I got an invitation to speak at a low carb conference where some of the biggest names in the low carb movement would be in the audience gulp I may have published some skeptical episodes about a few of them on this channel awward but here's the thing I have enormous respect for Dave Feldman the organizer of the collaborative science conference who believes in bringing people with different perspectives together respectfully Dave gave me 29 minutes to speak and 90 minutes afterwards to debate animal nutrition scientist Peter ballet on the following topic resolved the current scale and practices
of animal agriculture are fundamentally unsustainable for the environment I would take the affirmative and Pete the negative as an earth scientist I am so very passionate about this issue Dave had invited a cheering capacity audience to the premiere of his new film the night before in a beautiful theater where the audience gave him a well-deserved and long-standing Ovation it is beautifully filmed the story is exceptionally well told and it's filled with inspirational stories about how low carb diets have transformed some people's lives that film is going to influence a lot of people they also showed
some fascinating research for a rare type of person Dave refers to as a lean mass hyper responder my perspective is we have known for a century that very low carb diets can be effective for certain conditions like epilepsy and severe mental illness but we have tons of data showing that high meat diets induce more rapid aging and shorter lives among the general population it struck me that the very same filmmakers could make an equally inspirational film about various other diets like vegetarian and vegan and the Transformations we see when people adopt those that's because Dave's
film wonderful as it is involves individual stories and not population data so for my talk I decided to focus on data for the general population and to choose sources they are familiar with that they often site in their books and movies I tried to emulate Dave's positive upbeat respectful style and to me that meant not calling out names of people in the audience or showing clips from movies that they appeared in I'm repeating the talk on my channel because my audience and Dave's audience are so different one thing I will do here is to show
the actual film clips I referenced in the talk at the end of the episode I'll talk about the audience reaction and whether I did more harm than good by increasing polarization or it was the other way around here it goes my talk is about how big data will revolutionize nutrition like it has revolutionized almost every industry I can think of retail Sports Finance Etc I amused myself with thoughts of an alternative title like this who let the vegan in here Dave hey that's Austria's new dietary guidelines which includes red meat yogurt cheese and eggs I
have great admiration for Dave's desire to hear all sides of an issue respectfully I hosted Dave and Nick on my channel for the same reason my professors told us to look for the data point that doesn't fit because that's what often leads to new insights and I thought David Nick may have one with lean mass hyperresponders and LDL my own life was changed by a guy who attracted people with different points of view he started a new computer company NeXT which he launched after leaving Apple the company hired me an earth scientist for 17 years
what he had done this before this is the core of the original Macintosh team that's Joanna Hoffman who had a PhD in archaeology what is she doing as the product manager for a new computer that's Bill ainson who Steve hired when he was completing his PhD in neurochemistry and that's Andy herzfeld the most emotional software engineer I've ever known he would say we poured love into the Mac as we created it and it radiated that love back to us via the screen he hired the legendary artist Susan care to give the Mac personality Misfits Square
pegs and round holes Steve saw the next computer as a more robust Mac less crashing stereo sound Etc but I saw it as a machine capable of big data which was my background in geophysics and I think that's why they hired me when Apple bought us and Steve returned to Apple that operating system became both OS 10 and iOS driving Apple's Renaissance meanwhile Joanna Bill and Andy formed General magic with the before its time idea to create a smartphone and they recruited me we may have been too early but the engineers and scientists went on
to Apple and Google develop both iPhones and Android phones and changed the world how small will it finally be do you think someday dict Tracy wrist rat my interest in nutrition began in high school when my side hustle was caddying at the rinda Country Club One fateful day the caddy Master assigned me to caddy for Jack laain my name is Jack laain isn't this great to be alive how about a big smile who was a TV star whose show on Fitness and Nutrition was popular for 36 years this photo was taken when he was almost
40 his mother was a 7th Day Adventist and he was influenced by several Adventist nutrition professors some of whom are still alive he was also influenced by anel Keys who was a towering figure at that time for his bestselling books on Mediterranean style diets and his appearance on the cover of time I know that name is probably not so popular in this audience but this was the 60s and low carb diet books had been best sellers for decades Carlton Fredericks was a Radio Star 6 days a week for 30 years and his message was the
opposite of TV star Jacks my father embraced these books and fed us meat eggs and cheese starch was a bad word for him welcome to the diet Wars Young Chris I brought up Jack at the dinner table and dad said Jack is a musclean the word of the day for bodybuilders Dr Fredericks is a doctor that landed with me in addition to the steaks dad grilled we ate the geese pheasants and Ducks he hunted with a shotgun I remember the frequent sound of clinking as we would spit out the lead shot that remained in the
meat not sure how many I swallowed that was before herb needleman's epic battles with the lead industry in the 70s armed with epidemiology he and several scientists produced he is one of my greatest heroes my desk in second grade looked like this it had an Inkwell I filled it with Mercury which you could buy cheap at the drugstore and it made me popular because the kids could dip their dimes and quarters in it and get a really cool luster finish sometimes we would Splash Mercury onto the tile floor and Beads of it would dance around
the room no one thought anything of it Ironically in my earth science days I ended up working for a company with something like 34 water testing labs when I was there and so I ended up getting a decent background in environmental epidemiology water testing Labs typically get samples from mining areas where lead and arsenic get into the streams and near chemical plants which dump chemicals in rivers and we got samples from the Chesapeake Bay drainage area because chicken farms had concentrated manure that got in the Chesapeake Bay and killed fish and crabs the fishermen in
New England were upset and thought the chicken farmers were ruining their livelihood so it became industry against industry but the companies with the biggest balance sheet usually win so you can guess how that dispute came out unfortunately environmental epidemiology is depressing every industry goes after scientists like herb needleman accusing them of fudging their data doing poor science being alarmist a bully this is a riveting book about what herb and the scientists he worked with went through companies with toxic products Market them as healthy and natural they fund shoddy alternative science and do that to claim
the science is conflicting they write stories for the Press they Lobby the government with their enormous budgets they run circles around the baffled scientists who had believed kids with lead poisoning from paint chips would be the primary motivation for these companies the lead industry were Masters at it they used the Playbook the tobacco industry wrote but 30 years before they wrote it it bought them 50 years of delay and denial and as everyone knows we're still dealing with the tragic consequences if you get a PhD in physics from a top university and go to work
for NASA as many of my friends have done done you have a tough choice to make if you choose to work in space exploration you're going to be a rock star at every party you attend but if you choose climate science Industry is coming for you and they will get half of Americans to believe you're incompetent and promoting a lie some partygoers are going to bring the rage if you see this photo and think oh that's Joanna Hoffman you have a good eye you probably saw the Steve Jobs movie but it's actually Kate Winslet she
won a Golden Globe for her portrayal of Joanna in a Steve Jobs movie that's because it's in Apple's financial interest to lift her up as a rock star I was less qualified in Tech than I was in earth science but I was on stage at some of our company events sometimes signing autographs that never happens to epidemiologists who save kids from blood poisoning by the way we were at Joanna's House 3 weeks ago for a 35-year reunion of General magic we were all teasing Joanna and calling her Kate as life went on I kept learning
that I am a walk-in collection of risk factors if you're wondering why I have a hole in my head here's your answer doctors have pulled me back from the dead at least five times and they are my heroes when I was 42 a kateed ultrasound revealed I had moderate atherosclerosis which raised my life insurance higher than it already was given that I'd had rheumatic fever as a child which had scarred my heart and I have a type of birth defect in my heart I watched my dad former captain of his hockey team team at Queens
declined in his 60s with ailments like gout and high blood pressure he died at 70 of a heart attack in the meantime Jack pulled 70 boats with 70 people inside a mile across Long Beach Harbor to celebrate his 70th birthday he swam in handcuffs and he was Shackled at the ankles that white dot on the lower right of your screen is Jack in the meantime none of the popular diet doctors that my dad admired made it out of their 70s Blake Donaldson on the left was a popular carnivore doctor I knew those were anecdotes so
I tried not to let them affect me but Jack kept making the news for thriving until he was 96 it made me wonder if this was like environmental epidemiology and you could actually discover enough good signal in the noise like herb did with lead to understand what is healthy in my decades in Tech I watch companies like Google hire a lot of PhD data scientists some of whom I know and Crush comp companies like Yahoo who mainly hired Engineers who didn't understand Big Data data scientists that Google didn't call it epidemiology because that word means
population Health but the methods they use are very similar I wondered if my background would help me sift through the noise of nutrition it is a shock to come from environmental epidemiology into nutrition and hear over and over from the most popular influencers you can't infer causality from observational data What in in environmental epidemiology that has always been your job and you can't do rcts on paint chips in children there are dozens of great books on inferring causality from observational data which we do in every field I can think of UC Berkeley alone has over
a dozen scientists who list causal inference as one of their Specialties perhaps the most influential advice I ever received from my professors was to not be that guy who reads thousands of papers hoping to understand something youi the guy who thoroughly understands the relatively small number of papers that made a real difference either for or against a hypothesis most of the rest is noise it became super popular among consumers and influencers in the early 2000s to reference this 1957 paper after the bestselling book good calories bad calories mentioned it and that paper is still popular
today so I thought it would be important to fully understand it for example the movie Fat fiction which got millions of views made this paper a centerpiece of the movie The only copy I could find was a poor quality scan on crossfit's site and it was a little bit hard to connect data points to countries and there were variations of this chart about fat calories with no annotations at all so I converted the paper to a searchable PDF annotated the data points and made it publicly available on the net if you have a background in
epidemiology the first thing to jump off the page p is the lead author yakob Yami the famous Professor of biostatistics at UC Berkeley everyone knew him as Yak in his day he was best known for torturing Richard D and Bradford Hill who led the British doctor study which inferred that smoking was a causal factor in lung cancer Yak denied smoking was causal of lung cancer until the day he died in 1973 by the way all the books in this presentation are here if anyone wants to take one I'll just replace and remind my wife why
I wear this hoodie that says it's not hoarding if they're books this book by Bradford Hill an epidemiologist on the British doctor study was a Cornerstone of medical statistics for 50 years through 12 editions Yak was known for challenging well-known scientists so no surprise he led this paper with this famous chart from anel keys from his 1953 paper it showed a strong correlation between fat in the diet and heart disease in six countri countes Yak charted FAO data for 22 countries and noted that the correlation was weaker the movie said this looked like a scatter
plot and there was no correlation and when you put in all of those countries it just looked like a scatter plot there was no clear relationship no correlation between fat and heart disease I didn't mention this in my talk but Nina's book makes the same bold claim but that's one reason I made a searchable PDF and made it public so people could easily read it Yak was a statistician so he computed the correlation coefficients from the two different graphs he provided on fat that characterized the data slightly differently a one would be a perfect correlation
and zero is no correlation I would call these correlations quite significant notice he listed the correlation with animal fat and protein separately and there was a fairly strong positive correlation tying them both to heart disease and noticed that vegetable fat and protein had Fairly strong correlations in the other direction meaning they were associated with lower incidents of heart disease that was also true for carbohydrates at this point you're probably thinking who let the vegan in here hey now if I were to go down the street to the lowfat vegan conference I'd have plenty of epidemiology
to show that cutting nuts avocados and olive oil from their diets is not supported by any credible data that I'm aware of the point of yak's paper is his data shows the correlation between animal protein and heart disease was stronger than it was for fat so he thought Keys may be chasing the wrong hypothesis it's a reasonable thing to conclude from his data so he plotted this chart of animal protein versus heart disease deaths the movie Fat fiction didn't show this chart Yak would have known that a foundational theorem of epidemiology since the 1850s is
that chronic disease is multicausal but the point of the movie was something different it was that Keys had access to data from 22 countries yet he cherry-picked from his six country graph for his seven country study despite his critics Keys was determined to prove himself right he followed up with his famous seven country study where he traveled to the country's Cherry Picked from his graph for his seven country study he repeated the same mistake I mean he cherry-picked his countries I think he did cherry-pick countries for the seven country study that study was to begin
a year after Yak published this paper but here's how an epidemiologist would look at this chart epidemiology works best when you have a large effect size in a well-characterized population notice the largest effect size is in Japan compared to Finland and the USA so they added Finland to the six countries even though it was scattered to the left the next thing you'd be asking is what explains the scatter in this graph that's scientifically fascinating no maybe it's just poor data from the FAO but you don't know unless you investigate it which brings us to the
Netherlands according to yak's data they ate a lot more fat than France but had about the same mortality from heart disease so add them to the study an epidemiologist would also be thinking I need a really good team of scientists in each country and the countries would have to be willing to fund a very expensive long-term study so they dropped Australia Canada and England from the six country graph and now they're left with five countries so how would you pick more countries an epidemiologist ologist would say picking from 22 countries when there are 200 in
the world would be cherry-picking and it wouldn't add blinding to the study note that data for Greece and Yugoslavia were not available and seven of the 16 cohorts they picked were from them the only scientists I'm aware of to write an entire book to explain their study still available via Harvard University press is the seven countries team I have it here but they were not interested in Countrywide data because that would not be well-characterized they were interested in rural populations who had eaten the traditional food of their areas for all their lives and would for
a couple decades more before McDonald's and junk food showed up the scientists couldn't expect those populations to accurately answer questionnaires so a team of scientists had to visit every 6 months to collect representative samples of what they ate freeze them and send them to the lab for chemical analysis and they collected blood samples EK s Etc all Yak needed for his study was the crude data from FAO and a slide rule I can't think of a more expensive study to conduct than seven countries and what did they find after following the 16 cohorts for 50
years that the food they were eating when the study started varied in its saturated fat content by five times but heart disease deaths varied by nine times the film did not show this chart and it claimed there was no data showing saturated fat is harmful there is no evidence against saturated fat there just isn't real food fats are not dangerous they are not the enemy it's too simplistic and reductionist to say saturated fat is dangerous and needs to be avoided and the evidence does not support that it's hard to fake this data or to blame
it on anel Keys who retired after the first 20 years and passed before this was published and this data is quite consistent with other data of the era the famous French epidemiologist Serge Reno observed that in the 60s and 70s French populations in the north of France which relied on meat and dairy had about four times the incidence of heart disease and lived 5 years less than French populations near the Mediterranean who were eating the Mediterranean diet he noted that by the time he co-founded the famous Leon diet heart study that effect had faded because
all types of food had become available everywhere but his findings were still consistent with the seven country study noting how healthy the Mediterranean diet is for the general population by the way I talk to Henry Blackburn often with more questions about the seven country study he'll turn a 100 in a month and he's still playing in his band he was a core member of the study for the full 60 years of it I asked statisticians in AI what are the odds that three of 18 scientists born in America in the early early 1900s with no
genetic relation would make it to a 100 the answer they came back with was roughly one in a billion or one in 10 billion also two others on the team died at 97 and a third at 95 and I've been thinking of interviewing alesandro manat who oversaw the Italian cohorts and is 91 moving on in 1995 science published a very popular article by Gary tabs with the message that epidemiology was near its limit it was scaring the public with false positives and it was a blunt instrument incapable of discerning small effect sizes perhaps epidemiology was
done advancing but time and science march on 28 years later a group of epidemiologists followed up on that science article to see which claims were indeed false positives and needless scares the thing is Big Data is getting much better with bigger data sets more compute power and big advances in causal reasoning wouldn't that be true of epidemiology and indeed the Harvard studies alone have become much bigger data they've added another 200,000 people and another 30 years of observation since that article was published environmental epidemiologists can only dream of data sets like this we've done three
interviews with epidemiologists at Harvard and asked them to their faces how they answer their toughest critics the Framingham study just celebrated their 75th year there are 150 scientists and technicians involved in that study I toured their campus with my camera rolling and interviewed the director they followed three generations sequen their DNA and they measure almost everything you can measure when the participants come in every two years for 5 hours of bone scans blood tests glucose tolerance tests Etc no other study has data like this when the Washington Post compiled a list of 10 medical milestones
for the last century they listed framing him as number four and that's epidemiology so how well did the science article age it didn't list many indisputable positives of epidemiology like lead but it did pick a lot of things it considered sketchy in 1995 and here's a very partial list 30 years later no one is saying any of these are not causal factors such as tanning beds and melanoma but it didn't stop Industries in America from trying to wreck the careers of scientists who dedicated their lives to studying these things so this is where we were
in the 60s the TV star and the Radio Star giving opposite advice and this is where we are in America 60 years later for every doctor and influencer who believes their diet is the one there is another doctor and influencer who believes the exact opposite no consumer can make sense of it I think we Americans have reason to be humble about where we are in this chart there is so much corporate influence here and and we're making supplement salesmen and social media Stars unimaginably Rich selling what consumers want like magic pills and a new miracle
diet every few years but here's the thing we researched dietary guidelines around the world and identified 14 countries with independent scientists who create them it's amazing how similar they all are so we interviewed scientists on their committees from countries like the US Norway Canada Japan and Switzerland far as we can tell they all have epidemiologists on their committees who understand the Big Data modern epidemiology is producing I'm not aware of any popular American influencers who invite credible epidemiologists on their shows instead they vehemently deny that epidemiology is valid science I've seen that movie before when
Google's Founders were students they tried to sell their search engine to existing companies like exite and Yahoo but they couldn't find a buyer because exite and Yahoo thought the web would be far too noisy for search to work anyone with common sense could see the way forward was human curation of the internet as they both were doing whoops underestimating Google's Talent with big data cost them their companies I made an episode about Japan school lunches who have a dietician in each school who designs their meals based on Japan's food guide and they teach it to
the children the largest category on their visual guide is grains just like it is in the US but their OB obesity rate is 4% and they have an exceptional life expectancy so Chris you say you open with the Bold statement that big data will revolutionize nutrition how can you believe that that's because it's already happening in countries who typically lead us by a decade or two on topics like this Denmark banned trans fats 15 years before we did Uganda is leading the effort for African nations but Chris you say you're vegan and yet none of
those 114 food guides are 100% vegan including denmarks and Uganda and not even the epidemiologists at Harvard or Framingham or vegan why then are you I know several of you have posted on social media that being vegan is an eating disorder the thing is I'm an earth scientist all the prominent earth scientists I know advocate for a vegan diet James Hansen Johan rockstrom Stefan ramsdorf Hannah Richie Etc we don't like the land use water use pollution Pand mic risk pathogens antibiotic resistance greenhouse gases deforestation Etc I'm not aware of any of those sists having an
eating disorder they're all models of Health far as I can tell even into their '90s I finished just in time thank you all so what was the reaction you asked first of all before I even gave my talk Ken Barry came up to me wished me the best and was 100% gracious he said he watches some of my episodes but I noticed after the conference he posted on Twitter that the carnivore diet is about to go mainstream and poor vegans he's probably right because it does go mainstream every two generations it went mainstream under Blake
Donaldson two generations ago Vil Homer Stephenson two generations before that the Cutters in the early 1900s James Salisbury in the last quarter of the 1800s and I could go back centuries like that with my collection of old books the trouble is is populations who adopt it have significantly lower life expectancies on average compared to populations who eat Mediterranean Asian and vegetarian diets so it gets forgotten for two generations before someone revives it again other people who responded to me did so after both my talk and the 90-minute debate so I should say something about that
one point I made is there are no ruminants to emit methane in the Amazon except for a few small deer whose numbers are low because of jaguars and competition with other herbivores we were in the Peruvian Amazon a few months ago watching it burn to the ground to make way for huge cattle ranches and slaughter houses they export beef and leather via meat packing giant JBS we're turning the Amazon into a savannah that converts oxygen from the atmosphere into the potent greenhouse gas methane instead of trees turning carbon dioxide from the atmosphere into oxygen that's
what the remaining trees trees in the Amazon do my opponent in the debate said introducing cows to the Amazon was simply because poor people want better nutrition Nick norwitz said something to me in the hall which he said several times before that hit jobs on beef are fuel for the carnivore movement he said his three most popular YouTube episodes were about the carnivore diet and I noticed after the conference that he and Dave were both posting on Twitter promoting beef but not mentioning the environmental disaster that it is that is a gut punch to earth
scientists like me so the question is did I do some good by speaking at the conference or did I do harm this is the question herb needleman had to wrestle with because the response to his research on lead was for Dutch boy paints to ramp up their ads promoting the health benefits of lead for children so I think I should learn a lesson from Nick that my talk at this conference just added fuel to the burning fires of the Amazon no I wouldn't do it again I wanted to leave it there but when I sent
out drafts for factchecking the feedback I got was I should explain what I would do instead the situation in America is that about 10 YouTube stars are responsible for more than 50% of nutrition views on YouTube far as I can tell and I'm trying to get more accurate data none of them have any background in conducting credible scientific studies and most of them send sensationalize anti-science is there any such thing as good sugar no so even all the fruit that we find today in supermarkets is not natural some people believe that if the sugar is
coming from a fruit for example in a fruit smoothie that's good sugar but that's a total lie my perspective is Big brands have spent a fortune in America over the past Century discrediting science via disinformation and they have succeeded among American consumers for example France band lead in all paint by 1908 the League of Nations advised countries to ban it in 1922 but in America Dutch boy paints was Distributing coloring books to Children promoting the health benefits of lead until herb needleman prevailed in 1978 but we just lowered the permitted amount to 600 parts per
million in residential paints and the regulations for commercial paint are so complicated that in the immortal words of Nate gsy nobody [Music] knows and now we're exporting American social media misinformation to the rest of the world just like we exported McDonald's in 1961 time put scientists on the cover as men of the year you don't see that anymore but once upon a time it was common for example here's AJ Carlson who was a giant in the field of physiology on the cover in 19 1941 despite the big topic of the day being the war also
in 1961 they placed another Giant in the field of physiology on the cover anel Keys it wasn't until he was almost 100 and could no longer defend himself that influencers were able to wreck his legacy in the eyes of consumers by making up things about him actual scientists however were not fooled and continue to regard him as a giant in the field of nutrition and the reason they do is we now have 75 years of very big data to verify his results the thing about scientists who actually conduct credible studies is they either understand big
data or they team up with epidemiologists who do I have never seen that among popular social media influencers the mission of our channel is to find credible scientists and help them tell their stories to Earnest audiences who are trying to cut through the noise of dueling influencers the most credible scientist are not YouTube Stars they're too busy actually conducting science for example 3 weeks ago we published an interview with Iman Lee the co-director of the Harvard women's study she's an epidemiologist and there wasn't a loose fact to be found that has 200,000 views already and
great comments about the things people learned doesn't it feel like I should stay focused on that mission
