The Sevan Podcast - #316 - Zoe Harcombe

Episode Date: March 1, 2022

Zoe Harcombe is a researcher, author, blogger and public speaker in the field of diet and health. Her particular areas of interest/expertise are public health dietary guidelines (especially dietary fat), nutrition and obesity. In 2016, Zoe was awarded a Ph.D. in public health nutrition. Her thesis title was “An examination of the randomized controlled trial and epidemiological evidence for the introduction of dietary fat recommendations in 1977 and 1983: A systematic review and meta-analysis.” https://paperstreetcoffeeco.com/ - THE COFFEE I DRINK! https://www.barbelljobs.com/ - WORLD'S #1 JOB BOARD FOR THE CROSSFIT COMMUNITY https://thesevanpodcast.com/ Support the show Partners: https://cahormones.com/ - CODE "SEVAN" FOR FREE CONSULTATION https://www.paperstcoffee.com/ - THE COFFEE I DRINK! https://asrx.com/collections/the-real... - OUR TSHIRTS ... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Don't say anything you wouldn't want your parents to hear. We're live. But Andy is right here and it means he can't. Andy, good morning. Good morning, brother. How are you doing, young man? I'm happy as a clam to see both of you. Oh, you can. Brilliant. Happy as a clam.

Because you hear it. Yeah, happy. I don't even know what that means. What does that mean? Happy as a clam because you hear it expression yeah happy i don't even know what that means what does that mean happy as a clam why are clams happy no you've cut him off and he's just cut you off when uh usually have some help on the back end as soon as he comes on the back end i'll ask him what it means happy as a clam i have no idea what it means zoe i want to read you something. Is that okay? Yeah, brilliant.

Go for it. Okay. I've heard countless speakers and read more books on nutrition than anyone I know. Zoe Harcomb is that singular voice who speaks from intelligently, principled, and logically and scientifically. She's the mother of modern nutritional science as far as I'm concerned. I've always enjoyed defending her against the academic peer-reviewed epidemiology fraud crowd. Greg Glassman. Greg sent that to me. I think he's pretty excited that you're coming on the show. Oh, I thought the question was going to be who said that.

Oh, sorry, sorry sorry it's trivial pursuit but i asked the questions and give the answers just one person that's very good you're on your morning coffee i am do you drink coffee oh yeah one in the morning and then that's it the rest of the day that's it one okay i have one when i wake up which was i don't know an hour ago and then and then and then another one for the show. And then I think that's usually it. I used to be like 10 cups a day. It's not good for anyone.

Not good. Not good, no. Not good. What time is it where you're at? It is three o'clock in the afternoon. Yeah, three o'clock. Yeah, three o'clock. Exactly.

You're bang on time. Very good. And what country are you in? I'm in Wales. And is Wales its own country? Yeah, kind of. We're part of the UK. So the UK is Wales, Scotland, England and Northern Ireland. And that's been very apparent during all of this COVID stuff. So we've had separate coronavirus nonsense acts and various things. But for most of legislation, we are part of the UK.

So it's education and health that is devolved to Wales. But it just gets ridiculous. I mean, I'm really near the England border. And there were days when you had to do one thing in England and different thing in Wales. And you weren't supposed to travel in one country. You weren't supposed to wear a mask in the other country it's just been insane so um we're only a little country we could fit into most of your US states as is and it's just all been nuts well we're we're in bizarre situations like that too we're in places where kids are masked in school and five feet away their stadiums um having the largest boxing matches in the world

indoor. I mean, we have all that insanity here. But I guess I'm asking you if it's a country and I don't even know what a country is. I guess like does Wales have its own representatives in the UN? Oh, gosh, I don't know. Okay. How about Scotland? Is that a country? Yeah, but you're asking an interesting thing. so if you took as an example eu membership then it was the uk okay the uk left the eu scotland and wales left scotland didn't want to leave i think on balance wales did want to leave so i doubt we would have our own representatives at the un by that um by that logic i i think it would count as the UK for that kind of thing. Okay. So it's, it's fascinating. It's the kind of thing, if I was a 12 year old boy,

I'd be making fun of us for it. Those people don't know whether they're countries or not, but things have gotten a little complicated, right? They have. And all of this only happened in 1999. So until 1999, we were all one country. Good old Tony Blair, bless him or don't bless him. He decided to offer the country's devolution to run some of their own regulations and how they worked. You're looking it up now, aren't you? And so in 1999, approximately 50% of Wales turned out to vote and approximately 50% of those people voted to have devolution. So only 25% of Wales voted in favour of devolution.

The other 75% either voted against or didn't bother. And we ended up with devolution. And quite frankly, it's a nightmare i would love to get rid of it and just get back to being the whole uk not necessarily because i like the uk government or what the uk government is doing right now but it just makes no sense to have four different governing regulations particularly in terms of health or education and it's just got nuts over the last two years it's just been a mess so more more bureaucracy more more money being wasted more confusion more yeah and the money we you know we created a whole assembly building where they could

meet we have i don't know 60 assembly members who are all on fabulous salaries six-figure salaries they've all then got admins and other people who work for them we've created this whole infrastructure just to look after health and education and quite, Wales is doing a pretty bad job of it. So we're not performing better than England in health or education. So however bad England is, it's really difficult to argue that devolution was a good thing for Wales. Yeah. Sorry to interrupt. I want to introduce you to someone real quick. This is Matt Souza. I've seen him. I did have a look at a couple of your podcasts. Hi, Matt. Hi, how are you doing? Wonderful meeting you, really.

Yeah, I think. And Matt's had the honor of hearing you speak live in Santa Cruz, California also. Oh, wow. Yeah. And he lived about 70 miles north of there where he owns a gym called CrossFit Livermore. And Matt was invited to one of the DDCs and then proceeded to sneak into all of the rest of them. He would find out when they were and sneak down there, which is really cool, I think. Yeah.

When we were free and we didn't have masks and all this stuff. That's right. I like those days. Thanks, Matt. I don't even know where to start with you. As I dug into you, it's crazy, your background. So you have a bachelor's, you have a bachelor's and master's in economics and math. Yes.

And you have a PhD in public nutrition. Yes, public health and nutrition. Yeah. Have you ever thought about running for office? No, not in public nutrition. Yes. Public health and nutrition. Yeah. Have you ever thought about running for office? No, not in any country. I don't know politics. I think you've got to be a certain kind of person to be in politics. I think you've got to think you know what everybody else wants.

And then you've got to have the ego that make you think you're the right person to then go ahead and do that. And I'm not either of those. I'm not so arrogant that I think I know what everyone else wants. And I haven't got the ego that says I want to go and run your lives. I just want to be left alone, particularly after these last two years. I'm politically homeless. If any person said, I'm for freedom. I just want to leave you alone. I want to regulate as little as possible and just let you get on with your life. That's my that's my party now. There's left and right has gone. It's not left and right. It's right and wrong. And I'm done with all the nonsense we've got at the moment.

Wow. Politically homeless. I'm going to use that. I'm politically homeless, too. You say you say you're not arrogant enough to be a politician but you have this website that's called zari zoe harcombe.com and um it is a place where you and please correct me um if i'm wrong it is a place where you take articles you take publications and you look at them and you show and you put and you either validate them or unvalidate them. You poke holes in them. You ask questions about them and you show where they've lost their way. Is that correct? Yeah, pretty much. And I hope it's not arrogant.

I hope it's just good research. I started doing it over 10 years ago. I've done something called a Monday note. And we'll get you on it. I think you'd really enjoy it. We'll get you on it straight away. And every Monday I send out this note and it takes something topical. So there was something looking at meat and dairy. If you ditch meat and dairy, you're going to live 10 years longer or

something. So I want to go and look at the original paper. People haven't got time to do it. People running CrossFit gyms, nutritionists, lay people, mums, whatever, doctors, academics, they don't have the time to read it. So I dissect it for them. And then I send them an article, usually two to 3000 words long, it's got a summary that's just a few hundred words long. So you can go for the really short version, or you can go into it in more detail. And I basically unpack it. And I say, is the article right? Where did it go wrong? If it's not right. And I have been utterly astonished. There is barely an article out there that you can't find fault with. And they get through peer review. And some of the faults are catastrophic. They didn't adjust for alcohol in some dietary claim that they're making that would depend very heavily on

alcohol intake, or they don't adjust for activity, or they claim that they're making that would depend very heavily on alcohol intake, or they don't adjust for activity, or they claim that activity really doesn't have any impact. It's just incredible, the mistakes that are made. But then they become gospel, and then they get quoted by other articles. So people then run around saying, oh, the Seidelman low carb review that said low carb, you know know have low carb diets and you're going to die basically um and then it gets through peer review and it gets in an esteemed journal and it ended up being cited by other people and we've got a forum in in one of our clubs and people will chat and it might be at the lay level someone saying my mother-in-law is giving me grief because

I keep giving my husband red meat um or it might be an academic at an institution who's trying to write about the nutritional value of red meat who just sees these articles popping up every week saying red meat's going to kill you so it can be really different people but I want to take it apart if it's right I'll say it's right you know the pure study is great not conflicted came to good conclusions couldn't find much fault with it but the stuff that's trying to damn red meat praise whole grains every week it's just not robust. Susie can you go back to the website so if anyone if you don't know this website you should tab this website and you should visit this regularly. And not only to get information from it that will absolutely change your life and everyone's life around you,

but also there's this notion out there that people will say, well, I'm educated, so I know, or I'm a doctor, I know, or I'm a scientist and I know. And this clearly shows that that is not true at all. If you cannot think critically, if you cannot ask the right questions, it does not matter how much education you have. Will you click on that article that JCVI Joint Committee on Vaccination Immunization? It's her most recent one. And this is what's just crazy because we see this in the United States just everywhere now. For some reason, people are struggling with it. You see things like the head of Pfizer is on the Coca-Cola board.

And you're like, wait a second. The vast majority of people who've died in this country have had four or more comorbidities. And every single obese person that I interview, I say, what's your biggest crutch? And they say, soda pop. And I'm like, wow like how how is there a relationship with these guys yes and there it is you took you two seconds it took you two seconds to find it um this this is an article about people who in a nutshell about people who are supposed to be advising the um the uk on policy it's supposed to be a non-biased group of people who advise the UK on who should get the vaccine, who should not get the vaccine. It's supposed to be a group of like 15 or 16 people who are totally unbiased. Well, just with just a cursory check, Zoe finds people who,

almost all of them are biased. They have some sort of issue. They have some sort of conflict. Not only did they not report it but one of them um failed to declare that he leads the pfizer vaccine center of excellence i shouldn't laugh i'm like this is just by the way every article on this website has something like this where you're like well what's wrong what's wrong wrong? And then you see this. This can't be. The person – I think we saw Pfizer made $27 or $38 billion in profits. We cannot have them on a committee that's advising our kids to get the shot or to not get the shot. I mean it's – anyone can be bought off for that much money. Is that correct, Zoe? I mean, anyone can be bought off for that much money.

Is that correct, Zoe? That's my view. I think, and I kind of have a bit of a speciality in conflicts of interest. So I've looked at the dietary conflicts of interest in the past and found, for example, I ended up getting a publication in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. I found that the Public Health England had appointed a committee to come up with the role model healthy eating for the UK. And it was basically a panel of the who's who of the fake food industry so it was the Food and Drink Federation, the Institute of Grocery Distribution, Association of Convenience Stores which is kind of like the 7-Elevens over in the US, the British Nutrition Foundation don't be

fooled by the name that's also the who's who of the fake food industry. So if you put together all the organisations that in some way were represented by this panel of about 11 people who were coming up with the Eat Badly plate, as I called it in the UK, they represented every fake food company you could think of, from McDonald's to biscuit companies, cereal companies, biscuit companies, cereal companies, Kellogg's, General Mills, Costa, M&S, Sainsbury's, grocery stores, just everything was represented by these organisations. And then of course, they come up with this plate that has hardly any meat on it or fish or eggs or dairy products. If there are any dairy products, of course, it's got to be low fat dairy. And it's just all cereals, and beige stuff and pasta and rice and bread and stuff that's going to make us fat and sick, quite frankly. And they then tell us that's the role model of healthy eating. And then you get all these other papers. So that's kind of on the

food side. And then all the stuff I'm looking at for the Monday note, it's just red meat is bad, whole grains are good, low fat is good, real fat is bad, and and all the rest it's just incessant they're just coming at you from all angles um i looked at we have a committee that's been advising the government on covid policy since february march 2020 a couple of years ago um called sage um what does it stand for something advisory special um special advisory group for emergencies or strategic advisory group, something like that. And again, found out that they had immense conflicts with pharmaceutical companies, vaccine making organisations. And their advice to the UK was basically shut yourself indoors, just lock everyone inside, don't let them come out, close down public transport,

close the schools, just put us into this horrific, unprecedented social experiment for several months, and do that until we get a vaccine. It's like, we've never had a coronavirus vaccine. We've had coronaviruses for 55 years, we've never had a vaccine. Why would that be? Which is what I started researching back in the summer of 2020. But it's like, no, stay locked down. And then we'll get a vaccine. And sure enough, not ever having had one, we suddenly get about 10. It's like buses, they all come along at once. And these guys were the ones who said, that's your playbook, shut down, open when you get a vaccine. And of course, then we had to shut down again, because it didn't quite go to plan. But they were all conflicted. And so I did the conflicts on that one as well.

So that's how I sort of became known to some people in the UK who've been standing up against all the COVID measures saying this isn't right. And there's a group that's since been formed called the Together Declaration. And we've had a lot of success since that was formed. You have? You have had success? Yes. So if you follow the Together Declaration on Twitter, there's a phenomenal guy at the head of it, a guy called Alan Miller, just one of the nicest guys you'd ever meet. If he were only prime minister or president of some of the nations around the world, things would be in a much better place right now. And they have a website and they have sort of seven policies.

They don't want mandates is the big thing. We don't want things mandated. We want freedom for human beings. We want normal back. We want to go back to the life that we had. It was good. We want it for our children and our grandchildren. And things like we had a no jab, no job mandate came in in England.

Interestingly, Wales didn't go for it and Scotland didn't go for it. But Wales and Scotland had different measures that were more draconian. It was real swings and roundabouts. How do you get more draconian than that? How do you get more draconian than no jab, no job? While England were saying no jab, no job, they were kind of still able to go into outlets in England

without showing a COVID pass. Whereas in Wales, to even get into the cinema, there's Together, brilliant. So Wales, to even get in the cinema, you had to show a COVID pass. So I couldn't go into a local cinema or theater. I forget where else they introduced them. And I refuse to use them. I am not having a papers-pleased society. Yeah. And I refuse to lie also by the way i'm not going to lie either and tell you i am vaccinated when i'm not it's none of anyone's damn business it's when everybody's health become everybody else's business yep um it has just become

astonishing and just on principle it doesn't matter whether you're okay sharing personal details or not just as a matter of, if somebody starts inquiring into your private matters, you should just tell them to bugger off. It's none of anyone's business. So England had gone no jab, no job. And England fired a lot of healthcare workers. We have a healthcare crisis in England at the moment because they have these amazing people who, many of them locked themselves in care homes when the peak hit in the UK in March 2020. They locked themselves in care homes to try not to bring the virus into the care home to try to protect people. Of course, virus is going to do what virus is going to do. And it got into the care homes anyway, and we wiped out more people in care homes and hospitals.

People we were trying to protect, we wiped out more of those than in any other situation. Almost as if putting people together in a home was really not a very good idea there there are studies that show that the the what the what characterizes flu season is not the weather that a lot of people think but it's because the weather forces people to go inside and so i have you heard that also and that and that's the truth about flu season the only reason why we have a flu season is because people go inside and And so I, have you heard that also in that? And that's the truth about flu season. The only reason why we have a flu season is because people go inside and that's when the sickness spreads, but actually flu season is all year. The flu is always here. It's always with us, but it spreads because we, cause it gets cold and people go inside. And so that the absolute

worst thing they could have done, the absolute worst thing they could have done during the, this so-called pandemic was to force people inside. Have you heard that narrative? I haven't, but it makes complete sense. Okay. The time when colds and flu most spread is Christmas, Christmas and New Year. And that's when you mix with the most people in an indoor situation. The heating is on. Heating just helps germs spread as well. And you find a lot of people finish work 20th of December, start the Christmas week or two week break, and they're sick within a couple of days of starting that break. And it just happens. And people say, oh, why does it always happen over

Christmas when I stop working? You could well be right. It's not that you stop working. It's that you move from a much more aerated office with desks far further apart to mingling around a party, you know, the kind of parties we used to have when you're shoulder to shoulder and no social distance and you pick up loads of germs really quickly. And you eat a lot of junk food, which gives you an insulin spike, which within hours, I believe from what I've read, jeopardizes and weakens your immune system within hours. It could. I don't I don't eat junk food. You do. We had a joke, didn't we? When when we were together, you always used to be trying to wind me up saying I'm vegan today or I'm fasting today.

And I never knew you were. Well, yes, I know you do many experiments. I'm experimenting now. I can't wait to tell you what I'm experimenting with. I can't wait to tell you. Stop it. I just eat normal every day. I've been eating raw meat. Okay. For a week, I've been eating raw meat. So basically, I wake up, I take a pound of ground beef. I blend it with a third a cube of butter. I add some salt to it. And then throughout the day I eat that. And then I also sprinkle in some avocados and then occasionally some leafy greens and that, and I've been doing that for a week. And then I, and I mix it with honey sometimes and, and actually I did it for like seven days straight and I started justifying it. You ready for this? Because, well, let me ask you this first is there any truth that eating red that eating um red meat that has carcinogens in it and red meat no no no truth

if you put red meat and cancer in on my site that's one of the things i just i just dispel so many times it makes no sense and i saw that and the ones i read are fantastic by the way i read three of them last night. It's very ancient food. You know, what did Peter Cleave say or something? Surgeon Captain. The idea that an ancient food is responsible for modern illness is absolutely absurd. Will you say that one more time? That is brilliant.

It is. It's Peter Thomas Cleave. I think he was. He was a surgeon captain in the British Admiral or whatever. And one of his most famous quotes was for an ancient food to be responsible for modern disease is quite the most absurd thing I ever heard. And it is our most ancestral food. It's the thing that we first started eating at the point that we started really developing as homo sapiens. So you know, the ice age was supposed to be 30,000 years long ending about 10,000 years ago. During that period of time, we really would not have had much access to plants. And that's the time when we most evolved.

So allegedly, we went from Neanderthal to practically rocket scientist on meat and non-plant food and those fats fueling our brain. So the justification I gave was, is that, okay, so these must have carcinogens in them when they're heated up. That's what must damage the food and give people cancer. And so I'm going to just start eating it raw. Tell me how, tell me how flawed my thinking is because I'm tired of eating raw meat after a week. I don't understand why you're doing it. I don't think eating cooked meat is a problem. So again, there's some, I can't even pronounce it but i looked at something what's acrylamide or something where they say oh you mustn't have burnt toast because the burning

is a really bad thing so i'm thinking all those cavemen sat around the fire and then they put the meat because we discovered fire what 350 000 years ago 500 000 years ago that kind of time frame a long time ago in terms of the evolution of food can you really imagine the cavemen saying oh no no be careful don't put the meat in the fire it get all nice and crispy and you know i love those really well done bits but you know it's going to give us cancer i mean it's just insane the stuff that we believe at the moment we think that the food we've been eating for the longest time is going to cause us harm. And then somehow these cereals and low-fat yogurts made by Kellogg's and Danone are somehow good for us. How stupid do you have to be that someone has convinced you of that?

You were never convinced of that, please tell me. You will be very proud of me this. I have, I did use, you know, obviously hanging around Greg for 15 years every single day and the stop eating added sugar and refined carbohydrates after over 15 years. years ago, I'd say about two years ago, I used Paul Saladino's carnivore diet. I ran across that and I decided, okay, I'll allow myself to eat as much meat and hard cheese as I can for two weeks. And I did that. And basically that broke me of all sugar, all added sugar. And since then, and it's the best I've ever felt my entire life. I basically, for the last year and a half, two years, except for an occasional drink or something, just occasionally I will have no added sugar, refined carbohydrates. And I just use that meat diet as kind of like a mental thing, just the all-meat diet because then I can eat anything I want.

You said something in an interview where you said you used to be – by by the way she has what even better credentials than uh a degree from cambridge in math economics and a phd in public nutrition she's a 20-year vegetarian she worked at mars and um and and she worked in one of the she also was uh you you were head of hr for some. Yeah, a drug company. If you want to really get it out there, okay, I went from fake food to big drugs as well. Yeah, so she worked with Big Pharma. She worked for Mars. She was a 20-year vegetarian. And the reason why that's so important

is because when you see these, when you work in these places, you see the mischaracterization of things. I'm reading this book right now by a man named Patrick Bet-David. Sousa, what was the name of that book? Five? Thinking Five Moves Ahead? What was it? Your Next Five Moves. Your Next Five Moves.

Yeah. And one of the things in that book he says is when you're trying to solve a problem, don't confuse the issue with the symptom. trying to solve a problem don't confuse the issue with the symptom and so so like like people think people are dying of covid now that that is that is not what's happening that is the symptom the issue is is that we're in a tsunami of chronic disease but unfortunately our scientists are so stupid and i mean that in the most sincere sense i can that they're trying to solve the symptom and that and that and so so that they're never going to win. And the same thing is true. When you when you call people, we have a homeless problem in this country, but that's the symptom. The issue is drug addicts. So we have this massive economy that's trying to solve our homeless problem. But that is not the issue. It's like someone's poor and you give them money because you think being poor is the issue. No, that's the symptom. The issue is they don't have a job.

So it doesn't matter how much money you give them. It's going to be gone in a second. You can't – and when you have someone like Zoe who has this other experience, she's not going to fall for the mischaracterization of the real issues. the mischaracterization of it, of, of the real issues. She, she, she's, she, it's not, um, it's not, uh, she's not going to fall for low fat shit. I didn't even as veggie. I mean, veggies actually, um, they, they can easily get more calories. I don't care about calories, but they can easily get more calories than meat eaters. Um, I would go to black tie dues and the person next to me would you would go to what black tie dues they're called so um posh dues when you dress up you wear a ball

gown or a cocktail dress or something i was on the boards of a couple of organizations i was on the board of the national health service in wales so i do know something about the health service and i was on the board of a university in Wales Cardiff Metropolitan and we used to have all these functions when dignitaries would come over so you'd be at black tie dues and you'd have a really fancy dinner and sometimes it would be several courses and I would quite often look because I was interested in food that the person who wasn't veggie was getting a much healthier meal than I was getting um and they would have a nice piece of chicken usually chicken is served at those dinners because it's a safe

non-red non-fish kind of thing um and I would get some enormous pie or pizza or something so I'm in this you know nice little cocktail dress and I'm just feeling as the evening goes wrong my dress just feeling tighter and tighter, all these carbs are going in. You know, you'd have some carb styles. I mean, and that's the thing with vegetarians, because the only foods that have zero carbohydrate content are pretty much meat and fish. Eggs have got a trace, dairy products, it starts to add up. You'll know all of this, having been carnivore. But for a vegetarian, and particularly for a vegan, everything you're eating has got a carbohydrate content. So you end up having a whopping carbohydrate intake,

because that's the food that you eat. And it was that kind of thing that got me really interested in food. So I would look at things like, well, how does nature provide food, and then you realize that nature actually provides foods that vegans don't eat, which is the healthy stuff, which is meat, fish, eggs, and dairy. And those are your animal based foods, but they are what I call fat proteins. So they've got a trace of carbohydrate, but essentially they're fat and protein. And then you've got the things that vegans do eat, and they're carb proteins. And they're the grains, fruits, vegetables, legumes. Again, they have a trace of fat, but they're predominantly carbohydrate and protein. And then you just think that's really interesting. Nature just doesn't put all the macronutrients together. It's really rare that

it does. And when it does, it's things like avocados, which is why I smiled when you were saying what you're eating. Avocados, nuts and seeds are essentially the only things and then you look at a human being with a bag of nuts especially one who's come off fake food so they've managed to overcome the sugar addiction and the white flour addiction and you give them a bag of nuts and they can't stop it becomes the new crave food yes they can't resist yes that's because it has this unique fat carb combo that you don't find in natural foods that's the the only time that nature actually puts something together that we find irresistible we can eat more of it and more of it and more of it and the fake food manufacturers have latched onto that

so if you think of every fake food that you find irresistible it's got that fat carb combo so cookies muffins ice cream confectionery, chocolate, crisps, chips, fries, whatever you guys call them, they have that fat carb combo. And that's the stuff that we can't stop eating. They know what they're doing. It's so interesting. You say that when I, um, when I switched to this raw meat thing in the last week, I told myself I need to stop eating nuts and nuts. Like I it's yes. It's like nine o'clock at night. Time to eat a pound of nuts.

Yeah, it's crazy. It's crazy. I mean, seriously, the only I don't even think Paul Saladino would say raw meat. The only possible reason. Oh, he doesn't know to eat raw. But the vitamin that's most destroyed in cooking is obviously vitamin C. Now, if you're only having meat, if you is obviously vitamin c now if you're only having meat if you're kind of sean baker and you're only having meat then people will say where would you

get your vitamin c from you can actually get vitamin c from some parts of the animal so you can get vitamin c from liver you can get vitamin c from the thymus gland um but then you think okay i have to have that raw because otherwise the vitamin c would be destroyed so i got my hubby andy i got him to try having raw liver once just to show that it could be done. And it's disgusting. It kind of slips down like a goldfish in that movie with the with the people on Wall Street or whatever, the Wolf of Wall Street. But it can be done. But you don't need to, because, of course, your requirement for vitamin C goes down massively, practically to zero. If you don't eat refined carbohydrates because your body is going to use up i think it's vitamin b3 and vitamin c to try to digest those so you don't have to worry

about it just like have a nice steak and fry it a little bit on both sides and um just eat real food you a guy like you you don't have to do strange things weird things as i would call them just eat real food every day and choose that real food for the nutrients it provides. You've heard me talk, you know, my three principles or whatever. It's the guy chucking down the goldfish. Yeah, if you eat real food, choose that real food for the nutrients it provides, then you naturally choose red meat over white, oily fish over white fish, full fat dairy over low fat dairy, eggs, and then a few nuts and seeds and green things. And that's pretty much all you need to eat. And you don't even really need the nuts and seeds and green things.

You can get everything you need in the animal foods. You sound like a crossfitter. Well, you know, I did after getting to know you guys, I did. Andy and I, we did our level one with DAVS in Cardiff. So we took it seriously. We still do something. Most days we have the rest day. We like the rest day.

But I was bear crawling across the loft this morning and then doing lunges and we've got weights and we were doing all that stuff. And it's so effective. You have to do so little to make such a difference. It's, it's almost a sin. It really is. For those of you who want to deep dive into that and be entertained at the same time, all you have to do is go to YouTube, type in Zoe,

Z O E space H A R. You don't even have to spell out her whole name. It'll come up as the second choice. Click it and you'll see a bunch of videos. There's a ton of great lectures on there. In 45 minutes, she will explain to you everything you need to eat but why you should eat it. FDA thing. This isn't like, Hey, you need this much carbs. You need this. She will explain to you what you need to eat and why. And then there's others on what you should stay away from. I watched that one the other day. That was my first time watching your fiber lecture. Holy cow. I had no, I had no, I'm, I guess I'm just dumb. I had no idea fiber was a carbohydrate. I guess I'm just dumb. I had no idea fiber was a carbohydrate. Yeah. It's an indigestible carbohydrate. It's even worse. I get into saccharides and disaccharides and polysaccharides and fiber is one of your polysaccharides, many sugars,

poly, many saccharide sugars, and it's indigestible. So when people are saying, you've got to eat this 30 grams of fiber, you know bs every day your body can't even digest it how does that work i mean if that's straight out of um kellogg's playbook i don't know what is yeah and that's a fascinating thing too uh the um that whole section in there that basically and i knew that about kellogg i knew the whole thing was hey circumcise the man and give them cereal and maybe they'll stop masturbating. And I had heard that I had read that before, but I didn't know that who was the guy before that, who was, who was part of those shenanigans. Oh gosh. Yeah. There was Harvey Kellogg and then there was, um, Graham was another one. Yes. Yes. I tell you who's done brilliant work in this field.

Another person you've got to Google, Belinda Fetke. And Gary Fetke, of course, was one of the guests of CrossFit once as well. Belinda Fetke was trying to understand why the dieticians were going after her husband, Gary, so strongly. And she has just done some of the best work ever. You've got to get her on your podcast. She's done some of the best work ever. That's his wife, Belinda? Yeah, She's Gary's wife. Okay. Okay. Yeah. I'll look her up soon. How come you're not on Instagram? I kind of, I kind of opened an account and then I just, I'm so busy. I kind of do Twitter instead, but. Four pictures. You have four pictures on

there. I know. I mean mean I think you either got to do it properly I see people who do it properly but then I see the effort it takes I've got some friends who they're up in the morning it's like oh here's me in an ice bath and they're lighting everything and they've got them yes I have for breakfast and then here's me going to the dentist in the morning or like can anyone seriously be interested in my day what i do at that kind of level that's really sad like just i just want to live my life i don't want to kind of document it um you could you could uh just a thought you could you have all these fabulous slides from your lectures and each of those slides could be a post okay okay so then not about me it's yeah okay

i know andy spends a lot of time just standing in the front yard, throwing the rugby ball up in the air as high as he can and then catching it. Maybe he could do it. Andy goes on Instagram quite well, a lot more than I do because I'm never on it. So he will check people out. He likes CrossFit guys. He loves car and of course everyone loves car. Yes. Yes. He's always checking out his car and got a lovely new picture.

Matt, who we met over in Madison. He's always checking out his car and got a lovely new picture. Matt, who we met over in Madison. I'm trying to remember his surname. You'll know him. He's gorgeous. What's his surname? He follows him as well. And he's always showing pictures of him looking really pumped and whatever.

That's why you CrossFit guys do all the time. You always like doing these muscle poses. Yeah. I can't be bothered. I just, I just, I just post stuff that upsets people. Oh, go on. Like what?

I mean, did you, did you see, did you see the other day with the CEO of Pfizer said about how the two shots hardly work if at all. Have you seen that? I have. Yeah. I haven't seen it on your Instagram, but I have seen it. How, how does that like the earth should stop spinning on its axis we just they're bragging that they got five billion people on the planet to take these shots and yet this and they made 30 billion dollars in revenue on it and yet or maybe it's profit and yet they don't work if at all how okay so i'm what if i sold what if what if ford like all of a sudden was like dude we sold 800 000 cars this year and they barely work if at all

how i i i i feel like i'm just with morons i feel like i'm just surrounded by morons by the way just zoe i walk the walk mask. My kids go barefoot everywhere. If I go to the park and they have the yellow tape, kids can't play. I cut the tape. Like I don't give it. Like when I test positive, if I test positive for COVID, I still go out. Like I don't care. I don't need added sugar and refined carbohydrates. I'm doing my part. And not a single person like me has died on the planet. I post stuff like that on Instagram. Show me one healthy person that's died. One. One. I'd say just one, one. Yeah. Okay. Two. Okay. So the numbers did not surprise me. If Matt is still listening, if he puts Chad,

I think it will just come up with CHAD in a search box on my site. And it should go back to a post that I did in December, 2020. So in December 20, that Pfizer jab was approved. And they originally did a press release. And because when he said, oh, I get into the numbers, that's what I like doing. That did not surprise me at all, that CEO. He was basically saying what his original research said back in December 20, but nobody understood what it was saying.

So they had this press release, there you go, Chad, the Lancet paper. So I put it in quite discreetly, because if I'd have put in the title, the Pfizer jab effectiveness is seriously unimpressive, I wouldn't have got anywhere. I'd have had subscribers leaving and everyone upset and all the rest of it. It had only just been approved. Everyone was like, this is our get out of jail. This is marvelous. on upset and all the rest of it. It had only just been approved. Everyone was like, this is our get out of jail. This is marvelous. So what people didn't realize when the first Pfizer press release came out and it was, they said, this is 90% effective. That was based on 94 positive PCR tests. So they had a trial of approximately 44,000 people. 22,000 people were given a proper saline

placebo that was different to the AstraZeneca, where they were given an alternative injection, they were given the meningitis. Pfizer was a proper placebo, 22,000 get the placebo, 22,000 get the actual jab. And so they have 94 positive PCR tests with at least one symptom, which quite frankly could have been a, I've got a bit of a cough, and that's it. And we now know because there's been a whistleblower from the Pfizer trial that that data was easy to sabotage and was, basically she's come out and said that. So those 94 people were basically 85 they managed to get into the placebo group and nine they managed to get into the vaccine group and if you have 85 minus nine which adds up to 94 85 minus nine divided by 85 is 90 percent now about a week later they managed to have their first publication and I think see if I can remember I think the Pfizer

one went in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition or JAMA or something like that and then the AstraZeneca one went in the Lancet. They both went in really esteemed publications. So we'll stick with Pfizer. So this time they had 170 positive PCR tests with at least one symptom. They managed to have lost one person. So we're no longer nine in the Pfizer trial. We're now down to eight.

What do you mean they lost a person? I don't know, but it's just when they did the press release, they said there are nine people who have tested positive in the Pfizer arm of the intervention, those 22,000 people. But then when it came to being reported in the academic journal, which is the peer reviewed bit, they said, okay, we've only got eight in the Pfizer arm and then we've got 162 in the placebo arm. again the math is 162 minus a over 162 is 95 and they went out to market saying this is 95 effective now i say somewhere in that post i put all the covid posts on open view because i wasn't having anyone saying you're making money out of covid or whatever i just want to get the information out there um and i said if you stopped people in

the street stop 100 people in the street and say, what do you think 95% effectiveness means? If you find 100 smart people that can even work out at any level what it might mean, they will say, okay, so if 100 people get exposed to the virus, and they're vaccinated, 95 of them won't get it. Yes, yes. It doesn't mean that at all. 99% of people in both the placebo and the drug group didn't get it yes yes it doesn't mean that at all 99 of people in both the placebo and the drug group didn't get the virus at one point they were talking about is this what absolute and relative yes this is exactly it and this is one of the things that in almost every paper when i say i have to unpack and point out a flaw, almost every bit of nutritional

epidemiology. So nutritional epidemiology is where they take a population. So they didn't do a trial, this isn't an actual proper trial. Nutritional epidemiology is just say where they say, okay, we follow some people in framinum, that was one of the most famous ones, we'll just follow them over time. And we'll get loads of details on them at the beginning. So we'll find out how much they weigh, how much exercise they do, do they smoke, do they drink, what do they eat, we'll only ask them their dietary stuff at the beginning, then we'll maybe ask them another 10 years later. But then we'll just follow them over time. And we'll see which ones develop heart disease or lung cancer or high blood pressure or anything else. And then we just make an association with the original data so

we're like ah look all the smokers are much more likely to get lung cancer that that's a good observation um and then you should go and test that in a trial but of course it's so striking it would be unethical to do it to say right we'll get 22 000 people and we'll put 11 000 of them on cigarettes and we'll put the other 11 000 on on cigarettes and we'll put the other 11,000 on not cigarettes and then we'll follow them and see which ones get lung cancer. It's like, it's so high. You don't have to do that trial. You know, you don't, you don't. So has it never been scientifically proven that smoking causes cancer? No, we've not actually done a proper randomized control trial on that. It is given as the example of the thing that shows you don't need to do a randomized control trial.

And there are some other things. Okay. So Malcolm Kendrick talks about this one. He says shows you don't need to do a randomized control trial and there are some other things okay so malcolm kendrick talks about this one he says you don't need to do a randomized control trial to show that a parachute is a good idea if you're going to jump out yes okay so um there are some cases when you don't need to do it but basically nutritional epidemiology is just following that population over time so what they do is is they'll take, you end up comparing two completely different people. So let's take in New York, you've got really different people in New York. So you've got people in New York who are disadvantaged, have got not two pennies to two cents to rub together, no education, dropped out of education probably taking drugs probably part of a gang just no advantage in life you know life's guys that didn't get the the good cards dealt and

then also in New York you've got the people who've got the fabulous apartment overlooking Central Park and they can have a personal chef and the personal trainer and their kids go to brilliant school and they go skiing and they go off to the Caribbean and they're just two completely different people and it just so happens that the first people are more likely to be eating burgers and fries and having fast food and eating junk because you can just get a lot more junk for one dollar than you can caviar or sushi or something and then it just happens that the guys in Sunnyside, upstate New York, are more likely to be eating legumes and kale, and, you know, carrots fried in, you know, exotic ginger and all that kind of thing. They are completely different kind of people. So they look at these people at the beginning, and they end up in the same kind of population study being compared. And they say, oh, look at these people who eat legumes and kale

and kumquat. They end up not having as much cancer and not having as much heart disease. It's like they just end up having a far better life in all kinds of ways. They have better income. They have better access to medical health care. A lot of these studies are done in the US, where it's really important, the medical health they have better education they just have better everything but what you're saying is if only those really downtrodden disadvantaged people act like those really rich advantaged people everything would be equal that's what nutritional epidemiology and Gary Taubes puts that better than anyone I've ever heard put in that that's how he'll say at a conference is you're trying to say that if only they act like the really advantaged people,

then they would have the health of the advantaged people, but they won't. What do they say instead? What do they say instead? So they, I mean, the nutritional epidemiology is arguing that it's the legumes that made the difference. If only they were legumes, they wouldn't have heart disease. They wouldn't have cancer. They wouldn't have diabetes. It's like, no, if only they had access to healthcare, if only they ate better as an entire diet. If only they didn't smoke, if only they didn't drink, if only they didn't have no exercise other than kicking around on the street

corner trying to get a job or something. It's just insane the way that they assume that diet can, And it's just insane the way that they assume that diet can, what I say is, they assume that diet is the maker of health. I say it's the marker of health. So I say, when you observe the person eating legumes, you've described a kind of person who eats legumes, the legumes didn't make them healthy, the healthy person is eating legumes. So you can't then assume that, oh, if only the unhealthy person ate legumes, they'd be as healthy as the healthy person. No, they wouldn't. They'd still be disadvantaged and uneducated and low income and in a gang and no access to health care. They'd still have all of those other problems and they would still die many years younger. And you use the term educated

very loosely. There's two countries that had really, really low COVID death rates, Mongolia and Haiti. These are extremely poor countries. And yet for some reason after the United States felt like it was very important to get vaccines over to Haiti. But the reason why – and this is true for parts of rural India also that no one died of COVID there also because they don't have access to Western foods. When I mean poor, I don't mean poor like the United States. The poorest person in the United States still has greater tools than the richest person in the United States had 50 years ago. We have homeless people. We have drug addicts on the street with iPhones.

I mean it's – and access to all sorts of great stuff. So it's fast. That's also a fascinating piece to me. You have these really educated people thinking that Haiti needs vaccines. They don't. They don't because they don't,

they don't even have enough money to get to McDonald's. You know, it's, and same, same thing with me in Mongolia. Those people, and I saw pictures of the people who've died of COVID in Mongolia. that you know you know it's um and same same thing with me in mongolia those those people they in it i saw pictures of the people who've died of covid in mongolia they're all the bureaucrats and they're crazy obese i don't want to lose we got onto the relative um absolutely oh yes that'd be my fault i i went off somewhere no no no i don't want to lose that because that's

so important so we pointed out that basically their numbers were based on 162 minus 8 over 162, which is 95%. So I then pointed out that's what people in the street would think that 95% of people won't get it. That's not what it thinks. 99% of people in both groups didn't get it. So in that post and in one, I also did one in December 21. that post and in one I also did one in December 21 if you put in efficacy NNT in the search box I did one in December 21 that just kind of reinforced guys we called this a year ago people are now getting surprised at waning vaccine effectiveness it was never effective and you can work out from the numbers that they gave us in that trial paper you could work out

absolute risk you can then work out numbers needed to treat and I go through it all on the site so I explain how we get to it I put the tables in and everything and I think the numbers needed to treat was somewhere around 300 even when they were claiming that the efficacy was around 90 95 percent so you've got to treat 300 people to avoid one person getting a positive PCR test, which might be a false positive, and one symptom, which might be a little cough. And this was in healthy people. This was not in elderly people. This was not in immunocompromised people. This was not in children, and, and, and, and, and, and that's, that's what they went into bat with, to, with the aim of vaccinating 7 billion people on the planet with 170 positive PCR tests.

Oh, it's crazy when you say it like that. Nobody knows that. It's crazy. I want to explain it. I want to explain it because it's in a different way and hopefully people will get it. Basically what you're saying, and tell me if I'm right or wrong here, if you have a thousand people, if you have two groups of people, a thousand each, and one of them you give the medicine to and one person dies. Sorry. Yeah, if one of them you give medicine to and one person dies from whatever the illness is, and then this other group, you have a thousand people and they're the control group and you don't give a medicine and two people die they're saying that the effectiveness is 100 percent yeah double yeah yeah and that's how they report it fanduel casino's exclusive live dealer studio has your chance at the number one feeling winning which beats even the 27th best feeling saying i do who

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thing. But then what they do, which is even more naughty in a lot of these papers, they will report the benefit as relative risk. So they'll say statins will give you a 20% extra chance of avoiding a heart attack or something. And it might be exactly the example that you've just given. But then they'll report side effects as absolute risk. But only one in 100 people will suffer muscle side effects um and and even that isn't true because you go and look at the patient leaflet for statins wow list of things that will say these are experienced by um they'll have very rare rare quite common very common and they're sort of very common is i think they still only call it common, it will be experienced by one in 10 people.

So in the starting patient leaflet, they'll say, you'll get a risk of high blood glucose levels, you're likely to get muscular aches, headaches, I can't remember the other things, don't quote me directly on that one. But just just Google patient leaflet for Lipitor. And the patient leaflet, and I know this from the time that I worked in a drug company on the management team a patient leaflet has to be accurate by law it will be the most accurate of all literature that is ever released by the drug company because if it's not the management team can go to jail and we used to have a head of regulatory on our management team and she used to impress upon us all the time guys this is the thing we need to get right because if we don't any of the management team members can end up in jail and I didn't want to end up in jail

and nor did the head of marketing or the head of sales or anything else so we take it really really seriously it will be the most accurate thing that you see and it says you know read any patient leaflet read the patient leaflet for some vaccines um they they do have patient leaflets for vaccines you might think they don't because you don't go to the the doctor and then the doctor says um okay here's an antidepressant or something and then you can you've got a patient leaflet in the pack because you don't actually administer the vaccine to yourself you go to a center and someone administers it you kind of don't get the box that's got the patient leaflet in it but you can see it online you can look up a patient leaflet for measles or for Gardasil there's almost certainly one for oh actually that'd be interesting see if there is actually one for some of the Covid jabs

because they're all still under emergency use so not only are we trying to jab seven billion people on the back of 170 positive PCR tests, we might still be under the emergency unit. So what I would be Googling would be that CHAD name, or the Pfizer one is something like BN Tech. You go for the technical name, put in the technical name, patient information leaflet, and that's how you get it. I'm sure matt will be on the case or anyone can check later zoe this is fascinating to me this this is completely unethical they'll do the side effects with absolute and the effectiveness with relative yeah and so when when they say all this and i've tried to analyze the data so i've been in a bit of a row with the people who do the statin data in the UK.

So what happens is paper gets published and it says you're 20 percent less likely to suffer a heart attack if you're on statin. So I want to go to the raw data and I don't read the text. I just look at the tables. I'm a numbers person. So I want to get right into the detail and then I can do what you just did with that one in a thousand, two in a thousand. I can see what the absolute numbers are and I can see the absolute difference. And OK, if it's the case that in every 100 people, 20 fewer would have a heart attack, that's a big difference. But what if it's in every 10,000 people, 20 fewer? You've still got a 20 percent relative risk difference, but suddenly it's really not that impressive. So it's what I like doing with those kind of papers. I'll get into

the detail of the paper, I'll find the numbers that will give me the absolute risk difference that I'm looking for. So you go to the statin papers that come out of um there's a group called the um ctsu in the uk what does it stand for the um something um trialists collaborative trialists um ct god i should know this um something unit or whether they they're the treatment trialists looking at all the statin trials they get um last time i did the conflicts of interest on those guys they had something like 300 million pounds from the drug companies um serious yeah serious and it will be even more now um oh here it here it is uh ctsu i'm kicking myself it's like not knowing what fda stands for um treatment service unit collateral treatment service unit whatever collaborative treatment service unit, whatever, they're the statting guys.

And in the papers that they publish in The Lancet, they don't include the raw data that can be used to analyze the data. So I go to look at the paper thinking, I'm going to find out what the absolute risk is and it's going to be really unimpressive. And then I can counter this 20% with what the actual truth is. And they don't have the data.

So I remember writing to them back in 2012 saying, please, can you send me the data? And they tried to be really patronizing. Oh, you know, all the data sets like, no, this is what I need because then I can work this out. And they say, well, we can't release that. It's commercially sensitive. But you're not conflicted, but it's commercially sensitive that you can't release the data that I need to be able to. That doesn't even mean anything for starters, commercially sensitive. It's just nothing. Yeah.

Yeah. Just give me the data so I can analyze it. So if you put in the search box on my site, if you put in over 75, 75S, I think you'll get a post up from probably January 2019. And in one paper, they released the data that I had been looking for in all the other papers. How did you finally get it? Well, they did. So I've still not been able to get the really important statin data, which is their claims on everyone. But they did it. There it is. Statins in the over 75. So they did a

particular paper. That's no, it's the first one. it's the february 2019 one yeah go go back to the other one so it's the february 2019 one um statins in the over 75s has your site ever been attacked have you ever had your site pulled down my hubby does my tech and he's pretty good he's really good um yeah we're pretty locked down in terms of where you can access it from where you can do admin from okay it's basically here in this room and we can't edit it if we're away on you know we can't do certain things so it's pretty secure but anyway in this one whether it was a mistake or not i don't know but they did this paper and they announced that if only everyone in the UK over 75 took statins, all these lives would be saved. And they held a big press conference because it was a group that they hadn't managed to completely get on statins. And it's a big group.

It's a few million people in the UK. If you can get everyone in the US, it's even bigger. So the data were there. I was so excited. so i look at the data and the tables did not show what they claimed so to have claimed what they did first of all they had to be effective in what we call primary prevention so you haven't yet had a heart attack we're trying to prevent one okay so you go to the tables for primary prevention and in the numbers for the over 75s they were what we call not statistically significant so they could have happened by chance so they didn't count you had to ignore them any researcher with five minutes working in research would know you have to ignore um those data and what what makes something statistically insignificant? Okay, so the easiest way to see it, they give you what they call a relative risk.

So say the relative risk. So in your example where you were saying, let's take the 20% difference. So if your baseline number is one, then a 20% difference is represented by 1.2. Okay. So they'll say the person on statins, we're going to use as the baseline and their incident level is one. And then the person not on statins has got a risk ratio of 1.2. So they're 20% higher. That's how they measure it. 1.2 versus one, that's your 20% higher. Okay. Now they give what they then call a 95% confidence interval, which is we are 95% confident that that number 1.2 that we gave is in a particular range.

That particular range should be something like 1.18 to 1.22. So it's a little narrow range and it's nowhere near one. The key thing is if your confidence interval includes that number one, which was also your baseline, it could have happened by chance. You haven't got a differential. You've basically, if you imagine sort of two curves that your two normal distributions that you're comparing, they overlap so much that you can't say that they're significantly different. So you say they're not significantly different. So any range, that confidence interval, anytime it includes 1.0 or even touches 1.0, you should not declare it as statistically significant. So you'll see the examples in that blog post that I did where I show this is the claim that they've made for the over 75s. This is the claim

that they've made for over 75s who haven't already had a heart attack. And neither of those are statistically significant. They include that line of no effect. And they would know that. They know that. It's scientific fraud. They absolutely... You're trying to tell me an Oxford researcher with 30 years funding from the pharmaceutical industry doesn't know what statistically significant is. It was so outrageous. It was almost like the most outrageous one I'd ever seen. You think it's so fraudulent that before they publish it, they went to their lawyers and they said like they even they even know that it might be called like there's a whole contingency plan if they get called on it no i think it was even more interesting than that so they published the paper because they um people don't read the paper in the way that i read a paper most people don't clearly the peer reviewers let it through so right i think the peer reviewers should never be allowed to peer review again because it's on

their watch right what they did they were really cute so they published the paper and they then separately held a press conference to talk about the paper and they then separately held a press conference to talk about the paper. And then they invite the Times, the Telegraph, all the important publications in the UK. So the next day's headlines are if only over 75s in the UK would all take statins, 8,000 lives could be saved. And that's the headline that they wanted. So you look, that headline is not in the paper. That headline didn't have to go through peer review. That headline was a statement made by one of the funded researchers whose name was, he was one of the primary researchers on the paper. So all he has to do

is to say that in a press release, and then it's in all the papers the next day. The average person is then going to their doctor saying, oh, I need to be on statins doc. Look, my life could be saved. And they've done what they wanted to do. The fact that the evidence, the academic paper didn't say that, it's like, who cares? Nobody's going to read the academic paper. The Times is not going to look at the academic paper. They should, but they won't.

When in reality, the data shows that women over 65 with higher cholesterol live longer than women with lower cholesterol. Yeah. Women generally have higher cholesterol and lower incidence of heart disease. How does that uphold the cholesterol theory? 50% of the population immediately defeat the cholesterol hypothesis. And then you find as you get older, your cholesterol. It's crazy.

It's so crazy. It's so crazy. It's so corrupt. The second one is the older people, the older you get, the lower your cholesterol is because your body needs a lot of cholesterol made to repair cells. And you just generally get less good at everything as you get older. So your cholesterol is lower as you get older, but your heart disease is vastly higher as you get older. So age and sex, the two biggies with heart disease, defeat the cholesterol hypothesis in one fell swoop. Don't read an academic paper. That's all you need to know. And the older you get, the more sex you should have if you want to stay healthy. You need cholesterol, which is why you don't want to be on statins if you're hoping to

have lots of fun times. The the older you get the lower your cholesterol gets and maybe that's why you feel less interested in in sex the older you get i don't know i'm still i'm not old yet so i'm i'm still good you're still you don't you don't know i don't know either hey um there's this so i was looking at uh measles because there's this you know with all the vaccine stuff coming and my wife had been telling me for years when we had kids that vaccines are just complete hogwash and bullshit. And she would give me a list of all – and give me all these papers to read. And I was like, what are you talking about? But then this – and I just thought I had some crazy wackadoodle wife.

Well, then this COVID vaccine came out. And the very first study that I saw – well, even before the vaccine came out, the very first study that I saw – and this is thanks to people like you and Greg Glassman being involved in my life. The very first study that I saw coming out of China, this is very, very early on. I want to say this is maybe in January or February. It's not even a study, just numbers. It was that the vast, vast majority of people dying in China were men over 65 who had been smoking for 30 years. then the but then the article read um this kills smokers and old people and i'm like there's no proof that it kills um old people like in my mind because it's just a correlate you would have to you would have to separate these you have to study

old people basically meaning old the older you are the longer you can be complicit in your demise so someone who's 80 can drink soda pop for 50 years as opposed to someone who's 30 can't, but you can't just draw the conclusion that it's because they're old. And I had a see Malhorta on the show and we were talking about it and he was saying that age is the biggest factor. And I said, I don't think you can say that. I don't, I don't. And he said, actually, you're right. They, they haven't done. And I don't know what this exact, I'm going to use this. I don't know what it means. They haven't done a randomized control study on old people and the virus. They just have made this assumption that I think that your immune system wanes as you get older, and therefore it's the biggest factor. But the old people – so I start going down these rabbit holes, and right away then I'm not afraid of the virus because I don't smoke.

Oh, and do you know who the second biggest group of people who died was? It was the women who lived with these smokers. That was the second biggest group of deaths. And I'm like, well, this is a respiratory disease and a metabolic disease, and it's just another virus. And I'm tripping like everyone on that. If it was dangerous, everyone on that boat should have died. But that, that is really interesting because the data that I first looked at didn't come out of china where did you what did you look at the first data that i looked at was back in march 2020 two years ago and it was from italy and it was also very very soon behind from new york um because new york incredible data that came out. Italy said it's not hitting smokers.

Italy was the first country that made us start thinking this is not a respiratory illness. This is a cardiovascular illness. It's a metabolic illness. As you've just said, it's a sticky blood illness. It's an illness that the New York data was striking. It showed that if you had a BMI over 40, really significant BMI levels, you were something like six times more likely to have a bad outcome. And a bad outcome meant you'd go into hospital, you'd end up in the ICU and or you would die. But smokers, the Italian data, because there's a lot of smokers in Italy. Yes. Yes. And I went straight there with that, too. I went straight with that, too. I think Italy has the highest smoking rate in all of Europe or something like that. It's crazy. Sorry. Go on. But it wasn't killing smokers.

That was really interesting. It was killing it was killing people with a high BMI. I like what you're saying. You know, is is it age or is it just that you've had longer to be able to have a bad outcome? We all know people who are in their 80s, who are still slim fit, eat well, eat kind of how they were brought up to eat, and they've been fine. You know, I've got friends who've got parents who've been fine, and then you'll hear the rare story of somebody who was 50 years old and everyone says, Oh, you know, there's nothing wrong with them. And then they died with COVID. And it's

like, well, I think there would have been something wrong with them. They would have had diabetes or high triglycerides or metabolic syndrome of some kind, and perhaps didn't realize it. And also our treatment. I mean, was this the first disease in the world that we just decided could not be treated? Well, I mean, I mean, here here here's a healthy some healthy people did die. Here's a healthy boy who who died of covid. I mean, except for the fact that his ears are missing and his neck is gone. Other than that, he's he's he's so so I scour every healthy person they say. I made it my job for the first year and a half. I've stopped since then.

Every single health – and there isn't one. They say ultramarathoner dies, and I do some research on the guy, and the guy is 6'4", 140 pounds, and he lives on goo packs. And I immediately look at – so I start studying leptin receptors, insulin, and how they affect NK cells and T cells. And a five-year-old can watch the YouTube videos on it and realize that if you have a ton of insulin in your bloodstream and your leptin resistance, your whole immune system has gone to shit. Then I find out that the guys who are on the Tour de France are the most susceptible to sickness of any professional athletes in the world because they're so stressed and they live off of refined carbohydrates. And I'm like, holy shit. Like this is – this is what – I hate to keep going back to Greg. But in 15 years that I worked with Greg, he would tell us the tsunami of chronic disease is coming. It's coming.

It's coming. And now it's here. And instead of realizing it's the tsunami of chronic disease that's killing people, they're pointing at this virus when it it's they've missed they've mischaracterized the issue i mean i know i'm preaching to the choir your whole your whole website did you see the british prime minister in january of this year boris johnson yeah did a little thing he was trying to get everybody to get the booster because the ceo said oh two's not working everyone they tried to get everyone done in december which is just crazy because you put your immune system on the floor bang in the middle of christmas and new said our two's not working everyone they tried to get everyone done in December which is just crazy because you put your immune system on the floor bang in the middle of Christmas and New

Year and everybody was going down with either Covid or pneumonia or chest infection or whatever dropping like flies around me anyway we were fine obviously um but Boris Johnson comes out in January and said just go and get your booster it's much easier than it's your best New Year's resolution it's just much easier than diet or exercise which is kind of what we would normally start doing in january and it's like it's vile zoe it's vile the one thing that is actually going to help you can imagine if two years ago when we knew we had the data out of new york and we said guys if you have got a high bmi you're going to be in trouble i'm really sorry because we know that losing weight really is difficult it really is difficult it's been made difficult in so many different ways the evidence

is not good for success you and i know what you've got to do is basically ditch all the junk food and get down to high nutrient low carbohydrate it is difficult for sugar addicts very difficult and the companies have made a sugar addict so we know what people are up against but if we'd have said back then just lose five percent of your body, you can do that in two weeks, doesn't matter what weight you are, you can do that in two weeks. And then if you're over 40 BMI, you start trying to get down to 35 and then start trying to get down to 30. Two years on, we could have had millions more healthy people no longer at risk from this virus, any virus, any metabolic illness. But we didn't. We just said, stay indoors, close the gyms, close CrossFit, keep the takeaways open.

God forbid that we actually shut McDonald's or KFC. All of that stayed open in my in my state. I did in the UK as well. And you've now got research coming out saying, oh, we gained weight during lockdown. We got less fit during lockdown. It's like, no, that's a shocker. I better review that one on my Monday note. How did that happen? Insane. I want to talk to you about food addiction.

Okay. I had a guy on yesterday who weighed 515 pounds and now he weighs 215 pounds. He lost 300 pounds. 515 pounds and now he weighs 215 pounds he lost 300 pounds and and he said he's a food addict and he he received bariatric surgery and what was interesting is he had a quote on his instagram in a nutshell there's this he had it from uh henry ford the automaker but there's this daoist saying that lao tzu said um if you argue your limitations, they're yours. And when I hear people say they're addicted to food, I feel – I hear part of me wants to claim that that is not a piece of – that is – if it has any value, it should just be temporary and that at some point you should ditch that. You want your – you don't want that as part of your identity.

But I also heard you say that when you were young, you were addicted to food and that – and you also talk about satiety, the awareness of being full. And so I'm painting this picture here. I don't really ever feel full. I don't ever actually i i have to like be conscious of what i eat i don't i'm never like okay that's good i'll keep eating until i hurt i don't and i like i like your anecdote there and i like what that guy said and i like the henry ford um and i was subscribed to that as well i'm not a food addict but but you but you i was i'm not now i could go to work you know i worked in mars for

goodness sake right so in in mars and i worked upstairs so i was above the production line mostly i worked in mars electronics so i wasn't in the food bit but i ended up in the food bit and i i worked in the chocolate factory in slough which is the most famous of the mars factories across the world. And upstairs, you had, you know, marketing sales, the people wearing normal clothes. And then downstairs in the factory, you have the people wearing whites making the chocolate. And you could go down on the factory floor and check. In fact, we were encouraged to. So at the end of each line was kind of quality testing, because if anything was wrong with the M&Ms or the Mars bars or Snickers

bars or anything, if we could catch it before it left the factory, we saved ourselves a fortune. So the factory workers, you know the brown racks when you go into a 7-Eleven store and you've got those racks that are just covered in confectionery and all those kind of things. We had those all around the office. So in an open plan office, everywhere you walk, there's a brown rack because the idea is that we were the taste testers so if we found anything maybe the maltesers were not crunchy or they something had gone wrong we could phone straight down to the factory that would be today's batch it wouldn't leave um and and you'd catch it um i mean it's so rare that anything was wrong but if something was wrong we would catch it but i could just eat crap chocolate to my heart's content. That's amazing.

All day long. That's a dream. That's a 10-year-old's dream. Oh, my God. But everyone, when I joined and everyone said, oh, everyone gains a stone in the first month. Stone is 14 pounds to Americans. Wow. Wow.

I do not want to gain a stone in the first month. But I had to fight like crazy. I'm surrounded by all this candy and i'm trying not to eat it i could go and work in that factory now and i wouldn't touch it like right it would hold no interest for me whatsoever i don't try it because i know if you do you think oh that tastes good because it's made to taste good and then you you start heading down that slope so i don't i don't eat that stuff you know somebody says do you want a biscuit it's like no thank you um I haven't had a biscuit this century

wow I didn't set out to not have a biscuit so you call them cookies so I didn't set out to not have a cookie this century it's just that's how it worked out yeah I just don't eat cookies so you don't eat cookies for a lot of days you end up not having eaten cookies for 21 years yeah and and you but you work at it you're diligent you're you're strong you you went to you went to war with sugar inside of yourself right to to sort of it but once once you get to the point to me it's just um i guess it's like if you're an alcoholic if you're an alcoholic. If you're an alcoholic, you're just really advised not to touch alcohol. People say it's so much more difficult being addicted to food because you've got to eat.

You don't have to drink, but you do have to eat. Okay, you have to eat, but there's certain foods that you don't have to eat. So I made the decision that I don't eat crap. I don't eat, I do have sugar in one form. I like dark chocolate you might remember that from having been around me i always have 85 dark chocolate somewhere close to hand and barely and i don't think any day would go by when i wouldn't have some 85 dark chocolate um and when i was what about honey do you eat honey no it No, it's sugar. It's sugar with a bit of water. So sucrose is 100% sucrose. It's dry. It doesn't get sticky. Honey is about 87% sugar and the rest is water, which is why it's sticky. So if you add water to the sugar jar, you'll end up with sticky sugar, which is kind of like honey why why would you do that

i don't i don't know but i'll tell you this so the week this is the second time this has happened so this whole week i was basically just eating raw meat some leafy greens and avocados and yesterday my my feet started getting cold like my toes and i was like oh i remember this the last time i did the carnivore diet. And I remember the next thing after that is I started being able to hear my heartbeat a little bit, like in a way that I wasn't familiar with. So none of those sound, none of those side effects sound from just someone who's just eating what you've talked to Sean Baker. Does he have any of those issues from just eating? Does he eat any sugar? He's, he's, he's interviewed me more than I've interviewed him kind of thing. So I haven't asked him that.

I don't personally do any of this stuff. So I do low-carb conferences and people are in the middle of a three-day, five-day, I've even had someone who's just arrived at a conference and they've just ended a seven-day fast or something. And they're no different in size to me. You know, again, you do it in pounds, don't you? So I'm about seven stone nine. So that's seven fourteens, which is 98. I'm about 107 pounds or something.

You know, call it 110, who cares? Not heavy enough to give blood in the United States. You couldn't donate blood. No, not either in the UK. That's like my mom, yeah. I know, I'm quite happy with that, that actually because it's one of my uh one of my phobias um so yeah you know and i and i just eat normally every day i don't i don't eat junk at christmas so when you said oh we all mix over christmas and eat junk and get low immunity i

don't i just i eat pretty much every day i eat i eat the nutritious foods and i eat dark chocolate i have chocolate mousse most days because i put dark chocolate in nutritious foods and i eat dark chocolate i have chocolate mousse most days because i put dark chocolate in with cream and i wonder if that if that helps so so last night i had a little tiny just a tiny bit of pasta it was pasta made from rice okay rice pasta yeah rice pasta and um and i had it with a bunch of cooked meat and And within, uh, I'd say 30 minutes, all of those issues in my feet went away. It was crazy. So something circulatory. Yeah. Yeah. You should be fat adapted. So, I mean, you, you know, the professor Tim notes, the whole and, um, Jeff Folek and Steve Finney,

you'll know this whole area about being fat adapted. So you need to get your, any, any athlete worth their salt needs to get to the point where they're fat adapted, because the body will always use any available glucose if it can stored glucose is obviously glycogen. We've got about 14 1500 calories available in glucose stored glycogen at any one time, which is why he was saying about the Tour de France guys, they just eat junk the whole time because they're forever fueling in these gel um gel packs you know they tear the top off them and just glug this gloopy disgusting stuff down they're just trying to get glucose into them the whole time um i don't know if they're also fat adapted i think it could be um game changing if

any of them became fat adapted because you want to get to the point that your body can feel on fat because even the CrossFit athletes claim you lose your explosiveness when you become fat adaptive, that you need glucose for the explosiveness. You do. But I still think you should be fat adapted because so you've got to have the body able to flick that switch to start fueling on fat when you run out of those 1,400, 1,500 calories. So instead of just reaching for the next piece of glucose, so you're just this constant conveyor belt of glucose. That's why Professor Timnotes ended up as type 2 diabetic, because he was a slim, elite athlete running marathons, iron men, triathletes, you know, all that kind of thing. running marathons, Ironman triathletes, or, you know, all that kind of thing, loads of them end up as type two diabetic because they just chuck in glucose every 30 minutes, whatever they need to, to just keep the fuel up. You've got hummingbirds like hummingbirds. Yeah. So you've got to get to the point and you will go through a dip in your performance. So

you need to decide when you're going to do it. You need to do it after one games and the longest time possible before the next games. And basically to become fat adapted, you need to do it after one games and the longest time possible before the next games and basically to become fat adapted you need to go really low carb for long enough and finney and volick are the experts on this and prof notes and they would probably say you're probably looking at somewhere around four to six weeks of really low carb and then the body is just like damn it i'm so freaking hungry i'm going to access that fuel and even a marathon runner like paula Radcliffe, who still holds the marathon record for women, she's about my size and weight. Even we have got, I don't know, 40,000 calories of fat. You know, let's say I'm 100 pounds, keep the maths easy.

Even if you're 14% fat, you're looking at 14 pounds of fat. Now the calorie theory is wrong. That's another thing that I've blown apart. But let's say a pound of fat approximates to three and a half thousand calories, you can see that you're looking at 40,000 calories of fat fairly easily on even the tiniest marathon running person. So the body is going to run out of 1500 calories of glucose and it's got 40 000 calories of fat available who is going to win if you know what happens at crossfit games we've both been there they pull a nasty one and they have you swimming across madeline new madison lake or whatever and then paddle boarding and then running and something that is really going to use up those hours long yep exactly exactly now do you want to be the person that's still chucking in the glucose Something that is really going to use up those glycogen. Hours long. Yep. Exactly. Exactly.

Now, do you want to be the person that's still chucking in the glucose? Or do you want to be the person that when you had that moment on the lake and the glucose wasn't to hand, you were able to flick into fat burning? Now, you still need glucose for the explosive events. Volek Finney notes would all say this. If you're a 400 meter runner, if you're doing anything anaerobic you you will fuel on glucose you are not fueling on fat but you want to be able to do both yeah i've never really heard i've never thought of that before i didn't know it was so dynamic i thought you were one or the other i thought you either run on gas or on diesel at any one time you

are but the ability to be able to fuel on both. And what happens when you stop being a sugar addict is you just get cranky and tired for those first few weeks because your body is saying, where's the quick fuel? Where's the quick fuel? I'm used to that. That's what I fuel on. Every time your energy would dip, you know, I'd be studying at Cambridge or whatever, trying to get an essay in on time. Every time my my energy would dip i would just reach for the next chocolate bar the next bag of chips or just constantly trying to keep my brain fueled my brain is so much happier running on quality fats or ketones or whatever i just never gave it that chance um is syrup in the same category as honey? Yeah, it's sugar. It's all sugar.

I mean, the only thing that honey might be useful for is putting on a wound. There's some evidence that it can have antibacterial properties. But putting it in your mouth, no, it's just sticky sugar. There's a – I hope I can find this. Hey, you're cramps, by the way. You're cramps. I was just thinking, you know the guy that Kimmy whatever, he set up Virta. He was one of the founders of Virta, and he did that rowing event where he rowed on virtually zero carb.

And they rowed across the Atlantic? Yeah, yeah. What was that guy's name? He had, I'm sure it was um matt will have it in a second the guy who set up verta who did the rowing he had i wonder if your circulation thing is actually cramps in some way because he found that when he just got his electrolytes right which just meant adding enough salt to the meat and fat protein that he was eating everything sorted itself out so that amount of salt as i said yeah well maybe because salt is not dangerous you know that so if you eat too much salt your body will just make you thirsty because there's potassium in water

and then your body will just get you thirsty to drink and there's potassium and sodium in water but there's more potassium so you'll drink and drink and you'll get less thirsty because you'll mitigate the sodium balance. You'll get it back to normal. So try some salt next time. Instead of sugar? That doesn't sound as healthy. Hey, he's a Finnish guy, Sousa. I think he was also the founder of Trulia, maybe.

He's very rich. Yeah, very rich. I think he found Trulia and then sold it. And then now he started Virta. Let's see. I want to pick. I know we don't have a lot of time. I want to talk to you about baby formula. No, that'll be our next call the obesity uh epidemic 1976 1980 that's a different call uh hey again lucky us who what yes what huh we can do that again yeah yes yes yes i i hope so i hope you'll come on again i hope you'll have so

much fun and i won't keep you too long but there was this thing that basically you say somewhere that basically if you do caloric restriction to lose weight that that is absolutely not sustainable yeah it's just just talk talk talk me through that so so so talk me through that like i'm just an idiot because i kind of am yeah if you want to google one of my talks on this. Oh, yeah, yeah. Sorry, before you start. Anyone, please. I can't emphasize enough. The videos are so solid. She speaks at an incredibly fast pace. She has incredible slides.

She keeps everything clean. No, not them. Oh, no, it is him. Good job. Yeah, Sami. Sami Inkanen. That's right. Sami Inkanen.

I'm thinking of Kimi Räikkönen, but he's the Formula One driver the formula one driver isn't he or he was anyway yeah he looks great with facial hair he should grow that back he looks too clean when he doesn't have facial hair anyway you want to type in zoe harcombe and you want to put it into google and there are so many great videos as a matter of fact there's a couple from crossfit and all of this stuff will be explained to you concisely and you can just get like i know for a lot of people like me you just want to be told what to eat and why and be able to like comprehend it. And these videos are great. And there's a gang of them out there. So Google her name and you can get all this information.

Sorry, go ahead, Zoe. The one you want for this one is if you put in PHC, those three letters, public health collaboration, collaboration phc i think it was 2017 and if you put in calories and kettles or something in my name that should come up instantly um and that's one where i do a sort of 40 minute everything on everything to do with calories why do we even think that calories are important it goes back to thermodynamics um is there a principle of thermodynamics that says energy in equals energy out no there isn't um the whole calorie theory this this idea you'll have seen this somewhere in magazines where they say oh to lose one pound of fat you just need to create a deficit of three and a half thousand calories

and then you will magically lose one pound of fat. So I just kind of dissected that. It's like, okay, so one pound doesn't even equal three and a half. One pound doesn't even equal three and a half thousand calories. So just tore the whole lot apart brick by brick. And because one pound doesn't equal three and a half thousand calories, you won't lose a pound if you create a deficit of three and a half thousand calories. This whole idea, So people just say, if you just put less in and you just do more, forget that they say it's to the tune of three and a half thousand calories, which just does not add up. You can't even source it. It's just a myth that has come about. It's insane. If you just eat less and or do more, your body will just give up body fat. It's like, where do you start? There are so many things that are wrong with that. Bear with me here, but it sounds so logical right no it doesn't okay okay help me out here because okay so one one thing that is in me that that is assuming that your body is not going to compensate

in any way and well if you have a car and you have gas in it it'll conk out and i and i drive oh okay yeah you have a car and you've got enough petrol to get from california to i don't know illinois or whatever and then you have it which is what they say you know calories by a thousand a day or whatever you'll get half as far the car so that is a perfect analogy because what they're saying is um put less in the car and flog the car even harder yeah and everything will be okay no it won't you will get half as far and even less analogy because what they're saying is um put less in the car and flog the car even harder yeah and everything will be okay no it won't you will get half as far and even less because you flogged it even harder okay um it just doesn't work the body adjusts so you try to eat less the

body will just immediately do less you're just completely assuming that this magnificent thing that is the human body utterly utterly magnificent, that it cannot and will not make any adjustment whatsoever. It can and it does. It just does. So it can switch things off. So in women, you'll have seen this with women who diet too hard, their periods stop immediately. So that's one of the nine systems of the body just turned off straight away. We're just not going to do that. Forget reproduction. So instead of burning fat, you lose your menses. off straight away. We're just not going to do that. Forget reproductive. So instead of burning fat, you lose your menses. Exactly. And instead of burning fat, you get cold. And instead of burning fat, it turns down the circulatory system. Oh, that happened to me. That's happened to me.

Exactly. Exactly. So it just adjusts. The other thing it will do is it will do everything it can to try to get you to eat more because you're in a starvation situation. You're hardwired to eat what you need. So the minute you try to eat less, all you're in a starvation situation. You're hardwired to eat what you need. So the minute you try to eat less, all you can think about is eating more. The minute you go on a calorie controlled diet, all you can think about is food. And that's deliberate because the body is trying to get you to put that food in. So first of all, you're fighting your body, turning off systems and downplaying all the things that it could be doing. So there's studies on my website on this. So they have actually now academically studied

and shown if you put less in, the body does less. If you do more, the body compensates at other times. So you do, I mean, CrossFit guys are different because we kind of hardwired in a different way, but your average person who goes to the gym then goes home and collapses on the sofa and watches Netflix and rewards themselves with crap food because they've done something really heroic. And they went to the gym for half an hour. And the gym machine told them that they burned 200 calories. So they have

a weight watchers encourages this, they have a 200 calorie confectionery bar because you earned it kind of thing. It's just insane. There are so many reasons why it just isn't going to work, your body's going to work against you, your isn't going to work. Your body's going to work against you. Your body's going to adapt. Your body's going to get you to do less. Your body's going to get you to try to eat more. And then the other thing that completely fails it, that's one whole angle that I go through. So it's not so calories in calories out is. Just ignore calories. Think of calories as fuel for your car. Okay. And so what you should be thinking of is

if i need a certain amount of food per day then i need to make sure that that fuel that i'm eating is giving me the other things that i need because that's the other thing that happens when you go on a calorie control diet and trust me i did it as a teenager so i got the t-shirt i was gold medalist calorie counter as a mathematician i can hold numbers in my head i can play with them easily i was fucking brilliant at calorie counting i tell tell you, you know, no one better. You get the biggest bang for the buck because you're hungry the whole time. So if I was trying to limit myself to a thousand calories a day, when I was a teenager, I was playing hockey for the school. I was doing athletics for the school. I was swimming for the tool. I was life-saving. I was

a really good athlete when I was younger and I was trying to do it all on a thousand calories a day so you don't eat fat thousand wow no you don't eat fat a thousand calories a day because calories in fat approximate to nine per gram in carbohydrate and protein they approximate to four per gram again that's not accurate but it's an approximation so you always go for low-fat foods you go for carbohydrate foods. So your breakfast will be apples, and rice cakes, and black coffee, and bread with no butter on it. And then your lunch, you might have the same, you might have, you know, apples, what a great food, a small apple, 50 calories, yay, I can have four apples for 200 calories for lunch, you know, get me, I can have a 50 calorie pot of low fat high sugar yogurt

um in my dinner and that's going to make me feel like i've really had something after my 50 calorie coleslaw pot you know this is all processed food because they count the calories for you right so you make really bad choices when you count calories you move away from the most nutritious foods and you move towards the calorie counted processed least nutritious foods but the real killer is that people think all it needs for the body to lose weight is to have a calorie deficit you will know that that is not how the body loses weight to to be able to lose weight if you think about what weight loss actually is weight loss is the bad the body breaking down body fat so under what circumstances can the body break down body fat it can only do

that with glucagon so glucagon is the the hormone you know insulin and glucagon so we'll explain it for everyone so you've got the two basically regulate our blood glucose levels they do other things but essentially their main role is to to regulate blood glucose levels they do other things but essentially their main role is to regulate blood glucose levels so in our entire bloodstream yours and mine at any one time we should have no more than one teaspoon of glucose that's four grams of glucose that is tiny in our entire bloodstream so the minute we have an apple which is about i don't know 20 grams of carbohydrate 10 of those approximately will be glucose 10 of those approximately we will be fructose fructose goes to the liver non-alcoholic

fatty liver disease thank you very much and the glucose goes into the bloodstream and that's twice as much as you need and you've already probably got exactly four grams in as your body has regulated it so the body says I've got to get that glucose that's just gone in from the apple out of the bloodstream so it calls on insulin says insulin your job is to get glucose out of the bloodstream. Now, at four o'clock in the morning, when you haven't eaten for a few hours, if your blood glucose levels are dipping a little bit low, the body then says, hey, glucagon, you're the opposite. You go and do your job now. This guy's getting a bit low glucose. go and put some glucose back into the bloodstream so how does the body do that the body breaks down body fat because body fat is also called triglyceride not to be confused with blood fats that's just really annoying that they've got the same name

so your body breaks down triglyceride try the word meaning three it's basically three fats on a black backbone of glycerol and it's the glycerol bit that the body's interested in, because that's the bit that can top up the blood glucose level, but you just lost weight at four o'clock in the morning, you just broke down body fat. So you look at that, and you say, right, under what circumstances can I break down body fat? Now, think of insulin and glucagon as like alley cats, they are never, you know, there's two tomcats, and they don't to be in the alley at the same time because they're going to have a fight and it's going to be bad news. So if insulin is out, glucagon's at home. And if glucagon's out, then insulin's at home. They don't, they can't be in play at the same time. They're antagonists. That's the technical

term. So you can only have glucagon do its thing when insulin is not around. You only need glucagon to do its thing when blood glucose has got low enough that it needs to do its thing. So immediately, you can start painting the picture of the scenario in which you can actually lose weight. First of all, you cannot have insulin present, which means you cannot be snacking on carbohydrates the whole damn time. Because every time you put carbohydrate into your body you wake up insulin interestingly and there was another post on so so you're even if you're on a restricted diet but you're eating every two hours little carbohydrates you're just sabotaging the whole system you've got it and that's what i did as a calorie counter so i would get to the point i would eat a packet of um fruit gums we call them over in the UK um is basically fruit sweets they have nothing in them other than fruit flavoring sugar and a bit

of gelatin to bind them together um so I wasn't eating those when I was vegetarian this is as a teenager and I would graze on those because it would make me think I'm continuing or you chew gum um you know you just continually feel this need to be consuming something. So you are constantly you are setting yourself up for insulin resistance big time. But you are constantly having insulin present in the body. Now what people also don't realize, and I did a recent interesting post on this looking at the Holt paper from 1997, an insulin index of food is a very recent one. It will be on the homepage on the right-hand side. What people don't realize is protein also has an impact on insulin,

quite a striking impact on insulin. So all the people thinking, oh, I'm really low carb, but I'm having these protein shakes and I'm having these skinless chicken breasts and white fish and being all bodybuilder type. You are also calling upon insulin a lot of the time, a lot more than you need to be. And every time you've got insulin present, you cannot have glucagon present. So we have got to stop grazing. You know, I said this at the- Oh, and it says that in several places on your site, I saw also- I say, unless you are a cow or want to be the size of one stop grazing because that is the single worst thing that you can do just continually chucking stuff in your mouth you know my three rules are

eat real food choose that real food for the nutrients it provides and number three eat a maximum of three times a day what was the second one eat choose that real food for the nutrients so that's the one that makes you go for red meat oily fish full fat dairy eggs and if you want some green things sunflower seeds are quite useful for vitamin e you know rare kind of things but it doesn't get you eating beige stuff so to lose weight you cannot be consuming carbohydrate the whole time so i actually in the in that calorie presentation the kettles one at the phd towards the end i actually go through this little chart where i say i don't know the numbers on this if i did i would have written an academic paper on this what i don't know is okay make the math simple 2 000 calories a day let's say i as a female need 2 000

calories a day calories are just petrol don't think of them as something to be cut let's say i need 2 000 calories a day approximately 1500 of that are for what we call basic metabolic needs. So even if I'm ill in bed all day and I just don't get out of bed, I still need about 1,500 calories because my body still needs to fight infection, build bone density, keep the body pumping around, keep my menses going, circulation, all the nine systems of the body. It still needs all of that. circulation, all the nine systems of the body still needs all of that. Now, what I don't know is how much of that basal metabolic rate can be provided by carbohydrate. The body basically wants those functions done. They are they are fueled by fat and protein, by and large. So if I'm, if I mean, keep the maths easy again, and I say, right, the whole of those 1500 calories need to come in the form of fat and protein. So take that 2000 calorie a day person,

cut them back to 1000 calories a day. But what they do is they choose carbohydrate. So you eat fruit and fruit guns and crackers and rice cakes. So you only needed 500 calories of carbohydrate for your extra activity on top of the basal metabolic needs and actually you didn't need that in the form of carbohydrate that could happily be fueled by fat right so you had zero need for carbohydrate but you had a thousand calories of carbohydrate which was actually twice as much as you needed for your energy your moderate activity right daily basis but you had more than you needed that couldn't contribute to the basal metabolic needs. So you can see how a calorie counter can get both fat and sick.

What a great explanation you just gave. Wow. You're not eating what you need, but you are eating more of the stuff that you don't need. So you just, I say, just forget counting calories. I don't get hungry um I do feel fine I don't know if I eat to satiety you know I do remember on Christmas day I went out for dinner and I definitely got to the point where I thought that's great I've had enough I feel really good um I never eat until I'm sick but I'll eat I'll eat what's what's there kind of thing but the only way you can lose weight is not to have insulin in play to enable glucagon to do its thing. And those are the circumstances in which you can lose weight. You still won't necessarily lose weight. You still then have to

give the body a reason to burn fat. Um, how many hours of not putting something in your mouth before this happens, before the insulin is gone and the glucagon is there um that will probably depend a lot on what you had at the last meal okay so if you have um i don't know you go out for dinner you have a massive pasta dish thousand calories of pasta eight o'clock in the evening um you're probably still gonna have that that the body will take it out take the glucose out of the bloodstream instantly and pack it away as glycogen and then throughout the night the body might be saying okay we need a bit of glucose going back in but of course the first port of call for glucagon is just to go to the the larder to go to the storage room of glucose which is your glycogen storage and then just put

that back into the bloodstream. So you're not losing weight. You're just putting the pasta that you ate at eight o'clock, you're just putting that back into the bloodstream. So it's only when you don't have that available to go back into the bloodstream. To lose weight, you've got to be low in carbohydrate. Because you have that 1400 calories of storage there. And if by the end of the day, you haven't used those 1400 calories of storage there and if by the end of the day you haven't used those 1400 calories of storage let's say somebody and and and marathon runners do this so they will feel you know they'll have that okay let's forget a marathon runner let's just say that there's a person who's trying to get the biggest bang for the buck so they follow the dietary advice they're eating cereal beige stuff fruit vegetables legumes all that stuff all day long so they've got their

1400 calories of glucose, if they don't use that up, because they're not very active. At the end of every 24 hour period, the body basically says, right, we need to turn that to fat. Because your body, this is this another brilliant thing, your body doesn't store fuel. The reason it stores, I don't know how to put this across. So you approximate carbohydrates to four calories a gram and you approximate fat to nine calories per gram. So when I said that we've got something like 40, I've got 40,000 calories of fat stored on me. Can you imagine if that fat was stored as carbohydrate? It would be 2.9 over four times bigger than the fat that I'm storing. How much

bigger would we be if we were storing carbohydrate all around everywhere? So the body's really efficient. The body says we don't need much carbohydrate because actually we need zero carbohydrate. Zero is a non, carbohydrate is a non-essential nutrient. So we just have this limited capacity for storing it because the body has not evolved to have a lot of it.

We didn't find it. It wasn't, fruit wasn't available most of the year we couldn't access carbohydrates that tubers root vegetables until we had fire there were so many reasons why carbohydrate is just not all that to the body and yet it's what we now eat all day long so you've got to not have your 1400 calories of carbohydrate stored um you've got to be a best moderate carbohydrate which prof notes would define as below 130 grams of carbohydrate a day no more than approximately 25 26 percent of your daily intake in the form of carbohydrate that's a basic um and if you can go lower than that even better

and then you've got to give your body the opportunity to be able to burn body fat once that glucose has run out the body then can burn body fat if you can then add in intensive activity mixed activity like we do with crossfit you're giving your body the chance to burn body fat um avoid alcohol because that inhibits the operation of glucagon so that stops oh it does it does so the really quick one on alcohol alcohol is not about calories it's in that presentation as well i mentioned alcohol in that presentation you can't store alcohol calories alcohol is is an anathema to the body it's basically a toxin so when it comes into the body the body just wants to get rid of it so um your liver starts going into overdrive and starts dealing with this toxin as it perceives it,

the body will preferentially use the alcohol calories. So if you have 100 calories from alcohol, along with 100 calories of pasta, it's going to use the 100 calories of alcohol first, because it wants it rid of from the body will come on. So I mean, it's it's affecting your fuel consumption, because it's going to delay even your carbohydrate being used up. But if you just took it aside, if you just had alcohol and you had it with a steak, so you don't have the carbohydrate complication,

it inhibits the operation of glucagon for a period of time. I don't know how long. You asked the question, how long before the glucose runs out? It depends how much you've had. How long before the alcohol stops impairing your ability to burn fat? it depends how much alcohol you've had. So maybe it works

on the basis of, they say you lose about a unit of alcohol every hour or so, as a rule of thumb, if you want to get back into driving your car safely. And maybe it's like that for how long it takes before you can go back to having your glucagon working effectively. But glucagon switching off your fat burning during the night, which is the time we're most likely to lose weight. And that's not great if you're trying to lose weight. Yeah. We're at an hour and 45, but I got to ask you this too. Are you, are you, so I don't, every Saturday night, I wouldn't have done this when I was 45, but I got to ask you this too. Are you, are you a fat? So I don't, every Saturday night, I wouldn't have done this when I was younger, but I find it super duper effective at my age at 49, every Saturday night. And it doesn't matter what time I,

that's the last meal I have until Monday morning. I just don't eat Sundays. And I've done that for over a year now. Do you have any, do you have any issues with that? I don't, it's not for me. I wouldn't enjoy that. I love my food. Andy's cooking dinner right now. This is about the time that we would eat. I don't eat until breakfast tomorrow. Do you think it's bad that I do that? You think it's too much? You think I'm fucking with my system? I mean, what, I, what's crazy is when I wake up, obviously, I mean, obviously when I wake up on Monday morning, so basically what it does is it gives me a fast where I get to sleep twice.

I get, you know what I mean? So I don't, I don't eat all day Sunday, but then I get to sleep Saturday night, not eating. And then I get to sleep Sunday night. And when I wake up Monday mornings, I'm, I'm absolutely not hungry at all. Zero. I never have woken up hungry. I've been doing this for 60 weeks. Why do you do it? To give two things because I was fascinated by the concept of autophagy.

Okay. And to give my, I like the, nothing scientific based. I like the idea of giving my body my digestive track a day of rest a week it seems it's it seems fair to me and it's probably at my especially at my age yeah it's probably what we would have done we wouldn't have had food every day um i mean i think it's sort of how it works for you i think in because i've worked a lot with women who've had bad eating habits in the past. And I think for a lot of those, it's quite dangerous because I think it wakes up this whole, oh, I'm not going to eat today because I ate too much yesterday kind of thing. This whole sort of binge starve behavior. Yeah. And to tell you the truth, the first like three to six months I did it, Saturday night before I went to bed, I would feel a little bit of a panic and I would do that.

I would stuff myself. You know what I mean? Like I would, instead of having a small bowl of berries with a little heavy cream, I'd have a massive bowl of berries with a lot of heavy cream. Yeah. Yeah. And that's, that's not good. It sounds like you're not there now, which is no, no, no. Now I even forget. Now I forget. Yeah. Yeah. I would, I would worry about people who've had eating problems in the past going that route because I could see that happening. I wouldn't enjoy it because I love my food I wake up each morning the first thing I want is breakfast um and I love a massive cappuccino with full fat and you say full fat milk it's still three and a half percent fat for goodness sake right you know milk is is not heavy fat but I like I like I love dairy um so I'll have heavy yogurt and some berries and um um, eggs maybe. And I love it.

Um, I wouldn't want to go a single day without eating. If I ever went a day without eating, I would be really ill. You know, my mom's about, my mom's five feet tall, a hundred pounds. And, and for her, the day taking a day off, isn't really an option either. She went to a, um, she went to like like a fasting clinic like where you stay the night there and there was she said there were people there who like hadn't eaten like in 70 days but like after like three days the doctor's like yeah you're done my mom was like what do you mean they're like you're too small you're you're done go eat i wouldn't like it no i'm i i i don't even

stick to my third rule i i do eat more than four times a day when all this this COVID nonsense started and they said, oh, it's three weeks to flatten the curve. And me and my hubby were like, yeah, right. This isn't going to be three weeks. I make this amazing chocolate mousse. I'll send you the recipe. And you did know you knew it was a scam from. I mean, I knew the sickness was a scam from day one, but you knew that that this two weeks was going to go into. Yeah. Yeah. I remember Greg, actually, I hope I can share this. Greg, um, hosted a podcast. He kind of got us all together on a zoom call. Um, and I won't say who else was on it, but I'm like, Oh my goodness. These are all

my heroes around the world. Cause he had access to people like that. And we just had a free for all kind of chat of, okay, what do we think's going on we had academics we had doctors um and there were a couple who were a little bit cautious as in not too sure about this that everyone else just called it and said this is insane and the the main reason why i thought this was insane was because i'd looked at what a pandemic plan was so yeah pandemic whatever i hate that word because i mean to me they changed the definition of pandemic so you know they there's just so much they've done do you know who calls it a so-called pandemic go on um uh eckhart tolle oh really i love him and that's why i bring that up to you because there are a lot of very wide i have a friend who's a monastic monk, you know, and and he said that even the vast majority of the Buddhists don't get it, that they're completely.

It's so scary. Well, a pandemic used. I mean, I'm not I'm not being disrespectful. I'm just being academic. Yeah. A pandemic had a definition and it was a certain death level right across the world. And we just didn't have that. So you look at the and there's a great document from 2019. You look at the World Health Organization. If we ever do get a pandemic, what would we do?

And it kind of went through and there's this little summary table. It's just fantastic. And it's like, don't close borders. Makes no difference. Don't shut down public transport. Don't even think about closing schools. The word lockdown was just not there. It was inconceivable that you would lock human beings in their homes, isolate them from other people. And then all the other stuff we started doing, you can't have weddings, you can't have funerals. In the UK, we had this, oh, you can take your mask off if you're drinking, but only if you're having a substantial meal. So then we have, seriously, we had this debate, what counts as a substantial meal? And I don't know if you know, there's this British dish called a Scotch egg. It's an egg, a hard boiled egg surrounded by sausage meat. It's the most disgusting thing you've ever heard of.

And they decided that was your benchmark. If you were having that, you could take your mask off. And if you weren't, you weren't allowed to drink allowed to drink i mean we've had insanity how would you do it you would just like like put your straw inside your mask you're supposed to you know how it works you walk into the restaurant with your mask on and then you sit down and take your mask off because the virus knows that it won't get you now because you only risk when you i mean please somebody tell me we will look back on these two years and say, what did we do? We lost our minds. Some of us realize straight away we are losing our minds here.

But so many people didn't. And the fear, a friend of mine. Fear. Yeah, they're scared. They're scared. They're all scared. A state of fear by someone who's become a friend since she called Laura Dodsworth. A state of fear? State of fear. Great title, because she talks about what happened to us in the UK, what the behavioral scientists did to scare the life out of us, because they knew unless we were scared, we wouldn't comply. So they had to get us so scared that we would comply with all these things, even though they were completely and utterly non-scientific and absurd. So that's

what's been done to us but yeah I it was it was bs to me from day one so we have this chocolate mousse and we still have that every morning it's like our treat so I'm currently eating four times a day god we covered a lot of ground then just for me to tell you I'm not eating state of fear it's brilliant I mean look how many reviews 813 I think it's just pretty much five star. I think the Dutch parliament, somebody bought it for every member of parliament. I think somebody in the UK bought it for every member of parliament in the UK.

It just documents what these evil bastards on these government committees were doing to make sure that we stayed scared. Scaring the life out of people for two years takes some doing. And every time we might have got a little bit less scared because it was sunny and we started going out and enjoying the sunshine and going on the beach they bring something else out to scare the life out of

us again so that they could keep us compliant it's been truly evil what's been done to us i wish i could remember the guy's name it was it was like 200 podcasts ago i should have him back on but basically he is the head of the largest psychiatric institution in stockholm and i had him as a guest on the podcast and he was saying that 30 years ago the people that they would see the the issues that they would come into this to the institution with were unfathomable stuff he can't even talk about like the worst shit that you could do to human being happened to this person. And now they're in a psychiatric facility. He said, now they have a psychiatric facility with people just full, full of people who like

their dog got hit by a car or their boyfriend broke up with him. He said, the society, he said, it's so fucked up. It's the, the softness of people, the, the, the ability of people to cope with shit on their own is just out the door. And I, I picture this, um, I picture this, uh, society, especially the obese and those addicted to food, they've walked out onto a tight wire in between, um, you know, that the grand Canyon, let's say they're over a huge crevasse civilization and the wind is picked up and they're now just blowing off. And the rest of us are just sitting there, you know, like eating our piece of chicken on the side, being like, Hey, you guys should walk back off that wire. I mean, it's, it's crazy. Yeah, it is. I mean, we'll have to do the woke on another one

as well. Cause the woke, you guys have that word in the UK? Yeah, the woke The woke is insane We're at war at the moment and people are worrying about their pronouns Yes, yes, yes Yes Oh my god Did you see

One of our politicians I think he ran for president, John Kerry He's concerned about the effect the war is going to have on climate change. I'm concerned that the effect of war is going to have on war and world stability and civilization and food and energy and being able to turn the lights on and put food in my mouth and nuclear and that kind of you know those fairly big issues concern me um does it feel like your civilization in the uk is falling apart that's what it feels like in the united states here yeah yeah we're in a bad place at the moment i mean i try to stay sunny and positive and eckhart toller power of now do what i can stay where i am connect with good people like-minded people, stay away from battery

drainers, that kind of thing. But that's all we can do at the moment. Look after ourselves. The world is going mad around us. Just find the people who have not lost their minds and spend as much time with them as possible. I've met some fantastic people over the last two years. My address book is better than it's ever been.

Just amazing, connected, grounded, smart people. Yeah, that's great. It's nice to be. Yeah, that's great. That makes me happy to hear that. It's like that here also. Unfortunately, it's fascinating because I live on the Pacific Ocean. If you stay close to the ocean and when I mean close, a quarter mile, let's say like like three or four hundred meters. a quarter mile, let's say like, like three or 400 meters, there's quite a sane group of people. The second, like, and I'm, I'm further in, I'm like three miles in from the Pacific ocean. And it's just full of zombies and wackadoodles, but I can just drive to the coast. And that in general, that group of people, they just know, right. I mean, they're just enjoying their lives. They have their shirts off. They're drinking water. They're running. They're playing Frisbee. They don't care. They don't give a shit.

Yeah. And meanwhile, our homeless encampments, our drug addict encampments are flourishing with no COVID deaths. Wonder why. Uh, Zoe, I, I knew I came over prepared. I have so many questions to ask you. Maybe next time I, um, I, I didn't give you any ideas of what we were going to talk about. Um, maybe next time there's some topics that I think would be really fun to talk about. Um, uh, natural birth, breastfeeding, baby formula, some topics I've heard you touch on your, in your conversations that I think would be really helpful. It'd be fun to talk about the 1976 to 1980. I know you have a lot of strong opinions and great observations on the low-fat diet coming into

the United States. And I do also appreciate you giving the United States credit for kind of being the home birthplace of the obesity epidemic and not the UK. Ah, it's perfect. It is. It's the truth. It is the truth. Yeah. Okay. Well, thank you very much. Tell, it's perfect. It is. It's the truth. It is the truth. Yeah. Okay. Well, thank you very much. Tell Andy I said hi. Will do. It's so lovely seeing your handsome face again.

Yeah. Thank you. It's awesome seeing you too. I was telling Hayley all last night. I said, whenever I would see, run into you and Andy in the States, there was always a spark and like a sense of giddiness, like kids getting on the playground. I know. We were misbehaved.

Yeah.