The Ledger, every show

“I don't believe nutrition science is a functioning science. That it lacks many of the characteristics that a functioning science has to have, particularly the sort of critical, rigorous back and forth between scientists where they're attacking each other's ide…”

“Very difficult, if not impossible, to do right, and so what the nutrition and public health research communities did is they just lowered their standards for what they would consider reliable knowledge, and this just became sort of, ah, inculcated throughout t…”

“And, you know, we end up in a situation today where we have, you know, these massive, unprecedented epidemics of obesity and diabetes and related diseases, and the medical public health community has no idea, almost literally no idea what to do about it, and e…”

“This idea that excess calories is what makes us fat, Is the, and I, I'm embarrassed that I ever, never thought of this before. It's logically equivalent to saying, you know, excess money makes us rich. Or I don't know, scoring excess points in a football game …”

“You add fiber, you can slow down the digestion of the carbohydrates. You can even slow down the digestion of the sugars. So that would probably help, but you've paid attention to the wrong thing. It's not the absence of the fiber. It's the presence of those ot…”

“And if anything, at this point in time, we have done more harm than good.”

“Even type two diabetes was irreversible. Once on insulin, always on insulin, basically, until you get taken down by the side effects. And now people are showing that on these diets, and maybe others as well, but they're showing that this is a reversible diseas…”

“Easiest way to think about it is, I don't eat grains and starches and sugars anymore, because I think they make me fat and unhealthy, and I replace them for the most part with You know, fat animal products, so not good for the animals, but I think it's good fo…”

“Whatever causes insulin resistance causes obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, stroke, cancer, Alzheimer's, virtually every chronic disease has a link to insulin resistance, and the best research on what causes insulin resistance suggests tha…”

“By the 19 sixties, the biochemistry had pretty clearly worked out that when you dump fructose on the liver, it converts it to fat. And on the other side, you'd have these insulin resistance researchers saying, hey, insulin resistance seems to be caused by the …”

“And in animals at least, so rats and mice, we could do these experiments, you could demonstrate that they are, they will be more addicted to sugar than to cocaine or heroin, so these experiments Experiments, some of them were done in France, are sort of perver…”

“By the early 19 sixties, it was clear that insulin, the hormone insulin, was the primary regulator of fat accumulation in the human body.”

“The medical textbook, the most seminal textbook, and the Harrison's Principles of Medicine, I think it's called, and the chapter on obesity is written by the, you know, a very, very smart researcher named Jeff Flyer, who just, until recently, was dean of Harva…”

“Unlike the tobacco industry, so the tobacco industry's job was to somehow try to convince the world that the research community was wrong, and to sow confusion about what the research community was saying. What the sugar industry had to do was remind the resea…”

“Inuits near the Arctic Circle or Native Americans or First Nations people or you know, African populations or South Pacific Islanders and Middle Eastern populations or Southeast Asians, they all Experience obesity and diabetes epidemics when their environment …”

“In the U.S., and according to the Centers for Disease Control in the U.S., since the late 19 fifties, diabetes prevalence has increased 700%.”

“The Director General of the UN, a woman named Margaret Chan, a year ago referred to them as slow motion disasters, and she predicted, this was fascinating, this was at a keynote address of the National Academies of Medicine in Washington, and she gave a number…”

“And you find out, for instance, in the U.S. That diabetes rates, ah, in, were virtually nonexistent, even though it was a very, a relatively easy disease to diagnose You saw very little sign of it pre-eighteen 50, and even, for the most part, pre-eighteen seve…”

“Nutrition science from the 18 sixties to the 19 twenties was completely dominated by, as all sciences are, by what they could measure, the technologies available to make observations, and all they had were they had devices called calorimeters, Where they can m…”

“The German and Austrian clinicians, and Germany and Austria was, you know, these people were doing far and away the best medical science in the world at the time, and they pioneered all the fields of science relevant to Obesity, so metabolism, genetics endocri…”

“If we spend one day's worth of medical costs, I think we could probably answer every one of these studies.”

“Sugar over the course of the 19th century went from being a sort of expensive luxury in the beginning of the 19th century when Americans, for instance, probably consumed less than in the neighborhood of five pounds per person per year. So that's the equivalent…”

“Obesity and diabetes cost, the healthcare system in the U.S., the estimate is a billion dollars in direct medical costs a day.”

“Sugar's always been considered a painkiller, and actually entered Europe in the 1314 century, or 12th post-Crusades, more as a medicinal, and perceived as having medicinal uses, than as a food or a spice.”