#1058 - Nina Teicholz

Joe Rogan (0:02)

Three, two, one, Teicholz. Is that right?

Nina Teicholz (0:07)

That's it.

Joe Rogan (0:07)

What's up, Nina? How are you?

Nina Teicholz (0:09)

Good to be here.

Joe Rogan (0:09)

Thanks for doing this. Appreciate it.

Nina Teicholz (0:11)

It's good to be here.

Joe Rogan (0:12)

So, a big fat surprise. What's the big fat surprise?

Nina Teicholz (0:17)

That butter, meat, and cheese do not cause heart disease.

Nina Teicholz (0:20)

That saturated fat doesn't cause heart disease. That fat doesn't make you fat. That low fat diet doesn't make you healthy. Healthy.

That's my book.

Joe Rogan (0:29)

Yeah, that's very controversial. Pull this sucker up real close to you.

Nina Teicholz (0:32)

All right.

Joe Rogan (0:33)

There we go.

Nina Teicholz (0:33)

Right there?

Joe Rogan (0:33)

Yeah.

Nina Teicholz (0:34)

Perfect.

Joe Rogan (0:34)

Beautiful. Very controversial in this day and age.

Nina Teicholz (0:39)

It was even more controversial when the book came out, which is in 2014 But we've seen an almost complete sea change on this subject. Not at the expert level, but there's a real ground swell in a change of thinking.

I think, in part, really triggered by my book, which really laid out all the arguments for how do we come to believe that saturated fat is bad for health? Why do we believe animal fats are bad? Why do we believe they cause heart disease?

And really tells that whole story of how we started down this path, believing that fat and cholesterol cause heart disease, make you sick, cause cancer, make you fat. And it's a wild story. It's just an incredible story, the politics, the personalities. It really is a story more about politics than about science.

Joe Rogan (1:28)

Did you feel vindicated when the New York Times article came out where it showed that the sugar industry had bribed these scientists to lie about data and falsify data that showed that saturated fat was the cause of heart disease instead of sugar? Cause that was fairly recently, right? That was after your book.

Nina Teicholz (1:44)

That was. And you know, that's a small part of the story. I mean, I have documents in my book.

There's maybe a hundred different documents that you can find where companies are trying to sway the interests. They're trying to pay off scientists, basically. There's so much money going into nutrition science. It's amazing how little people know about how much nutrition science is funded by the food industry. And that was one small example where Harvard scientists had received money from the sugar industry.

And what this article contended is that that's what pushed them to blame fat and not sugar for heart disease. I actually don't believe that that's what happened in that particular case for those Harvard scientists in 1950s because I studied them extensively. You know, for my book, I read like, well, it took me nine years and I read like 10,000 scientific papers. So I knew the work of those Harvard scientists. I knew everything they had written. One of them was named Mark Hegsted, who was very influential. And the reality for him and his colleagues was that they truly 100% believed that fat and saturated fat and cholesterol caused heart disease. And they had believed it for more than a decade before the sugar industry came along with that proposition for them.

They really believed. Those early scientists were true.

They were not corrupt. They were actually not corrupted by industry. They were true believers. And one of the things that my book explores is this phenomenon that happens, happened then, happened today, where scientists, they come to fall in love with their beliefs. You know, they fall in love with their own hypothesis.

Joe Rogan (3:26)

Humans, it's a problem with humans, not just scientists.

Nina Teicholz (3:29)

So this is what we all do. We fall in love with an idea, we believe something, and we only see things that confirm it, and we kind of ignore everything that contradicts it.

Well, in science, what scientists are supposed to do, what they're taught to do, is to not behave in a human way. They're taught to rigorously distrust their beliefs. They're taught to try to find every way to shoot down their own hypothesis. That's the job of being a scientist.

Nina Teicholz (3:56)

That's why they seem so cold and dispassionate, or to us mere humans.

Nina Teicholz (4:01)

But in the case of nutrition science, that didn't happen. They fell in love with their idea. It was like a favored child.

All they did was try to find evidence to support it. They cherry-picked the evidence again and again, and they completely ignored or actively even suppressed any information that contradicted their ideas. So this scientist, Mark Hextead at Harvard, he and his favorite colleague Ansel Keys, who is from the University of Minnesota, they would actually bully and kind of stomp on scientists who came up with contradictory information. They would actually suppress stuff. And this is still going on today, which is what makes it such an interesting story. I mean, today, it's the same phenomenon in nutrition science. This is the way nutrition science started, and it's the legacy that continues today, which is that any papers to the contrary, you know, hard to get them published, hard to get them into disgust, hard to get them presented at expert meetings.