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Transcript
- 11:22 About Denise Minger
- 21:43 Death by Food Pyramid Book
- 26:22 Food pyramid History
- 35:51 Is there any hope of the food pyramid having a drastic change?
- 36:54 Saturated fat
- 48:22 Underlying themes in health promoting diets
- 56:21 The most pressing health issue in the world today
Wendy Myers: Welcome to the Live To 110 podcast. I’m your host, Wendy Myers. You know Cate Beehan by now. She’s a Soul Cycle and Pilates Instructor and Health Coach.
Hi, Cate.
Cate Beehan: Hi, Wendy.
Wendy Myers: How was New York?
Cate Beehan: It was great, just lots of family time. I got some official fall weather in and a lot of time with my nephew who just turned two. It was great.
Wendy Myers: Nice. Yeah, I told the listeners last week that you’re probably doing a lot of very unhealthy things over there.
Cate Beehan: Not too bad. My sister is actually very insanely meticulous about what she wants my nephew to eat. He thinks a lollipop is a kale banana smoothie.
Wendy Myers: Perfect.
Cate Beehan: Yes. It wasn’t too bad.
Wendy Myers: That’s good, more family time. That’s good. Everyone, today we are interviewing Denise Minger, author of the new book Death by Food Pyramid: How Shoddy Science, Sketchy Politics and Shady Special Interests Conspired to Ruin the Health of America.
I love that title. I have really been anticipating this interview for a couple of months. This podcast is going to be a really, really informative. So stay tuned.
Cate, can you do our little disclaimer?
Cate Beehan: Sure. Keep in mind that this program is not intended to diagnose or treat any disease or health condition and it’s not a substitute for professional medical advice. The Live To 110 podcast is solely informational in nature. Please consult your healthcare practitioner before engaging in any treatment Wendy or myself suggest on the show.
Wendy Myers: Yes. What kinds of things were you doing in New York?
Cate Beehan: Actually, I took a Soul Cycle class. I took one.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, really?
Cate Beehan: Soul Cycle out there in East Hampton and Watermelon, Bridgehampton.
Wendy Myers: I thought you’d be pretty sick of it and take a break from it.
Cate Beehan: No, I didn’t. I still took a class.
Wendy Myers: Are you addicted?
Cate Beehan: Yeah.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. You’re addicted to cardio.
Cate Beehan: What’s going on with your weight loss guide?
Wendy Myers: It’s finally done. It’s a miracle. I finally have a little present for all you listeners. I wrote an e-book called the Live to 110 by Weighing Less eGuide. So if you go to my website myersdetox.com™, it’s available to download for free.
Just look for the blog post about it, about the free weight loss guide or click weight loss in the post topics and you’ll find it. And it will also soon be available on the homepage right up on the front homepage or when you look on the side bar, on the right side bar. I’m working on that right now.
The eGuide is a 33-page basic weight loss eGuide filled with science backed tips from the latest research that I’ve discovered about diet and exercise and other tips about the causes of cravings and how to conquer your cravings and how to reduce stress, which is a very important aspect of weight loss.
The eGuide will basically help you get started on your path to lose weight. It’s a primer for my book When Diet and Exercise are Not Enough: A Step by Step Plan to Eliminating Your Roadblocks to Weight Loss. And that will be available in hopefully spring 2014.
It’s going pretty slow. It’s quite a task writing a book, let me tell you. When you’re trying to do such a good job and trying to do lots of research with all the latest scientific studies and really get the most cutting edge information, it’s a big pain in the butt.
So everyone, as many of you guys may know, Denise Minger, our guest today is the famed study dismantler of The China Study. She studied and dissected Dr. Colin Campbell’s raw China Study data and found all kinds of flaws in the study and thus, major holes in his findings that supposedly claim that eating meat and dairy cause cancer and all the diseases of Western affluence.
So essentially, this study is what many vegetarians and vegans are basing their diet upon, but they could be making a big mistake with their health. I turned vegan when I read this book a few years ago, but my health absolutely nosedived really quickly.
I was pretty much about six months into the diet, and I had to stop. I had to go to my doctor and try to figure out what was wrong. I realized it was the vegan diet I was doing. I’m sure many of you listeners out there have had the same experience, because it’s just the diet that I personally don’t think can be done long-term in a healthy way.
I think not that many people can do it successfully like Cate. Do you remember when we both used to be vegans and vegetarians, and we used to go eat at all the vegan restaurants in LA thinking, thinking we’re being super healthy?
Cate Beehan: Yeah. We would be eating salad leaves and sprouts with a side of seaweed and tacos of spiced walnut taco meat.
Wendy Myers: I don’t know how I survived. I remember when you ordered a BLT once where the bacon was dried spiced coconut meat. It was tough as nails. It was on this unchewable gluten free bread. That’s nasty. You kept going on about how good it was. I think we were both totally delusional.
Cate Beehan: I don’t think I’d eaten any like real food in months.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. I don’t know. I think both of us were vegetarian and vegan before going to IIN. It’s our nutrition school, for you listeners out there. It’s the Institute for Integrated Nutrition.
They had some lectures about vegetarian and veganism, which is great, but it pretty much set me straight and exposed me to other ways of eating and other ways of being. It got me thinking.
I really responded to Sally Fallon who’s the founder of the Weston A. Price Foundation. A lot of her lectures really rang true for me. And I read her book Nourishing Traditions. And I thought, “This is it. We need to eat how we’ve always eaten for millions of years.” And I couldn’t deny that. But basically for me, after I first heard the speech from Sally Fallon in our school program, I went and bought my first pound of bacon with total peace of mind.
Do you remember when I used to give you and all my friends a copy of the China Study? I was so fanatical when I first read this book. It was like I was in some vegan brain fog, thinking I was going to save everybody. I actually became a fanatical before I started myersdetox.com™. “I was going to save everybody. These are just some of my friends and family. I’m going to save them from the ravages caused by meat. Oh God, not bacon.” I’m sure that was super annoying.
Cate Beehan: No, it wasn’t too bad. I mean I do still have the book.
Wendy Myers: Yeah.
Cate Beehan: But I don’t know. The good thing about IIN is that we did get to learn everything. We got lectures from everyone across the board, across the spectrum of health. It’s good because you get to make your own decision.
It’s true. In the beginning towards the first part of the lectures, a lot of it was about being vegan, being vegetarians. I was experimenting with that, and obviously you were too. And eating meat, I think for me and I know for you, just is the way that we need to live.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I agree. I mean my poor husband – he had to listen to me talk about how meat was going to give him heart disease and cancer. I mean I was hitting really agro about it too. It’s like doing the vegan police thing.
And my husband would be innocently eating his healthy food, and I’d be talking about how nasty meat was and factory farming and he’s eating cancer tumors. They don’t call it the vegan police for nothing.
Cate Beehan: Yeah.
Wendy Myers: But he was very patient with me. But now, I feel bad for spewing nonstop nonsense about how meat is bad for you. I just found my husband – he would have to go to one restaurant to get his food and then to another one for my food.
Cate Beehan: That’s right.
Wendy Myers: What a poor guy. I definitely put that man through the ringer. I would have divorced myself. I was being so obnoxious about it. And now, I’m being super obnoxious about Paleo and grass-fed meat and bitching if we go to restaurants that don’t serve grass-fed meat. He just can’t understand why I don’t want to eat sliders at the Cheesecake Factory.
Cate Beehan: No.
Wendy Myers: I know. All I can say is I literally became retarded when I was vegan. I couldn’t hold the conversation. I couldn’t remember anything. I’m still convinced I have brain damage from being vegan because the diet just starves the brains of fats.
That’s basically the problem with the diet. It’s the lack of fats and cholesterol that we need to be healthy. But all of that, Denise will explain it.
So today, I’m so honored to have our guest, Denise Minger on the show today. She’s a fellow blogger at RawFoodSOS.com. And today, we’re going to extract a few of Denise’s thoughts on the China Study.
But first, I want to talk about Denise Minger’s new book, Death by Food Pyramid: How Shoddy Science, Sketchy Politics and Shady Special Interests Conspired to Ruin the Health of America. I’m hoping her book will prompt change of the food pyramid.
Our lunch school programs are based upon this document, as well as other government-run food programs. And this document is taught in our school. Our children’s health is at stake frankly. And many other countries also based their diet recommendations on this document. So it’s important not just for our country, but for the world that this document is loudly criticized to prompt change.
So Denise’s book is very important and timely. I believe a book on this subject is long overdue.
So Denise, thank you for being on the show. How are you?
Denise Minger: I’m fantastic. Thank you for the intro. Do you want to be my publicist?
11:22 About Denise Minger
Wendy Myers: Absolutely. I will take the job. I would do a really good job too.
Why don’t you first tell the listeners a little bit about yourself and why you started your website RawFoodSOS.com?
Denise Minger: Sure thing. My health journey actually began when I was pretty young. I was seven years old when I first went vegetarian.
At the time, it was a choice I made because I almost choked on a piece of steak. I became very phobic of anything with a meat texture. So at that point, I just pushed meat off the menu. But as time went on, I became more involved with the ethical and health arguments with vegetarianism.
I’ve been a vegetarian until I was 17 or 18 years old. It’s about a decade as a vegetarian. And throughout that process, I developed 20 health problems, as well as food allergies including an allergy to wheat and soy and dairy. That all happened about when I was 11 to 15 years old.
So by the time I was a teenager, I was already very – I had to be very health aware just because I needed to read food labels and understand what was in my food so that I don’t get sick from it. So this led to an ongoing interest in health that just laid in the background for the rest of my life.
And then when I was 15 or 16, I discovered the raw vegan diet. And the version of this diet I came across was promoted by someone named Douglas Grant. Basically, his message is that humans are best adapted for a diet of fruit and vegetables and almost nothing else. Maybe very small amounts of seeds, but you should eat about 80% of your diet carbohydrate, 10% fat, 10% protein.
At the time, I have absolutely no health background, any knowledge on biology, physiology, anything like that. So his arguments made sense at the time. I was thinking, “Well okay, that’s what the chimps eat. And we’re very closely related to them. And they don’t get these diseases that humans get, so maybe that’s how we’re supposed to eat.”
So at that point at very young age again, I think I was a sophomore in high school, I went completely raw vegan for a year. Not a single bite of cooked food, no animal products, whatsoever. I had already been a vegan for about two years before that just because I couldn’t eat dairy and I didn’t like eggs.
And so after that one year, it started out wonderful. There was this great honeymoon period that I think happens when a lot of people switch to a diet like that. And I felt incredible for the first time in my life for about two or three months. My energy was sky-rocketing. My skin was clear. I felt incredible all the time.
And then it stopped working basically. The great feeling left and was replaced by lethargy and swings of energy where I just crashed after eating a lot of fruit. I was cold all the time. My hair started falling out. And my teeth ended up just disintegrating at this very young age despite never having a cavity at any other point in my life.
The breaking point for me came when I was at the dentist. In fact, I’ve gone to a doctor previously who had told me my blood work was a mess and all that. That didn’t even persuade me as much as the dentist appointment did because I was back in the chair, waiting for my usual pristine bill of health that they usually gave me when I went in for a cleaning. And instead, the dentist started making all these grunts and these horrible noises like, “Oh, my god. Something is really wrong.”
At the end of the appointment, I thought I had about 14 or 16 cavities. I didn’t know if they were counting. I think it’s just that all my teeth were basically decaying. And it’s at that point when I realized, “Wow, I’m really a mess right now. I need to figure out what’s wrong with me, and I need to change this.”
So that’s what began my deeper exploration of nutrition, especially away from veganism and the vegetarian movement. And it was at that point when I came across the work of Weston A. Price. He did a lot of – he was a dentist. I don’t know if you’re familiar of him.
Wendy Myers: Yeah.
Denise Minger: So he’s just fabulous. I mean the stuff that he explored and that he documented is probably irreplaceable because you can’t really do that today because all these primitive populations have been westernized.
But anyway, I came across his work and just the importance of fat soluble vitamins, vitamin B2, vitamin A, vitamin D. I started eating foods that were richer in those nutrients.
I was able to pretty much stop the progression of my tooth decay, as well as heal all the stuff that was going on in my mouth. There was an expensive dental work involved as well, but I realized the nutritional aspect of it was just huge.
So at that point, I became very disillusioned with veganism and vegetarianism and just all the information I’ve been fed from that movement. And that laid the background for a few years. I was finishing up college, doing my own thing.
And then at some point, I forget why, I just became inspired to go back onto vegan websites and forums and just stir up troubles.
Wendy Myers: I love to do that.
Denise Minger: I don’t know if I did like an outlet for my aggression or something. I guess at that point, I’m just feeling like – there are so many people out there who are struggling with the same things that I was struggling with. I might as well go and try to help them.
So I go into these forums and usually message people privately who are complaining with the same health issues I’d undergone as a raw vegan. And then I was just telling them, “This is what I did to fix myself. Here is my information. Maybe it will help you.”
And during this process, there was one book that kept getting thrown on my face. That was the China Study. Anytime I would say anything about animal products being beneficial, someone would bring up the China Study. And they wouldn’t even go further beyond just this one sentence, “Read the China Study. You’re wrong.”
Wendy Myers: That’s all they got. That’s all they have.
Denise Minger: Yeah. That’s why this book was so widely embraced because it’s the answer written by a very credible person with all these wonderful credentials. We think we should be able to trust. So you take this book and you just feel like you can slap it down on the table and that’s going to end any argument.
So that’s what was going on for me. People kept throwing that book at me. It was a book I had already read. I didn’t read it much in depth because I came across this after I was already not a vegan anymore. So it wasn’t that interesting to me.
But after I kept getting this argument and this book thrown at me to conclude every argument I tried to bring up about animal foods, I was like, “I’m going to read this book and I’m going to go into greater depth with my comprehension of it. I’m going to go back to the original data that this scientist T. Collin Campbell was drawing from it. I’m going to see if he is actually representing his findings correctly. I just want to know what’s going on.”
So there’s a lot of bad stories right at this time. I actually had recently got hit by a car. So I was laid up for a while. I have some insurance money to burn, like pain and suffering money that they give you after you get injured like that.
My plan at first was to travel to Thailand and live there for a while. That didn’t pan out because they can’t get my passport in time for this thing to work out. So I was stuck in the US. I had a lot time in my hands and I was like, “Well, I’m just going to dedicate the next few months of my life to looking at this huge compilation of 900 pages of data from the study.” I’m a nerd. I like math. I like numbers. It’s a wonderful journey for me to start with.
Wendy Myers: That’s a big nerd project.
Denise Minger: It’s a very big nerd project. I’m not ashamed of it. I embrace my nerdism. I’m happy how it turned out.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. Have faith intervened, you couldn’t get your Visa.
Denise Minger: Yeah. So basically, I spent the next two to three months just pouring over this data and crunching numbers and trying to figure out what the author of this book had done with these numbers to reach the conclusions that he reached.
And by the end of this experience, I had basically convinced myself, based on looking at what he had written versus what the data said, that he’d very selectively picked evidence from this huge just database and stuff to support a very unfounded position about animal protein being related to all these chronic diseases.
And what was in the data was a correlation, just a straight up one variable changes with another variable in case, correlation between animal protein consumption and total blood cholesterol. Then there’s a mild relationship between total blood cholesterol and certain chronic diseases.
And so I found out that the author had said, “If you have this three link chain of variables, then you must be able to say that animal protein is the thing causing these diseases.” If you actually go back and look at the data, there is almost no relationship between animal food consumption, animal protein consumption, meat consumption, dairy consumption and these chronic diseases that the author explained and worked on.
So I wrote a critique of just basically everything I found. And I had this little dinky blog running, RawFoodSOS.com that I started just shortly after I got hit by a car. I had the idea to start blogging with one hand that I could type with because my other arm was broken.
Wendy Myers: Oh no.
Denise Minger: Yeah. It was just a little project I had. Maybe five people are reading it. I have five consistent readers for my blog.
And so I didn’t expect too many people to actually read the critique that I’ve written on this book. I just wanted to put it out there. It’s a compilation of everything I found. It’s just for my own reference and to direct people to it if it could possibly help them.
So low and behold, this thing went viral within a few days. I sent it out to a couple of people I thought would be interested in it. And then they just exploded it all over the Internet. My blog went to having maybe 50 views a day to I think 20,000 in one day. And I just couldn’t believe what was happening and how many people were interested in this.
So that’s what kicked me off into the blogging process. I mean my blog started out basically as a raw vegan myth debunking blog with helpful tips for people who might be struggling as raw vegans. And after that, I abandoned that direction and just broadened my blog into debunking bad science in general, especially in terms of nutrition.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I love it. It’s a fantastic blog. I mean I know a lot about nutrition and I learned a lot because I like how you really get into the science. You get really detailed about that. I really like it.
Denise Minger: Thank you.
21:43 Death by Food Pyramid Book
Wendy Myers: Yeah. So I’m really glad that your success with picking apart the China Study parleyed into a book deal. So why don’t we talk about your book a little bit? What is it about? What prompted you to write Death By Food Pyramid?
Denise Minger: So the Death By Food Pyramid – basically, I was offered the opportunity to write a book on almost anything I wanted regarding nutrition by Mark Sisson who wrote a book called The Primal Blueprint. He has a fabulous blog MarksDailyApple.com.
So I’ve written some guest posts for him. He came at me as an author to write this book. So I have to think about this for a while because writing a book is something I wanted to do since I was very, very young.
And I forget how the title came to me or the concept, but I think I was waiting on the bus stop one day. I was thinking “Death by Food Pyramid.” I want to do something like that because here we have this symbol.
The food pyramid is retired now, but it’s probably the most prominent symbol of conventional wisdom and the health advice we’ve been dished out by the USDA and by the American Heart Association, by the American Dietetic Association, all these big name acronyms that gained our trust and seem like authorities. So many people look to them for reliable information.
So I was thinking the food pyramid would be a fabulous symbol, a central point to build this book around. It’s just the advice that it contained and how that advice came to place.
So basically, the book has two major sections, two major elements and themes. And one of those is the political influences that spoke to our dietary recommendations. The other one is the scientific background that basically led to our conclusions about saturated fat and about grains, about carbohydrates, about cholesterol, all that stuff and how these two forces converged into the creation of this pyramid.
So my goal with the book is basically, first of all, give people an eye-opening view of our history in both in the clinical and in the scientific aspects and also to do it just in a very unbiased way. I feel that the information we have out there right now – a lot of it is planted from the vegetarian, vegan standpoint. A lot of it is also from the low carbohydrate Paleo, that primal community as well, which also unfortunately has its own dogma much in the same way that vegan is addressed.
This book is an attempt to restore the balance between the different versions of history we have and just make it something very objective for people to help them understand how we got to where we are right now in terms of nutrition.
The other aspect of it is just to implore people to become critical thinkers. In reality, anytime you outsource your thinking to somebody else, even someone who is a very credential authority, highbrow organization that seems to have all the facts in place for us – anytime you do that, you’re giving away some of your own personal power.
And you’re basically telling – the attitude that that creates is that other people knowing yourself, knowing you better than you know you. So I’m just trying to encourage people to take control of their own health and learn to think for themselves when they heard these nutritional things so that they can evaluate these things without having to go to somebody else and having some middleman involved in the translation process.
So I’m pretty excited about it. What was interesting to me is when I started writing this book, I felt a lot more confident about the things that I know that I do now. Just the process of researching, I’ve come to realize how many great areas there are in terms of our knowledge about nutrition, how many things we really don’t understand yet and that we are still trying to figure out and more importantly, how many people out there are convinced that we have all the answers figured out in a full form of information in terms of a specific dietary paradigm.
So really the whole point of the book is to demolish this whole pyramid, geometric figure, mind play, whatever attitude we intend to take towards food. And just to make it so that people realize there’s no one-size-fits-all diet for anybody.
You really have to go back to the basics and understand nutrition in a very basic level. Go back and look at what healthy populations have done in the past, instead of trying to tweak and modify these new things to good new diets that are completely not for our bodies. So really the whole rest of the book is a call to critical thinking.
26:22 Food Pyramid History
Wendy Myers: Why don’t you tell us about some of the history of the food pyramid? I think it’s really interesting. What did the originally proposed food pyramid look like? Why did it change so drastically from the original proposal?
Denise Minger: Yes. So basically, this is something I haven’t heard spoken about too often in terms of the pyramid history.
There’s one woman who wrote this book. Her name was Luise Light. She wrote the book called What To Eat. She published it in 2005 shortly before she passed away.
Basically, she was hired by the USDA to replace the nutritionist who had created the previous food pyramid. This is way back in late 1970’s. This was way before our current food pyramid ever came into existence.
Basically she was hired to scour the information and convene groups of scientists and agricultural workers and determine what would be the best nutritional plan to put the United States on. Basically, ever since World War II, the nation’s mortality and disease trends had shifted away from infectious diseases, pneumonia and tuberculosis, that kind of thing, towards chronic diseases like heart disease, cancer, diabetes, obesity.
So the USDA was lagging behind in terms of updating these recommendations and finding something that would be more preventative in terms of these chronic diseases. So that’s what Luise was brought onboard to do.
So she spent her first year working at the USDA, convening all these groups of experts, scouring literature herself. She had a team of people working with her as well. And by the time she was done with her project, she had assembled this food guide that was based on fresh fruits and vegetables. I think it was nine servings a day of these that she formed a base of this new food guide.
Some lean meats and dairy products, cold-pressed fats. It wasn’t all the fats that she put in the pyramid at all. She’s recommending I think three to four tablespoons of cold-pressed oils and fats like flaxseed oil and olive oil.
And then, up to the very tip of the pyramid of her version of the food guide were grains. She thought that grains should be two or three servings a day per person, always in whole form, never anything like crackers or bagels or the refined stuff that ended up forming the basic later pyramid.
Her reasoning was that she thought people were eating a very high-starch diet. It would unleash waves of basically diabetes and obesity within the nation. That was her prediction.
So she went to the Secretary of Agriculture at the time, proposed her food guide, sent it out for approval. And strangely enough, when it came back to her, the whole thing had basically been ripped apart as if Picasso had redone it or something.
The use-sparingly tip that included the grains, suddenly that was at the bottom of the new pyramid. Instead of nine servings of fruits and vegetables per day, I think it was two to three servings that USDA had minimized it first.
The only reason they ever changed that was because the National Cancer Institute thought that that was going to kill people by giving them such low recommendations for fresh proteins.
Fat was stripped away from the pyramid. Basically, it just became this starch-centric new food guide that just completely horrified Luise Light.
So she went to her boss. She said, “I don’t understand what happened. This is going to kill people.” And basically, the only thing she was told was that the USDA considered grains, fruits and vegetables all to be nutritionally equivalent. And it will be more economical and cheaper and easier on food stamp programs at the time if they just increased the grain servings and decrease the fruit and vegetable servings.
So unfortunately, Luise really couldn’t do anything else at that point. It was out of her hands. Her position didn’t allow her to really protest that very much. So basically, that became the seed for what later became the USDA’s food guide pyramid, which was released in 1982. Yeah, it was 1982.
So it was basically a complete perversion of what the food guide was intended to be originally.
Wendy Myers: I mean obviously, the food pyramid – to us that know a lot about nutrition, it’s not based upon our nutritional needs and getting America healthy. It’s about money. It’s about saving the government money.
But what are the real motivations behind pushing this document and teaching it in our schools?
Denise Minger: A big part of it is financial. If you look at the government subsidies, we have all these money getting poured towards farmers to produce corn, wheat and soy.
If you look at any concrete packaged food that’s out there, you can see that those are the top three ingredients, from high fructose corn syrup, wheat flour and soybean oil. Those are the three ingredients we use with Bouillons and flavorings and salts and dyes.
And that’s going to produce almost every single fat in junk food or packaged food that you see it out there in the markets. So the push for Americans to eat high amounts of grain is very much an economical thing. It’s very much financial.
In fact when Secretary of Agriculture Bob Bergland – this was back I think in the late 1970s, early 1980s. No, it’s close to when the food pyramid has been put together. I think it was probably the late 1980s.
At the time, the grain farmers were so upset about losing money that they would actually protest outside his office building. There were times when he had to crawl out of his bathroom window to get out of work and to go home just because people were standing in the way. These angry grain farmers were protesting, asking him to do something to increase their profits.
For the book, I was trying to piece together how that linked in with the ultimate grain recommendations that the pyramid ended up espousing. I don’t have conclusive evidence for this yet, but I’m pretty sure a large reason they ended up embracing so many grains and just shunning the foods and vegetables was because these farmers were protesting at the time.
One of the issues with the USDA is that it has these two conflicting missions. One of those missions is to protect agricultural interest in America. And the other mission is to dispense health information for Americans.
Unfortunately when agricultural interest and health information are in a conflict of interests, the USDA usually defers to its agricultural roots. It aims to protect the farmers. It aims to protect the most profitable crops that were growing. That usually comes at the expense of giving inadequate health advice to Americans.
When the food pyramid was being put into place, a big issue was just the fact that the USDA still needed to protect these agricultural interests even if it was going to be at the expense of American health.
Wendy Myers: I always scoffed at how much these grains were recommended on the food pyramid. I mean eleven servings? That’s what was taught to me as a kid.
Denise Minger: Yeah, me too.
Wendy Myers: Even then, I doubted its merit. I couldn’t even fathom how someone could eat 11 servings of bread and bagels and et cetera, no matter how tasty they are. How can someone fit that many servings into their body?
And because of this document, I ate grains for decades, thinking that they were healthy. They do have some nutrition in them, but they’re not nearly as healthy as people think.
I personally believe that they’re the after-sugar. They’re the least nutritional food that you can eat, except for blue corn chips, some things that are super nutritious.
But what is the real reason so many grains are recommended on the food pyramid? How did the cheap corn and other grains completely take over our diet?
Denise Minger: A big part of that was in the 1970s, under the Nixon administration. There’s this whole revolution of basically farming practices.
What Nixon did was he stripped away all these regulations that have been put in place after the Great Depression to prevent these huge price swings for farmers. What he did was he encouraged farmers to just plant as much corn and grains as they possibly could. He had this amount of plants to grow.
The goal of that was to produce as much grains as possible and then just ship any surplus overseas. The farmers were having this promise of greater money earnings strangled over their heads to produce more grains. And ultimately, that led us to be a nation of excessive grain production, which we then need to do something with. And what better way to get rid of it than to feed it to humans.
A big part of it was the stuff that was going on back then. There’s just all this stuff that was going on in the 1970s. There’s something called the Great Grain Robbery that happened as well, when the Soviet Union bought, in a very illegal underhanded shading way, millions of tons of grains, because its own crops have failed that year. That also set the US on this weird price roller coaster with grains that really influenced the way we need to grow and produce.
So a lot of the stuff roots back to the 1970s, these changes that happened back then. And that’s what we can pinpoint our nation is turning into this nation of high grain production and high grain consumption as well.
35:51 Is there any hope of the food pyramid having a drastic change?
Wendy Myers: Do you think there’s any hope of the food pyramid having a drastic change? Do you think Michelle Obama’s food plate was an improvement?
Denise Minger: No. I mean in some ways, I know they’re trying to just reach a certain portion of the population that really has no understanding of nutrition.
But the graphics that they’re producing just tell us, first of all, so little. They give so little guidance about selecting proper foods. The new plate is supposed to be an improvement over the food pyramid, but there’s no place, no direction for fat even if you look at the whole thing.
There’s skim dairy on the side. There are grains. There are fruits. There are vegetables. Then there’s protein, which isn’t even a food. I think that’s for the purpose of protein sources.
But there’s no guidance about how to select foods in a way that will make you healthy. I think at this point, all the money that we’re shoveling into these kinds of graphics is really, really wasted.
36:54 Saturated fat
Wendy Myers: Let’s weigh up on the case against saturated fats. This is a huge thing almost everyday where people are like, “Am I really supposed to eat saturated fats?” It’s just so ingrained in our brains and by our doctors and by the media that we are supposed to avoid saturated fats. But that’s not true.
So what did you find on your research on saturated fat when writing your book? How did saturated fat become vilified as causing heart disease in the medical community?
Denise Minger: Let me process this by saying when I first started this book, I was very much convinced that saturated fat was not a problem in any quantity for any person. I have to say that over the course of writing this book, I’ve realized that the picture is actually a lot more nuance than that.
And I will not, at this point, say that everyone can go hog wild on saturated fat and be okay. Although I think for the most part, it’s pretty much benign for most people that there are some just certain variations that people can express. I’ll get to this later. Basically, I don’t think it’s like a one-side-splits-all picture in any way.
That said, if we go back and we look at the very root of where saturated fat first became a villain, it really stems back to this guy named Ancel Keys who was a scientist and physiologist. He had a whole bunch of occupations. He was working in the early 1940s on developing key rations for war.
He conducted something called the Minnesota Starvation Experiment, which is fascinating experiment. I think it’s probably his most valuable work that shed some light on the effects of food deprivation on the human body.
But what he was most known for is – first of all, he did this analysis of six countries in the early 1950s. He was curious of what was going on with these disease trends that were popping up. As soon as the war was over, heart diseases started skyrocketing for the first time. A lot of people at the time, a lot of the scientists were trying to figure out what was going on.
So what Keys did was he took data from a bunch of countries. And he looked at it in terms of the fat content people were eating on their diets for each nation and then picked that against each nation’s rate of heart disease mortality.
What he found was that for the nations he selected, which were only six, there was a very, very perfect curve connecting fat consumption with heart disease mortality. From this, he started hypothesizing that the reason people were getting heart disease was because they’re eating more fat.
He got highly criticized for this graph first of all because it was only six countries. There’s actually data for quite a few other countries available at the time that he didn’t use.
On top of that, some of his critics discovered that there are other variables that were also associated with heart disease that weren’t just fat. That included things like television viewing, radio, sugar consumption, saturated fat, animal protein – all these different variables that were actually just markers of a nation’s affluence.
A lot of stuff was changing after the war that was contributing to heart disease, but what Keys homed in on was fat content of diets. He ended up just developing this theory that the reason heart disease occurs was because people were getting more fats, especially in the form of saturated fats. That would raise their blood cholesterol. In turn, that higher blood cholesterol would cause heart disease.
He developed what we call the Diet Heart Hypothesis, which connects saturated fat to cholesterol to heart disease basically at the start of the 1950s. We are still running with this hypothesis today. It’s the reason our saturated fat recommendations are still kept very low. It’s the reason people with heart disease are told to eat low fat diets. It all stems down to this one guy Ancel Keys.
Throughout the following decades of his career, there were a bunch of observational studies conducted that were in the same way. A country’s saturated fat intake or citizens’ saturated fat intake would be measured. And then they’ll be followed for the heart disease outcomes.
There’s some observational evidence linking saturated fat consumption to heart disease. But with the controlled trials done to see whether reducing saturated fat intake or just replacing it with omega-6 rich vegetable oils, which lower cholesterol levels, testing to see whether that would improve people’s heart disease mortality, what ended up happening was some of the studies showed that people – first of all, mortality really changed. Occasionally, the heart disease mortality would sink, but usually cancer mortality would rise. That wasn’t actually a benefit.
Unfortunately, the highest quality studies of those early years were forgotten and replaced with other studies that were less quality. Basically, it gave the impression that saturated fat was bad. But if you actually go back and you look at all the evidence, the case against saturated fat is so incredibly weak that it’s amazing it persisted as long as it did.
Now that said, during my research writing this book, I discovered there are – I’m sorry. Go ahead.
Wendy Myers: I didn’t say anything.
Denise Minger: Oh, I’m sorry.
Basically when writing this book, there’s one genetic variation that’s called ApoE-4. It’s a variation of the Apolipoprotein-E gene, which is involved in liquid metabolism, cholesterol absorption. It’s considered the ancestral allele because it dates back way before the humans and chimps even split. It goes way back to old primate days.
Basically, this genetic variation is incredibly good at keeping your cholesterol levels very high. It’s very good at suctioning dietary cholesterol out of your intestines. It’s good at basically hoarding all these nutrients from food because it arose in a time in our history when nutrient and animal foods were very scarce and food supply was inconsistent. And basically it was a boon at that time to be able to suction every drop of nutrition from the foods you’re eating and hold on to our bodies.
So a small number of people – I think it depends on the ethnic population. I think it’s about 15% of the population that has at least one copy of this gene. For these people, a diet that has saturated fat actually does seem to have some link with both heart disease and Alzheimer’s disease.
Wendy Myers: Is that the test for Familial Hypercholesterolemia?
Denise Minger: Yes.
Wendy Myers: Is that the test for that? Okay.
Denise Minger: No, that’s actually something different. That’s also another situation where people with that condition – basically in their bodies, there’s something called the LDL receptor, which picks up LDL from your bloodstream. It’s supposed to take it to the tissues that need to be in.
For people with that condition, they don’t express enough of the LDL receptors to really clear the LDL out of the bloodstream. What happens in that case is they end up usually with very elevated cholesterol levels because the cholesterol is not getting through the bloodstream rapidly.
What happens then is it floats around for a long time. It starts to oxidize and that kicks off the whole heart disease process. When you have oxidized cholesterol on your bloodstream, your body views it as a foreign invader. It sends out all its immune army cells to come and gobble up the oxidized cholesterol and incorporate it into fats.
But that’s another condition where people aren’t going to eat diets that keep their cholesterol levels as low as possible just because there are very strong links with that condition and heart disease. That’s another one.
But the ApoE-4 is something completely different. I think we still need a lot more research on it to really understand what’s going on and how it interacts with our diet, with saturated fat and whether it’s really a problem in the context like a non-Westernized diet higher in saturated fat.
Maybe there are other things within the lower quality diets that are also influencing the effects of that gene. Basically I think that for the most part, eating saturated fat in its natural form, in the form of animal products, whole foods – for the vast majority of people, it’s not going to be a problem at all. In fact, many of our most nutrient-dense foods like organ meats, egg yolks, they’re very high in saturated fat, but they’re also incredibly nutritious.
One of the biggest casualties of this whole anti-saturated fat movement is that it really pushes some of the best foods we could be eating straight off of our dinner plates. We’re not eating these foods anymore and not also having health repercussions.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, and I think there’s something to be said for biochemical individuality that every person is different. I think that the Paleo diet that I advocate is a good template to start with.
But I tell people that you’re going to have to play with how much protein you need. You’re going to have to play with if you’re sensitive to dairy or not. I think many people are adaptive to dairy or a little bit of grains or other foods like potatoes that are typically aren’t on the Paleo diet. These foods don’t bother a lot of people and they’re really nutritious foods.
I think it’s definitely a good point that some people are sensitive to saturated fats that you’d find in red meats. And you just have to eat those foods and see if they work for you or not.
Denise Minger: Right, exactly. Even with the grain issue, another really fascinating thing I came across when I was researching for this book is basically all – in our saliva, we have an enzyme called amylase, which kicks off the starch digestion process.
The cool thing about amylase, what’s fascinating about it is we can produce depending on your own genetic make-up. Some people produce very, very small amount of amylase. Other people produce tons of it.
They have actually done some studies that show people who are low amylase producers, when they ingest starch-rich food like grains and potatoes and squash and all that, they have a very exaggerated blood sugar response, as well as a very exaggerated insulin response compared to people who produce a lot of this enzyme.
This is actually a case that means that some of us are – I don’t know for people who are adaptive to grains per se, but there’s a legitimate reason some people are going to do well on a high-starch diet, whereas another person could eat the exact same diet that that person is succeeding on and just feel like their blood sugar is going on a roller coaster ride. So that’s just another point in favor of the whole bio-individual thing.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. I’m a big advocate of having people try different diets and then do medical testing.
Do a certain diet for six months and then go to your doctor or test your blood sugar at home. Test your cholesterol levels and if you have blockages in your arteries and just see if it’s working.
Denise Minger: Yeah.
48:22 Underlying themes in health promoting diets
Wendy Myers: You talk a lot about New Geometry in your book, about common underlying themes in health promoting diets. Can you explain this a little bit? Why do we need to transcend any kind of food pyramid altogether?
Denise Minger: Yeah, for sure. A big part of that section in my book – for anyone who’s going to read it in the future – is just looking back on the work of Weston A. Price. His work just beautifully sums up the fact that people really can thrive on a wide-range of different foods as long as their certain basic nutritional needs are met and as long as we are not eating these modern agents of disease like these highly refined vegetable oils, sugars and refined grains.
I think in Price’s work, basically what he found – for any listeners who are not familiar with him, he traveled around the globe for many years studying these primitive, isolated populations who have not been introduced to western foods yet. So they’re eating the same kind of diet generation after generation after generation, the kinds of foods that they knew as a community could promote health and could produce very healthy babies, could protect against infectious disease. That seems to be keeping people pretty free of chronic disease that we’ve seen elsewhere in the world at the time.
What he found was, regardless of whether he was up in the Arctic Circle or down in Africa, looking at tribes there – all these communities embrace certain foods that were very rich in those fat soluble nutrients, vitamins A, D and K and especially K2. These foods are things like fish eggs, shell fish, organ meats, eggs, insects and just foods that a lot of us don’t eat anymore today.
Apart from these common denominators in these certain foods, the communities that he discovered that were in fabulous health ate such diverse diets. Some of them were eating grains. The Swiss in the high Alpine valleys were eating rye bread with just this beautifully nutritious dairy made into cheese. They were in this pristine state of health.
Then you go and you see the Eskimos that are eating whale skin, seal skin and just the organs of all these sea animals that they can capture and eat with small amount of berries and stuff. It’s just a completely different diet. They’re extremely healthy.
So if we look at just the sum of all that evidence that he pulled together and the picture he painted of human health, we can see that this whole concept of there being one diet that’s going to be best for all of us, a diet that we can prescribe universally and that’s going to give everyone the same health outcome is just baloney.
The whole USDA food pyramid paradigm, which gives us a very firm set of guidelines to eat this many servings of this kind of food and avoid the fat in this and not the other – that’s just a horrible approach to nutrition. It’s really not going to make the nation, as a whole, healthier because it completely sidestepped the issue of people being individuals and having different nutritional needs and having different health conditions to fix and so on and so forth.
So the New Geometry chapter is basically saying, “Here are the common denominators in all these health promoting cuisines that we’ve seen, whether it’s from Weston A. Price, whether it’s from the Paleo community and the successes it has seen so far, whether it’s from the low fat plant-based diet and the success that they are claiming.”
What kind of common threads do we have in all of these different cuisines? A huge one is not just what you’re eating, but it’s what you’re not eating. And again that goes back to avoiding these high omega-6 vegetable oils, refined sugar and refined grains. You’ll never find a nourishing, health promoting diet that contains those foods, especially across the span of generations.
If you dig deeper, you can also see again the theme of these specific, highly-priced, nutrient-dense foods like the organ meats, shellfish, eggs, fish eggs, bones, cartilage. Basically all these briskly bits on animals that most people don’t eat anymore. If you look elsewhere in the world, those foods have once been most cherished and priced by communities that know how to stay healthy.
I think a big thing we all need to do is to find a place for those kinds of foods within our diet. Of course, it’s a little harder for vegans if they’re not eating any animal products. In my book, I offer some potential solutions or suggestions for staying as healthy as you can as a vegan if you’re doing that for other ethical reasons.
But basically, I think we can just look at the sum of our evidence instead of creating these worrying diet communities where we want our diet to be the right one and the best one for everybody, and we’re going to shoot down everyone else that says otherwise.
I think instead of that mentality, we really need to move towards a unifying and an interactive dialogue between different cuisines that have proven to be healthy, to just learn from other people’s successes, to combine everything that has worked and to let people draw from that combined wisdom.
Wendy Myers: I think that’s a really great thought because it makes me sad. I’ve had a couple of clients that come to me that are vegan, and they see that another person has been raw-food vegan for thirty years, just a couple of examples of it.
And I’m thinking, “That’s probably not you.” Everyone is so different. I think people need to remember that just because someone is successful at one diet doesn’t mean that that’s going to work for you.
Denise Minger: Exactly. You could find successful examples of almost anybody. I mean we’re all through like if someone has a grandma who lived to be 96 years old, smoking a pack a day, eating Ho-Hos every morning or something.
So there are always examples of people being able to be successful in any program. You can’t always assign their success to their diet like with the raw vegans who are surviving that long and doing well on it.
I really think that there are exceptions rather than the rule at this point. It is alarming now because when we look at people like that, we think, “Well, if they’re succeeding, then I’ll actually be able to succeed too.” It just doesn’t work that way usually.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I like that idea that you brought up. Some people can smoke and drink and live to a hundred. It’s like nothing’s going to kill these people. I think the same thing with some of the raw vegans that are doing it for a really long time. It’s the same concept. Nothing’s going to kill these people.
They’re just these hardy individuals. They are – I don’t want to say this – like cockroaches. Nothing’s going to kill these people no matter what diet they eat, no matter how much nutritionally deficient diet they eat or smoke or drink whatever. So that’s just mighty sense.
Denise Minger: Yeah, I agree. Since I was a raw vegan – it’s been a decade I guess since my raw vegan experience – I’ve watched the community change a whole lot in that process. And actually a lot of raw vegan gurus, who have gone cold and not bothered by the cocoon, reversed their opinion. They are eating potatoes and steamed vegetables now. Some of them are not vegan anymore.
I do think that there’s probably a shift going on as well within that community as people realize maybe this is not maintainable for your entire life.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. I’m on the opposite spectrum. I tell all my clients to eat cooked vegetables. There are some things you can’t cook.
I just think that we have a hard time breaking down cellulose or plant fiber. And it’s hard to extract the minerals. This is my personal opinion, but I think people are mineral deficient. That contributes to a lot of health problems.
But I think there’s a place for raw foods. You can get too much of a good thing from those too.
56:21 The most pressing health issue in the world today
I have a question that I like to ask all my guests. What do you think is the most pressing health issue in the world today?
Denise Minger: That’s hard. That’s like asking my favorite color, which I don’t have one.
I would have to say, on just a very general sense, it is our disconnection with our sustenance, with our food. And I don’t just mean physical disconnection because obviously we don’t grow around food anymore. Most of us have never touch the soil where our vegetables grow in. Most of us don’t have our own farms anymore. We’re very disconnected from our food supply
At the same time, we have this intellectual disconnection from the food we’re eating because everything we think we know about food has been fed to us from manufacturers and from marketers. We’re living in a time right now where we’re eating things that are worn into our bodies, with the exception of the people who live beyond the standard American diet and embrace more whole food cuisines.
We’re so far removed from the thing that can probably make us the healthiest and sustain us throughout our lives. Because of that disconnection, it’s like every aspect of our health has gone haywire.
And maybe even in a more general sense, we’re so disconnected from the kind of environments that our bodies know. It’s like we’re living in a foreign world right now that really only emerged within the last hundred years or so where no longer do we need our bodies as transportation, no longer do we need to hunt and work for our own food.
We sit at our computers all day and we’re using our smartphones. We basically created all these tools to make life easier. Our bodies are affected as a result.
So combined with our disconnection from our food, we’re tolling our bodies. We’re completely misplaced in the world we’re living in right now. That’s the root of almost all these chronic diseases that we’re experiencing now.
Wendy Myers: Thank you so much for being on the show, Denise. Why don’t you tell the listeners a little more about you and where they can find you and what you’re up to these days?
Denise Minger: Sure. I’m just in a literally last few days/weeks of finishing my book. Pretty soon, I’m going to re-emerge into the world. I’ll be blogging and posting stuff again.
But right now, my book Death By Food Pyramid should be available – the publishing date is going to be early January, but I’m not quite sure. But anyway, you can pre-order it right now so you can get it whenever it will be published. You can just do that on Amazon or wherever.
I have a blog RawFoodSOS.com, which I don’t think I’ve updated in like a year and a half. Pretty soon, I’m going to be posting again on that.
You can follow me on Twitter. Denise Minger is my name on there. You can find me on Facebook. I don’t post too often, but when I do, it’s usually nutritional related stuff. My name on there is again just Denise Minger.
Other than that, pretty soon, I’ll be getting back, speaking and engaging with groups and stuff. But right now, I’ve just been focusing so strongly on finishing my book. That’s where my head has been for like a year.
Wendy Myers: I know what you mean. I’m writing a book right now too about weight loss. And I’ve gained 10 lbs., writing a book on weight loss. I’m like, “Why?”
Denise Minger: It’s so ironic writing health books. I know my health has never been worse than when I’ve been working on this. In the middle of the night, I’m just stressed out and just not sleeping or eating properly. It’s ironic that I’m writing a book about health while I’m letting my own deteriorates, but I guess that’s what it takes.
Wendy Myers: You sent me the Table of Contents for the book and I can tell the listeners that it looks really, really good. So I definitely urge you guys to go out there and pre-order it. Check it out when it comes out. I think it’s going to be really, really good.
Denise Minger: Thank you so much.
Wendy Myers: Well Denise, thank you for coming on the show. I’m thrilled that you’ve agreed to come on and help people to navigate the nutrition literature and get some facts straight.
I know it’s really confusing when you first began to figure out how to eat. It took me a few years of basically nonstop reading and then nutrition school to finally figure out what diet personally works for me. It’s daunting to say the least for the majority of people.
Thank you for coming on the show and taking the time to shed some light on this issue.
Denise Minger: Thank you so much for having me.
Wendy Myers: All right. Thank you. I’ll talk to you soon hopefully. Hopefully, we’ll have you on the show again soon.
Denise Minger: That’d be awesome. Thank you.
Wendy Myers: Okay. Bye-bye.
Denise Minger: Bye.
Wendy Myers: And thank you listeners for tuning in. Remember the time to be thinking about your health is while you’re still enjoying it, not waiting until you get sick. By then, it’s much harder to turn around your health.
So thank you so much for listening to Live To 110 podcast.
Cate Beehan: Please go check out our websites. I can be found at Fitness-Broad.com. And Wendy is at myersdetox.com™ . If you liked what you heard on the show today, please give the Live To 110 podcast a nice review and rating in iTunes. Thank you.
Wendy Myers: Thank you every one. See you next week.
