hello folks at low carb down under I am my name is Nina tels I'm a science journalist and author and the founder of the group The Nutrition Coalition which is a nonprofit dedicated to ensuring that dietary policy is evidence-based which is to say based on rigorous clinical trial evidence and I'm delighted to be talking to you thank you Rod Taylor for inviting me uh I hope you have a wonderful conference I know it'll be great um so I'm just just going to talk a little bit about some of my previous research some new research that I'm doing and basically the theme that is tying everything together is why is nutrition advice so wrong why is it so out of sync with the science and I think the only way to really understand this is not uh innocent incompetence but I think there are a number of forces working behind the scenes that influence nutrition science and it's been my work really more int L recently to try to uncover and document some of those influences so they really can be better understood so just to review here are the US dieric guidelines this is the food pyramid we now use an image called my plate but this is the one that I think best expresses what our guidelines recommend that big bottom slab of grains breads much smaller proportion for animal foods and the teeny tiny amount of fat in the tip of the pyramid um you know even though our government doesn't call it a lowfat diet anymore it is de facto lowfat and to look at our guidelines another way you can see that it it recommends six servings of grains per day including inexplicably three servings of refined grains and up to 10% of calories as sugar although in school meals there's uh no limit on the amount of sugar that children can be served because we want to do especially well by that population apparently and then 5 and A2 teaspoons of seed oils uh and that is instead of saturated fats which are capped at 10% of calories looking at this another way it's over 50% of calories as carbohydrate and uh the best available data for America 1965 was that we were eating um less than 40% of our calories is carbohydrate so that's a huge shift I think it's increased since 1970 an increase of 25% of our calories as carbohydrate it's just been a tremendous change in the way that people have eaten worldwide and it cor correlates with a huge increase in obesity so obesity uh before the guidelines were started in 1980 obesity was at 123% and now it is uh well it's officially at almost 43% but that's a number from 2016 the the number hasn't been updated since so I think it's safe to say we're probably close to 50 50% now of our country having uh overweight or obesity sorry this is a chart for overweight and obes and obesity together that's now at 77% obesity is I would guess at around 50% now and in Australia your guidelines look very much the same as ours with a heavy emphasis on greens and a relatively quite a small sliver there for all for animal Foods um and then some more for dairy so one of my first attempts to really study rigorously why our guidelines were so off was I initiated a study the first ever systematic review of all the conflicts of interest on the US dietary guideline advisory committee that's the expert group in charge of reviewing the science for the guidelines appointed there's a new group appointed every five years as with each new iteration of the guidelines we looked at the committee for the current guidelines uh which are the 2020 to 2025 anyway here's what we found 95% of the members on the committee had conflicts of interest with a food or pharmaceutical in company more than half had 30 such conflicts or more one adviser alone Sharon Donovan accounted for more than 152 ties she's the blonde in the bottom row and the most common ties were to Nestle Dannon General Mills and Kelloggs uh giant multi-national Ultra processed food manufacturers General Mills and kellogs are cereal uh principally cereal companies and then the single greatest number of ties was with the international Life Sciences Institute which is a food lobbying group a food industry lobbying group founded by an ex vice president of Coca-Cola and same familiar names there Unilever Coke Pepsi Kelloggs General Mills are among their industry members which are mostly multinationals so you can see that this expert group is has with such close connections to Industry uh it's I think difficult for them to do science that is truly in the public interest um and that's and we see those results in our guidelines so the nutrition Coalition also did an analysis of the of the USDA office that is directly overseas the guidelines and we found that it had at least a 100 Partnerships with uh ultr processed food companies which is amazing I mean this is the these memberships sorry these Partnerships include monthly meetings supporting the guidelines and I think as best as I know reflects a measure of regulatory capture uh at the USDA it at least with um regard to the guidelines so that's some of the work I did previously I'm now doing a column on a platform called substack and the column is called unsettled science and I want to do a number of things there including giving nutrition advice but I really want to focus on trying to draw back the curtain so that people can see the forces and the conflicts that are behind our trusted scientists and institutions um and and I and I want to really try to document some of the conflicts of interest out there here's one of the columns I did it's on uh the leader at Harvard his name is Walter Willet he was um he was the head of the Nutrition department there for more than 25 years and Harvard is just so important because you know it's Harvard and it's also very influential in the nutrition space when I interviewed hundreds of scientists from my book they said Walter Willet is easily the most influential person in nutrition science Harvard runs two large observational studies that just turn out constant papers showing an association usually associations between some bad thing and animal foods and some good thing and plant foods and when I dug into Walter wet's history I found that he has very long since 1990 he's been a Believer really a Believer because there's no science then and there there's no science now but certainly no science in 1990 for vegetarian diet and he was saying even in 1990 why don't you give up meat and give yourself a gold star an optimal diet has very little meat or chicken um I also uncovered his connections to uh I don't know if you know recognize this guy probably not anel Keys um the author of the diet heart hypothesis the grandfather of the idea that we should all limit saturated fat and cholesterol in order to fight heart disease and Walter Willet had a picture of him uh shaking anel Keys's hand on his office wall when I went to visit him at Harvard uh so he considers anel Keys one of his guiding stars and certainly uh Walter Willet has carried on this uh tradition of using weak science to make strong recommendations so what else did I find out about Walter Willet and why has Harvard been anti- meat for more than 30 years um I also found out that another influence Ence was Walter willett's connection to the 7th Day Adventist Church he had been an adviser to the blue zones which is uh Advocates a uh mostly plant diet and was acquired by the 7th Day Adventist Church for $140 million some years ago he's been an adviser to the American College of Lifestyle medicine a group also very very closely tied to the 7th Day Adventist Church um and he has many other connections to groups that are promoting vegetarian vegan diets and I also uncovered a a third I I don't know if it's an influence on his thinking but he certainly has uh now at least a a pretty significant financial incentives that to show benefits from plant-based foods and so there's a list of some of the uh donations that have been made to the Harvard School of Public Health um also from pharmaceutical companies they give money ranges because they won't say so anything specifically and they've only been issuing these Financial disclosures uh since I think 2017 so we really don't know that much about um who is financing Harvard's work but one of the things I found for instance is that they get a lot of money from tree nuts you know peanuts almonds peans every kind of nut and then in the time that they were receiving those donations or that we know that we we could document they were receiving donations they came out with eight separate papers showing the benefits of nuts for this or that health condition so um so you know whether there's a pay forplay science going on there I don't know but um it's clearly a conflict of interest uh for for Harvard uh the other I also talk about and document Walter will it's um history of bullying nutritional scientists that disagree with him so when some papers came out about uh that said like actually meat was okay these came out in the annals of internal medicine uh very in important papers they were the most rigorous review that had ever been done on all the meat data looking at cancer metabolic outcomes um mortality and heart disease they and finding really a minuscule amount of evidence and no effect of meat on these conditions or very little effect Walter Willet uh presented this disinformation triangle at a number of lectures where he um he made fun of the evidence-based academics Gordon Gatt mentioned there is the co-founder of evidence-based medicine um and he you know he it's basically a I think a kind of slur attempt on people who were challenging His science and there other bullying incidents that I report on in my piece and you know who really began the whole tradition of bullying scientists you didn't agree with was anel Keys um who as I write about in my book I mean he just went on and on and on and uh in criticizing scientists who disagreed with him most notably I guess John yudkin um who was challenging uh anel keys because you can believe that sugar was actually the cause of heart disease and obesity uh here's another piece piece that I did on um Christopher Gardner at Stanford he is on the current US dietary guideline expert committee he's served on Expert committees at the American Heart Association very influential nutrition scientist he's a vegan he's an ideological vegan he doesn't believe in eating meat and for um animal rights reasons and now climate reasons uh which he States openly and he and he runs a center that I guess pretends to do clinical trials objective clinical trials but there all of his trials are uh I guess it's fair to say rigged to show an advantage for a vegan diet while showing the least Advantage for the other diet his first study interestingly he did his first and longest trial that he did um was a head-to-head diet trial that showed that the low carb diet was the best um and after that he I guess figured out how to design trials so that um they no longer had those results what did I find out about him additionally his entire Center is funded by beyond meat which is a fake meat company um that's been backed by Bill Gates and and others and which is just a giant conflict of interest that nobody really talks about um and even after my piece came out none of the press reports that include quotes by him will ever mention that he's completely funded by beyond meat I mean imagine if a nutrition scientist was funded by say like Cargill Meats their entire Center was funded by Cargill meat and uh and can you imagine s of the reporting that would exclude anything I mean can you imagine that that would not be in the first line um describing that scientist whenever he was quoted or she here's another story I did on Carnivore where I wanted to look at the just incredibly unfair portrayals of uh of men really most all all men carnivore is portrayed as being entirely men men who are just Jim Bros and only care about their physiques and do crazy things like eat raw liver and I went back and interviewed the original um you know people who were involved in carnivore back on the original chat boards who really founded the the movement and you know many women among them and who makes up the carnivore Community about half women it's really a lot of women mostly middle-aged women who are suffering from an unbelievable range of horrible chronic diseases and the carnivore diet is not something that they necessarily want to do but it is life-saving for them so I think that's just a really interesting compelling story and I talk about why there is such a bias towards carnivore um which just is pervasive in the media and I think so unfair so this is the last column I'm going to share with you um really was one it was one of my first which is why are we basing food policy on blackbox data and it referred to something called the global burdens of disease study which we in the US don't know that much about but it's hugely influential in Europe especially policy in the European Union so the UK and at the global level um policy it's it's studies uh disease internationally it's a $380 million study at the University of Washington backed almost entirely or exclusively by The Bill Gates Foundation and in 2019 it had come out in the Lancet with this claim that no amount of red meat was safe so and that claim made it into all kinds of policy documents in Europe um just in 2017 2 years before they had judged red meat to be the least likely to cause disease and now it was completely unsafe in any amount so a group of academics challenged that 2019 finding they're very persistent I mean I I urge you to read this piece just because it shows how hard people have to work to try to correct the science and uh in March 2022 the global burdens of disease authors said oh you're right we got it wrong in that 2019 paper uh and in my interview with the study director Christopher Murray he said yes we did make errors we um I forget the exact nature of the errors but I mean not small errors and the whole the reason I call it a black box is that the whole process they don't show their work work it's like you know in math in math you have to show your work in order to uh explain how you got to your solution in science it's even more important so that your conclusions can be in independently validated but they do not say how they come to their their uh conclusions they just say we put it in the box and this is what came out and obviously it was flawed I think one of the most sobering things about this story is that they did not retract the paper the Lancet did not insist on their retracting the paper the head of the Lancet said it's up to the authors to retract the paper which is actually not how it works the journal itself could have forced retraction so I mean I think you can see here well a couple things one is just the incredible bias against meat and for a plant-based diet and how that bias exists at the highest levels of our institutions and how that bias is funded and fueled by the food industry uh who don't benefit if you are uh they don't benefit if you're eating whole Natural Foods they make their money off of ultr processed foods and so demonizing uh natural Whole Foods is not in their interest is in their interest it's not in their interest for you to get healthy the pharmaceutical industry also has an obvious interest in um the profit off of people who are chronically sick so uh I so my the purpose of my work which is probably you know like a Cassandra in the wind warning people but I want to document all of these forces at work and um you know my hope is that serious people will recognize this and will um hopefully that will lead to change and action so um you know I think at the moment I might be one of the only journalists uh in the world doing this kind of thankless work but I I you know I think it's important and worthwhile and I just urge you to take some time to read it if it interests you so thank you for listening to me and I hope you have a really really great conference okay bye-bye