things once you get their self-interest involved. So I think what's really interesting to me, uh, I have a graph of looks like quite reliable data. Um I made it from Our World in Data, where you can look at the obesity trend for any country and select your countries and so on. So I selected countries I was particularly interested in, which was America, Australia, Japan. Um those are the us uh America's got the highest rate of obesity. Didn't have it when I was a kid. We uh you know, look at photos of of uh Woodstock or something like that. We were all you know fairly thin. Um that was back when our mothers were telling you to eat our vegetables. Um and but it's it's gone up to 44 percent obesity. 44 percent in America obesity, and it's like 33 percent in Australia. And then it goes down in various different European countries, finally to Japan, which only has an obesity rate of I think five percent. And they define obesity more severely than we do. So if they defined it like um like we did, it would be even lower. Um so um nobody wants to be obese. Um and what's interesting are countries like France and Spain, they have been able to show that in the early 2000s they were able to bend their obesity curves down. And the way they did it is with their nutritional guidelines, which are the Mediterranean diet. If you look at the Spanish Mediterranean diet recommendations, you won't find red meat anywhere on there. You won't find it on Switzerland's new guidelines, you won't find it on Denmark's new guidelines, and if you do find it in some place like Norway, it's a little tiny speck. Because that is something that's changed. We didn't realize before how pro-aging and pro-heart disease and everything else, red meat in particular really is. So I've begun to think maybe we should tell the story about look at this exploding obesity crisis, and what are we doing about it? We're stabbing ourselves with pens, you know, Legovi, and and we don't know what the side effects are, we don't know what the long-term effects are, we know some of the side effects, and they're not great. We don't know what the long-term effects are. We're panicked about the little pricks that we put in our arms from vaccines. But when it comes to, oh, this will make you skinny, well then bang, bang, bang, you know, we'll inject every week and spend a lot of money on it. But if you look, the Japanese are not doing that, and neither the French nor the Spanish. We don't have different genetics than we had in the 70s. Um, we don't have different genetics than them really, you know, in France and Spain, uh, or the other uh European countries that have remained fairly slender. It it's the food, it's the diet, and it's the gold standard diet that has persisted all these years. Countries are modifying that. It is changing, but one of the biggest modifications is to remove the red meat because that turns out most of the studies now, you know, from credible institutions are showing for pro-aging, red meat is worse than sugar-sweetened beverages like Coca-Cola, it's worse than desserts, it's worse than any other food, it's worse than sodium. The only thing it's better than is trans fats. At the bottom of the list of all the foods that Harvard published, or um Dr. Frodnes published it in um in Norway with his big studies, red meat is at the bottom. And I don't I don't think we ever really knew that. We knew we should limit it, but we didn't know it was that bad.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, and you um actually went and interviewed one of the researchers in that Harvard study, um, Fengley Wang, Dr. Fengle Wang. And I listened to that, and it was fascinating, listening to how they did the research and the how sophisticated the questionnaires are. And one of the arguments against sort of an epidemiological study that comes up with, oh, red meat's worse than uh than than sugar, sorry, than soda pop or something, is that it's the questionnaires. And you addressed that question. You you asked him, you said, so you know, how do these questionnaires come about? He's like, oh, we spend about two to three years getting the questions right. Uh and I was I thought that was fascinating.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, there's some, you know, in epidemiology, the number one thing that's uncertain is exposure, exposure to whatever risk factor it is that you're studying. And so people look at environmental epidemiology and they say, well, I believe that. I believe that mercury is bad and asbestos and everything else. But having been involved in those studies, it's like we would die for the kind of you know data that Harvard has from those food frequency questionnaires. So, you know, for example, PFOS chemicals are all the, you know, the concern right now. And so there was a scientific committee that's been nicknamed C8, uh, three of the best epidemiologists in the world went into places where they had exposure to PFOS chemicals to find out if PFOS chemicals were causal of things like kidney disease, cancers of different kinds, and so on. And so they were able, the community was able to rally 70,000 participants, which is pretty big, uh, and observe them for seven years and do various different uh other sort of uh you know experiments on cells in the lab or whatever. And they were able to conclude with a high level of confidence that PFOS are no bueno among a whole lot of things. Can you imagine how much they would have loved? To have those participants recording first being responsible participants, nurses and doctors. That's why they chose them, because they they're very responsible in filling out those forms. And they have a little bit of a scientific background and so on, and they're willing to take blood samples and send them in and tissue samples, fingernail samples, hair, you know, all the the whole thing. I just can't imagine having that quality of data for 300,000 people like Harvard has over what is it now, almost 50 years. When you look at these other epidemiology studies, I I we interviewed Brenda Eskenazi at UC Berkeley, and she studies pregnant Hispanic women and their children over 20 years from the Salinas Valley because of pesticides like glyphosate. 800 participants in that study, and hard to track, hard to pin down on FFQs and all that kind of stuff. And yet, the law of big data, when you get big data, of course, some of it is going to be uncertain. But statistics is a really powerful tool that very few people understand unless they have a PhD in statistics or at least a master's degree. And it's why the casinos always win. It's why the insurance companies always win and the hospitals go out of business. They have the big data and you don't. And um, and that's why epidemiology works. It's the law of big data over time that makes it so good. And that big data has they've devoted so much of that time into designing those FFQs, and they are very impressive. They pass all the validation checks and everything else. This is amazing.
SPEAKER_02:I wanted to just change gears a little bit here and sort of put up a little bit of an argument to say, well, okay, the data's there, the recommendations are there, it's been there for 40, 50 years, but some people just love to eat meat. Some people love their steak. Now, the steak that they're eating today, according to the research by Tera Faz uh Fazzino, has changed from the steak that perhaps their parents say or their grandparents ate. And so you might have a dietary tradition in your house, but the food you're eating is different. It's more palatable. Can you talk about this rise in hyper palatable foods?
SPEAKER_00:Well, first of all, I love historical books. Um, so I have all kinds of them on my table here. This one is from, I don't know if I should really touch the pages, um, but it's from the 1600s. I'll just go to random pages. Written by a doctor. I paid$5,000 for that book. No way.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:The copyright on the back, if you can see, is printed in 1650s, it's not going to focus, 1655. Anyway, really good doctor of physique, uh physic, um, as they called him in the day. Um, and uh over the years, this book and many of the dye books, there were hundreds and hundreds of dye books, people weren't different in any age than we are today. Whatever they could get on the latest diet and how it would help them, you know, they they would they would eat right up. The printing presses just went wild with these books throughout the Renaissance. Uh but what was standard knowledge there until the early 1900s was wild animals are so much better than sedentary animals, and variety is so much better than you know uh not eating very much. They didn't know what caused berry berry and pallagra and and uh scurvy and things like that, but what they did know and had observed in their villages and townships and cities for hundreds and hundreds of years is the more variety you ate, the less likely you would get scurvy and pallagra and all that kind of stuff, because you ended up getting beans and greens and citrus and things like that, and they didn't know about vitamin C, so just eat a wide variety. So the sedentary animals and also wide variety, eat swans, blackbirds, gophers, squirrels, foxes. They ate it all. And and they repeated that mantra throughout the 1800s, and then long in the 1900s, we began. So so Brigham Young, the founder of the state of Utah, in speaking to the Mormon congregation as what they considered a prophet, speaking what they considered to be Lord, he said, I'll tell you the most healthy diet. The most healthy diet is to eat, you know, the greens and peaches, which we can get year-round even in Salt Lake, because we can get them from the southern part of the state where it's warm, and the fish is in our mountain streams. And he said, and beef, the cattle raised on our mountain grasses is, you know, it's as healthy a food as we'd need right now, but not stall-fed beef, which is of a very different character. He knew that in 1862 or whatever the year was. Well, Daniel Levy, who runs the uh Framingham study, wrote a book um on heart disease, and he said, you know, one of the things we're seeing is people are eating more and more sedentary animals, and they're eating fewer types of animals, just chicken and pork and beef, and they're only eating the mussel meats, um, and they're feeding them not their native diet, and they're penned in and they're diseased and everything else. This is not your grandparents' uh food. This is there's never existed before. These animals can't even exist in nature. None of these chickens, none of the cows now uh would make it in the wild because they're different creatures, they're Franken creatures. So, but uh Ansel Keys warned in this article in Time in 1961 about marbled beef, because marbled beef was becoming a thing. And in those days, you achieved marbled beef by overfeeding the animals, giving them high calorie density food that there isn't part of their native diet. Well, now the beef industry figured out oh, customers love marbled beef, wagyu beef, or whatever. The higher the fat content, the higher the price you can get. It's a premium cut of beef and so on, and you get it all marbled and everything else. Um, and so they're breeding the animals, the Angus beef and so on, in order to produce animals that get marbled like that. It's terrible for the animals, you know, it's like having diabetes or something. Um, but they don't live that long anyway, so and nobody really pays that attention to that. But the beef that we're getting now is so fatty, and that fat has such a poor um, it's so high in saturated fat, almost no omega-3s, um, because the bacteria in their rumens, the way their digestive systems work, the bacteria in the rumens eat all their omega-3s. Now, you would hear influencers say, oh, but grass-fed beef has twice the omega-3s. Yeah, twice zero is still zero. I mean, it's a very small fraction of omega-3s. It's still the anatomy of the of the cow with those four rumens, you know, to put so they don't have a lot of, it's a it's a terrible fat profile. And we're finding out all kinds of other things. The form of iron they have that's very high, heme iron is harmful, the form of sugar they have is inflammatory, new 5 GC. Um there's it's just the worst kind of food, and we're only eating the muscle meats of these animals that never existed before.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. And my understanding is that the there's a um a sweet spot when it comes to highlighting our sort of pleasure senses in our brain when it's sort and fat. If you have the right amount of salt, the right amount of fat, it's going to become a food that we eat potentially more of or start craving. So there's a book called the Dorito Effect where they they talk about like how the scientists have engineered this sort of flavor profile and so on that uh really appeals to us. And it's my understanding that meat is somehow crossing into this um into this area where we think it's a whole food, we think it's you know natural, but actually it's not. It's just it's ticking the boxes for for the fat content.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so that's fascinating. Tara Fazino, who you mentioned from the University of Kansas, she did a lot of breakthrough research in this area. And the Dorito Effect author, I interviewed him. That book just shocked me to my toes. Because he points out that Doritos used to be uh a uh corn chip, basically, and the people weren't really eating it. Um they weren't it wasn't selling, but it was at the time of the rise of artificial flavors. And those artificial flavor and color companies, you know, are now multi-billion dollar companies because they turned Doritos into this enormous you know um uh taste sensation and blockbuster product um because you could have three different cheese tones, one that exploded on your tongue as soon as you bit into the chip, another one that as you were chewing it, it it released that flavor and so on. Um and so artificial colors and flavors have been um amazing. Um but also just we thought it was fat, sugar, and salt. Uh that was another New York Times bestselling uh book. I've talked to that author and I've forgotten his name now. But um uh but what Tara was able to figure out is that when you get enough fat and you just have salt, you don't need the sugar. And that's what they've done with beef. And I think what she said is it has to be like 30% fat. That's when you hit the bliss point, uh, and you have to have a certain amount of salt per uh portion. Well, we got those. Uh and when you go to the steakhouse and you see somebody eating a 16-ounce steak, and they're not the most slender person in the world, and they're dumping all that salt on it. Now you know why. Because it has become the equivalent of an ultra-processed food. We have uh bred those animals and fed those animals uh in order to produce a food we've never seen before. And I it's it's certainly an industrialized food. I would call it an ultra-processed food.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. And you know, that ratio is important because people say to me sometimes, um, you know, I'm in the health industry and they say, okay, well, well, what's wrong with a McDonald's patty? Uh you strip away the bread, you take away the sauce, and you just order the patties. And I don't really have a, I didn't anyway have a good answer for that because when you look at what McDonald's puts in the food, it's puts in the patty, they say it's just beef and salt. Uh, and it's pretty, it's pretty um clean. Uh, forget where they get the beef from, forget all that kind of stuff. The actual patty is is hasn't got much stuff in it, according to McDonald's. But now I understand that, well, hang on, that patty is not what we think it is. It's this really high fat profile plus the salt, and now we've got a food that actually can be quite harmful to us.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and I think consumers get fooled by the fact that fat is nine calories per gram and protein is four calories per gram. So when you see 20% lean beef, ground beef in the supermarket, you think, oh, it's only 20% fat. No, do the math. It's more like over 50% fat.
SPEAKER_02:But I think by calories, it's more, it's way more.
SPEAKER_00:By calories.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, by calories, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, good clarification. And McDonald's patties are like that. Um I posted at one time uh nutritional information for McDonald's patties, and I think I remember it was 65% fat by calories. Oh wow. That's a lot. And all you have to do is add the salt, which they do in great abundance, which isn't great abundance, isn't good for you either. And of course, people are crazy about McDonald's patties.
SPEAKER_02:Uh you you reminded me of a book I read that's um by a British author called John John Lewis Stempel. And uh it's basically a book about him living off his farm for a whole year. It's called a wild life, something like living uh living wild for a year. And he set himself this challenge to live on his 40-acre farm, eat whatever was growing, and and uh hunt whatever was, you know, whatever he could. And he had to find books from the Second World War about how to cook these sort of plants that grow in the hedgerows and so on that were distributed to the British population for in for food rationing and so on. So he would go into his house and he would have this room dedicated with everything that he was sort of harvesting and storing and pickling and and so on. Meanwhile, his this is amazing, his kids and his wife didn't do it. They would shop in the supermarket and have a different room and eat their food, and he would sit in his own little room with his rabbits hanging up and you know, processing the meat. And uh I'll get I'll get to my point in a second, but one of the things he noticed was when he would get up in the morning and he would go out, he would be able to spot the other predators, so the eagles, the foxes, and he would be like, damn it, they've beat me to it. So wherever the foxes and eagles were, there was a bunny, a rabbit, or something that he could he could also potentially uh eat. But he wouldn't get there in time because they got there before him. Anyway, my point of this is when he eventually came off that year-long diet, he had a uh, I think it was a ham and cheese sandwich. He was just at some party somewhere and they had the this this the triangular cut, the cheapest food you can possibly buy, a ham and cheese sandwich. He bit into it and he describes being able to taste the adrenaline and the hormones in the beat in the meat. He it tasted completely different to him from a year of resetting his palate.
SPEAKER_00:That's amazing. Yeah. Well, this book, this is my 1600s book, describes the difference between wild pigs and tame swine. And he said they they're not comparable health-wise. Well, that was 400 years ago. Can you imagine with all the chemicals we've invented, and now we pen the pigs in so they can't move, which makes them eat more tender. Uh, and we've overfeed them to make them fat and don't give them their native diet. I mean, even the swine that were in your pen in the 1600s, you fed them the leftovers from real food, the foods that you were cooking. You didn't feed them, you know, hyper genetically engineered corn or something like that. And um so if it was unhealthy in the mid-1600s and everybody knew that, imagine what they're like today. Blows your mind.
SPEAKER_02:It's a it's a hugely, hugely important point. Um, I want to sort of bring us more to a close. I don't want to take up too much of your time, but uh there's a few scientists that you've interviewed, and um you've got some fascinating uh YouTube's from. But I want you to mention, if you can, mention some people's names who you think are worthy of more attention. If someone's listening to this and they're like, okay, I'm interested, who should I find more more information about?
SPEAKER_00:Uh well, I think the factually correct that the most cited scientist in the world today is Walter Willett of Harvard. And he ran the nutrition department in the Harvard CH School of uh Chan School of Met of Nutrition for a lot of years. He's the one who uncovered trans fats and got them banned through the nurses' health study and so on. I interviewed him in his home. I'm gonna do it again. Harvard's busy laying off people now. Um but um uh he's just a reserved guy, and you know, he speaks slowly and he does the science thing of well, the evidence points to, uh, and we think with high you know probability, blah, blah, blah. He speaks like a truly great, the truly great scientist that he is. Um, and he has built a vast team there at Harvard School of Uh Public Health, that no one I think I'm the only one who's ever interviewed an epidemiologist before. I don't uh the Zoe podcast has um an epidemiologist, a uh a well-known epidemiologist, but they're not in the top 50 podcasts for nutrition, I don't think. They get some traction, which is good, but you know, I want to hear from when I read these papers on epidemiology, uh, and you know, I'm I might spend like this one I did, optimal uh patterns for healthy aging. I must have spent two days sweating through that paper. And I have a decent background in epidemiology, and I still couldn't fully understand everything. So I went to Harvard and the lead author uh is at the University of Ontario, she was on maternity leave, so I got the second author, Fang Lee Wang, uh, and talked to him. And he opened my eyes on so many different things in that paper that I just could not understand by reading it. So um I somehow in America, America only, all the new other nutritional guidelines around the world, including America's proposal for the 2025 guidelines, have a lot of epidemiologists on there because they really know what they're talking about. They know nutrition science inside and out, and they're very consistent. But anyway, those studies are difficult enough. I I have one other point to make on that. Um I talked to my son-in-law, who's a family practice physician, and he he's quite knowledgeable. Um, but I said, why is it that if you're a physician, why do you have so much confidence in radiologists? And why do you have so much confidence in pathologists? But physicians don't seem to have that same confidence about epidemiology. And he gave a very interesting answer. He said, Well, we go to med school with the pathologists. We know they just locked in a room looking at slides all day, and we know all the things that radiologists need to learn that we don't learn. So, of course, when we have a patient who gets a, you know, goes in for a scan or, you know, gets a pathology report, we're gonna trust those radiologists and pathologists because they know much more than we do. But the epidemiologists are off somewhere else, some other kind of school, and it's it's highly mathematical. We don't have a lot of math. We read their stuff, we try to read books on epidemiology, we just can't follow it. It's too much statistics and big data and all that kind of stuff. So can't you lie with statistics or something like that? That's what I hear in the popular press. And I think that's where we are. It's just hard for people to understand epidemiology. In fact, I talked to Michael Greger, who uh and asked him to speak at a conference once, and we were talking in the hall, and I was asking him about this about epidemiology, and he said, you know, I've dedicated my life to understanding these research reports and how to read them, and I have a whole team of people that does that. And he said, but I just don't have a deep enough background in math to understand how epidemiologists infer some of this, these causal relationships from the data that they're seeing. I just have to trust them. And so I went into my speech about, well, you trust pathologists and radiologists too, right? And he said, Yeah. How much do you know about radiology? Oh, not that much. So there's just some difference there. I don't know what it is.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, that's a very interesting answer, isn't it? And I and I presume that trickles down to the general population. If you've got a a family practice position struggling with that, then us, what what are we gonna do? So we then look to the person who seems the most confident, to seems to be like the the best looking, the the best physique, or whatever, and we just yeah, the storyteller. Um, yeah. Okay, so with that in mind, I've got a few quick fire questions I want for you to answer. Okay. So what one habit do you wish that people would adopt uh immediately when it comes to nutrition? Trust in science.
SPEAKER_00:It's not it's not complicated. Pick your dietary guideline. You like the one from Canada? How about the one from Austria? From Norway, from Spain, Japan? What's your favorite dietary guideline? Pick that.
SPEAKER_02:What one nutrition myth would you like to retire?
SPEAKER_00:Uh that meat is the healthiest food you can eat, or that it's that it's even healthy.
SPEAKER_02:What one book or study or resource would you would you like everybody to read and understand?
SPEAKER_00:Walter Willett's book on the Harvard uh School of Um Nutrition. He he wrote a book on healthy nutrition, gets five-star reviews from every scientist I've ever known. Red red pen reviews rated the highest book ever. Trust that guy.
SPEAKER_02:And then to put all this into context, uh, I haven't asked you this question. Are you a vegetarian or a vegan or do you eat meat? What's your what's your diet?
SPEAKER_00:Well, so that's an interesting question. Um I'm an earth scientist by background, and earth scientists don't, I mean, we we believe with our souls that we see what's going on with the earth and how catastrophic it is and what the future portends, and we just don't understand why no one else sees that unless they're an earth scientist. When you become an earth scientist, you just go into this state of shock when you see what's going on. And agriculture is 35 percent of the impact. We all talk about fossil fuels and CO2 and the atmosphere and all that. We know that. We have to solve that, or it's gonna we're gonna face a very uh difficult future. But it isn't just that, it's also agriculture. Um it's and that's about 35 percent of it. And the most toxic thing in it in agriculture by far, by a magnitude magnitude, a factor of 10 is is meat, um, and dairy is second. And um uh so we earth scientists uh want to go 100% vegan. And but we're not sure, we're not nutrition scientists. I'm speaking for the group as a whole, uh we're not nutrition scientists, so we're not sure 100% vegan is the healthiest. Um maybe we need to eat some sardines or some low-fat dairy, fermented dairy, like yogurt or something like that. And so that question is always in the back of our minds. And I think you saw that in one of my episodes where in the Harvard studies the vegan diet was healthier than almost any, certainly than the standard American diet or, you know, almost anything, but not quite as healthy as if you include a little bit of oily fish, dark meat fish, um, and maybe a little bit of low-fat dairy, which is kind of a non-intuitive shock to me. Uh so, but I am vegan because the earth scientists in me, and we earth scientists also see terrible things like the rise of pandemics. Don't ask me why the rest of the public isn't concerned about that. Didn't we go through enough trauma with COVID-19? Do you realize how uh the conditions we're setting up to have the next pandemic? And it could be much worse than COVID. It could be much more severe. Well, just breed these unhealthy chickens and put them in, or turkeys and put them in the closest confines you can and see if you can generate a pandemic. That's the probably the best way. Any uh infectious disease epidemiologist will tell you that. And it isn't just that, it's water use and land use. And when you buy a home in Arizona and then you find out you bought the plot and you're ready to build the house, and you find out you can't get water rights. Why? Because 50% of the water in that area is going to grow alfalfa to feed cows, because cows absorb, you know, drink more water than anybody. And uh so I and I don't like E. coli, I don't like pathogens, all those things come from animal agriculture. I mean, think of all the children and older people who get these terrible strains of E. coli and die or you know, change for life, and yet we just get the chicken and say, well, I'm not thinking about that kid. And I think one of the interesting things is when I see people that do go vegan, they become concerned about the animals too, and the way the animals are are raised, which is such- I mean, come on. Is there any person on earth who is okay with the way we're raising animals? Not is there one person? Can you I can't find that person. I've always wanted to meet them. How can you be okay with raising pigs and chickens the way we raise them? It's that's not possible. But nobody thinks about it because they they think about it as food. And and by the way, chicken farmers wouldn't eat that chicken because they know how diseasy those chickens were and the chemicals and everything else, but whatever. So nobody's okay with that, but they don't face that until they become vegan. And then when I ask them, and I've asked probably 40 different people about this, why do you care about animals now and you didn't care before? And the answer is always I couldn't think about it before. I couldn't associate what I was eating with the way the animals are, I just couldn't think about it. But now that I don't eat them, I can think about it. And now it's like, how did I, what did I, what was I doing? So I don't have one reason for being vegan, I have 10, but I can't make be sure that it is the healthiest diet. And and and how many people are really gonna adopt it? Walter Willett, Ansel Keys, they all said, you know what, people aren't gonna go 100% plant-based, so let them have some fish and cheese and things like that. You know, if it's 10% of their diet, it doesn't matter, it doesn't harm their health. It it it's just such a you know, if people just reduce, yeah, that would you know 100% be the big thing.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I think you're 100% right. And it's the same with with alcohol. It's like if you ask people to go teetotal for the rest of their lives, you're gonna get like zero percent uptake. But if you say, hey, yeah, just cut back, drink at you know, Christmas or something or whatever, then you're probably gonna get more people buying uh buying in. And I think you raise a good point about the animals. Um there's something I've been thinking about recently with with you know cancel culture. I sometimes think, well, how can we judge people 200 years ago on today's standards and so on? But in another 200 years' time, I wonder whether the grapes of today will be judged because they ate meat. That there'll be the future populations will be like, well, you know what? That person wasn't a vegetarian, that person wasn't a vegan. They were participating in this uh in this cruelty to the animals because of that because they ate meat. I know it's it's a slightly flippant thing to say, but it could be a future thought for the human human race to actually judge us now on the way we treated our animals. Just a thought.
SPEAKER_00:Well, Ezra Klein has a couple of articles about that in the New York Times and Washington Post. I was just thinking about that earlier. But he's kind of dropped that for the political thing. Um but he he went vegan for that reason. Um but I um, you know, we have watched um things change when people realize how harmful something is to their health, like smoking, and that second secondhand smoke is also harmful. You know, gradually it became, oh, you're lighting up a cigarette? What are you thinking? Don't light that up around me, not around my kids. No smoking at school and things like that. Well, you know, with red meat, as they become more and more aware of how drastically harmful it is to the environment and how drastically harmful it is to their health, that's one thing. Um I mean, the rise of cancers is very threatening right now among people who are too young to be considered to have cancer. They get detected later because we do screenings later because the doctor's not expecting a 30-year-old to have severe colon cancer or something like stage four. Um where is that cancer coming from? It could be from eating so many ultra-processed foods, everything's multifactorial. Um, it could be from, but I I think a lot of it is our obsession in America for protein and especially protein from red meat. We know that's cancer causing. There is no doubt about that. So um I I I wonder if someday um, and this is kind of my mission in in life, someday for people to say, you know what, um, let's pass on the red meat. And and the countries that are doing that, Denmark and Spain and France and so on, uh, with their guidelines, and and Denmark has gone beyond their diet guidelines and are really have a heavy plant forward focus. And they tend to lead the world in nutrition. They were the first ones to adopt banning trans fats and so on. Um they um, you know, they're all pushing for removing red meat from their dietary guidelines, listing it as, you know, a toxic food to eat, toxic for the planet and everything else. And maybe, you know, if we become good enough storytellers, you and me, Ed, and Simon and people like that, maybe we can make a little progress on that front.
SPEAKER_02:Chris, it's been an absolute pleasure having you on the show.
SPEAKER_00:Thanks for having me. You're uh I'm starting to binge listen to your podcast because I didn't think, I don't know. For some reason, you know, I hadn't heard of you and I I treated it lightly, and then I um got into some episodes that were really good, and I thought, oh my gosh, who is this guy? You know. So congratulations on what you're doing. It is really solid stuff.
SPEAKER_02:Thank you for joining me in my conversation with Christmas Caskell. Hey, look, if you enjoyed listening to this podcast, I'd love it if you can leave a review because a review helps me get this podcast out to more people. Something to do with an algorithm, don't fully understand it, but I know that you interact with wherever you get your podcast from Apple to Spotify, and you actually put something down there, it boosts this the profile of the podcast and more people listening to it. And remember, if you want my direct help, you can send me an email, ed at at ebbpage.com or visit my website, eppage.com, and there you're gonna find out a little bit more how I can help you make your lifestyle your medicine.