FAT: A Documentary 2

Camera speed, Vinnie 4. Take one, Mark.

The 20th Century gave us so many misconceptions when it came to health.

One egg equals five cigarettes.

Eggs cannot legally even be called safe.

Cutting down on meat is a good idea.

So, is the pendulum swinging back

in the opposite direction?

Where are we since the last movie came out?

Is there progress?

Has meat made a comeback?

In some cases, I can say yes.

I swear by the ketogenic diet.

I hear more doctors talking about it.

The low carbohydrate keto community is based on science.

And I can see a few things moving in a direction

that people want to see it move into.

There is a bottom-up revolution going on.

But then I see the other side of it.

There was another vegan propaganda movie

that came out in this past year.

Surprise, surprise, there was a product hooked to it.

The impossible burger is the world's only burger

that looks, handles, smells, cooks and tastes

like ground beef from cows.

People are becoming guinea pigs.

Completely replace animals

as a food production technology by 2035.

InFat, part one, we talked about the war for information.

But I actually think we also live in a war with ourselves.

It's almost like we're gaming the system of our own bodies.

We're trying to get our system to do

what it's not supposed to do.

"Eat this, eat that, don't eat this, don't eat that."

Our program is known as a starch-based diet.

"Take this supplement,

"it'll make your muscles grow bigger."

We have more questions than ever.

And the world always speeds up

and it gets more frenzied all the time,

and sometimes even people who are so-called experts

don't know what's going on.

You suck it all up.

Mmm.

"This study says this."

"That study says that."

"Well, that study wasn't done correctly."

"This is healthy."

"That's not healthy."

The answers we're searching for

seem to have these long winding roads

that eventually lead to nothing.

But maybe it doesn't have to be so hard.

In this movie we're going to expand

on what we talked about in Fat, part one.

We're going to talk to the same experts you saw before.

-But let them stretch out a little bit.

-Great. We're going to discuss

why some of the things we believe are wrong.

Fat tends to cause you to be fat.

We're going to also get into why

some of these things are right.

Based on the research,

we cannot say with any certainty

that eating red or processed meat

causes cancer, diabetes or heart disease.

And also why there's so much confusion between the two.

It doesn't have to be that divisive.

My name is Nina Teicholz. I'm a science journalist

and author of book called The Big Fat Surprise.

I'm also the executive director of a group

called the Nutrition Coalition,

which aims to ensure

that our nutrition policy is evidence-based.

Nina Teicholz was a one-time vegan.

She crossed over. She crossed the aisle.

And that led her into ten years of research.

She went through all the papers,

she went through all the studies

to come back to figure out where we had gone wrong.

And it's the work like her book,

The Big Fat Surprise,

that has led a lot of this pendulum swing,

in my opinion, to start moving in the right direction.

I got into this field just completely by accident.

I was doing a series of investigative food articles

for G ourmetmagazine

and one of them that was assigned to me

was on trans fats.

Well, what are trans fats? I had no idea.

Researching that story

really plunged me into the whole world of dietary fat,

which is the subject that Americans and nutrition

have obsessed about most.

And that really led me down the rabbit hole.

For nearly a decade,

I researched everything I could find

about dietary fat and cholesterol.

When I started doing my research,

I couldn't believe the kind of reactions

that I got from interviewing scientists.

I mean, I'm the daughter of a scientist

and in my father's "dreams" journal,

if you open up, there are math equations.

I always thought that science was full of people like him,

who rationally, soberly, would discuss interesting ideas

and consider other ideas and change their minds

based on the scientific observations.

And instead, in nutrition science,

I couldn't believe what I found.

People who were afraid to talk to me.

People who said,

"If you're going to take that line on dietary fat, I can't even talk to you."

There is some huge story here.

If people are afraid to talk to me,

that means there's a really big story here.

Saturated fats, butter, lard, cheese,

fatty beef and poultry with the skin on,

all said to be bad for your heart,

but you should replace most saturated fats

with more monounsaturated healthy fats

which help reduce your risk of heart attack and stroke.

Limit red meat, dark poultry meat,

or poultry with the skin on

to a serving the size of a deck of cards per day.

In good science, you try to do everything you can

not to go public prematurely

because as soon as you go public,

as soon as you claim you've discovered something you haven't

or you've realized something

that you don't have evidence to support,

all these consequences kick in

and make it virtually impossible to back out of.

My name's Gary Taubes,

I'm an investigative journalist,

co-founder of a not for profit research organization

called the Nutrition Science Initiative,

author of Good Calories, Bad Calories

and Why We Get Fat, of The Case Against Sugar.

Gary Taubes is largely considered a lightning rod.

Gary has never shied away from media.

He will go up against anyone

because what he has on his side is a little thing called facts.

I often asked myself when I was writing Good Calories, Bad Calories,

it's like, I have friends

who sort of have conspiratorial turns of mind

where they think people do things

because they're venal and they're getting paid by industry.

And I just think, "I don't see any conspiracy there."

I don't really think the industry

had much to do with that.

The food industry was given

this enormous gift of this bad science.

And these people just literally could not have caused more harm

if there had been a conspiracy.

At least if there had been a conspiracy,

enterprising Washington Postreporters

could have interviewed

the right people in garages in Washington and exposed it.

My name is Dr. Eric Westman.

I'm an associate professor of medicine

at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina.

The US government got involved

in creating guidelines for what people should eat.

And it was not based on science.

What can you say about Eric Westman?

You know, the original Atkins Diet

has been around since the early 1970s.

But when they wanted to update it,

they had to find a doctor to write that.

Eric Westman is that guy.

He wrote The New Atkins for the New You.

He also started his own little obesity clinic

over on the east coast.

The guy is just phenomenal.

I was involved in research communities

where we would look at a guideline

and see that as a straw man,

as something to either prove or disprove.

So unfortunately, the research

that was going to support

and back up the low fat guideline

never proved that it was healthy.

What's the information people are getting about their health,

because everybody wants to know what does it mean to be healthy?

And that's sucha difficult question to answer.

They're interested in their health,

they've been searching for answers.

And they found an answer

that has actually done them more harm than good in the long run.

Bret Scher was this great guy I met

when he came on my Fitness Confidentialpodcast.

And just fell in love with this guy.

He's a cardiologist

who doesn't believe that red meat will kill you.

He also feels the same way about saturated fat and cholesterol,

which is a paradigm shift when you think about it

because there are not many cardiologists out there

that are thinking that way.

Hormones in our body play a huge role.

So, things that raise our insulin