https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=5sxEAwWeZc8
So let me step sideways here for a moment. I’d like to talk about the food pyramid with you. And so I’m going to lay a little bit out about my understanding of the food pyramid and how it came about. And then we could talk about the standard Western diet and its relationship to insulin resistance and obesity. So my understanding is that the food pyramid was actually produced by, not by scientists or by MDs, although there were some MDs who were consulting who were mostly ignored, but by the Department of Agriculture. And it was a marketing scheme essentially. And that the consequence of the marketing scheme was that people were enticed and convinced to rely primarily on carbohydrates for their nutritional necessities. And perhaps carbohydrates at far too excess a level. Now, carbohydrates are transmuted into glucose during metabolism and we eat way more carbohydrates that we need to produce the amount of glucose that we need. Now, people have been getting fatter in a catastrophic way for about four or five decades. And that’s really no small part since the introduction of the food pyramid. Now, I do understand that part of the reason the Department of Agriculture did this was because carbohydrates, and this was particularly true of corn syrup, do provide a very inexpensive source of calories. And if you’re dirt poor and you don’t have enough to eat, I mean, just getting enough calories period is of vital importance. Not everybody can afford steak, for example, or more expensive foods of that type, but virtually everyone poor or not in the West can afford basic carbohydrates. But now we’re in such… But having said that, I also have read, and I think it’s valid, that there was early evidence that this heavy carbohydrate loaded diet that was being prescribed was going to increase obesity and diabetes, which it’s done at a level that makes the pandemic look like absolutely nothing. And this is still being pushed forward by people who are hypothetically on the nutritional front. So two questions. What’s your understanding of the derivation of the food pyramid? And what do you think about its recommendations for the typical diet? So I think before getting to that, there’s a broader point I want to touch on that you just sort of alluded to, which is what is the system optimizing for? So in the book, I talk about the standard American diet, which I forever abbreviate as the SAD. And the standard American diet is effectively, with or without food pyramid, the standard American diet is what is killing people. And so the question is, where did the standard American diet come from? The standard American diet was nothing more than the solution to a business problem. So the business problem was we need something where we can produce lots of food. So you had to have this quantity issue, right? So that gets to part of the problem, right? We have too many people at the time who are undernourished. We can’t have that anymore. Everyone needs to be adequately nourished. So we need scale. The next thing is exactly your point. It can’t cost too much. So we have to be able to do it at scale and it has to be cheap. The third question or problem statement was it has to be non-perishable and portable, right? So you can’t have abundant food if it needs to be consumed 10 minutes after it’s made. So it has to be sort of non-perishable. The fourth and final parameter, I guess, there would be it has to taste really good. We have to make food very palatable. This, again, is just part of a business and marketing strategy. And what I argue, I guess, is that the solution to those four things is what we have today. Like, when you walk through a grocery store, all you’re looking at is the solution space to a problem statement called those four questions and it’s called the standard American diet. Now, whether or not a pyramid, I’m going to just argue that 95% of people, if they go through life eating the standard American diet with no attention to how much of it they eat or maybe certain things in it that they shouldn’t eat are going to be unhealthy. There just aren’t that many people that have the genes to avoid the deleterious consequences of the standard American diet left unchecked. And therefore, yeah. Well, so that was the least conspiratorial account of the origin of the American diet that I’ve heard. And that’s fine. That’s perfectly appropriate. I mean, I do think that we could give the devil is due and say the consequences that we have today of this epidemic of obesity was in fact the consequence of solving a problem too effectively. I mean, the middle of supermarkets, the outside edges of supermarkets don’t contain generally highly processed carbohydrates, let’s say, but the center does. And they are cheap and they are delicious and they are easily provided and they are portable. And so that did solve the problem of under nutrition on the pure caloric front. So we’re victims of our own success in that sense. And I suppose it’s perfectly reasonable to dispense with the accusations that the food pyramid was nothing but a marketing scheme because it did have to solve these four problems that you described and did so. Yeah. I mean, I think what I want, I certainly don’t want to give the food industry a pass. I mean, we can certainly delve into that, which is to say there is no question that data have been suppressed, right? There’s no question that we’re not having an honest discussion about the following. So are all calories created equal from an energy balance standpoint? Sure. At an isocaloric level, if I give you a thousand calories of Coca-Cola versus a thousand calories of baked potatoes versus a thousand calories of steak, it will have the same impact on your energy balance. But it won’t have the same impact on your appetite and your ability to subsequently eat. I mean, to me, that’s the most, I think, probably offensive aspect of where the food industry has failed, right? So the food industry didn’t set out to kill people any more than the tobacco industry did. Where these people are effectively liable is in that they’re not honest about the discussion until it becomes too late. And the reality of it is junk food, I think, hijacks your normal appetite centers. And I know people who are very good at working within those confines. So I know people who can eat junk food in small amounts and continue to eat nutritious food and stay in overall energy balance. They can track their calories perfectly and they can have a couple of Oreos and some ice cream here and there and drink a soda here and there and they’re all fine. What I can just tell you clinically, taking care of actual people who are not robots, on average, more people than not struggle with that. And with the introduction of these very hyper palatable foods that kind of hijack your appetite, it tends to produce overeating. And ultimately, that’s the problem at hand here. When people overeat from whichever part of the pyramid they’re going to overeat from, we’re going to get down that whole cascade we just spoke about. It just so happens that I think the things at the bottom of the pyramid are the things that are making it easier for you to be disconnected from the true driver of appetite. And there are lots of hypotheses here, right? There are some hypotheses that we are kind of hardwired to get a certain amount of nutrient value. And as the nutrient value of our food deteriorates, we have to eat more food. We have to eat more calories to get the certain nutrient density. There are people who argue we’re hardwired to get a certain amount of protein. And as we’re diluting protein content in food, we’re eating more calories to get food. In other words, and by the way, I don’t think any one of these particularly is necessarily the explanation. My guess is it could be a lot of the above, but it’s probably the case that we are opportunistic omnivores, right? We grew up, we evolved eating pretty much anything we could, but we didn’t eat that much of it because we didn’t really have that much of it and we were wildly active. When you eliminate those two consequences, being opportunistic omnivores is not working for most of us. We have to be more selective to push back against the amazing success of our civilization.