Transcript: #1 Why is Nutrition So Confusing? with Wendy Myers

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Transcript

• 04:19 We are all different
• 08:45 Books are very convincing
• 12:24 Question nutrition advice from your doctor
• 14:16 Do not get your health info from the news
• 18:27 Bad Science
• 24:13 Epidemiological Studies
• 32:26 Double-blind Studies
• 33:36 Retrospective and Prospective Studies
• 35:50 Short-term Studies
• 37:40 Animal Studies
• 39:00 A lot of food research is brought and Paid for
• 46:02 Supplement research
• 47:57 My Advice

Good morning everyone! How are you? This is Wendy Myers. You we’re just listening to Everyday Animals. They are a fantastic band. I love their new album Under the Tyranny of Good Weather. Go and check that out. I’m absolutely in love with it. My name is Wendy Myers, thank you so much for coming to my first blog talk radio show. It’s also going to be a podcast soon. So check that out on iTunes.

I’m a Health and Nutrition coach.  I really got into health and nutrition when my father died of esophageal cancer. It’s really kind of put things in perspective for me and really hit home to the fact that I just did not want to go that way. So I just started studying furiously about nutrition. 1) to help save my father when he was still alive, but also to just, it just had never dawned on me to eat healthy because I thought that I ate healthy. But the more and more I studied nutrition, I realized how much there is to know and it can get really, really confusing. So that’s why I wanted to do my first show on why nutrition is so confusing.

But before we get into that, definitely please if you like my show today please subscribe to the show. You can also check out my website at myersdetox.com™. If you have any questions, feel free to call in. The number is 917 889 2838 and please if you have any questions, I will be answering your questions live on the air after I’m done with the show.

Additionally, I wanna tell you a little bit about next week’s show. Next week I’m so excited. I have a woman her name is Nikki Moses. She is actually the person that I consult with for my health on some matters. She is a nutritionist that specializes in Nutritional Balancing science with hair mineral analysis.

And it’s such an interesting program. I’ve been doing it for about a year and it’s basically a program where you completely detoxify your body from heavy metals and industrial chemicals, something I’m really big about it. You will hear a lot of future shows about detoxification and how to do it properly and safely. This is a program that I’ve been doing — I’m detoxing heavy metals and getting aluminum out of my body that causes Alzheimer’s.  I’m getting out cadmium that eventually causes kidney disease. It’s just such an amazing program to mineralize your body and detoxify it. So we’re gonna be talking all about that next Saturday at 3 p.m. so be sure to tune in and check that out.

So let’s get onto the show. Why is nutrition so confusing? Basically, when I first started to study nutrition, I didn’t know what to believe. You read one theory on nutrition that’s totally proven and then you read the exact opposite, which is also totally proven. So I wanted this show to help you understand why there’s so much conflicting information. So there are a lot of questions out there. Should you go Paleo or go vegetarian? Or what’s the best diet to lose weight? Or what supplements should you take and which brands are the best? Low fat used to be the buzz word, but now it’s all about low carb. And for a long time, people were saying don’t eat so much sugar, but now people are saying don’t use artificial sweeteners. Now is: fruit has too much sugar to be healthy. I mean, it’s enough to make you absolutely bonkers. And what I have been finding in my years of study that I have fallen victim to is a lot of wrong ideas about diet. A lot of information about nutrition is misguided, is outdated, and some information is really just outright lies.

Some books I read were merely a pitch for an author’s supplements or biased toward a diet that worked for the author, which is not going to work for everyone. Many diet books promote diets that current research show to be dangerous or unhealthy. So with so much wrong information out there, you’ve got to arm yourself with a little bit of knowledge so that you can decipher what’s wrong and what is right when you read it.

Now, one of the reasons that nutrition is so confusing is because of the basic fact that we’re all different. Many people can dramatically improve their health by adopting a Paleo diet. I am a big fan of the Paleo diet, but that is not going to work for everyone. Some people can go without animal protein. Some people get the best results eating six small meals a day. Others swear by a warrior type diet where they’re only eating one large meal per day or favor periodic fasting. Some people are big on being a raw foodie. Other people feel best when they eat 70% or 80% of their diet from fat. Some eat low carb, some eat high carb or they practice carb backloading that a lot of athletes do. Some avoid gluten or dairy or eggs or soy or nuts or fish. Others eat anything all day long.

I think these people are universally despised. But in truth, everything works. You know, there are people getting incredible results with all the above eating styles. Now why is this? It’s really because we’re all different. We have varying degrees of health. We have a different hormone levels and metabolisms. We have different body composition or different body types. We have different genetic predispositions and different responses to food and we live really different lifestyles in different environments. We also endure different stress levels. We have different ethnic backgrounds. For instance, those with Japanese heritage or who come from coastal people will need more fish and fish oil to be their healthiest.

So this is why differences account for so many different diets. But beyond the basic fundamentals that more or less everyone can agree on, like we need to eat whole foods and vegetables are good, blindly following some nutrition plan, especially the more extreme variety, without listening to your own body and paying attention to how you feel will likely lead to poor health. You want to avoid any diet that is all raw food or all protein or high carb or high protein or where you’re only eating one food, for instance. Our bodies, they need balance and variety. So this extreme diets — they just do not support health in the long-term. So take responsibility and find out what works for you. You don’t want to blindly follow a book or a diet if it is not making you feel good.

However, if you feel off and want to give up on a diet don’t give up so soon. Right in the beginning of a diet there are some exceptions where you’ll be feeling bad on some diets initially. For instance, like when you start getting rid of gluten out of the diet this is going to make you pretty much feel like crap for a bit as you withdraw from its heroine-like effects on the brain. The same goes for sugar. Usually, most people are really not going to feel too hot for two to five days after they put down sugar. Some people feel better initially on a vegetarian or vegan diet like I did, but this is only because their digestion is screwed up and they do not produce enough stomach acid to digest animal protein. So you don’t want to think that just because you initially feel great on a diet, that that is going to be good for you too.

That is what I found when I went vegetarian, I initially felt good, but that’s because I didn’t produce enough stomach acid and but then eventually, I started feeling you know pretty bad because the diet caused me to suffer from adrenal fatigue and some nutrient deficiencies, which is, pretty much guaranteed on a vegetarian or vegan diet. The minute you begin a water or juice fasting, you get headaches and other symptoms due to detoxification. However, in the end if a diet doesn’t work for you it doesn’t work. Forget the dogma and nutrition tribalism and move on.

Now, one of the biggest factors in why nutrition is so confusing is that books are very convincing and there are so many different books that have so many different view points, but any book can make a convincing argument backed by research. The nature of writing is to convince readers of the author’s point of view. Pretty much every book I’ve read on nutrition has swayed my convictions by the end of book. After reading the pH Miracle, I began drinking tons of alkaline water and eating big huge salads everyday. After reading the Atkins diet, I was eating 25 grams of carbs a day and began eating processed low carb bars and pepperoni sticks and all these horrible processed foods, but hey, they were low in carbs.

After reading The China Study I was totally disgusted with meat and dairy for pretty much two years. It’s theories are based on a 30-year study convincing us that meat and dairy may cause cancer and other diseases of Western affluence. It pretty much says in the book if you eat dairy and meat, you’re going to get cancer and all these other diseases. Though this study shows this correlation, there has never been a culture or tribe in the history of the world that was vegan which vegans exclude meat and dairy from their diet. And this is because it’s a diet that just does not support health and reproduction in the long-term. So big study or not, they don’t mention this little problem in the book. However, another person may fare better than I did on the vegan diet. Like I said everyone’s different. Some people are able to do this vegan diet and even the raw vegan diet but I there are few and faw between.

After reading the Paleo diet, I finally found my holding grail. I’m all about Paleo. I love Paleo; it just makes so much sense to me. Now, all the health problems that I developed on the vegan diet are slowly resolving on this diet. I’ve done Paleo for about a year and pretty much the moral of the story is that there is no cookie cutter diet for everyone. So avoid books telling you that this is the case. Don’t believe everything that you read, but take bits and pieces that make sense within the context of everything else you’ve read.

The reality is some books are back by solid science, but most are not, even if they quote research studies left and right. As we’ll discuss in a minute, there’s a lot of really poorly done food research out there which contributes to this problem why nutrition is confusing. And I hear this all the time from my clients that their doctor told them do this and their doctor told them do that. What I have found, even with my own doctors, who are really good doctors, is a lot of doctors give totally wrong nutrition advice. So I want you to question any nutrition advice you get from your doctor. Many people trust their doctor and the medical establishment without question and I was one of them. I used to put the medical establishment on a pedestal or think that my doctor was God, but this can be a really fatal or mistake. That’s the mistake my father made as well,  listening to his physicians at all cost.

Now, physicians are wonderful. They were trained in diagnosing disease and prescribe medication. This is a wonderful, valuable contribution to help when you’re sick, but what about preventing or healing with food. Some doctors have limited nutrition training as elective courses at medical school, but even fewer have post-graduate nutrition training. But what is more appalling is a full one-quarter of medical schools do not even offer courses on nutrition. And it seems that since health is so much determined by your diet, because your body is composed of the foods you’re eating, that’s what your body is made out of. So it seems like since your health is somewhat determined by your diet, a doctor would be required to learn more about nutrition.

Now, I don’t know what do you think, but perhaps they are overloaded with information already. May be this job should be left to nutritionists and health coaches like myself, but I’m personally more comfortable trusting my health with a physician that knows the relationship of food and it’s ability to cause or heal illness. Now granted, there are a few really gifted doctors out there who know what they’re talking about when it comes to nutrition, Dr Weil for instance or Dr Hyman, maybe your doctor. But I’ve had so many of my clients with heart problems or high cholesterol for instance, be told by their doctors to eat margarine that are full of trans fats. And trans fats cause heart disease. I mean, trans fat have been proven since the year 2000 to contribute to heart disease and high cholesterol, but sadly your doctor may have learned a proven fact at a convention or training a decade ago and continues to dispense this outdated information. So I urge you to question and research everything that your doctor advises you to do. It’s something that I do.

I found that I almost never follow my doctor’s advice when it comes to food or medications or treatment protocols that they prescribed because upon further research, I find that it’s just not right for me. So it just makes things very confusing. So another thing that makes nutrition very confusing is you do not want to get your health information from the news. The media can provide us with very important information but much of the information on health and diet that you are fed on CNN or other major news outlets and newspapers is usually wrong or false.

Headlines are meant to catch your attention, but not necessarily inform. But it does not dare report unbiased information that would cast their advertisers, food manufacturer and growers or pharmaceutical companies, they are not going to show things that will show their advertisers in an unfavorable light.. Therefore, a lot of what you hear in the news, it just simply can’t be relied upon. Frequently, news claims are made based on a single study or a new study. So you can’t take a new single study and report it as an absolute fact. But this is exactly what happens when a new study is dispersed on the news.

People take it as a fact and they talk about all their friends and co-workers about it and they still have it in their head as a fact a decade or longer later. I mean, I can’t tell you how many times, I’ve had this happened to me and then I am proven wrong by something that I read or what not. But this is what the researchers, the founders of the research and the benefactors, the people who will benefit from the research, want exactly. So keep in mind that research must be proven over and over again  in study after study before they can may considerable relevant. So pause and think for a minute before believing everything that you hear in the news.

Because media outlets,  you know; they’re desperate for information and they want to be the first to report the latest research, whether the findings are valid or not.

And one of the main problems in food science in food nutrition research is bad science. Nutrition science is one of the only sciences in the world where two polar opposite theories can be totally proven. This isn’t happening in other fields of science and this can mainly be attributed to bad science and bad food scientists. Because in food science, it just doesn’t have to be as rigorous as nuclear physics, for instance. It is also due to the fact that people, including scientists, are low to change their stance on existing paradigms. Like say the “Calories In/Calories Out” theory of thermodynamics, that has been debunked as too simplistic and outdated by many.

Now you may have heard of Gary Taubes. He’s a noted food journalist who began his career as a science journalist. Mainly reporting about really bad science research. He then turned his attention to food science because they had some of the worst science being conducted of all the sciences. So, he found that food science just doesn’t have the regular checks and balances necessary to discover reliable knowledge. And after interviewing countless scientists, he pretty much found that bad scientists never get the right answers. And there are a lot of bad scientists out there. So, you can’t just read a scientific research paper on PubMed or get something from the news and be like “Oh! There you go”.

There’s a lot of false information that’s out there. Anyway, in the course of his investigative journalism, Gary Taubes has uncovered many bogus commonly held nutritional beliefs that began life as the result of bad science. And I absolutely agree with his findings that salt does not cause high blood pressure, eggs do not contribute to high cholesterol, and that low-fat diets are healthy. I mean he has exhaustively researched his subjects. But most notably, he’s a champion of trying to convince people that the “Calories In/Calories Out” theory of diet is totally bogus. That’s the theory where you know women need to eat about you know, they eat 2000 calories a day. They’ve got to burn 2000 calories a day or they’re going to gain weight if they eat more than 2000 calories.

However, it doesn’t exactly work that way, it’s a little bit too simplistic. Clearly, a hundred calories of Coke has a very different metabolic and hormonal effect on your body than a hundred calorie of broccoli. And you know  when you drink a hundred calories of Coke, that raises your blood sugar which will also raise your insulin. Insulin is the hormone that tells your body to store fat, and so you’re gonna gain you know more weight from a hundred calories of Coke than you would from a hundred calories of broccoli, which does not have this hormonal effect on your body. So if you want to learn more about his research and his reporting, you can read his incredibly well research book “Why We Get Fat” and “Good Calories, Bad Calories.” These are fantastic books.

Another problem with nutrition science is its habit of measuring individual ingredients of fat on health outcomes. For instance, that consumption of saturated fat causing heart disease which is actually more accurately linked to wheat flour, sugar and trans fat consumption. And you may have heard of Michael Pollan, he wrote a book , what’s the name of his book? It’s called Food Rules. He does a really persuasive takedown of what is called nutritionism, as he calls it, which he defines as an ideology built around the widely shared but unexamined assumption that the key in understanding food is indeed the nutrient.

So this is the part about you know breaking whole food apart. You know a chicken breast is nothing but an assemblage of different nutrients, vitamins, minerals, fat and proteins. And all these individual components are studied for their effects on health, but this is not how food works in the body. Nutrients work in synergistic ways, many nutrients of which we haven’t even yet discovered. So nutrition all too often depends upon shoddy science and ends up causing Americans to indulge in poor diets.

So why is nutritionism endured? Pollan blames the scientific process. He says, “Because the nutrient bias is built in the way science is done. Scientists need individual variables that they can isolate. Yet even the simplest food is a hopelessly complex thing to study, a virtual wilderness of chemical compounds, many of which exist in complex and dynamic relation to one another, and all of which together are in the process of changing from one state to another. So if you’re a nutritional scientist, you do the only thing that you can do given the tools at your disposal. Break the thing down into its component parts; study those one by one, even if that means ignoring complex interactions in context As well to the fact that the whole or may be more than or just different from the sum of its part. So this is what we mean by reductionist scientist.”

Now, he goes on to say that, “Scientific reductionism is an undeniably powerful tool. But it can mislead us too, especially when applied to something as complex on the one side of food and on the other, the human eater. It encourages us to take a mechanistic view of that transaction: put in this nutrient; get out that physiological result.” Needless to say, Pollan takes issue with his reductionist approach and shows, in study after study in his book that nutrient based nutrition is bad science. It’s akin to studying vitamin E and saying, “Oh, vitamin E is not good for heart health,” but it’s just not that simple. You just can’t take this one nutrient and study its effects on people and whether it’s not good for heart disease. It’s just too simplistic. Reductionist scientist relies on medical oversimplification and faulty longitudinal studies and it really has helped to create a food industry that’s making us fatter, sicker and less satisfied with our food. So for those of you that are interested in the shoddiness of nutritionism, you might want to check out his amazing book called Food Rules by Michael Pollan.

Now, I wanted to talk a little bit about research methods. This is kind’ve boring, but it is very important to touch on because its one of the main reasons why nutrition is so confusing. Now, there are lots of different research methods, with some being far superior to others. No study is perfect and the evaluations of the results must take into account the design and execution of the study together with the analytical methods used. Now, I am going to mention a few methods and their weaknesses to illustrate how poorly most diet research is conducted and why incorrect results and conclusions are the norm leading nutritionists like yourself and dieters very, very confused.

The first one that I am going to go over is epidemiological studies. These studies compare populations of people who are alike except for one factor, such as exposure to a food in the presence of a health effect like cancer. Now these investigators try to determine if any factor is associated with this health effect like cancer. These studies of diet, though they provide a valuable tool for the investigation of the causes of disease, their fraught with difficulty and frequently subject to mistaken interpretation. So the problems that can cause epidemiological research results to be wrong include the data collected, the accuracy of the information, the end point definition that they are trying to conclude, the study size and the way the results are interpreted and presented.

There are a lot of critics of epidemiology and its usefulness in research. Some say epidemiology is totally bogus, but does have some value. It does seem to be good for hypothesis generation, but many believe that it is almost worthless for finding the truth. Adding to these problems, many researchers take the freedom to selectively reference only research which supports their cause rather than the totality of the evidence. So first, let’s take a study like The China Study. There’s a lot of controversy surrounding this study.

It’s a book that I read that really convinced me to stop eating meat and dairy. But I frankly, you know when I first started having health problems on this diet, I thought a little bamboozled. I felt like if this study was so great and this study is so scientifically done and there was so much proof for it, then why am I not healthy on this diet. So I am going to explain a little bit about that. Now, this study, The China study, it urges you to stop eating all animal protein and go vegan. It’s an epidemiological study. However, such studies alone do not prove causation, but merely correlation. This means The China Study can only conclude that there is merely a correlation between eating meat and dairy and getting cancer and other diseases.

This pretty much means nothing. Because there is also a strong correlation between heart attacks and how many televisions one owns, the more televisions, the greater the chance of heart attack. So correlation is not exactly strong evidence that one causes the other. And there is something called confounding variables. These are variables in research that screw up the results of a research. So there are a lot of confounding variables that can cause epidemiological studies results to be wrong. For instance, The China Study concluded the populations that eat meat and dairy have higher rates of cancer. However, these same urban populations also consume high amounts of flour and sugar that are other known contributors to cancer. You know, as cancer feeds on insulin and sugar. So it can’t be reliably concluded that meat and dairy in and of themselves caused cancer from the study. I mean, unless these studies are evaluated and interpreted with care, they can result in more harm than good.

Because you know, dairy we can definitely live without out. I am in agreement on that. But I believe that telling people they must essentially go vegan by not eating meat or they are going get cancer and other diseases, it simply defies logic and common sense. It completely ignores nutritional needs of humans because we need cholesterol and we need animal protein in our diet to be mentally and physically healthy, though in limited amounts,  not usually the amounts that most people are eating.

We need iron, B12 and zinc, most frequently found in red meat. We need animal proteins to make our hormones in our bodies, the chemical messengers that tell our different body parts what to do. We need them to make to feel good chemicals, the neurotransmitters in our brain like dopamine and other feel good transmitters like serotonin. I mean, there are countless populations in history that survived solely on meat or had it as a main staple in their diet and suffered almost no diseases of any kind. And you can see this clearly in the work of Weston A. Price. He studied all kinds of populations that had been totally untouched by unprocessed food, untouched by civilization, they were just eating their native diet. All of them ate meat and he was actually really disappointed because he set out trying to find vegetarian populations.

He really wanted to find some populations anywhere on Earth that were vegetarian and thriving, but he just didn’t. There wasn’t one population on the Earth that was vegetarian and there is a reason for this. Vegetarians, I think, if they are smart about it, there can be healthy as vegetarians, so don’t get me wrong. But the vegan diet I have a problem with because I just don’t think people can physiologically be healthy eating a vegan diet. I think people can survive and they can get by but they can’t optimally be healthy. So I am not going to take advice from a single study like The China Study, albeit, a seemingly good 30-year study like The China Study, but I can’t get advice from this study, given our several million year history as, you know, meat-gorging humanoids.

We have been eating meat for millions of years, so it just seems strange to me that all of a sudden in the 21st century it’s not healthy to eat meat anymore. It just defies common sense. And there is even a new study that came along, that tested the most nutrient-dense foods on the planet. The most nutrient dense foods are animal organ meats and after that come the animal muscle meats, after that come the vegetables and fruits and then after that are the flours and sugar that have almost no nutritive value. So meat is incredibly nutritious and that’s all we needed to be optimally healthy and for me personally, I wanted to do a diet that’s going to make me ultimately healthy. I want to live a really long time and I personally believe that doing a Paleo diet and eating meat is the key to longevity.

Now, it should also been heard that heart attacks, cancer, etc., were pretty much almost unheard of prior to 1900 not nearly approaching numbers that we see today in the United States. The last consensus data was in 2002 where 500,000 Americans died of heart disease. But prior 1900, meat consumption was lower than it is today. So this uptick in the diseases of Western affluence like heart disease and cancer directly correlates to our progressively increasing consumption of factory farm meats, which definitely have toxins and carcinogens and are we are not healthy.

And it also relates to our increasing consumption of flour, sugar, industrial chemicals, heavy metals, toxic medications and food additives since the 1900’s. We have been consuming these foods in epic amounts since 1900. So its really impossible for epidemiological studies like The China Study to take all these confounding factors into account that can muddy up the results.

Now, I also want to talk about double-blind studies. Double-blind studies are the gold standard of studies. It produces the most reliable results but cannot be used in most nutritional research. For example, in double-blind study protocols, individuals are given either a placebo or a drug treatment, which is very common in pharmaceutical studies. The test subjects and the administering physicians are unaware of which subjects received which. That’s why it’s called double-blind. Now, these aspects of double-blind studies are essentially impossible in food research you know except, for isolating minor nutrients like effects of vitamin E because people are aware of what they are eating.

You can’t feed someone meat and try to prove that it causes cancer in a double blind study because people know that they are eating meat. So diet studies of this kind are almost never done under such really controlled, rigorous conditions. They are often done under retrospective or perspective studies.

Now in retrospective studies, the investigators ask a group of people about dietary intake for some period of time in the past and then they look for correlations between these intakes and their current health. So already we have our first problem. People’s recollection of what they eat is uniformly untrustworthy, rendering such studies almost worthless, but not totally.

Perspective studies of diets are less commonly due to their expense. They cost millions of dollars, but the results are more trustworthy than the retrospective studies. Perspective studies find a relationship over time between characteristics, for instance, dairy consumption shared by some members of the group, say perimenopausal females, and a health condition like breast cancer. The researchers follow the population group over a period of time, noting their rate at which a condition, such as breast cancer, occurs in the dairy consumers and then in the subjects that don’t consume dairy.

Now, a typical longitudinal study like retrospective and perspective studies will look for correlations between diet and conditions. The investigators collect retrospective dietary and health information from the subjects. The investigators then comb the data, you know they are looking for correlations between particular dietary characteristics and particular health conditions, be they positive or negative. And then any significant correlations are then hailed as the next dietary solution to some disease syndrome or symptom. So you can see all the inherent problems in doing this. And a lot of times the correlations that they make are simply not correct and are proven many, many years later to not be correct.

For instance, when women were given hormone replacement therapy they thought that initially this reduced the rates of heart disease, but now they are finding that these initial findings are not correct and that hormone replacement therapy actually contributes to heart disease.

Now, a lot of problems I have with nutritional research are short-term studies. Most studies are done for a short period like two weeks or 30 days and therefore are not necessarily applicable to our health in the long-term. There are so many confounding variables that can screw up the results of short-term and long-term studies. A diet study on low fat diets for instance is typically only a study for a period of two weeks to a year, though sometimes longer. These longer studies are really rare due to expense. That’s why you just don’t see that many of them.

So you see these changes in subjects like the ones that are on these low fat diet short-term studies. And many times they have reduced arterial plaque or lowered cholesterol due to eating a low fat diet, but what you don’t see are the nutritional deficiencies and other health consequences most subjects will eventually suffer if they continue a low fat diet for extended periods of time. For instance, they used to think that a lot of studies show that saturated fat increases cholesterol, but that’s because this is shown on short-term studies. When you eat saturated fat, which is absolutely a necessary part of a healthy diet, then there is some healthy saturated fat and some unhealthy saturated fat. We can’t lock them all as unhealthy fats. But what these studies were showing is that saturated fats increase cholesterol — and they do in the short-term, but over the long-term they don’t have an effect on cholesterol levels and they don’t, in fact, cause heart disease.

Another problem with what makes nutrition so confusing are animal studies. Now, many studies use animals as their test subjects and many studies, unless they pass with flying colors and show no to harm the animals but they are never done on humans. Now the reason this is done is because of cost and the fact that many studies done on animals would be unethical or illegal to perform on humans. So people seem to automatically think that animal study results can be generalized to humans and while this is sometimes the case, results in animal studies are usually not attributable to humans or duplicated in human trials.

Now, obviously there are subtle differences between humans and animals in terms of physiology, anatomy and metabolism making it really difficult to apply data derived from animal studies to human conditions. And according to a lot of researchers, you just can’t extrapolate the findings of a lot of prominent animal research to the care of human disease. So be really careful when reading or hearing about animal studies and thinking that those results apply to you. No, they need to be done on humans.

And another problem, a big, big, big problem, one of the biggest problems in nutritional research is that a lot of food research is bought and paid for. A majority of research done by major universities is paid for by big biotechs like Monsanto, the evilest company on the planet. They make genetically modified seeds and a lot of pesticides and they make the synthetic RGBH, which is cow crack. It’s for the cows to make them produce more milk. And so this major research at universities is also paid for by food growers and manufacturers. So not surprisingly, the results are usually favorable to their funder. For many scientists and researchers, their work depends on pleasing the fonder, the granting agencies or the state legislators responsible for funding.

So it’s very difficult to decipher if what you’re reading is real science conducted by unbiased scientists looking for honest answers. Now, the food industry supports food science research if it will help them reap a greater profit, not in finding out if the food is healthy for you. For instance, a kind of research has been conducted on soy showing its health benefits. However, nothing can be further from truth. Soy is unhealthy for you on so many levels. For more information you can see the blog on my website Little Known Dangers of Soy on my website myersdetox.com™. Soy is one of the most profitable foods generating billions of dollars for big AGRA, which is the acronym for the agricultural corporations that grow and manufacture food.

This is why you hear so much positive news and research about soy, not because it’s healthy.  Now, when I read research studies involving specific foods or nutrients, I immediately look to see who paid for the study. Sponsorship almost invariably predicts the results of research. David Ludwig and his colleagues demonstrated this phenomenon in studies of the effects of soft drinks on childhood obesity. It’s a very famous study. Independent studies almost invariably find an association between obesity and the consumption of soda. That’s why there is such an uproar for getting rid of sodas in schools and what not because they are contributing to obesity. But by contrast industries sponsored studies almost never show this link. Hmm, I wonder why that is PepsiCo?

But in food research, as in research on drugs or cigarettes, the results are highly likely to favor the sponsor’s interest. They are not outright buying the results, although it sometimes seems to be that way, but instead it seems that researchers who are willing to accept grants from food companies, tend to be a little bit less critical about the way they design their studies and the results that they get. And sponsored studies tend to lack appropriately rigorous controls and the results suffer as a result. Now, take research on the health benefits of pomegranates for example. Pomegranates are fruits and all fruits contain antioxidants. Yet the producers of POM pomegranate juice have spent millions of dollars to pay researchers to demonstrate that pomegranate juice has healthful antioxidants. I mean, of course, pomegranates have antioxidants and health benefits.

But compared to what? You know, I have yet to see a study that compares antioxidant affects of pomegranates to those of oranges or other antioxidants rich fruits. And I can’t imagine that an independent scientist would want to bother comparing pomegranate to oranges. Both are worth eating, but as a rule corporate funding discards this critical thinking or promotes uncritical thinking about the importance of individual foods or nutrients in a healthful diet. Sponsored studies have only one purpose: to establish a basis for marketing claims. Now, they are not carried out to promote public health. Falsification of data is rife today in science, adding to all the problems in research mentioned above. There is really little or no consequences for scientist that falsify data. There is only a retraction in small print years later in the scientific journal in which the study was originally published.

But by then it’s common knowledge in society. They don’t go to bad scientist jail. However, there is a lot to be gained by a scientist for data or result falsification. They are celebrated for new discoveries. They receive promotions. They receive cushy tender college positions. They get continued or increased research funding and they get increased pay or lucrative book deals. So it’s just a really, really big problem today in science. There is just too much to be gained by falsifying a result.

So not only can research not be trusted, but there is a lot of fantastic research that is prevented from being conducted due to corporate interests. Many powerful companies simply buy up research firms that are producing unfavorable research about their products and it’s crazy. I mean for instance, Monsanto; one of the largest producers of genetically modified seeds and pesticides bought up a research firm that was showing that bees — you know which are vital to food pollination and production – are dying due to neonicotinoid pesticides manufactured by Monsanto. And this is actually quite common for these big companies to buy up these little research firms that are pumping out bad information and PR about their products.

Monsanto has even blocked research on the safety of genetically modified foods. This is exactly why there is so much confusion concerning the safety of genetically modified food and this is no accident. Multibillion dollar agricultural corporations, including Monsanto and Syngenta, have restricted independent research on their genetically engineered crops. They have absolutely refused to provide independent scientists with seeds or they have set restricted conditions that severely limit research options. This just is not how science should operate. Given these facts, it is no surprise that these companies can claim that their GMO products are safe because there is very little evidence and research to the contrary.  So be very careful about what you are hearing on the news or what you are reading in books and reading on the Internet. That GMOs are safe, they are not.

I wanted to go over a little side note here in supplement research because there is a lot of confusion about supplements as well. Not that many natural supplements have research to back up health claims and are therefore dismissed as dangerous or not useful. But I wouldn’t be so quick to jump to these conclusions. Research studies cost millions of dollars and the only way a company is going to do this is if they can get a lucrative patent on a substance, supplement or medication so that they can make millions of dollars being the sole holder of that patent. Many companies that sell supplements would love to prove the efficacy of their product, but cannot afford the research.

Some supplement manufactures like Metagenics conduct their own studies, but sometimes I worry that they would have biased results because they are trying to prove the efficacy of their own product lines. Another scenario entails a supplement getting a lot of attention and the government or an independent research company paying to do the research. But this leaves the majority of supplements without scientific merit. They only have anecdotal evidence or thousands of years of years use like traditional Chinese medicine or Ayurvedic medicine, for instance.

But because a lot of supplements don’t have scientific merit, this is the position many drug companies and physicians take when advising a patient to use or not use a supplement. However, just because a supplement does not have clinical research behind it, it does not mean it does not work or that it is dangerous. Many supplements have been used safely for thousands of years in traditional Chinese or Ayurvedic medicine. So do your research on the Internet, try supplements out and make your own decision.

Now my advice: I say do not get worked up about a study you hear in the news. Just know that many headlines are generated to produce ratings and sell magazines. Don’t take diet and health advice from your doctor without doing a little bit of research. And don’t take advice from the results of a brand new research study. Wait until there are many, many studies proving the same thing because no matter how well developed and executed, study results can be wrong, inconclusive and even falsified. So take in everything with a healthy amount of skepticism. Remember, no matter what book you read, keep in mind that you have to eat the diet that works for you.

Don’t substitute anyone else’s judgment for your own. I mean, it takes years of trial and error while listening to your body and its reactions to food to figure out the best diet fitted to you. For instance, the amount of protein that you need. Then once you get it figured out, of course everything changes. Your needs will change according to your age or your health status or whether you come down with an illness or a chronic disease. This is a lifelong journey. So read books with an open beginners mind and honor the fact that nutrition science will constantly change. And just enjoy this journey that is the path to your health. Because for me personally, after several failed diets, from doing the vegetarian diet and the vegan diet, and Atkins diet, I have settled on one conclusion, there are many ways to eat healthy, but you have to do the diet that is sustainable for you.

Now, after finding out that I have health problems as a vegetarian and vegan diet, I urge anyone wishing to try a new diet, to get medical and nutrient testing to gauge their health before starting a diet. And then revisiting the same testing six months into the diet. You can go nuts with these tests. You can test your hormones, vitamin levels, mineral levels, your fat profile, cholesterol, your whole heart panel, your blood sugar, inflammation markers, etc, etc.

And I love this company called metametrix.com. They have amazing tests. They’re just a highly recommended company. You can just have your doctor write you a prescription for a test and if he doesn’t have an account with them or isn’t familiar with them, go to the website and familiarize yourself with those tests because they are fantastic. However, I realize medical testing is not feasible for everyone. A lot of people don’t have insurance and even if they do, they can’t afford all the copayments for all these tests. So, I recommend learning to listen to your body. If your body is craving a food, not flour or sugar, these are not nutritionally required.

But if you’re craving a food or you’re dreaming a lot of a food not on your diet, this means that you need that food nutritionally. The body is a brilliant microcomputer that urges you to eat foods that it needs nutritionally at a given moment. So, I want you to really work to pay attention to that. So if you have food cravings for healthy foods that are not on your diet, if you have low energy, if you become depressed even though your life is great, or unlike yourself mentally, if you develop a chronic illness or even just don’t feel like you used to, do not ignore your body’s cries for help. It’s all too easy to attribute subtle changes in mood or energy levels, pain or illness to other things besides diet. Additionally, many people who are fanatical about their diet get stuck on the idea of a diet or the ideology or lifestyle while their body is completely falling apart.

I mean, I have read about this so much with people on a vegan diet or a raw food diet. And I experienced this myself. I kind of ignored my body until I just couldn’t take it anymore. I didn’t have any energy. I had brain fog. And that’s what happened when I was vegan. So I decided to go to my doctor and figure out what was wrong. The doctor didn’t tell me this but I was very surprised to learn in doing a little bit of research that it was in fact my diet that was causing all my health problem.

So, I urge you to switch gears and listen to your body. The fact of the matter is, that people who eat a diet that’s right for them, are generally mentally healthy, they have a healthy weight, they have radiant eyes and skin and hair, they’re free from health problems and they get straight A’s on their medical tests. The proof is in the pudding.

So, thank you so much for listening. I hope this clarifies any confusion you have about nutrition. And please, anyone out there, if you have any questions, just feel free to call in the next few minutes and I’ll answer your questions live on the air. And also please if you like what you’ve heard today, please subscribe to the show on blogtalkradio.com/liveto110. And also I’m on Facebook and Twitter. You can find me on Facebook and Twitter @wendyLiveto110.

And please join me next week, next Saturday at 3 p.m. I’m going to be interviewing Nikki Moses, all about Nutritional Balancing with hair mineral analysis. It’s going to be a fantastic show. And thank you so much for joining me. I have had a great time trying to teach you about health and nutrition. You can find me Wendy Myers on myersdetox.com™. I have a weekly blog and with a video every week that I put out every Saturday. So, please go there if you want to learn all about health and nutrition, detoxing, weight loss, and all kinds of other stuff, toxins and what not. So, thank you so much for listening and have a fantastic day.