Comments on the Fat Summit, Day 5, Part 1

Published 2.4.2016
During the last week of January 2016, Mark Hyman hosted an online summit about fat designed mostly to tout his new book, Eat Fat, Get Thin.

What follows are some of my notes and observations made while listening to select talks on day 5. They are not meant to give precise details on each talk. Day 5 was the day I listened to the most talks, and so based on length, I am splitting day 5 commentary into two pieces. And despite saying previously that I would not, I did listen to part of the discussion with journalist turned lobbyist Nina Teicholz. As expected, it covered the same ground that all of her presentations do, but more on that below.

Michael F Roizen MD

• I know this name because he has authored the "You" book series with Dr Mehmet Oz. Unlike Oz though, he seems to still practice medicine. The "You" book that I own is You, on a Diet: The Owner's Manual for Waist Management.
• Roizen is on the staff at Cleveland Clinic and invited Hyman to join him there and set up the Clinic's new functional/integrative medicine program, which not everyone is thrilled with.
• Roizen and Hyman agree on 98% of nutritional things.
• Roizen likes the odd omega oils, specifically Omega 3 and Omega 9.
• The point of this talk is to discuss trimethylamine N-oxide (TMAO), which has been confirmed to cause inflammation. Other substances in meat that cause issue in large amounts are carnitine and choline, which is another strike against the Paleo diet. Paleo shills often tout choline as essential and a deficit in most people. Another case of too much is as bad or worse than too little.
• TMAO is related to cardio-vascular disease, cancer, dementia— basically everything bad that happens to aging humans.
• However, if you eat a lot of plants (as in whole food plant based vegan amounts of plants) then the meat (the example was steak, so they're talking red meat) didn't have the effect. The hypothesis is that a healthy gut flora (one grown with lots of plants) can handle the TMAO.
• The suggestion is that consuming extra virgin olive oil might help— or how about just eating less meat? The Cattlemen's Association won't like, but your health will.
• Nobody thinks eating processed food (and lunch meats and bacon are in that category) is a good idea.
• Roizen's recommendation is to eat less than 4 ounces of red meat each week. There is no mention if that includes pork or not. The focus is beef.
• Roizen compares saturated fat to COCAINE— says that the good effects only occur in short term studies, but looking at longer term the effects are bad for you… ESPECIALLY COCONUT OIL. Which is hilarious, because Hyman thinks coconut oil is the best oil there is.
• Animal studies show that coconut oil (actually all saturated fat) breaks down the blood brain barrier. There are no human studies. The blood brain barrier helps prevent inflammation; the more saturated fat consumed, the more the blood brain barrier breaks down. Doesn’t matter how long the fat chain are, which means that the medium chain fats of coconut oil are not magical, whatever Hyman and "paleo" diet shills think. It does make me wonder what happened in Terry Wahls trials with adding coconut oil to her protocol. If Roizen is correct, my bet is nothing good.
• Eating a lot of fiber (in other words PLANTS) offsets the bad effect of saturated fat.
• The kind of foods Roizen would eat to get saturated fat includes nuts and seeds. He agreed that replacing fat calories with simple, refined carbs is not a good idea, but refused to give, even a little, on his insistence that red meat consumption be less than 4 ounces a WEEK.
• Roizen's new book is about genetic expression based on food and habits and is called This Is Your Do-Over: The 7 Secrets to Losing Weight, Living Longer, and Getting a Second Chance at the Life You Want.
• Genes are not destiny.

Nina Teicholz, journalist/lobbyist

• Teicholz book, which she summarizes in Every. Single. Talk. she gives is The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet.
• I skipped most of the summary because I've heard it all before. If I ever choose to actually read the source material for these repetitive talks I'll go through her spiel with more specificity.
• Hyman read the book on a beach, which I found funny. Clearly her prose required no significant concentration or attention.
• Ancel Keys is the anti-christ to this woman, but if cardio-vascular disease began in the early 1900s (the college of Cardiologists was founded in the 1920s, prior to then there had been no reason to focus on heart health) and the suddenly rose in the 1950's then ANCEL KEYS CANNOT BE BLAMED.
• But she slanders him anyway, because reasoning is not Teicholz's strong suit. Reciting talking points appears to be though.
• Teicholz distinguishes herself by being the only speaker to INSIST that large amounts of butter and meat are essential to a healthy diet (earning her salary as a lobbyist).
• She admits under questioning that she makes no distinction between refined and unrefined carbs. Why? It gets in the way of the thesis she's pushing (which is obviously not what she said). Older studies might not draw a distinction, but certainly newer research does. She does not seem to be up to date on nutritional research. She doesn’t know the totality of the data, and certainly doesn't know it well enough to be challenged— even the mild challenges that Hyman made.
• Under that mild questioning though, Hyman does force her to reveal the truth, even if she herself can't admit it. Until 1900, the only fats used in any cooking were animal fats (at least in the US. I don't know the usage history of olive oil in the Mediterranean region). Heart disease was unknown during that time. There was NO medical specialty called cardiology, because there was no need. So what changed? Around 1900, industrial saturated fat (Crisco) came into being. It was marketed heavily to households and chefs— there was not processed food industry yet.
• Heart disease suddenly began to show up, 30+ years BEFORE ANCEL KEYS.
• The possibility exists that in fact, it WAS saturated fats that caused heart disease, but that those fats were industrially created saturated fats, which history has shown were solid at room temperature because of trans-fatty acids (trans fats). And nobody now thinks that trans fats were a good idea.
• The discussion about seed oils was interesting, because people still don't fry using animal fats, they use poly-unsaturated fats instead. And at high temperates (though it is both TIME and temperature dependent, another nuance Teicholz clearly does not comprehend) poly-unsaturated oxidize and break down. The by products of these processes are also not healthy. The big issue here though is restaurant use rather than home use because restaurants can't afford to replace the oil in the deep fryer daily, and so food is fried in these oxidized oils.
• Plant sources of saturated include palm oil and coconut oil, both of which are more expensive than seed oils. Not sure how the price of beef fat (which is now used in other applications) would compare. McDonald's used to fry its fries in beef tallow. I'm old enough to remember when they started to use vegetable oils rather than beef tallow.
• Teicholz claims that use of seed oils in restaurants causes equipment issues and incidents of "spontaneous combustion" in laundry trucks. Both claims should be verifiable, and would have to be before I'd accept their veracity given this women's track record with facts. It does seem to be a good idea to avoid anything deep fried in a restaurant. Frying at home with fresh oil is probably okay no matter which oil you use, but I am considering switching either to coconut oil, olive oil or beef fat (though we seldom have enough of this) for frying.

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