Lessons

Lesson Info

The Food Pyramid Scheme

As promised this session is gonna get a little bit get a little bit rowdy because this is the session where if you take a step back everything we've talked about today it really just makes sense right? I mean it just makes sense there's a lot of science but from a common sense perspective this just makes it so why the heck haven't we been told about it like what's going on how did these calorie myths start and why are they being perpetuated like we're dying where people are literally dying in mass children are suffering and we continue to be told to do the same things and that's unacceptable and once we start to see why some of that is happening we as individuals can become incredibly empowered to make changes that will affect generations to come so very exciting stuff they're exciting stuff and excuse me if I get a little bit amped up but you know it's it's amable topic so dr weiss really summarizes a situation brilliantly when he says there's a lot of money being made feeding both ov...

ersize stomachs and feeding those enterprises selling fixes for oversize stomachs and both industries those selling junk food and those selling fat cures depend for their future on the prevalence of obesity before you go any further I think about the following if we cure obesity and diabetes and people stop eating processed garbage and just start eating simple natural whole foods how many gigantic corporations would go out of business statins alone are a fifty billion dollar market alone so there is a man like we talk about oh the dependency on oil and you could imagine that like there is our corporate interest trying todo there's even more money tied up in perpetuating a sick and sad population not to be like all there's no hope but just understand that looking outside like looking to anything that could be touched by an organization with a financial interest to get your nutrition or exercise information is a recipe for disaster because they have a vested interest in you failing if you no longer have diabetes they can't say let's sell you drugs anymore, right? So it's not a conspiracy theory it's economics one oh one so let's talk a little bit more about this let's start from the very beginning let's go back and look at the history of eating so if you think of ah human history as one day just to put in perspective how we've eaten throughout human history from twelve a m so right at the as the day started to eleven fifty six p m we ate what we call st foods we ate things you could find and eat directly in nature like people don't eat wheat off the stock right? They eat raw plants and cooked meat and seafood nuts and seeds berries cool then at eleven fifty six pm agriculture started so this is when we started farming this is when we started incorporating much more starch and sugar into our diet that's also when civilisation began it seems like a long time ago but the vast majority of our history proceeded that era then three seconds before midnight right before midnight we started eating some form of processed starches and sweeteners and only now one second before the day ends has the vast majority of our calories forty to sixty percent of americans calories are coming from non food so think about like that for the ninety eight percent of human history we ate a diet that was dramatically different from the diet or eating today in fact, dr boyd eaten over at emory university tells us that one hundred thousand generations of humans have been hunter gatherers five hundred husband farmers ten had access to modern food processing and only one has been exposed to the modern food culture so framed as a pie graph we ate same foods for ninety nine percent of our history and then everything else combined is a teeny teeny tiny fraction of what we ate overtime while our genome was developing which is interesting because we're recommended a diet that wasn't even possible to eat let alone healthy for ninety nine point eight percent of our history that does not make any sense at all this is what we ate this is what we're being told to eat now, and if you just look at it from a sanity perspective, right big business is working to make us eat more sweeteners and processed fats while the government tells us to eat mohr starch eleven servings per day six to eleven servings per day at the base of the pyramid and a giant portion of the plate during the vast majority of human history, the great majority of carbohydrate was designed was derived from vegetables and fruit very little from cereal grains and none from her flying flowers that's all we're talking about here like why? Why would anyone say? Because remember, eating is a zero sum game, which means if you eat one thing, you're not going to eat something else because you'll get full. Why would we ever etm or dry low fibre low protein starch instead of like more vegetables? Why why would anyone recommend that it just doesn't make any sense? And even from a historic perspective, we're led to believe that that bread and grains and starch or just a fundamental part of humanity it's like oh it's been the core backbone of human civilisation since the beginning of time and that's just not true at all bread and starch like products were not even consumed by humans up until twelve, ten or twelve thousand years ago, depending on your beliefs that is a teeny teeny tiny fraction of what researchers estimate is a five million year evolutionary history teeny tiny fraction if you think about it all of these things obesity, diabetes, tooth decay these these didn't even exist prior to the advent of these food like products and refined starters and sweets and I know what you might be thinking that twelve thousand years ago and just making these historic comparisons is not fair because people didn't live as long back then as we live now so it's not a fair comparison you can't compare modern day people two previous generations because we're just living longer I thought the same thing it was a very very reasonable argument but then after digging into the research I saw three fax first is that more primitive hunter gatherer type society still exist they're not all gone there still are some and scientists have studied the heck out of them and they consistently find that civilizations that eat things you confined directly in nature that's it there's a diversity of ways to do that but the common denominator is civilizations that eat things you confined directly in nature basically have no incidents of diabetes, heart disease, obesity or cardiovascular disease and while the average age of our ancestors was lower that's a bit of a red herring it's a bit of a distraction because it's the average age think about how many people died in childbirth prior to modern medicine think of people who got eaten by the lions, right? Because the average age is lower doesn't actually mean there weren't individuals that lived well beyond the age of sixty, and the historic records show that that is true and that those people stayed free of the diseases we think are basically guaranteed and part and parcel of growing older today and then forget about age completely. We talked earlier about how this epidemic is affecting children. Obviously we've had children for the entirety of human history and diabetic children and children that are having heart attacks and children having cholesterol problems that has never been the case before, and that takes a jot of the equation entirely. Dr eating again over at emory university tells us dr boyd eaten occasionally one hears the claim that primitive people all died too young to get degenerative diseases. This claim is simply false. Many lived well into and through the age of vulnerability for such disorders yet didn't get them. We're not broken by default, we don't have to deteriorate over time, but if we put the wrong fuel in our system like any other system, it will break down. So could it be that the lowering of the quality of our diet is related to the lowering of quality of our health and that we're not getting bigger and sicker because we're putting too much fuel in but because we've been given the wrong information about the type of fuel to put in, obviously we all know the answer is now yes. Back to the chair of the department of nutrition at the harvard school of public health, the usda pyramid is wrong. It was built on shaky scientific ground. It has been steadily eroded by new research from all parts of the globe. At best, it offers wishy washy, scientifically unfounded advice. Guess we teach in schools that guess what dietitians get taught that guess what primary care physicians get taught that dr otto bayani in the journal of the american physicians insurgents, the food guide pyramid is nutritionally and by okay bio mech biochemically unsound radically changed the food habits of tens of millions of americans in a massive human experiment that has gone awry. There was little doubt that there is a clear association between the pyramid and current growing epidemics of cardiovascular disease, obesity and type two diabetics. What do you say on the back of cereal boxes? To put in perspective the scope of this problem? The average americans diet is forty three percent completely insane. Just starches and sweeteners comprise forty three percent of our diet, so in the spirit of progress versus perfection even if you got twenty percent of your calories from starches and sweets imagine the dramatic health outcomes you could achieve like one of the good it's kind of a weird thing to say but the good news about how bad things are is they can get better so quickly and so easily right because they're so bad right now it's not like we need to make these little refinements it's just these slight tweaks could have such a dramatic effect again this is from the journal of the american college of cardiology the low fat high carbohydrate diet publicized vigorously by the food pyramid may well have played an unintended role in the current epidemics of obesity, diabetes and metabolic syndromes. The deteriorating quality off our diet is a result of the deteriorating quality of our calories that is a function of the guidance we've been given by our government and then the adaptation of our food supply to that by big business that's a mouthful but if you look at the way we're eating today versus the way our grandparents and our great grand parents eight it's dramatically different and what spawned all that the government starting to intervene in our diet from a bottom line perspective if nothing else is convincing or nothing else is well dr action decades of research has taken place from the day that the first government guidance around eating and exercise came out those guidelines haven't changed that would lead us to believe that there has been no scientific progress for food and exercise like that's. Obviously false there's always scientific progress, but we still get told the same things. Why? Why? Why? So let's skip some of this stuff. Oh, actually, no, this is a good one again. Back to harvard university. Some recommendations and diet nutrition are misguided because they're based on an adequate or incomplete information, not the food guide pyramid. It is wrong because it ignores the evidence that has been carefully assembled over the past forty years. I started the presentation with a slight cold pride and profit. Like, why are people ignoring things? Well, if you mean put yourself in the senate select committee on nutrition shoes, they come out and say, eat a low fat, high starch, low protein diet and count calories, and then millions of people die it's kind of hard to be like, oh, sorry, like we got that wrong and and that's why I like your aunt died and why your mother has struggled with diabetes her whole life so it's very hard to take that back once it's been said. So the responsibility really lies on us to take back our sanity as individuals. This is from the american diabetes association. So american diabetes association for those that follow their work I know that they are quite traditional, but if you actually look at things beyond what they post on their website, you'll see that they make some pretty amazing statements such as. Although low fat, high carbohydrate diets are recommended in an effort to reduce the risk of coronary artery disease, the results of short term studies have shown that these diets can lead to an increased risk of coronary artery disease. Yet if you read their website, guess what kind of died they recommend the one that they say increases the risk of coronary artery disease. Um, yeah, so why are we still told to eat in a way that just doesn't make any sense? Or does it right? Keep in mind that the thing about the usda pyramid is that it comes from the department of agriculture, the agency for promoting american agriculture, not from agencies established to monitor and protect our health. It's not called the department of diabetes prevention and obesity reduction it's the department of agriculture. Like, what do we create a lot of in this country? Corn? Ah, yes, eleven servings of corn per day. There you go, create a market. So what we actually end up seeing in this pyramid scheme I like to call it is we've got the government telling us we need to eat the backbone of our diet from starch, it also tells us to fear fat, so it tells us starches great protein is irrelevant and fat is bad that creates a massive market for super profitable hi starch, lowfat edible products because we can create all kinds of things with starch and sugar and just set him on shelves that's the ninety percent of those interior isles cannon was talking about the end of last session that creates large profits because it's incredibly profitable to take corn or wheat or soy and put it on the shelf and sell it as some magical new food product that cost you fifteen cents to make and that you sell for five dollars a box that also causes people to become sick and diabetic, which then, of course, the pharmaceutical industries and the fitness industry is love, because now they have a huge client base. And then as we'll see, the government then gets kickbacks from those industries, thus perpetuating this cycle where the worst we do the better other people d'oh, which we have to stop because they won't. So of course, we've seen generations of people suffering from this way of living. And we understand that from an economic perspective, it just makes sense to produce edible products that cost the lease and sell them for the most and make sick people so that you can then treat them with drugs that don't cure diseases but only mask symptoms that you can keep them on for the rest of their life. Like when's. The last time we cure the disease, we're very smart, like think of all the technological advancements we've had when's the last time a disease was cured not right, like you can live with diabetes is long as you continue to treat the symptoms by buying insulin and diabetes medication like there's. No market in cures there's a market in masking symptoms for entire lifetime that's. Why we need to take responsibility for curing ourselves not to mention that sixty four percent of members on national committees on nutrition and food policy consult for or get kickbacks from food companies. She's, of course, disturbing and, in fact, reporter williams from the los angeles times tells us that at least five hundred thirty government scientists at the national institutes of health, the nation's preeminent agency for medical research, have taken fees, stock or stock options from biomedical companies in the last five years it's a lot of people. Dr nestle over at new york university who if you haven't read her work I would highly recommend one of her books food politics is fabulous you look up marion nestle online professor over it and why you brilliant the government's dietary guidelines necessarily our political compromises between what science tells us about nutrition and health and what is good for the food industry write their interest is in balancing what is economically viable with what we can produce as a culture that is their job it is our job to manage our health, not to listen to them but don't don't worry right like this happened before this happened with smoking in the early nineteen hundreds like the government's official position on smoking was is not bad for you and in fact there was doctors on television saying that nicotine is good for your t zone and then the science made it to the surface and what's the science made it to the surface we saw we didn't ban cigarettes like you can still buy cigarettes but nobody smokes cigarettes thinking that they're good for them every single day mothers give their children things which they in their heart of hearts think are healthy and why wouldn't they? Because on the package for example it says well it's cholesterol free and it's a good source of six vitamins and minerals and it's a good source of four b vitamins to be very clear if you take a glass of soda and you take a vitamin pill and you dissolve the vitamin pill in a glass of soda it will contain one hundred percent off any number of vitamins and minerals that doesn't mean it's something you should eat but like what are you supposed to think right or you look at it come here this's my favorite favorite all right so we've got some some some cereal here which has whole grains as the first ingredient which what are the other ingredients and our whole grains what we should be eating anyway but then there's this heart which of course anything with a hard on it must help our heart right and the claim is may reduce the risk of heart disease to be very clear eating the cereal may give you the ability to fly it might like it might it absolutely might it won't but it might and if you're if you've got a shopping cart you're going down the aisles and you've got kids screaming tears like well there's a heart that looks good right like that's manipulation that's not fair that shouldn't be allowed there's a reason we label cigarettes the way we do it's because we as a culture believe in a term called informed consent yeah sugars in total cars per serving which to be clear a serving is three quarters of a cup when's the last time you ate three quarters of a cup of cereal for breakfast. Okay, so per serving, and in reality, you're probably gonna eat four for breakfast. There is nine grams of sugar, so an average breakfast of this serial, which is, you know, healthy, contains more sugar than a can of coke that's, about two teaspoons almost to a lot of sugar and what's. Even better are things like this. This this complete nutrition shake, which is eight ounces in eight ounces of this complete nutrition shake, you get about twenty grams of sugar, which can of coke has twelve ounces, so you drop you increase that by fifty percent, and this has about as much sugar per ounce as sort of but it's a complete nutrition shake. It is a vitamin pill dissolved in soda, marketed as complete nutrition like that's just not and it's even got a straw attached to it. So it's, easy for your kids to drink. That's that's fabulous one my favorites juice so first and foremost, making your own juice out of low frutos fruits, berries and citrus. Throw him in a vita mix. Brilliant, great that's, great that's not what this is, so this is grape juice. If you look a serving of grape juice, eight ounces, eight ounces of grape juice, thirty nine grams of sugar, twelve ounces of soda has about thirty this has about fifty percent more sugar in it than soda does and if you read this it's like, oh, you know, made with concord grapes it's healthy for you it's with added vitamin c it's a great option? I hear parents every day saying, jonathan, I'm going saying I've switched my kids from soda to juice and I just say, oh my goodness or oh, here we go and folks, this is why understanding those principles are so important I'm going off script a little bit here, but what we're talking about food labels so it's critical to understand the science because if you use like dogma, it can quickly go off the ranch for example we've talked about natural things being good for you that's true to a point right? Tobacco is also natural that doesn't mean it's good for you so for example this is organic blue agave nectar okay marketed as a healthy alternative to sugar okay, high fructose corn syrup is thought of as bad and it is bad it's horrible it's horrible, horrible horrible for you and it contains about forty two percent fructose high fructose is defined by forty two percent fructose guess how much fructose is in a goddamn it's ninety percent fructose it has more than twice a cz much fructose as high fructose corn syrup and yes, it is natural but snake venom is natural, like just because it's natural doesn't mean your body's like, oh, this fructose is natural that's okay, fructose, your natural like it's, just fruit toast. Your body doesn't care anyway. Sorry, uh, that's, why we have to care. Okay, one more, one more. So this is a very common bar that is marketed as it's, all natural, all natural ingredients, right and that's. True, it does have all natural ingredients. The cherry pie flavor of this bar, which is a teeny, teeny tiny bar, can open. This box has twenty three grams of sugar that's, five grams of sugar, fewer than a can of soda. So this healthy all natural snack bar is five grams of sugar away from being a can of coke. You hand your child and yes, you're it does contain some vitamins and minerals, can't dissolve a vitamin pill and a can of coke and call it healthy, right?