Wednesday, April 27, 2022

Interview: "The Science Behind Vegetable Oils and Why They’re Terrible For You"—The Natural State with Dr. Anthony Gustin

Dr. Anthony Gustin

We did this one quite a while ago, and it finally got released. 

I expect you all will enjoy it and hopefully learn something. 

Anthony is a very smart guy, and asks some hard questions.

He's the guy who put together the twitter thread I reposted recently: 

Can We Replace Seed Oils With Beef Tallow?

In this interview, we discuss

  • Tucker’s backstory and how he went from being a Chief Technology Officer to studying the effects nutrition has on our health
  • The serious health conditions Tucker experienced firsthand
  • Why Tucker didn’t get better even after eliminating sugar and carbs and what he removed next
  • The approach Tucker used to remove wheat and seed oils from his diet and what happened when he did
  • Does consuming wheat or seed oils give you different symptoms?
  • The food that gave Tucker the biggest reaction and why that is
  • What Tucker removed from his diet that eliminated all of his health problems
  • How is family reacted when he removed these offenders from their diet too
  • What happens when seed oils break down in the body
  • What we’ve learned from the Hadza tribe
  • The shocking reason why seed oils were created in the first place plus how they’re made
  • How we went from having virtually no chronic diseases to 60% of the population experiencing them
  • And more...
(From Anthony's show notes.)

There's a second half coming soon, so follow Anthony's podcast to stay up to date!
 


David Gornoski Is Now On Twitter

 David has a been a wonderful supporter of my crusade to get the news out about seed oils. He's willing to touch the third rails of discussion, and thus has avoided Twitter for a while. 

Now that it's under new management, he (and many others) have started to put a toe in the waters.

David Gornoski on Twitter

He covers a lot more than just the health topics he has me on his podcast and his radio show (live feed and back episodes), some of which might appeal, some not.

He's a good guy and an important part of getting this message out. Give him a follow and a listen. 

Thursday, April 21, 2022

Podcast Ep. 1: The Seed Oil Disrespecter Revealed!—With Dr. & Ashley K


After the kick-off episode of my podcast:

What VICE Left Out: Bitcoin and Seed Oils—Starting a Podcast

I get to reveal my co-host in episode 1.

Meet the Seed Oil Disrespecter and his wife, Ashley. We talk about how and why they started doing what they are doing, and what they hope to accomplish, with a focus on how avoiding seed oils affected their family health even after eating a mostly healthy diet for many years. 

Some news at the end, so stick around! 




Seed Oil Disrespecter on Twitter: https://twitter.com/SeedOilDsrspctr 

Healthy Oil Respecter (Ashley) on Twitter: https://twitter.com/RealOilRspctr 

Seed Oil Rebellion: https://www.seedoilrebellion.com/ 


Wednesday, April 20, 2022

Interview: "Ending the Debate Over Seed Oils"—Fundamental Health with Paul Saladino

This is from August 23rd of last year, but I just realized that I forgot to post about it. It's a follow-up to this:


A bunch of people on Twitter had commented on what a great interview the above was, and I agree, so I reached out to Paul about doing a follow-up.



Enjoy!

Paul has a lot of good material and interviews, so do consider subscribing to his podcast. I have.



Paul's notes on this podcast:

Time Stamps:

0:10:16 Podcast begins

0:12:16 Tucker’s blog post: https://yelling-stop.blogspot.com/2021/06/thoughts-on-of-rats-and-sidney-diet.html

0:14:16 Compounds that reduce overeating

0:17:16 Dietary Linoleic Acid Elevates Endogenous 2-AG and Anandamide and Induces Obesity: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1038/oby.2012.38

0:23:31 Endocannabinoid signal in the gut controls dietary fat intake: https://www.pnas.org/content/108/31/12904

0:29:56 A Neural Circuit for Gut-Induced Reward: https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(18)31110-3?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS0092867418311103%3Fshowall%3Dtrue

0:35:46 CRP is a marker of oxidized linoleic acid

0:38:32 Dietary linoleic acid intake and blood inflammatory markers: a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials: https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2017/FO/C7FO00433H

0:43:06 Take a pill or just stop eating so many seed oils?

0:45:16 Low‐Density Lipoprotein Cholesterol Corrected for Lipoprotein(a) Cholesterol, Risk Thresholds, and Cardiovascular Events: https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/JAHA.119.016318

0:49:46 A high linoleic acid diet increases oxidative stress in vivo and affects nitric oxide metabolism in humans: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9844997/

0:54:16 HNE – what is it and why is it important?

0:58:36 Where is linoleic acid even found?

1:02:46 The average amount of linoleic acid in the human diet

1:12:06 Why I don’t eat bacon

1:14:46 Just because a study was conducted a long time ago, doesn’t mean it should be ruled out

1:20:31 Re-evaluation of the traditional diet-heart hypothesis: analysis of recovered data from Minnesota Coronary Experiment (1968-73): https://www.bmj.com/content/353/bmj.i1246

1:27:16 When low LDL can result in a higher risk of cardiovascular disease

1:28:31 Use of dietary linoleic acid for secondary prevention of coronary heart disease and death: evaluation of recovered data from the Sydney Diet Heart Study and updated meta-analysis: https://www.bmj.com/content/346/bmj.e8707

1:32:16 Mediterranean diet, traditional risk factors, and the rate of cardiovascular complications after myocardial infarction: final report of the Lyon Diet Heart Study: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9989963/

1:40:40 The blood test you should consider getting

1:42:55 The idea of “Intralipid”

1:51:00 Tucker’s personal experience with weight loss and dietary changes

2:03:10 Health Characteristics of the Wayuu Indigenous People: https://academic.oup.com/milmed/article/184/7-8/e371/5481850

Tuesday, April 19, 2022

Interview: On Diabetes—A Neighbor's Choice with David Gornoski

Another weekly appearance on David's radio show. 

"Plus, Tucker Goodrich joins the show to talk about how Christianity birthed scientific progress, what causes diabetes from a nutritional perspective, what kind of weight loss should be alarming, and more."
The video at the link contains both 1/2 hours. Skip past 23 minutes for the second half. It's a radio show, so no video.

Podcast:

Thursday, April 14, 2022

Can We Replace Seed Oils With Beef Tallow?

Dr. Anthony Gustin runs through the math in this twitter thread (reproduced here for readability):




24% of our calories come from seed oils! 😳 

My dream? Use regenerative beef tallow to replace all seed oils. In fryers, at restaurants, in sauces, packaged food, everywhere. 

This would transform public health and save the planet. 

But is it possible? Let's do some math.👇

Context first: 

Why tallow? It is healthy for humans and the planet. Managed properly, it's the only truly sustainable way to produce fat.

Regeneratively raised cattle restore ecosystems, sequester carbon, & support small local farmers while producing healthy fats for humans.
Why no seed oils? 

They're grown in industrial monocrops and  destructive to the environments. 4 of 5 top GHG emitting crops are seed oils.  

They destroy our health and are connected to obesity, heart disease, cancer, neurodegen, AMD, & more, and only benefit corporations.

Alright, math time. 🤓

How much seed oil do we consume in North America alone per year? 

23 million metric tons, or 23 billion kilograms (~51 billion pounds). Per. Year. 🤯 

This figure is rising rapidly and predicted to be 72.6 billion lbs by 2026.


How much tallow could we get if we rendered ALL the fat from EVERY single beef cattle per year into tallow? 🐄
  • 30 million cattle harvested per year
  • 150 pounds of fat trim per carcass
  • 90 pounds of tallow yield rendered from fat 
30mm x 90 = ~2.7 billion lbs of tallow possible

Uh oh! There's only 2.7 billion lbs of tallow possible per year, to replace 51 billion lbs of seed oils consumed per year.

That's only ~5.3% possible seed oil replacement.

And this is using ALL cattle, most of which are grain-fed and conventionally raised (I do not support).

P.S. The US currently produces only ~100 million pounds of tallow per year. 😬

Unfortunately we can't add the ~2.1 billion pounds of butter produced in the USA each year because it's already being consumed. 

Even if it were additional supply that was replacing seed oil consumption, it would still only be another 4% replacement.

Is lard an option? Nope. 

99% of all pork (even pastured) is fed corn and soy, so lard FA profiles are worse than canola oil. This is terrible for the environment as huge monocrops are needed to support high PUFA lard. 

We do not have a scalable regen pig option on the table.

Alright, well we need more grazing animals to improve ecosystems, provide nutrient dense meat, & build our top soil back anyway, great! 

But we'd need at minimum ~20x more cattle (with 100% utilization of fat) to be able to match yearly seed oil consumption. 

Is that possible?

Grazing currently takes up 741 million acres in the US. If we 20x'd this, we'd need 14.8 billion acres. 

But we only have 1.9 billion acres of land in the lower 48!

Even if we had an 8x improvement of land use utilizing rotational grazing instead of conventional, it won't work.

A fair argument would be that we don't need to be eating all of these seed oils. Over consuming them is why we're fat and sick in the first place, right? 

But even if we consume 10x less oil, we can still only replace 50% of it with tallow if we used EVERY SINGLE head of cattle.

I'm starting to do work on how much high-quality real food can scale to support the food system (regen meat and tallow, eggs, butter, avocado, coconut, etc.) and it is looking pretty similar to the grim calculations above.

This is clear: We need as many people as possible buying and consuming regenerative ruminants, and all parts of them (bone broth, organs, tallow, hides, etc), so we can get as much nutrition while improving ecosystems as we can. 

But it's not enough.

We have essentially two options: 
  1. Focus only on the ability to grow regen food and ignore the 95%+ of seed oils and watch billions die from hunger
  2. Try to find some solution to bridge the gap between maximizing local regen food supply AND provide better alts to seed oils
If we focus on option 1, corporations are going to continue to pump these seed oils into our food system & profit at all costs. 

I personally have a hard time standing by watching our population be involuntarily poisoned, knowing that real food isn't an option, & doing nothing.

So, option 2 it is for me. This is why I'm working mostly now on trying to scale regenerative practices and products as fast as possible AND working on other alternatives that will help replace destructive seed oils. 

I'll be chatting far more about all of these projects soon.

Feel helpless after this math? Don't fret! Here's what you can do: 
  • Know & support your farmer 
  • Buy regenerative animal products
  • Eat local
  • Stop eating seed oils
  • Share this information with friends & family 
P.S. You can find local farms here: 

The convergence of health and sustainability issues we face as a species is undeniable. We need as many people working on problems like this as possible.

If you have any clear solutions to replace seed oils with regenerative sources that I'm not thinking of, I'd love to hear!

If you want to stay tuned on all of the projects I'm working on follow along here @dranthonygustin or subscribe to my newsletter with 130k+ other people here:

Wednesday, April 13, 2022

The Folate Experiment

 My mother has gotten senile. So when she recently told me about how she thought she had some sort of genetic folate absorption problem, it was a little short on details, and she hasn't seen the physician who diagnosed her for decades. But she has been supplementing with folic acid for years, and attributes it to a big improvement in her health.

Well, it's a bit problematic. But when she told me back in my early 20s that she had a problem eating wheat—something she doesn't remember at all now—I should have listened.

Solgar Folate 1,333 MCG DFE
(Metafolin® 800 mcg)
 

So, I figured I'd give it a shot. Supplementing with folate (the natural form, don't supplement with folic acid) seemed pretty harmless, so I bought the brand Chris Kresser recommends, and proceeded.

I noticed some benefits (mainly concerning anxiety) right away. That was kind of what I was looking for, and it was in the list of symptoms that my mother had mentioned. I noticed that if I didn't take it, the anxiety returned, so I set a reminder in my calendar to take it, 

I also recommended it to my daughter, who has had some pretty severe anxiety issues over the years, which the "health professionals" have been useless at treating.

One of the symptoms of folate deficiency is supposedly canker/mouth sores. I suffered from these as a child, and my daughter does too.

I didn't notice anything after the initial changes, but kept taking the pills.

My daughter reported that if she stopped taking the pills, she got a canker sore. Interesting. She also reports that her anxiety/depression is entirely gone. Well, that's what my mother had reported, and was why I suggested my daughter try it.

She's also been battling over-fat, and, contemporaneously with the folate, has made major gains in that area. Correlation isn't causation, but it's interesting.

So all this sounds good, so far.

My diet is pretty boring, and stable. The last big change was a small one, when I moved to Idaho and started eating a bit more beef and potatoes. Nothing major.

So about five weeks ago I had two unusual health issues. The first was what I at first thought was a pulled muscle in my lower back. I never get pulled muscles in my back, not since the combination of barefoot running, fixing my diet, and not sitting all day.

And I've never had a pulled muscle like this. It was like being stabbed, and hurt so bad I couldn't roll over in bed, my wife had to push or pull me.

And it took weeks to heal. It still hurts a bit, almost 5 weeks later. Very unusual, since fixing my diet relatively major injuries don't hurt much, and heal quickly.

The second was what I at first thought was a canker sore. Since deficiency and overdose for some nutrients can result in similar symptoms, I immediately stopped taking the folate.

Mouth sore

I wound up with not only a major sore in the back of my jaw, but when it finally healed up a bit, I had a new tooth!

No, it wasn't a new tooth. It was a bone spur.

But while these are typically the result of a dental procedure that leaves a shard of bone in the gum, this is more likely due to the body's attempt to heal the sore. The sore left me with a divot in the jaw bone, and I suspect that the calcium redistributed itself into the spur.

Bone spur
Either one of these wouldn't have been too remarkable, although they were each unique in my experience. The fact that they both happened soon after starting the folate supplementation makes me think that they are a result of that. (What changed?)

The sore had left me with pretty clear signs of infection, including swollen glands. Unfortunately, the bone protruding from my jaw prevented the thing from healing, and also hurt like blazes if I talked for any length of time, like I did the other day. It also kept getting reinfected. Not good.

So I consulted a dentist, which is where these photos came in. My father-in-law is a dentist, as it happens, and my wife was briefly his dental assistant and is now a nurse. But he's back in Connecticut, so we sent him these pictures.

He ruled out a canker sore, and cancer (thanks to an autocorrect of 'canker'), but was mystified. He's 80, and still practicing, so if he's never seen it...

So today I gave up and made an appointment with a local dentist to have it removed. Luckily a few hours later my lunch of leftover beef shank broke the thing off, and the usual seed-oil-free recovery took over. The inflammation and infection are almost totally gone a few hours later (now) and I expect it will be fully healed up tomorrow.

Lessons

I suspect that the injury in my mouth and in my back were both the result of folate overdose. The fact that they occurred around the same time and lasted for the same period, and both seemed to involve a breakdown in bone/connective tissue is too much of a coincidence for me to think that they are not related.

There is information on folate deficiency, but none on folate overdose. They do note that it's unlikely unless you are supplementing.

So don't supplement unless you need it. I did get some benefit from this, and so did my daughter, so it wasn't a mistake, necessarily.

But my mistake was setting that calendar reminder. Just like when I was taking cod liver oil years ago, when I was getting a benefit from it, I craved it. Unfortunately with the reminder I was just robotically taking it each day.

My daughter is taking it when she remembered to. I think that's a smarter approach.

I have warned her of what I experienced, but she also seems to be getting a lot more benefit from it than I did. So she's going to continue taking it.

I don't blame Chris Kresser or the supplement company for this at all. This was my experiment, and I have no reason to think that the supplement was bad, I confirmed what Chris recommended before buying it, and if you think you are in need of a folate supplement, I would recommend that one. I have had good luck with Kresser's recommendations in the past, and still consider him to be an authoritative source.

I just took too much of it. Luckily it didn't do me permanent harm or cost any money... But it could have.

I don't at the moment know if I'll take it again, I guess I'll see if the symptoms come back. But the reminder is deleted!

Tuesday, April 12, 2022

Interview: "Seed Oil Apocalypse: Toxic Food and the Health Crisis"—Primal Edge Health with Tristan Haggard

 A good chat with Tristan Haggard of Primal Edge Health. We got into a few new areas, talked about wheat and wheat poisoning at length, for instance, and got into some details about my own health experiences that I don't think I've covered elsewhere. 

I don't believe he has a podcast, we did this as a livestream on Youtube.

Monday, April 11, 2022

Book Review: "Eat to Beat Disease" by Dr. William Li

Dr. William Li is a physician and research scientist at his institute, the Angiogenesis Foundation in Massachusetts.

Eat to Beat Disease:
The New Science of How Your Body Can Heal Itself 
I recently had the opportunity to interview him with DavidGornoski, and in preparation for that read his book.

EAT TO BEAT DISEASE shows you how to integrate the foods you already love into any diet or health plan to activate your body’s health defense systems —Angiogenesis, Regeneration, the Microbiome, DNA Protection, and Immunity —to fight cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, neurodegenerative disease, autoimmune disease, and other debilitating conditions.”

Introduction

It’s an interesting book, and a bit different from any I’ve seen before, in that he starts from what he says are the five functions essential for health and repair: Angiogenesis, Regeneration, the Microbiome, DNA Protection, and Immunity, and then backs into foods that support those functions. This leads to his 5 x 5 x 5 “framework” for eating better. It’s not meant to be a strict program of eating, but is a series of guidelines to pick better foods in your day-to-day life, while allowing for flexibility and not requiring perfect behavior. Aside from the list of foods, it’s also not complicated.

He starts from a presumption which should be self-evident, that medicine has made many advances, “But, despite all of the success, the sobering fact is that the rates of new disease are skyrocketing.”

He attributes this, correctly I think, to our diet, and to Medicine’s lack of attention to it:

“Not many doctors know how to discuss a healthy diet with their patients. This is through no fault of the individual doctors, but rather a side effect of how little nutrition education they receive. According to David Eisenberg, a professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, only one in five medical schools in the United States requires medical students to take a nutrition course. On average, medical schools offer a mere nineteen hours of coursework in nutrition, and there are few postgraduate continuing education classes on nutrition for doctors already in practice.”

Being at root a physician of the vascular system, he starts there (which of course allows him to look at every system in the body, since all depend on the vascular system to some extent). Angiogenesis is the process of the body growing new blood vessels. Surprisingly, this takes place regularly, and is involved in wound healing (good), and atherosclerosis, cancer, and blindness; and is an area in which Dr. Li is a pioneer.

“The goal of an angiopreventive diet is to keep the body’s angiogenesis defense system in a healthy state of balance. This sometimes becomes a point of confusion among Western-trained doctors, because balance is not typically part of their lexicon for disease treatment. Balance is a more familiar concept in Ayurvedic and traditional Chinese medicine, in which the focus is on balance for preventive health. Health is viewed in those systems as the presence of balanced systems in body and mind.”

Lack of balance leads to dysregulation, where the homeostatic systems that are supposed to keep things in balance (within reason) get out of order, leading to the chronic diseases.

It’s an approach I whole-heartedly agree with.

The book is presented logically, in an easy-to-follow manner. He goes through each “5” of the framework, so the first five chapters cover the topics mentioned above (angiogenesis, etc), and so on.

He offers a suggestion of surviving in the kitchen, and a bunch of recipes. You have to like a book about food where this is the first recipe!

From Eat to Beat Disease.

Background

Li seems to approach this with a strong “plant-based” (aka vegan) view. (“Vegan” appears in the text nine times, and “plant-based” 32, “paleo” appears eight times, "red meat" appears 13 times (mostly negatively), and “carnivore” does not appear at all.) However, while I think it is fair to say that Li is biased in that direction, or at least influenced by that school of thought; he is open-minded. He is somewhat critical of the Paleo diet (calling it an “elimination” diet, a critique he does not level the vegan or vegetarian diets he discusses, but he also describes the success of Loren Cordain’s autoimmune protocol, a Paleo-based diet geared towards reducing autoimmune disease. He expresses some concerns (unfounded, I think) about the ketogenic diet, but also describes some successes of that diet for treating cancer.

“Glioblastoma was used to study the ketogenic effect, in part because of the importance of cancer stem cells in this disease. Even if this cancer is successfully removed or treated initially, the glioblastoma stem cells help it return aggressively. Avoiding added sugar and adhering to a ketogenic diet are strategies that may be helpful in fighting brain tumors.”

Many of the papers he cites or discusses start with an assumption that a plant-based diet is optimally healthy, and even those that he has authored himself make this claim:

A plant-based diet is increasingly becoming recognized as a healthier alternative to a diet laden with meat.... We suggest that a shift toward a plant-based diet may confer protective effects against atherosclerotic CAD by increasing endothelial protective factors in the circulation while reducing factors that are injurious to endothelial cells.” (Tuso et al., 2015)

Another paper contrasts a “plant-based” diet to a Western diet (Fotsis et al., 1993), and that’s a comparison where the PB diet will win (in the short term, at least) as nothing seems worse than a Western diet.

But this is not a vegan or plant-based diet book, by any means.

“Because the 5 × 5 × 5 is a framework, not a prescription, it is adaptable to whatever diet plan you’re currently following, whether it’s Paleo, Whole30, Ornish, low-carb, plant-based, gluten-free, allergen-free, or ketogenic—and it’s easy to adopt if you don’t follow a plan at all.”

Many of the foods he recommends as part of his list of prescribed foods are indeed fish, but the only meat is dark chicken. He does not proscribe red meat, although he certainly discourages it.

Pros and Cons

Ultimately the cons to this approach are quibbles. The pro is that it’s a flexible, relatively easy-to-follow diet plan that you can overlay on whatever you are currently doing. Adding foods that are healthy—and it’s fair to say they are all healthy, and he includes beer and wine in moderation—will make any diet better, so even if you are on a junk-food Modern American Diet your diet will improve.

“For the 5 × 5 × 5 framework you first create your own personalized preferred food list (PFL) based on foods you actually enjoy. You create your list from the master list of all of the foods that follow.”

It’s a long list, so I won’t reproduce it here, but the sections are:

  • Fruits 
  • Vegetables 
  • Legumes/fungi 
  • Nuts, seeds, whole grains, bread
  • Seafood
  • Meat
  • Dairy
  • Spices/herbs
  • Oil
  • Sweets
  • Beverages

Three sections only contain one item, and these sections tell you the most about this framework: Meat is only dark chicken, Oil is only extra-virgin olive oil (EVOO), and Sweets are only dark chocolate.

He obviously doesn’t like red meat, and recommends dark chicken, along with lots of cheeses, because of the vitamin K2—which is what your body needs, not the vitamin K found in vegetables. K2 is thought to be important to vascular health. He does recommend not eating the chicken fat. Li is not a fan of organ meats, although he does recommend oysters, the liver of the ocean.

Recommending only EVOO is due to Li not being a fan of omega-6 seed oils. While this is a major pro in my view, it’s also a con, as he doesn’t explicitly say so.

Instead, one must read between the lines:

“Tilapia has a high unhealthy ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 PUFAs, making it a less desirable fish from a health perspective.”

And:

“There was no cancer-risk-reducing benefit seen with seed oils.

And:

“For cancer protection, researchers have found that the higher the overall intake of marine omega-3 in the diet, the greater the benefit. In contrast, higher omega-6 PUFA consumption in relation to omega-3 PUFA (the omega 6:3 ratio), which comes from vegetable oil, for example, is linked to unhealthy inflammation and an increased risk of disease.”

I fully agree with those ideas, but I would have been helpful if he had been more explicit. (I asked him about this in the interview, he was quite explicit there.)

And by recommending only dark chocolate for your sweets, what I do personally, he is recommending against too much added sugar, something he discusses at length in the book.

I would have liked to have seen a similar discussion of omega-6 fats, which I think are a much bigger health issue than sugar.

His recommendations on meat are unfortunately not well-founded in science, unfortunately. He is concerned that meat can increase the production of TMAO, a chemical which is often cited in the vegan literature as a reason not to eat meat. However, “Among food groups, TMAO directly correlated with the intake of fish, vegetables, and whole-grain products, but not meat, processed meat, and dairy products,” which is from a paper titled, “Plasma TMAO increase after healthy diets: results from 2 randomized controlled trials with dietary fish, polyphenols, and whole-grain cereals” (Costabile et al., 2021). Li’s diet is indeed a healthy one, and it will indeed raise your TMAO. Fish is the single biggest source of TMAO production. It’s not a reason to avoid Li’s framework, or red meat. The biggest issue with red meat consumption that I’m aware of is when it is consumed with high levels of omega-6 fats (Guéraud et al., 2015; Pierre et al., 2003), which, happily, Li steers his readers away from.

Quibbles aside, if you follow Li’s framework, and increase your consumption of fruits, vegetables, fish, dairy, and avoid seed oils and sugar, you will surely improve the quality of your diet immeasurably.

Conclusion

When David suggested interviewing Dr. Li, it was at the suggestion of his listeners. Frankly, I was rather dreading it, as it pretty quickly became apparent that he was on the plant-based side of things as I did my initial research.

So I was quite happily surprised when I went through his book, and in speaking to him. While we have some disagreements, it’s a well-founded book that takes a reasonable approach to nutrition, and is more cognizant of the science behind a lot of the issues in the Modern American Diet than, say, the Dietary Guidelines.

I’d recommend this book to anyone that is looking to fix their diet for the first time, as it’s a good introduction to some basic principles of diet and health, or to someone who is simply looking to expand their understanding of what makes a healthy diet, and is looking for a more holistic view. From either perspective he has a better approach than a typical physician with little interest or training in the subject. The advantage of Li’s background in vascular health is that he starts from a holistic view, and thus makes a series of very practical recommendations.

The recommendations in Li's book reminds me of both a traditional Japanese diet, with its emphasis on fish and vegetables, while avoiding fat and sugar; and also of Dr. Terry Wahls’ excellent Minding My Mitochondria (Wahls, 2010), also heavily focused on plant nutrients and from a vegetarian background.

I recommend Eat to Beat Disease, it’s a helpful addition to a happily burgeoning literature of how diet can improve health..



References

Costabile, G., Vetrani, C., Bozzetto, L., Giacco, R., Bresciani, L., Del Rio, D., Vitale, M., Della Pepa, G., Brighenti, F., Riccardi, G., Rivellese, A. A., & Annuzzi, G. (2021). Plasma TMAO increase after healthy diets: Results from 2 randomized controlled trials with dietary fish, polyphenols, and whole-grain cereals. The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, nqab188. https://doi.org/10.1093/ajcn/nqab188

Fotsis, T., Pepper, M., Adlercreutz, H., Fleischmann, G., Hase, T., Montesano, R., & Schweigerer, L. (1993). Genistein, a dietary-derived inhibitor of in vitro angiogenesis. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 90(7), 2690–2694. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.90.7.2690

Guéraud, F., Taché, S., Steghens, J.-P., Milkovic, L., Borovic-Sunjic, S., Zarkovic, N., Gaultier, E., Naud, N., Héliès-Toussaint, C., Pierre, F., & Priymenko, N. (2015). Dietary polyunsaturated fatty acids and heme iron induce oxidative stress biomarkers and a cancer promoting environment in the colon of rats. Free Radical Biology and Medicine, 83, 192–200. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.freeradbiomed.2015.02.023

Pierre, F., Taché, S., Petit, C. R., Van Der Meer, R., & Corpet, D. E. (2003). Meat and cancer: Haemoglobin and haemin in a low-calcium diet promote colorectal carcinogenesis at the aberrant crypt stage in rats. Carcinogenesis, 24(10), 1683–1690. https://doi.org/10.1093/carcin/bgg130

Tuso, P., Stoll, S. R., & Li, W. W. (2015). A plant-based diet, atherogenesis, and coronary artery disease prevention. The Permanente Journal, 19(1), 62–67. https://doi.org/10.7812/TPP/14-036

Wahls, T. L. (2010). Minding My Mitochondria 2nd Edition: How I overcame secondary progressive multiple sclerosis (MS) and got out of my wheelchair. (2nd edition). TZ Press. https://amzn.to/3v6G03s

 

Interview: Dr. William Li on Angiogenesis, Diet, and Chronic Disease—A Neighbor's Choice with David Gornoski

 This turned out to be quite an interesting interview, much more so than I had anticipated. I think in some ways it's the best interview David and I have done.

"William Li MD on Seed Oils, Cancer, and Food as Medicine"

"David Gornoski and Tucker Goodrich sit down with Dr. William Li, an internationally renowned physician, scientist, and author of the New York Times bestseller Eat to Beat Disease. The discussion revolves around why we are seeing cancer rates skyrocketing in the US, anti-VEGF treatment for neovascular eye disease, seed oil consumption, the cause of angiogenesis dysregulation, the right diet for a strong immune system, and more."
Video:
 

Podcast: 


Book Review: "Eat to Beat Disease" by Dr. William Li

EAT TO BEAT DISEASE shows you how to integrate the foods you already love into any diet or health plan to activate your body’s health defense systems —Angiogenesis, Regeneration, the Microbiome, DNA Protection, and Immunity —to fight cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, neurodegenerative disease, autoimmune disease, and other debilitating conditions.”

Friday, April 1, 2022

Podcast Ep. 0: What VICE Left Out: Bitcoin and Seed Oils—Starting a Podcast

 


Back in February, Dr. K, the Seed Oil Disrespecter on Twitter, was contacted by Audrey Carleton, a reporter for the news website VICE. She had some questions about why the seed oil topic had become a 'big thing' in the bitcoin world. He mentioned me as being knowledgeable about the seed oil and health topic, and suggested I reach out to her.

Click to see full discussion.

I did, and we had a nice chat, although it probably went on longer than she was expecting. I've often heard it's wise to record conversations with journalists, and we did so via Zoom, to which she agreed.

We had a pleasant enough conversation, and she listened to me at length (~48 minutes).

I followed up with a bunch of references to some of the scientific evidence we had discussed (see that link for the file I sent her, references below), and offered to send more.

She didn't get back to me for any follow-up discussion, and then finally the article came out:


I'll not editorialize about the many problems with that article, but the major one is they never addressed the research from institutions like the NIH and the AHA showing that there are credible reasons to think that the benefits of seed oils are oversold, and that there are real reasons to fear harmful effects.
"Misinformation is a two-edged sword in the seed oil debate, however. Figureheads like Shanahan, after all, believe that most mainstream dietary guidance around fat consumption is built on lies, the kind that have quietly fueled America’s major health epidemics for decades. Like Bitcoin itself, the anti-seed oil stance reflects a skepticism of authority, one that is often not unfounded in the least but which can quickly snowball, echoed and amplified online."
It's rather routine at this time for journalists to spread misinformation while pretending to be preventing it, and this is a perfect example of that.

So I am presenting here the full discussion I had with VICE, so you can be the judge yourself of the value of what they elected to leave out while claiming that being concerned about seed oils is "misinformation".



Journalists have editors, and many publications have clear—often unadmitted—editorial biases. I have no particular reason to think that Audrey wrote the bias into this story, so I won't blame her for it. I appreciate the time that she took to speak to me.

I do blame VICE, however, which I think is fair. They printed a biased, misleading article, while ignoring that there are valid scientific reasons to think seed oils are problematic.

I'm glad they left my name out of it.

Podcast

Incidentally, I have decided to start a podcast. Consider this episode 0.

In 2000 I and all the readers of Dave Winer's Scripting News blog were invited to a dinner at  Katz's Delicatessen in New York City (yes, from When Harry Met Sally), to discuss a neat idea that former MTV video jockey Adam Curry had to distribute audio files via the RSS feed that Dave was maintaining and extending. 

There were 5 or 6 people present, including Dave and Adam.

From this dinner (I had a Reuben: pastrami on rye bread, as I recall) sprang forth the idea of the podcast.

So better late than never, I suppose! More details to follow, but please subscribe (either via YouTube or the RSS feed here.



References


Birch-Johansen, F., Jensen, A., Mortensen, L., Olesen, A. B., & Kjær, S. K. (2010). Trends in the incidence of nonmelanoma skin cancer in Denmark 1978-2007: Rapid incidence increase among young Danish women. International Journal of Cancer, 127(9), 2190–2198. https://doi.org/10.1002/ijc.25411
Black, H. S., Thornby, J. I., Gerguis, J., & Lenger, W. (1992). Influence of Dietary Omega-6, -3 Fatty Acid Sources on the Initiation and Promotion Stages of Photocarcinogenesis. Photochemistry and Photobiology, 56(2), 195–199. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1751-1097.1992.tb02147.x
Dominion of Canada. (1890). Sessional Papers of the Dominion of Canada (Vol. 1). Dominion of Canada. https://books.google.com/books?id=JA0xAQAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=cotton%20seed&f=false
Gladwell, M. (2017, August 16). The Basement Tapes (S2/E10) [Mp3]. https://www.simonsays.ai/blog/the-basement-tapes-with-malcolm-gladwell-s2-e10-revisionist-history-podcast-transcript-d764d0472079
Goodrich, T. (2021, October 19). What Is The Most Fattening Food? [Blog]. Yelling Stop. https://yelling-stop.blogspot.com/2021/10/whats-most-fattening-food.html
Lennon, R. P., Lopez, K. C. O., Socha, J. A. M., Montealegre, F. E. G., Chandler, J. W., Sweet, N. N., Hawley, L. A., Smith, D. K., & Sanchack, K. E. (2019). Health Characteristics of the Wayuu Indigenous People. Military Medicine, 184(7–8), e230–e235. https://doi.org/10.1093/milmed/usz021
Mozaffarian, D., Hao, T., Rimm, E. B., Willett, W. C., & Hu, F. B. (2011). Changes in Diet and Lifestyle and Long-Term Weight Gain in Women and Men. New England Journal of Medicine, 364(25), 2392–2404. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMoa1014296
Page, I. H., Allen, E. V., Chamberlain, F. L., Keys, A., Stamler, J., & Stare, F. J. (1961). Dietary Fat and Its Relation to Heart Attacks and Strokes. Circulation, 23(1), 133–136. https://doi.org/10.1161/01.CIR.23.1.133
Park, M. K., Li, W.-Q., Qureshi, A. A., & Cho, E. (2018). Fat Intake and Risk of Skin Cancer in U.S. Adults. Cancer Epidemiology and Prevention Biomarkers, 27(7), 776–782. https://doi.org/10.1158/1055-9965.EPI-17-0782
Ramsden, C. E., Zamora, D., Majchrzak-Hong, S., Faurot, K. R., Broste, S. K., Frantz, R. P., Davis, J. M., Ringel, A., Suchindran, C. M., & Hibbeln, J. R. (2016). Re-evaluation of the traditional diet-heart hypothesis: Analysis of recovered data from Minnesota Coronary Experiment (1968-73). BMJ, 353. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.i1246
Reeve, V. E., Matheson, M., Greenoak, G. E., Canfield, P. J., Boehm‐Wilcox, C., & Gallagher, C. H. (1988). Effect of Dietary Lipid on UV Light Carcinogenesis in the Hairless Mouse. Photochemistry and Photobiology, 48(5), 689–696. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1751-1097.1988.tb02882.x
Rose, G. A., Thomson, W. B., & Williams, R. T. (1965). Corn Oil in Treatment of Ischaemic Heart Disease. British Medical Journal, 1(5449), 1531–1533. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.1.5449.1531