30 Years of Diet Trials: What a Stanford Scientist Is Most (and Least) Sure About | Dr Christopher Gardner

Simon Hill (0:01)

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You've been on the show, what? Is this like fifth, sixth, seventh?

Christopher Gardner (1:11)

I asked the internet and it said seventh so far. Okay. I'm not sure if it got it right.

Simon Hill (1:17)

Today's eight.

Christopher Gardner (1:18)

It could be. Yeah.

Simon Hill (1:19)

I think at this point, our regular listeners, they'll be pretty aware of your overall thesis and a lot of the trials you've done. But I do hope we retrace over quite a lot of that today. I think we'll also explore some new territory.

I would like to challenge some of these positions, because I think you and I, we share pretty much all, but we say things very similarly. So along the way, just to give a voice to perhaps some of the counterarguments that are out there, I want to throw some of those at you and just see how you think about them.

Christopher Gardner (1:55)

That was part of the book too. Like after all that time, how do I approach that new paper?

It's based on all those studies.

Simon Hill (2:02)

I think most people know you as a Stanford Nutrition Professor, someone who conducts these really interesting, highly relevant topical studies, clinical trials that answer interesting questions like the fermented food study that you did and the low fat versus low carb diet fits trial and all these kind of clinical studies which the media love to write about, we love to talk about on the podcast. But what people might not appreciate is you started in philosophy.

Christopher Gardner (2:35)

I did. Absolutely.

Simon Hill (2:39)

How does your understanding of philosophy and that study of philosophy influence the way that you see nutrition and communicate nutrition today?

Christopher Gardner (2:52)

Oh, hugely. And it's actually been super satisfying to come full circle, right? So I attended Colgate University in upstate New York and all, it had a great philosophy department and all the freshmen were required to take philosophy. And I kind of loved it because there was no right answer. What is truth? What is beauty? What is good? And you had to come up with these compelling arguments and read all these different philosophers, how they approach things and really always made me look at the big picture like, wow, there's actually no key to this exam. You can't just be right. You have to have a compelling argument. And the next person can have a different compelling argument, and you can both get an A in class. So at the end of that, I didn't really want to go to school anymore. I thought, I don't even know why I went to school. I don't want to be a doctor or a lawyer. I think maybe I'll just go see the world and I'll work in restaurants. And I worked in a lot of restaurants, six years worth of restaurants. At which point I thought, wow, I'm going to have to get a real job and grow up at some point. And I think I've told a story here before. I had a vegetarian girlfriend at that point that dumped me. Thought if I went vegetarian, she'd get me back, take me back. She didn't. There were more issues than that. Stayed vegetarian, thought I would open a vegetarian restaurant. Was sick and tired of people asking me where I got my protein. So I thought I would get maybe a master's degree in nutrition. So when I opened the restaurant and had a lot of plant food, I could tell them where their protein was coming from. I got a Ph.D. by mistake and then the Stanford faculty position by mistake and started studying phytochemicals. At first, I was really interested in the allicin in garlic or the genestine in soy or the anthocyanins in blueberries.