#62-Dr. Evan Allen- Lines of Evidence and Debates on Dietary Fats

...time is the commodity that I am seeking more of and that I'm assuming many of you are seeking more of as well

I think there's a broad consensus in favor of making sure that people understand the real truth, which is being obscured right now by fairly sophisticated patterns of misinformation

Like everything in life, my current opinions are things that I have changed my mind on over time

...If you've ever tried to convince someone to quit smoking from your personal life, you know that that's not an easy sell, and it's a much harder sell if you have five minutes [like a physician does with a patient]...

So we watch people who have these chronic conditions, and we do things to them that do help, and then we watch them get worse more slowly than they would have otherwise gotten worse had we done nothing.

Most everything they said in Forks Over Knives is in line with A - the scientific facts of the case and B - the general recommendations for the public on nutrition

Well, the facts are that American fat consumption has never dropped since the 1970s. It's been actually relatively flat - it hasn't gone up, but it also hasn't gone down. What HAS gone up dramatically is the total caloric content.

...We now see obesity rising everywhere, but most worst in the western world where calories are the easiest to come by.

Fat calories are by far the easiest to store

...Fat calories are always the easiest thing to store because it doesn't require any work...

...You're not cured of diabetes until you can eat a sandwich and your blood sugar doesn't go up to 250...

So what do we see with the epidemiology of saturated fat? We see that if a population eats a diet that is very low in saturated fat and extremely high in carbohydrates, they have essentially no diabetes.

..it's like clockwork, everywhere you get industrialization and westernization of the food supply, the diabetes comes along...

...palm oil is a huge contributor to the saturated fat burden. It's found in almost 50 percent of all grocery store products.

One of the big problems with with the the vegan label is that a lot of things are vegan, but they have very, very high saturated fat.

Saturated fat is a problem for all people and all diets and should be something that people really really pay close attention to..

...any study is to me less valid than well examined epidemiological evidence.

My point of view is that Toubes makes a lot of conceptual errors in his work and then those conceptual errors are essentially adopted whoel hog.

Epidemiological studies are not perfect, but they give us as good a tool and as good a handle on what people eat as we possibly can get.

So someone who decides to cut out sugar, well, they did get rid of two of the top four sources of saturated fat in their diet just by doing that [grain-based deserts and dairy-based deserts]... but they would do even better if they got rid of the sugar AND got rid of the saturated fat

The case against sugar is relatively weak. It's not there's not no case, but it's certainly nothing like the case we can make against saturated fat.

If you went on any diet of any type and you lost weight, you lost weight because you breathe out some carbon dioxide and peed out some water and you burn some calories. That's how you lost the weight. There's no magic there.

Any monotonous diet will always result in lower caloric consumption because the food becomes uninteresting.

Every day, when people reduce their saturated fat, their cholesterol levels drop.

All these different scientists, all around the world, look at the same data and come to the same conclusions.

...there's good evidence that low-carbohydrate diets do cause birth defects.

On the other hand, the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics has said that vegetarian and vegan diets are suitable for all stages of life, including pregnancy and childhood.

"Non-starchy vegetables are massively established to have huge health benefits...

Don't eat refined sugar as a staple source of calories.

To get the benefits from a healthy diet, you really need to markedly reduce your intake of saturated fat...

Anybody who's grown up in this country knows how much meat people eat and yet this is the propaganda that they want people to believe - in the 90s Americans just totally gave up all meats and saturated fat and then the obesity epidemic immediately began at that point.

It seems like the primary driver of insulin resistance that drives that excess gluconeogenesis is saturated fat...

...So if somebody eats enough fat of all types, they will always have more saturated fat in their diet.

"So therefore, when the epidemiology lines up with the clinical studies in human beings, and the animal studies, and the mechanistic studies, how is it not true?

Here's where the majority of saturated fat comes from

...They're percent calories from saturated fat might have gone up, but they're absolute calories from saturated fat almost certainly dropped.

...A natural side effects of caloric restriction of any type is an improvement in blood lipids.

So whether you are vegetarian, vegan omnivorous, carnivorous, whatever you want to be, you should really try to limit your saturated fat intake."