How Suppressed Science Led To Widespread Misunderstanding About Fat And The Root Cause Of Heart Disease
The Dr. Hyman Show
Dr. Mark Hyman
4.6 • 8.7K Ratings
🗓️ 27 March 2023
⏱️ 52 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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Summary
This episode is brought to you by Rupa Health, Athletic Greens, and BiOptimizers.
For many of us, growing up we were told that eating foods high in fat is bad for you. Many people still believe that eating cholesterol and fat, especially saturated fat, causes heart attacks. Yet recent studies show there is no association between saturated fat consumption and adverse health outcomes like coronary disease or heart attacks. We also don’t hear enough about insulin resistance as a main driver of cardiovascular disease.
In today’s episode, I talk with Nina Teicholz and Dr. Aseem Malhotra about the origins of the hypothesis that dietary fat raises cholesterol, subsequently increasing heart disease, and how it caught hold.
Nina Teicholz is a science journalist and author of the New York Times bestseller The Big Fat Surprise, which upended the conventional wisdom on dietary fat—especially saturated fat—and spurred a new conversation about whether these fats in fact cause heart disease. Nina is also the founder of the Nutrition Coalition, a nonprofit working to ensure that government nutrition policy is transparent and evidence based—work for which she’s been asked to testify before the US Department of Agriculture and the Canadian Senate.
Dr. Aseem Malhotra is an NHS-trained consultant, cardiologist, and visiting professor of evidence-based medicine at the Bahiana School of Medicine and Public Health in Salvador, Brazil. He is a founding member of Action on Sugar. In 2015, he became the youngest member to be appointed to the board of trustees of the UK health charity The King's Fund. He is a pioneer of the lifestyle medicine movement in the UK and in 2018 was ranked by software company Onalytica as the number one doctor in the world influencing obesity thinking.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Coming up on this episode of the Doctors' Pharmacy. |
| 0:03.6 | None of those studies, the billions of dollars spent by governments around the world, |
| 0:08.4 | none of those studies have ever been reviewed by our dietary guideline committees, |
| 0:12.3 | which is our like our expert bodies making our national food policy. |
| 0:16.5 | Hi, this is Lauren Fien, one of the producers of the Doctors' Pharmacy Podcast. |
| 0:21.3 | Many of us were raised to believe that we should be eating low-fat diets and that cholesterol |
| 0:26.1 | is the primary driver of heart attacks. Yet in 2015, the US dietary guidelines came out to say |
| 0:32.6 | that cholesterol is no longer a nutrient of concern, and the data linking dietary fat and heart |
| 0:38.7 | diseases we get best and corrupt at worst. So where did these ideas come from? |
| 0:44.0 | In this episode, we feature two past conversations from the Doctors' Pharmacy, |
| 0:48.3 | detailing how these ideas originated and the real dangers when it comes to cardiovascular risk. |
| 0:54.4 | Dr. Hyman Speaks was a science journalist and author Nina Taikholz |
| 0:58.1 | about the origin story of how we came to believe that that was bad, |
| 1:02.0 | and how ideas become institutionalized once adopted by public health and medical institutions. |
| 1:08.4 | He also speaks with cardiologists, Dr. Seen Melhotra, about why cholesterol may not be the |
| 1:14.0 | cause of heart disease, and they explore the harmful effects of our over-consumption of sugar and |
| 1:19.0 | starch. Let's dive in. Starting from when I was a teenager, you know, |
| 1:24.1 | I taught like so many people, like all of us, that fat is bad, meat is bad, makes you fat, |
| 1:30.8 | and so I stopped eating almost any bit of fat, no butter, no, you know, skim everything. |
| 1:36.9 | I used to put water on my cereal in the morning because like why even have the skim milk? |
| 1:42.0 | I don't know how I bared that. And it is, and I didn't get fin, of course. I was, you know, |
| 1:50.8 | I was overweight most of my young adulthood, but I just thought this wouldn't make me thin, |
... |
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