do you ever fantasize like I do about having a virtual reality headset that could tell you if something's true as you read it maybe it could look like this in Flash red when something's false and green when it's true I mean whoever dreamed you could just wave your iPhone over a book written in Chinese and read it in English as I did for 110 year old Chinese nutrition professor zhangji's book sometimes I feel like reading books like Marion Nestle's food politics is like going to the optometrist and having her click through different lenses to sharpen your vision everything gets clearer when we see how amazing food companies are at influencing what we believe without us knowing this is going to sound totally Preposterous but I feel like I stumbled upon a pair of Truth goggles that seem pretty unique to me we'll put them to the test by watching highlights of a nutrition lecture and you'll be able to see for yourself when they flash red and you won't need scientific knowledge for them to work sound too good to be true I think you'll find them convincing I feel else you roll your eyes especially when I said I think they're unique to me here's why I said that I went for an interview with podcaster Simon Hill a man with a master's degree in nutrition who has interviewed an insane number of doctors and scientists and here's what he said Chris flew down to Los Angeles to meet me for this episode and of course being the historian that he is he brought two full suitcases full of classic nutrition books and magazines I've never met anyone who's as dedicated as Chris to going back through non-fiction books the thing is my scientific background is physics and in that field we are obsessed with the history of scientific discovery Robert Oppenheimer spent his years after developing the atomic bomb giving fantastic lectures on the history of physics and many of those lectures are on YouTube this will really not be a lecture about technical things but it will be about a great man of science it's pure gold so I was naturally drawn to the history of nutrition science for years I thought it was probably just an irrational passion so I'm honestly shocked to see how powerful it is at separating fact from fiction for example scientist David Diamond wrote an opinion piece with the stunning headline Statin therapy is not warranted for a person with high LDL cholesterol on a low carbohydrate diet there aren't many bigger Topics in nutrition science than heart disease cholesterol and statins so I decided I better listen to DrDiamond's lectures I like this backstory he's a neuroscientist and professor at the University of South Florida with genetically high cholesterol who has taken a very long and deep dive on the topic out of personal interest and he has bet his own life on what he believes ironically I listened to this lecture in my car as I drove to a giant iMac screen to watch Oppenheimer for such is my crazy love of scientific history so we'll have a little history here oh DrDiamond had me at history the very very first person who actually was obese and did something about it lost weight and then in fact wrote the first diet book was this fellow named William Banting who lived in London middle of the 19th century hmm I can add some clarity to that it's a pamphlet of 18 small Pages not a book even the author called it a letter there were about 200 actual diet books in Renaissance Europe alone and I own two dozen of them one of my favorites is the art of preserving Health written by a famous Scottish doctor in 1748 which has various tips on controlling corpulence some labor fasting or but slightly fed to La La grinding stomach's hungry rage where nature feeds two Corporal into frame it is wisely done back to banting's letter his doctor actually prescribed that a limit and completely eliminate carbohydrates so I eliminated potatoes bread and sugar but he was allowed to eat as much meat and other animal products as he wanted okay that's misinformation and my goggles are blinking red what banning's ear doctor actually said is right in the pamphlet the items from which I was advised to abstain as much as possible uh bread butter milk sugar beer and potatoes oh it had been the main and I thought innocent elements of my subsistence DrDiamond didn't mention the milk and butter what was on banting's list were thought of as common fattening foods we had over eaten for centuries and they're in many of my Renaissance diet books in the addendum to the Third Edition of banning's pamphlet the addition that DrDiamond showed Banning said little remedy may be as old as the hills that I have since been told no kidding here's Thomas tryon's famous 1683 diet book after persons are grown very fat it is more difficult to contract nature it may well be done but not without some trouble instead of morning drafts of strong drink drink or eat a pint or more of thin water gruel lightly boiled with only a little butter bread and salt but not too much butter and then to walk Banting also added this to his addendum I take this opportunity of making some few Corrections in my published dietary I ordered seems to have accepted veal owing to its indigestible quality as well as pork for its fattening character also herrings and Eels owing to their oily nature being as injurious as salmon in respect to vegetables not only should potatoes be prohibited but a parsnips and carrots context of the day is important for diet books because as Frenchman briat savarine said in his 1828 diet book which some people claim was the real first low carb diet book all thin women wish to be fat this is a wish we have heard expressed a thousand times they wanted to look fair and plump like royalty not Slender and tanned like peasants so he devised a fattening regimen very popular in the day fattening machine much fresh bread will be eaten during the day before eighth in the morning soup with bread or pasta will be taken and afterwards a cup of good chocolate an 11 breakfast on Fresh broiled eggs small slices of lamb and what you please have eggs coffee Will Do no harm you then have in the U. S doctors are noticing that people are becoming obese becoming prevalent and one Doctor Who is treating people who are overweight decided to write a book how nature cures hey I own that book from DrDensmore and I thought I was the only one crazy enough to read it and right on the cover of the book you can see here it says a statement of the principal arguments against use of bread cereals pulses which are beans potatoes and other starch foods oh my goggles are flashing red dead DrDiamond actually read that book it's 400 pages and the author explained that statement our attention has been called to the fact that the sweet fruits which must originally have formed the principal item in man's food are not only digested in the first stomach but have a major portion of their nourishment already in condition to be absorbed and assimilated as soon as eaten he went on to say throughout civilization the great bulk of the Human family the vegetarian and mixed eaters alike are cerealites in the future when the doctrines herein tort are understood and adopted mankind will become fruitarian he was a big fan of a nuts and fruit diet because nuts and sweet fruits are eaten with no salt and no seasonings and no cooking flesh foods and cereals quite universally require cooking and salt and other seasonings cereals lead to cooking cooking to seasoning seasoning to stimulants and stimulants to undermining the nervous system the morbidity and death but here's the thing if you're a scientist like DrDiamond wouldn't you be drawn to to a diet that has data to back up its claims I'm not aware of data about Drdensmore's fruitarian diet and he died at 73. his contemporary was John Harvey Kellogg a vegetarian Adventist who died at 91.
the Adventists are now 23 million strong have established many hospitals a respected College of nutrition and huge numbers of them have been extensively studied for 70 years and the data show they are the longest lived healthiest population on Earth no matter where they live with very little obesity yes Kellogg said some crazy things in the 1800s but densmore's book took crazy to the next level better not go there but I think what's very useful is that we have a leader of the field in the 1950s his name is Alfred Pennington ran a clinic to help people who were obese at risk for heart disease publish in all major medical journals and here you'll see from one of the papers what he recommended that obese people should eat one half pound or more of fresh meat with the fat in fact he emphasizes the meat does not have enough fat you should buy fat specifically and add it to your food yeah it's it's funny now but this was Medical Science in the 1950s the thing that isn't funny is DrPennington died at 56. DrAtkins said he based his diet on Pennington but he became obese on it as people who knew him could see his medical records showed he had a history of heart attack and he weighed 258 pounds when he died at 72. the Atkins Corporation made the astonishing claim that should make anyone's goggles flash red that he gained 60 pounds from IVs during the nine days he spent in the hospital before his death that's seven gallons of IV fluid assuming he never peed in those nine days what the Atkins diet was not a fad diet frankly it wasn't revolutionary the idea had actually begun in 1863 with William banting's book and so is it healthy and again I could go over dozens of studies but we don't have the time um and so I'm going to cover one study which is very useful for us because it has people with high cholesterol and low cholesterol people with diabetes as well as not with diabetes it shows the actual diet what it is that they ate and we also have biomarkers which can tell you whether or not the Atkins diet puts people in Peril when I was looking for from DrDiamond was longevity data for these diets not just improved markers from 66 obese people who eliminated processed food for 56 weeks longevity data is available for huge populations all over the world but I've never seen it for the diet he's promoting I recently did an episode of life expectancy in America versus health care costs not a good look at all what jumps out is Asian Americans live six years longer than white Americans and Adventists live three years longer than that both those populations eat diets that are far from low carb who was Ansel Keys very important to understand who this may then was he had no education at all in heart disease or nutrition he had a bachelor's degree in economics and a PhD in oceanography I agree with DrDiamond that it's very important to know who this man was what the record actually shows is he got a masters in Zoology and a PhD in both oceanography and biology from Berkeley after spending time at Scripps studying fish physiology then he spent two years in the lab of Nobel prize-winning physiologist August Crowe before going to the University of Cambridge to earn a second PhD in physiology he became assistant professor at Harvard studying high altitude physiology in humans where he published 21 respected papers about it this information is on Wikipedia for all to see and in pretty much every search result for DrKeys's education Ansel Keys had languished in obscurity for decades wait what he was written up in many magazines as a war hero partly because he developed the K rations that sustained troops in World War II which had everything to do with nutrition like many famous people he ended up on the popular TV show What's My Line only one of these men is the real DrKeys the other fewer imposters and will try to fool this battle and he published many Landmark papers about heart disease including his famous Keys equation he conducted one study basically I consider unethical in which he starved conscientious objectors okay if you want to read about the most fascinating and inspirational study ever and the other reason Ansel Keys was a war hero this is it amazing book I mean this is super detailed about every little physiologic finding with prolonged starvation and this is more the Layman's overview of the Minnesota starvation experiments by Todd Tucker an amazing read I read this on an airplane I couldn't put I was one of those conscientious objectors we knew fairly well what a star person looked like and what starvation did to the human body but until this time there had never been an opportunity to measure exactly what changes take place in the body under starvation conditions nor had there ever been any scientific tests to determine what best to feed a star person to bring him or her back to health I had already spent a couple of years with the forest service planting trees and fighting forest fires this call for volunteers sounded like an opportunity to provide a worthwhile service not just to our country but to all Humanity researcher Leia com from Johns Hopkins interviewed 18 of the volunteers 60 years later and they all said they would do it again and it was one of the most important things they had ever done this is basically the extent of Ansel Key's experience with nutrition and Cardiology which is nothing DrDiamond must not have read this Time Magazine cover story about Drkeys because if he had he would have known about his 90 1859 best-selling book on nutrition which introduced the Mediterranean diet one of the most respected diets in the world which has stood the test of time he would have known about ansel's amazing study of Japanese men that he published in 1958 in the annals of medicine showing that Japanese men whose diet was fish rice and veggies had very low rates of heart attack but if they moved to Hawaii they began to eat more meat Dairy and eggs and experienced four times the heart attack rate and if they moved to Los Angeles they ate even more meat Dairy and eggs and their heart attack rate became 10 times what it was when they lived in Japan am I the only one to have read this article in the last 60 years I just converted it to a searchable PDF and will link it in the description and I did the same with his paper about Japanese men this is a paper published in 1953 think about this contrast to where Pennington is publishing in the New England Journal of Medicine Keys is published she can barely better than a newsletter out of a hospital yes he was giving a talk at a hospital he published it two years later with the National Academy of Sciences but he published this paper which shows a relation between fat in the diet and people dying of heart attacks and so what you can see here is that the more fat in the diet going along here you have more deaths from heart disease so in the U.
S you have the most fat in the diet and you are the most heart attacks the problem with this graph is it is a result of him cheating okay this is not real Ansel Keys actually had data from 22 different countries he chose six data points to create this graph this was known at the time that he had cheated in fact here is a paper published in 1957 basically saying that Keys had cheated so that is a fascinating paper and it's quoted very often in the low-carb Community I promised you wouldn't need any science in this episode and you don't for that paper it's simply about how many carbs fat and protein people in 22 countries ate in the early 50s the problem is I've never found anyone who has actually read it besides my centenarian nutrition Professor friends who read it back in 1957 when it was published maybe that's because the only copy has been a very poor scan not searchable on crossfit's website with poorly annotated Graphics so I made a clear searchable PDF with beautifully annotated graphics and made it publicly available online you'll find a link in the description they introduced the paper quite politely by saying now information is given by Keys as to why he chose 6 out of 22 data points the irony is the two guys who published the 1957 paper must have skimmed ansel's 1953 paper and missed his explanation the paper is 22 Pages he published a table of 16 countries for all cause mortality and he chose them because they were reasonably comparable in race climate culture Medical Systems and Vital Statistics but he bemoaned the fact that he could only find six that had comparable Vital Statistics specific to heart disease and diet and he was detailed about what comparable meant but he wasn't a garbage in garbage out kind of scientist so six countries is all he could report I applaud the authors of the 1957 paper for trying to make sense of the more recent data they had from 22 countries but they spent most of the paper complaining about it guessing where the data points should go for countries like France Mexico and Chile and finally leaving it up to the reader to make sense of it I think we should take their word for it that their data had considerable limitations and supplementary investigations were essential so we're going to show you all 22 data points so they actually start off by showing his graph and then they show their graph of all the data points and it's important to understand these are data that came right out of World War II well to be specific the author said the data came from 1951 to 53 and so you have post-war Japan and Italy which basically have very thin people you do have a low rate of heart disease I don't know why DrDiamond isolated Japan in Italy with arrows he could have done the same for many countries like Great Britain and Germany and anyway he misidentified the second data point is Italy it's Ceylon now known as Sri Lanka Italy is further up to the right but anyway if you look at the overall curve which I've surrounded 20 of the 22 data points with the rectangle you can see a random scatter that when you have all the data points there is no relation between fat in the diet and heart disease that's the problem with not re reading the paper had he read it he would know the two authors were statisticians who calculated the correlation coefficient a coefficient of zero which is what DrDiamond is suggesting means no correlation between 0. 3 and 0. 7 means moderate and above 0.
7 means strong four percent of total calories the correlation coefficient for fat is 0. 390 moderate but on the weak side and animal fat was correlated with death more strongly 0. 557 that's because vegetable fat was negatively correlated meaning a higher percentage of vegetable fat in the diet meant fewer deaths from heart attacks and in fact that's exactly what the authors concluded he suggested association between death rates and heart disease and fat in the diet cannot be accepted as valid context did you notice that's Point number four let's look at Point number three three the presumed Association is not specific for fat in the diet or for diseases of the heart for example the association with heart disease mortality is stronger with animal protein the paper places the animal protein chart side by side with the fat chart but DrDiamond didn't show the protein chart the authors are right with their data animal protein shows a stronger correlation with heart disease death than fat that's the major finding of this paper it's very clear that answer keys doesn't know what he's talking about as far as diet he doesn't know anything about heart disease and he lied when he published that paper in 1953.
my eyes my ears they're bleeding you have to hand it to DrDiamond he may not have a background in heart disease or nutrition but he knows how to get millions of Internet views by calling scientists who do have a strong background incompetent Liars uh I guess I should explain why I'm going to be a little bit subdued for the next part of this episode 11 years ago we brought home a puppy who had a lot of Orthopedic issues he's appeared in several of my episodes Past after many surgeries starting at nine months in of age and years of physical therapy we formed an incredible Bond and a few days ago he fell down our stairs and broke his leg and so we put him to sleep I didn't think it was possible to love a dog that much but we do and that's why I took a break from social media and I put this episode on pause for a while and I may be a boob but it doesn't cheer me up to see DrDiamond in the audience Mark cancel Keys the way they're doing for the record ansel's 1953 graph accurately reports the 1949 data he said he used the authors of the 1957 paper used data from 1951 to 53 and for the same six countries they got the same graph as ansels and they complained bitterly about the data from the other countries so what is the result he gets to be on the cover of Time Magazine he served on the editorial board on cardiovascular journals yet he knew nothing about heart disease and what did he say in that paper in 1961 Americans eat too much fat too much saturated fat that's the kind of fat you get from animals there were no studies that supported this idea at all if DrDiamond had read the Time magazine article he would have been very familiar with this chart from Keys 1958 paper that he produced with an international team of scientists the red dots are from 400 autopsies of Japanese men living in Japan they were not eating much fat and even in the 60 to 69 age group only 15 percent of them had severe atherosclerosis Japanese men in Hawaii ate more saturated fat and 35 percent of them had severe atherosclerosis in the 60 to 69 age group when they died Caucasians ate even more saturated fat and 80 percent of them had severe atherosclerosis at death in the 60 to 69 group so you go to the American Heart Association website it still follows Key's original recommendations well if you don't trust the American Heart Association and no one would blame you given the poor life expectancy in the U. S there are something like 200 other countries with their own teams of independent scientists many of whom who have never heard of Ansel keys and all their food guides look like what Ansel advised in Time magazine in 1961. I read Japanese centenarian physician shigayaki hinohara's book on nutrition and honestly I couldn't tell any difference with Ansel Keyes 1959 book Drhinohara even promoted olive oil now to me this would just be sort of a footnote to history to show that Ansel Key's ignorance followed by good science means we no longer follow it wait that's it DrDiamond is going to stop with his coverage of Ansel keys after the Time magazine article that article was just the preface to the amazing books I've read about what unfolded next suppose you're Henry Blackburn who I correspond with often still sharp at 98 who was there when the 1957-22 country study was published he was a nutrition scientist and colleague of Ansel Keys what's your next move Henry the authors of that paper correctly observed that six data points was not enough but the data they had for 22 countries was horribly shaky and how could we know if it's animal protein or fat they called for more research Henry and ansel's response was to launch the most fascinating study I have ever heard of a once in a lifetime study that could never be done in the modern world modern randomized trials or even long-term observations in the modern world reveal very different things than this study was able to do I think it answered much of the mysterious but scientifically fascinating scatter in the charts of the 1957 paper it also provides a fascinating example of how misinformation spreads studies show that a very small number of people create the Lion's Share of misinformation in any field and they usually profit from doing it in the case of this study and the attempt to discredit DrKeys the major vectors of misinformation are the popular book author is Gary taubs and Nina touch halls and they do profit from it for those of us who've read the studies listening to Gary and Nina is like listening to DrDiamond you can tell how little they've read about the study the key thing is in the 50s rural communities with men arriving at heart attack age 40 to 59 still existed that hadn't experienced the invasion of supermarkets and restaurants that are everywhere now they had eaten the traditional diet of their area all their lives and would continue to do so for a few decades more unlike studies that are based on self-reporting teams of scientists replicated the meals the men were eating they froze them and sent them to the lab for chemical analysis they took blood samples Ranny kgs Etc they picked 16 areas representing 12 000 men a few from ansel's original chart some from the 22 countries who represented scatter on the chart like Finland and the Netherlands and critically seven from areas where no data was available to add blinding to the study the heart attack rates varied by tenfold from area to area at the start of the study unlike the crude data from the 22 country study of 1957 they standardized how deaths were reported and they knew exactly the calorie fat and protein intake of the men so they could eliminate scatter from shoddy data after 50 years of collecting that data well after Keys retired and passed away at a hundred the team of scientists published this chart it shows the profound influence of saturated fat in other words meat and dairy have on the rate of heart disease deaths remember how we set a correlation coefficient of greater than 0.
7 is strong this one is 0. 92 I know what half of you are thinking that's just epidemiology it means nothing it can't infer causality it's only hypothesis generating and that is a tragedy of not knowing nutritional history and underestimating how profoundly food companies influence what we believe for example this Landmark book was written by DrHarriet chick the most influential nutrition scientist of the first half of the last century in my opinion Dame of the British Empire the heroine of Vienna designer of British rations in World War one which prevented soldiers from suffering awful diseases like Barry Berry founder of the British nutrition Society seen writing the London Underground by herself at 98 who lived to 102. she writes about the profound role epidemiology played in tracking down the causes of dreaded nutritional diseases like berry berry palagra and rickets now you're thinking oh come on Chris you could verify the epidemiology of those diseases with short-term changes in their nutrition to eliminate nutritional deficiencies and that is exactly why the epidemiology answer keys performed is so profound because shorter trials only measure markers like blood pressure and cholesterol and it takes decades for those markers to lead to death and it's exactly why epidemiology is more important now than it ever was because short-term trials are not enough to understand long-term disease if Harriet was the most prolific nutrition minus of the first half of last century and Ansel for the second half Walter Willett is the most influential now he wrote the most respected textbook on nutritional epidemiology here's what DrWilla had to say about randomized trials in the absence of epidemiology long-term Court studies combined with randomized studies and mechanisms is probably going to be the best quality information that we can get and this is not unusual most of the important things we assume are causation and we make decisions are not based on randomized trials and it's sort of the more important the question is often the harder it is to do a randomized smoking is a good example of that smoking's a good example or do you believe in climate change right of course well have you randomized planets how many do you need I guess the biggest problem with randomized trials it's so easy to get the wrong answer because you didn't go long enough not a lot not enough adherence by the participants if we did want to um only make decisions about anything we do only using randomized trials we'd be just amazingly good but Chris you say doesn't Nina Thai scholt make some good points she's an investigative journalist who thinks epidemiology is trash and answer keys was a fraud epidemiology only shows is shows associations associations and nutritional epidemiology is particularly fraught because it depends on people reporting what they ate you know listening to her is exactly like listening to DrDiamond neither has been involved in heart disease or nutrition research and you can tell they haven't read much of Walter willett's books in Nina's case she has a million dollar annual budget for PR and lobbying to promote meat and dairy and those Industries have every incentive to cast doubt on epidemiology because it shows very clearly that populations who eat a lot of meat and dairy live shorter less healthy lives you can have a little as population studies showed just not a lot and that brings me back to DrDiamond's paper claiming if you're on a low carb diet and have high LDL cholesterol you don't need statins a bold claim like that deserves strong data to back it up but if you read that paper all the studies it references were of one to three years duration except one for that one he said the longest assessment of low carb diet effects on record is by hoosing her at all who documented the safety and effectiveness of the ketogenic diet over a 10-year period in the treatment of patients with epilepsy without evidence of an increase in cardiovascular disease risk biomarkers well that's encouraging but 10 years is not 50 like the chart I showed from the seven country study and it's for biomarkers not outcomes like death how many people ten well that's not the 12 000 in the seven country study or the hundred thousand in the Adventist 2 study when you read the Time magazine article you'll see how proud Ansel was about the statistical power of His studies time quotes him as saying I've Got 5 000 cases what about the ages of this 10-year 10 patient biomarker paper were they of the age when atherosclerosis really takes hold as key showed in his 1958 study they were young children they were seven months to seven years old when they started the keto diet they had epilepsy because they had impaired glucose transport to the brain I have no idea why a sinus would hang his hat on a study like that with 42 citations but it gets worse Harry cites just a letter to the editor from a student with a bachelor's degree in nutrition science who hasn't been heard from in years and what you actually find here is more fat in the diet is associated with less deaths from heart disease a complete opposite of the graph that Keys created in 1953.
let's look at the data point that's at the very extreme right here the people who eat the most fat and have the least heart disease France okay the French are truly horrible people they don't respect the American Heart Association at all thank you they have an absolutely anti-American Heart Association diet and keys refuse to acknowledge that the country even existed the good news about knowing nutrition history is you'd know immediately the French have their own Heart Association founded in 1937. here are their guidelines a healthy diet is a Cornerstone of cardiovascular disease prevention adopt a Mediterranean or similar diet replace saturated fat for example fast food and red meat with unsaturated fat for example olive oil and avocado reduce salt intake eat more whole grains fruits vegetables and nuts eat fish at least once a week and reduce sugar intake three things first of all this is the 1957 graph DrDiamond referenced to discredit DrKeys earlier in this talk cleaned up by me so we don't confuse data points like DrDiamond had done before that's where France is on the chart Not Unusual in terms of fat intake versus heart attack rate the authors of the 1957 paper struggled with the day data from France and we now know France was Under reporting their heart disease deaths by about 20 percent back then second Ansel tried to get France to fund the cohort of the seven country study in France but they passed like a few other countries did so we did the next best thing and got a French doctor on the team DrJacques carlotti which you see in this film Drcarlotti preparing a patient on the Colorado Parish preparing a patient for the electric cardigram which is being taken by Professor Kimura of Japan who go for Japan who joined our international team third DrKeys didn't fall into the Trap of thinking that countries are monoliths that's why the seven country study had 16 study areas Western Finland Eastern Finland several areas of Italy Etc here's what DrWillett had to say about France and of course France itself has been interesting but France is not monolithic either and one of my friends and colleagues who died a few years ago really studied France and detail Serge Renault does cheese deserve its bad reputation DrRenault says no it is milk we must be careful of surveys in different countries through a very very strong relationship between the intake of milk and the motivate from common heart disease why for cheese it's there is no relationship at all and he showed very clearly just within France if you looked at the north of Brittany Normandy parts of France they were really Northern Europeans that had very Dairy Centric diets and then the south of France had more Mediterranean type diets they were really on the Mediterranean and across though just within France there was also a four-fold difference in heart disease rates with the dairy animal-centric diet at the North having about four times higher risk of heart disease compared to the Mediterranean country so if you just look at the National Data you miss a lot from France and within France actually the seven countries findings were basically replicated so the title of this episode is how misinformation spreads there are some reasons which are obvious we hear what we want to believe [Music] the money but companies do exploit different fields in different ways in nutrition there are at least two first no one in the field knows nutrition history not even nutrition professors I asked 86 year old nutrition Professor Marion Nestle whom I adore as one of the most sensible knowledgeable people in the industry what she thought of Harriet chick she said I have never heard of her second the food company Playbook relies on the ancient marketing adage if you can't win on one playing field change the playing field the denial industry's product is doubt no better way to confuse and cast doubt than to change the subject from food to biochemistry no consumers understand biochemistry and as a doctorate makes you sound like you're really smart even if you have no idea so how does a scientist like DrDiamond get swept into the misinformation Vortex scientists have particular vulnerabilities like not understanding how marketing lobbying and the machinations of front groups work the most successful front groups can get naive scientists to believe they're genuine like Nina teichols's nutrition Coalition has done with a few scientists like Tim Knox and finally studies continually show a small number of people or outsized spreaders of disinformation they're responsible for the Lion's Share of its spread here's an example Gary taubs wrote this viral New York Times magazine article in 2002. 2.
if you know nutrition history you know that is a best-selling message here's Herman taller's 2 million copy best seller in 1961. calories don't count the marketing copy is unbelievable but true exclamation point you need to eat fat if you are to be slim or DrAtkins 1972 bestseller about his diet Revolution if you knew nutrition history you would know the Revolution was often the diet of Royals for all of recorded history and for all of recorded history they got the diseases of Kings heart disease and gout Gary said that New York Times article would not have been possible if it were about vegetables no kidding to Americans beef and butter are irresistible what they desperately want to believe are healthy that article got him a book advance to sustain his family for four years and what did his first book say the entire prologue is dedicated to misrepresenting Banting the way DrDiamond did and lionizing Herman Toller and Robert Atkins Gary is a journalist who exploited the fact that no one knows nutrition history and they wouldn't have access to Herman Tyler's book or know that taller was found guilty of male fraud and conspiracy for that book as a vehicle to sell as supplements Gary is the master at finding obscure almost uncheckable references for example he frequently misquotes Hilda Brooks 1957 book he has a copy and I have one but I'm not aware of any rare booksellers who have won to sell but he is good at getting people who don't know nutrition history to repeat his misinformation here's DrWestman about Banting I work at Duke University and one is the Banting diet book from 1863.
