VIDEO - Georgia Ede - Presentation (Denver 2019) Dr. Georgia Ede: - - PDF document

VIDEO - Georgia Ede - Presentation (Denver 2019)

• Dr. Georgia Ede: This presentation, grew out of a critique I wrote for Psychology

Today, of the EAT Lancet Report, which came out in January of this year, and it's essentially a document which seeks to control the way all of us eat. So before we get started, just to disclose... which I think everyone investing in nutrition should disclose their biases and conflicts of interest... I have no financial conflicts of interest, but a girl can dream. I am not funded by the meat industry, even though I am convinced by the science that meat, seafood and poultry belong in a healthy diet. So, this report... 47 pages is entitled "Food in the Anthropocene" by the Lancet commission on healthy diets. So, its lead author was Professor Walter Willet, of Harvard School of Public Health, and it envisions a great food transformation, which seeks to feed a growing global population, a diet, a healthy diet that will do minimal damage to the planet. So, that's what we all want, we all want that, it's really really important for us to understand this document, but before we can do that, we have to first understand, what is EAT , what is Lancet and what in the world is the Anthropocene. So, EAT is a non-profit start up dedicated to transforming our global food system through sound science, inpatient disruption and noble partnerships. The Lancet is one of the world's

• ldest and most respected medical journals and it commissioned this report.

The Anthropocene, if you ask me, is a pretentious word laid out as an unwelcome mat basically to say, don't bother trying to understand what's in this report... you won't understand it, let us just explain it to you and we'll tell you what to do. But, if like me, you didn't know what this word meant, this is the definition... the current geological age, viewed as the period during which human activity has been a dominant influence on climate and the environment. So, what does EAT Lancet propose we do about this predicament in which we may have some negative impacts on our environment? This is their great food transformation and its cornerstone is the minimization of... or complete elimination

• f all animal foods. In this diet it's okay to eat zero grams of all animal foods, if you

wish, but if you do choose to include some animal foods in your diet, you may have, up to three ounces, combined of all animal foods, so meat, seafood and poultry, etc...

and when it comes to red meat in particular, you are allowed 7 g per day, or one quarter of an ounce. So, according to EAT Lancet, if you eat two or more of these bad boys, you've shaved years off your life. So after this proclamation was issued, there was a worldwide media blitz and articles are still being published every single day and most of these articles essentially echo the main message of the report without scrutinizing its content and that's a real mistake because this report is not your average nutrition study to be debunked. This is actually, a grand masterplan to control the way all the Earthlings eat. So a quote, "The scale of change to the food system is unlikely to be successful, if left to the individual or the whim of consumer choice", and they intend to use every lever of power available to them, to implement their mission. Quote "By contrast, hard policy interventions include laws, "fiscal measures, subsidies and penalties, trade configuration and other economic and structural measures." So, that's what inpatient disruption means to them. So regardless of whether or not you eat meat, or whether you're low-carb or high- carb, a document this authoritarian really deserves our attention. If you just look at the cover of the report or just read the media headlines you will be left with this impression that meat is a dangerous-- dangerous for the environment and dangerous for our health. But if you dare to open this report, what you will actually find is an airtight case for meat as an essential component of a healthy diet. Surprise! So, one of the foundations of EAT Lancet is supposed to be sound science. So, what kind of science did the commission use? Well, there are lots of different types of evidence to choose from and they did use various kinds. Most scientists would say that experimental evidence where you're actually changing someone's diet and then seeing what happens... but that maybe a better type of evidence than epidemiological evidence, which Robb did such a beautiful job of describing, and-- so most people think that randomized control trials, or RCT's, are a superior form of evidence to some other types of evidence. Now RCT's have their problems too, they're not perfect, no study is perfect. But the EAT Lancet commission is biased heavily towards epidemiological studies and epidemiological studies are not experiments, they do not change foods and find out what happens. Instead they administer these food frequency questionnaires, or FFQ's, to people, and they gather the answers and then they look for patterns in the answers to try to guess what types of foods cause what types of diseases.

Now, these types of studies have been increasingly discredited by very reputable scientists, but yet they still form the lion share of nutrition studies that we see in the

• headlines. And this particular methodology as it applies to nutrition was essentially

invented by Professor Walter Willet, the lead author of this report. So, these food frequency questionnaires deserve to be exposed. So, here is an actual question, from an actual food frequency questionnaire; "Over the past 12 months: How often did you drink milk as a beverage? "Not in coffee, not in cereal, please include chocolate milk and hot chocolate." So, you know, you can choose once a month or less, two to three times a day, five to six times a week, and then what kind

• f milk did you usually drink... you have to remember what percent.

So, how many of you could answer this question, easily? Most people can't remember what they ate three days ago, let alone twelve months ago, and notice what's missing here... you're not allowed to say, "I don't know, I don't remember", or you're not allowed to say, "I gave up milk and dairy in August", or you know you're not allowed to say, "You've got to be kidding me!" So, these are the kinds of... excuse me, these are the kinds of study, these are the kinds of data... your answers become the data, your wild guesses become the data that these scientific studies are based on, and furthermore, this particular food frequency questionnaire contains 66 questions and some of them contain a few more than that, but the typical modern diet contains thousands of ingredients. It's really impossible to imagine being able to construct a questionnaire capable of capturing that kind of complexity. So, I would argue not that some epi studies give weak results, or the associations aren't strong enough or this or that, but there's no data to begin with. These studies should not be used to form public policy. They can be used to generate hypotheses, guesses, when they're very well constructed, guesses about which foods might cause which diseases, and then those need to be tested in clinical trials. So, you know, one of the other things that happens, with looking at scientific studies, we ignore all of the other kinds of evidence available and this is where I spend a lot of my time, is reading about other types of science, to try to figure out what's going on because you can't rely on epidemiology. And so, the vast majority of the time, the hypotheses, the guesses, the people who use this kind of methodology, the guesses they come up with fly in the face of biology and find there's every other type of evidence available. This is why I think nutrition epidemiology is really mythology, because when they actually get around to testing these guesses in clinical trials, they're wrong more than

80% of the time. So you would actually be better off flipping a coin, to guess which foods cause which diseases. Does that sound scientific to you? So you know we are going to have to crack open this report and look and see what's inside and I think... we need to look at the different ways, some examples, in their words, of how the authors could twist pro meat science, into anti meat

• recommendations. This would be a lot of fun. So, what do they think about protein?

Well, there were some nutrition epidemiological studies that found that red meat increased the risk of death when those studies were conducted in the U.S. and when they were conducted in Europe. But the epi studies from Asia found that red meat, especially pork, did not increase the risk of death. So what do you do when your favorite methodology comes out with two different answers? Well, you dismiss the answer you don't like, and you say, "Huh, maybe the risk didn't show up in Asians... as this is literally what they said, "They haven't been rich long enough to afford meat for long enough, for the risk to show up yet." So, you know, not true... very interesting. They have an entire section in their report dedicated to red meat and they blame it for everything from heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes, obesity, cancer and early death. And they list 16 references in this section, and every single one is an epidemiological study, but meanwhile in sub- Saharan Africa the real world, quote... "Growing children often do not obtain adequate nutrients from plant source foods alone. "Promotion of animal source foods for children including livestock products can improve dietary quality, micro nutrient intake, nutrients status and overall health". That's a quote from the report. So, red meat on planet epidemiology is an apocalypse

• n a plate. How do they come up with these specific numbers, 7 grams of this and 31

grams of that? Well, they aknowledged there was some wiggle room there, they say, "We have a high level of scientific certainty "about the overall direction and magnitude of the associations, of a considerable uncertainty exists around detailed quantifications." "Since consumption of poultry has been associated with better health

• utcomes than has red meat, we have concluded that consumption of poultry is zero g

per day to about 58 g per day." It's the illusion of precision; they actually have no idea what they are talking about. So, they are conflicted about poultry... what do they think about eggs? Well, to their credit they think eggs are nutritious. "Eggs are a widely available source of high- quality protein and other essential nutrients needed to support rapid growth." In large prospective, epi studies, high consumption of eggs up to one a day has not been associated with increased risk of heart disease, except in people with diabetes.

"However in low income countries, "replacing calories from a staple starchy food with an egg "can substantially improve the nutritional quality of a child's diet, and reduce stunting", [randomized control trial]. So how much eggs do they recommend? We guess an intake of eggs of about 13 per day or about one and a half eggs per week, for the reference diet, but higher intake might be beneficial for lower income populations with poor dietary quality. Why recommend one and a half eggs per week when your own epidemiological studies say that up to seven eggs per week is fine? And if you're worried about the people with diabetes, why not just say except in people with diabetes? And that might actually make sense, except for these six randomized controlled trials showing specifically that eggs in people with diabetes are perfectly safe? Now, this did not make it somehow into the report, maybe they didn't have enough room to include it, I don't know. So, you know they're not really fans of red meat, poultry, eggs... how do they feel about protein in general? "Protein quality, reflects amino acid composition and animal sources of protein are of higher quality, than most plant sources." I completely agree. "High quality protein is particularly important "for growth of infants and young children "and possibly in older people losing muscle mass in later life. " However a mix of amino acids that maximally stimulates cell replication and growth "might not be optimal throughout most of adult life, because rapid cell replication can increase cancer risk." Translation... complete proteins are good because they are healthy and essential and only animal proteins are complete and most plant proteins are incomplete, so complete proteins are good... But complete proteins are bad because they "cause cancer". And you know I've heard every anti-meat argument there is, every meat causes cancer argument there is, but I've never heard this one. So, I wanted to know where they got that information. It was a single source cited and it was this paper, which has-- it's a paper about the cell mutation theory of cancer, that mutations cause cancer, and in their report the words protein, amino acids and meat show up a grand total of zero times. This paper is not about protein of any kind, meaty or otherwise causing cancer. The commissioners, to their credit, repeatedly acknowledge that animal foods are inferior sources of nutrients compared to plant foods and that it's harder to get your nutrients from a plant- based diet. In pregnant women, they say, inclusion of some animal source foods in maternal diets is widely considered important for fetal growth, increased iron requirements, and especially during third trimester evidence suggests

that balanced vegetarian diets can support healthy fetal development with the caveat that strict vegan diets require supplements of B12. And adolescent women, young girls, teenagers, adolescent girls are at risk of iron deficiency because of rapid growth combined with menstrual losses. Menstrual losses have sometimes been a rationale for increased consumption of red meat, but multi- vitamin or multi-mineral preparation provide an alternative, that is less expensive, without the adverse consequences of high red meat intake. Now if you really believe that red meat is dangerous, has adverse consequences, which is only true on plant epidemiology, why not recommend to these dear women, a different type of animal food, like oysters or chicken liver or duck? So, in changing to their diet, the commission claims that "the adequacy of most micro-nutrients increases, including several essential ones, iron, zinc, folate, vitamin A, as well as calcium, the only exception is vitamin B12 that is low in animal-based diets. Supplementation of fortification with B12 and possibly B2 might be necessary in some circumstances." So this statement really downplays the nutrient deficiency risks of plant-based diets... not only, do iron, zinc and vitamin A come in the wrong forms in plant booth, and they are harder for us to use, but they plant-based diets are missing other nutrients as well, vitamin K2, the correct form of Omega 3's. I think that they don't really understand that you have to also look at bio availability, not just-- just because food contains a nutrient does not mean necessarily that you can access it well. But you know, essentially, they're just saying, their argument is, yes, we know that maybe our diets are less good at giving nutrients, but just take supplements. But the vitamin B12 is a major issue... it's really, I think our best argument for explaining to anybody why we can say for sure that our ancestors, all of them, ate animal foods. Because, at least until the 1950's when B12 supplements were invented you just couldn't have survived on a diet without animal foods, prior to that time. So, what did they think about fat? Well, the essential ones they like... Omega-3's are essential, fish has a high content of Omega-3 fatty acid, which have many essential roles; adequate intakes are essential for neural development, eating more than two servings of fish per week or taking fish

• il supplements during pregnancy is associated with improved child cognitive

performance, so Omega-3 is good. "Plant sources of alpha-linoleic acid-- sorry linolenic acid, can provide an alternative to Omega-3 fatty acids, but the quantity required is not clear."

Well, the reason for that is, the elephant in the room is that all Omega-3's are not created equal. You have... in plants and animals you have an Omega-3 called ALA, but the kinds of Omega-3's our bodies need are EPA and DHA, and it's very difficult for us to convert ALA into the EPA and DHA our bodies need, in some studies as low as a zero percent. So, what they're basically saying in their recommendations is this is their final, "About 28 g per day or one ounce of fish "can provide essential Omega-3 fatty acids. "Therefore we have used this intake for the reference diet. "We also suggest a range

• f zero to 100 g per day, because high intakes are associated with excellent health."

It's just you can't make this up. So basically, that's how they feel about essential fatty acids. How do they feel about all the other types of fat, including saturated fat? Well, evidence from prospective cohort, epi studies and randomized trials, the Women's Health Initiative has not suggested a benefit of reducing total fat intake. Translation, fat is fine, eat as much as you want, but wait... That would mean saturated fat is fine too... well we can't have that. Let's do something here. "Epidemiological evidence supports "a substantial reduced risk of cardio-vascular disease "by replacing saturated fat with unsaturated vegetable

• ils, especially those high in polyunstaturated, that include Omega-3 and Omega-6

fatty acids." Now, just a minute... this is an epidemiological study. Nobody replaced anything with anything. This was not an experiment. This replacement of saturated fat with unsaturated only happened in their

• imagination. So they go on to require that everybody have at least one and a half

tablespoons of... up to 6 tablespoons of unsaturated oil per day, divided equally between olive, soy, canola, sunflower and peanut. So, essentially, the majority of your fat intake should come from highly processed, industrially produced oils, very high in pro inflammatory Omega-6 fatty acids and containing the wrong form of Omega-3's. How about carbohydrates, their favorite macro nutrient? So, to their credit, they do acknowledge that insulin resistance exists. "In controlled feeding studies "high carbohydrate intake increases blood tri-glyceride concentrations, "reduces HTL, the so-called good cholesterol and increases blood pressure, especially in people with insulin resistance." "In a large controlled feeding trial, replacing carbohydrates iso calorically with protein reduced protein and blood liver concentration." So that was actually the Omniheart trial, which used a 50-50 mix of plant and animal protein, and they lowered the carb in the diet from 58% to 48% of calories per day.

The commission then goes on to simply ignore concerns about carbohydrate, it recommends a very high carbohydrate diet, and thanks to doctor Zoe Harcombe for this information, 330 carbs per day, on average, is what they recommend, 51% of calories, they really don't say what you should do if you have insulin resistance, so just don't worry about it. And they say that this diet is appropriate, it's intended for all healthy people over the age of two, but the problem is that most of us aren't healthy anymore and a recent study-- I mean this is true all over the world, but in a recent study it's been estimated that only one in eight Americans are metabolically healthy now. So, this diet, this high carbohydrate diet is dangerous for the vast majority of us. While they never come right out and say this, there's a drum beat in the background as you're reading it, that the less animal foods you eat the better, the more plants you eat the better and it's even okay to completely remove all animal foods from your diet. But the problem is throughout the report they acknowledge that their diet is insufficient for pregnant women, for babies, for growing children, for teenage women, for aging adults, for the malnourished and the impoverished, and it's inappropriate for anybody with insulin resistance. And everybody else has to

• supplement. They're basically saying that their diet is insufficient or inappropriate for

everyone, full stop. So then why is it that so many people continue to--? It's becoming more and more popular, more and more people are adopting plant-based diets every day, it's really interesting, and so that's why, you know, welcome to what I'm calling the "myths Anthropocene". The "myths Anthropocene" is the era of species self-hatred. You know we feel bad, we feel guilty, we think we're damaging the planet with every fork of food we're taking in because we think it's bad for animals, we think it's bad for the planet, and we-- I understand this emotional argument. So, the question is-- I'm convinced that their nutritional recommendations are not based on anything worthwhile, in fact it may be dangerous, but what about the sustainability argument? Now, I am not qualified in any way, shape or form to comment on sustainability, so I'll just show you a couple of really quick things. This is just one strip of-- this comes from table six in the report and bear with me for a second... Across the top you see all the different types of environmental outcomes that they were looking at, and then down there in the left you can see three different diets. The BAU diet or Business As Usual, their recommended reference, their average intake

diet that they're recommending, their reference diet and then a vegan diet on the

• bottom. So you can, you know, red is bad for the environment, yellow is a little better

and green is the best. So you can see way over on the left under greenhouse gases, the vegan diet they're projecting would be better for the planet, based on all kinds of really complicated

• things. So, I didn't know how to assess this, but Doctor Mitloehner, did take a look-- oh

and I want to show you one more thing. That's the entire table right there modified so you can really focus on things. So, as you go down this table, it's the same strip, but just each time they're making the production and waste management measures more and more strict, to try to really get-- to try to really improve the environment. So, as you see, as you go down the table, most of these blocks are still of solid color, which means except over in the left-hand side really, most of these environmental

• utcomes except greenhouse gases, do not improve, even under a vegan diet.

So, Doctor Mitloehner wrote to EAT Lancet, to enquire about how the greenhouse gas emissions were calculated and he received this remarkable reply from the science director at EAT Lancet: "The meat consumption limits proposed by the commission, were not set due to environmental considerations, but were solely in light of health recommendations, thus is not the diet to reduce climate change, but the diet to reduce the risk of premature mortality due to dietary related health causes." So, if by their own acknowledgement this diet is not the one that's intended to help the planet and by our-- hopefully we agree that it's not better for health, what is it really about? So the sustainability issue I want to call your attention to, but I didn't realize that Diana Rogers would be here in the audience, please consult her for her point of view, Nicolette Hahn Niman's excellent book, Doctor Frank Mitloehner, UC Davis, Peter Ballerstedt, who is here, a forage agronomist and Erica Hauver, who is also here, she is a sustainability advisor with many, many years of experience. Please seek out different points of view on this topic. So if it's not for people and the planet, who is this report really for? Well, remember those noble partnerships we talked about? In January, a couple of years ago, 2017, EAT co-launched FRESH, Food Reform for Sustainability Health, a global partnership of many corporations, about 32 now, and you'll notice that about 2/3 of these companies produce things like fertilizers, pesticides, processed foods, flavorings and additives. So, you can make of that what you will. So, you know, I think it's really important for us to question authority, you know, the EAT Lancet report is a well-orchestrated rallying cry to adopt a dangerously deficient planetary diet under the guise of

compassion and responsibility and health and it has what it takes to succeed. It has a unified appealing message, it has vast resources, powerful institutions and corporations behind it and a seemingly virtuous benevolent agenda which wards off criticism, whereas we people who believe in using nutrition science to value public health recommendations. Those of us in this community, the low-carb community, as well as other public health minded communities around the world, we have diverse messages, we don't have centralized funding, we have independent voices, and we have a seemingly risky controversial message which draws criticism. So, you know, there are many problems here, I feel that EAT Lancet is trying to capitalize on fear, guilt, miseducation and our addiction to processed foods. I mean vegan diets come with serious risks, they require incredibly careful planning. They make people dependent on experts, supplements and fortified foods, which by their nature, must be processed, because you can't fortify a whole food. So, this plan is disempowering, whereas those who profit from-- you know, those who profit from nutrition miseducation don't want you to know, is that nutrition is really simple... it's really simple. You eat whole foods... whole plants and animals....avoid everything else, you know, tweak for your food sensitivities, try low-carb for insulin resistance or any other strategies, it's really that simple. And I think that, what we need to do, you know we're kind of a herd of cats, we're kind of a rag tag fugitive fleet. And I really hope that we can find a way to coordinate

• ur efforts better because you know, even though I eat meat, I care about animals, I

care about the planet, I care about fellow human beings, I care about health and I just think that feed lots and industrial crop production, they're no good for animals, they're not good for the planet, they're certainly not good for us. There just has to be another way forward, so-- Thank you very much.