So I did a video recently and it was on Penn Jillette of Penn & Teller. Penn lost
a hundred pounds in 85 days eating nothing but potatoes. Now you have to ask,
well you know, did it create hazards for his health? He'd lost a hundred pounds
but here's one of the things that came up. I was gonna show - I have to apologize
some what. I was going to show you the com - one of the comments. One of the
fellows, one of the viewers said, I can't believe you liked this video, I can't
believe you like this diet. You said, you dislike this potato diet
less than some others so that means you're a big fan of it; and I had just
gotten through saying I had responded to his original comment that I'm - I don't
prescribe the potato diet. I'm not a major fan of the mono diets
however, eating is a psychological thing and Penn is in a whole different space
now in terms of his health. A hundred pounds less, he's a lot healthier. If the -
why didn't I show those - those comments? Here was the bottom line.
I was planning on it. You know, it's good to keep a little spice and debate going
on a channel because people can debate iron sharpens iron. People begin to
understand and focus on details but I had to delete it and here's why. The
guy's name was "Vegans are Idiots" and I just couldn't take that. That's just - his
name was inappropriate in terms of appropriate respect for others; and
besides that I know some a lot of vegans- Joel Khan for example. Joel can get
flippant and hey, you know, Joel can be job but he's anything but an idiot. Joel
is a very smart guy. So don't tell me vegans are - all vegans are idiots
and don't tell me that Penn Jillette is in worse health than he was a hundred
pounds ago. Now I'll cover a little bit more about this - this focus; but let's go
back to - to the original - one of the original points. I did a video a few
weeks ago about the biggest diet mistakes and one of my major points was,
yes, we all have our opinions in theories about diets but food selection, we throw
the baby out with the bathwater. We get, like I said, too much heat not enough
light on this situation sometimes. How did I come up with these? Well hundreds
and thousands of patients and actually supervising hundreds and even thousands
of docs, internists, family practitioners mostly. Mistake number 1: not knowing
that you cannot metabolize. Your body does not metabolize. One of the 3
macronutrients. In other words that you have insulin resistance, pre-diabetes
metabolic syndrome or even full-blown diabetes. So therefore you don't know
that you have it and you just eat plenty of carbs and glycemic carbs- rice, pastas,
sugars, you name it, fruit juices, sodas. That is one of the major problems you
made. All those bad choices but the choices weren't is those choices were
driven by your lack of knowledge of your own body.
Nobody's - most people are not focusing on whether or not they have insulin
resistance and as I've shown in multiple other videos it depends on who you look
at but and who you believe but insulin resistance is very common. So if you
believe Jenny Rules for example and some of the other folks in the diabetes world
they would say, by the time our age 60, half of us have at least insulin
resistance. I think that's way too few. If you believe the UCLA, University
of California in LA, School of Public Health they would say over half of us by
the time were aged 30 have insulin resistance and a lot of people would
agree with that. Josef Kraft who wrote the book The
Diabetes Epidemic would probably say, even that's too few and I would
agree with him. Those numbers for - that came out of UCLA showing half over half
of adults 30 years and older had insulin resistance. Those numbers came from
looking at a couple of different things; Hemoglobin A1c and fasting blood glucose.
So again, major lack of data there. None of them are based on OGTT. None of them
are based on taking a challenge with any kind of glucose. None of them are based
on an insulin survey. So again mistake number 1 is, not
knowing that you can't metabolize carbs. How does it happen? You never looked. You
didn't even get a hemoglobin A1c. Maybe you did. Maybe you looked at a fasting
glucose and you said, well it's 95 I'm ok, big problem; but know what that I've
already done that video. This is a different video and this is on mistake no. 2. Mistake no. 2 is too much focus
diet. Whether it's carb, keto, paleo, the 5:2 diet, Jimmy Kimmel's diet, eating
clean. Whatever that means; and again I've studied that. I've done
videos on it. I still didn't know what it meant when I studied it, clean. All of
that and not enough focus on BMI or fat mass. Let's talk about that for a minute.
So back in, you look at this. This was in CNN December 20th of 2018 and before we
go too far down that road of BMI and you say and look, BMI is a flawed number. I
know that. I've done 3 videos on it and this is one of them. Relative fat
mass would be a lot better because we want to look at the
percentage of our body fat that is - of our body that is fat mass. Now, mm-hmm why
don't we do that? Well it's not easy but guess what, it's not easy getting that
message across either. If you look over here, 1370 people
viewed it, compared to many thousands of views for something like my
cardiologist said, this was impossible. Yeah you know I understand, there's some
components of clickbait here but again we need to begin to understand what's
going on with our individual bodies. And let's just go ahead and use BMI because
that's where the - that's where the - the big statistics, that's where the national
statistics are coming out and again if you want to correct me on BMI, go to one
of my videos on relative fat mass. This was again from the lay - lay press at CNN
and it was again just late December 2018. And what it was doing is comparing CDC
NHANES studies. NHANES is N-H-A-N-E-S, National Health and Nutrition
Examination Studies. What that study is doing is documenting the continued
increase of obesity in this country. In fact, the average adult in this country
has a BMI over 29 between 29 and 30. 30 is the cut point for Frank obesity,
full-blown obesity and the average is 29. So we're fiddling while Rome burns. We're
arguing too much about what's the best diet and will continue to make
assumptions that the best diet for a 20 year old with no insulin problems is
also the best diet for someone who's a heavy insulin - insulin secretor; and we
know, there are people that don't secrete a lot of insulin; there are people that
secrete a lot and they're - their - their body is totally different in
response totally different to diets; but let's again let's go back and look at
the - the BMI story for this country. So between 1999 & 2000, and 2015 & 2016,
there was yet another significant increase in the average body weight.
Before that, between 1960 and 2002, there was a 24-pound increase in the
average weight of the American Human, 24 pounds. In this one between 99 and 2016,
it was about 10 pounds. From - to 197.9 for men, from 189.
So, in for women it went from 164 to 170. So again we're continuing to get more
and more obese. Now this goes on to talk about the BMI, the formula and again it
doesn't - doesn't get into some of the problems with it. If you want to focus on
the problems with the BMI that's for another video, 3 other videos in fact.
If I can remember I'll put them down in the description but again here's where
Arden makes the point, one of the folks from the CDC. The average Americans BMI
is now almost 30 which is the cutoff point for obesity. A normal and healthy
BMI is between 18.5 and 24.5 or 24.9. I would
say, really the the best in terms of doing what I do which is looking at
heart attack, stroke, cardiovascular inflammation. It's not really 25. It's low
20s- 2021; but the average American again is 29. So average waist circumference
increased as well about a 1 inch in men, 2 inches in women. Average waist
circumference is now 39 in men and what 30, it went from 36 to 38 inches
in women. While height or as weight is going up, height's actually going down.
They lost a centimeter so mm-hmm let's go back. Let's focus up for a few
minutes on this debate. A lot of this started. I mean it was all about
plant-based low-fat until there was a group that started looking at fat in the
diet. Gary Taubes wrote 3 books. He made most of his literary career so far
on this issue of why we get fat and what to do about it. There's actually been a
lot of folks going in that direction. These next 2 people are actually very
well qualified to deal with this issue. They are both endocrinologist. This is
Robert Lustig. He's an endocrinologist that runs an Obesity Center at UC San
Francisco. He makes the lecture circuit talking about obesity and sugar and
processed food and how sugar drives obesity and it has to do with insulin
and leptin and hormones. This next guy David Ludwig, is also not only their name
sounds similar, their jobs and their careers are similar.
David Ludwig is also on the lecture circuit talking about that. He's a little
bit deeper in research. He's over at Harvard in the PhD, also an
endocrinologist, also running a - an obesity Center for Harvard and he wrote
the book, Always Hungry, that book and the book by Lustig Fat Chance. Both of them
get into some of this hormonal issues around fat. So basically what they say is -
is that they reverse it and I think there's a lot of validity to it. Hormonaly,
it's not that we eat more and therefore we get fat. It's we get fat and
therefore we eat more; and what they're talking about is eating carbs or getting
insulin resistant - resistance from age. You start to get these fluctuations in
your blood sugar associated with increased levels of insulin.
When you decrease that blood sugar, you get hungry so you eat. Before you start
saying that doesn't make sense, you should look into this to the actual
research. It's becoming clearer and clearer. There are other ways of looking
and other people with very strong opinions about losing weight and diet,
how to diet. Dr. Func's got a lot - a lot of really good points that you know what,
if you just do fasting, it's cheaper, it's easier. There's - you don't have to worry
about recipes, it's cleaner etc etc; but he also focuses on the - the endocrine
model for weight loss. So then you go to somebody like Valter Longo who's - does a
great job in terms of research, developing good research to support his
dietary theories. He actually, he's not a low carb. He focuses a little bit more on
plant-based, low protein, low fat in terms of longevity and he also does the
fasting mimicking diet proline which is a 5-day diet where you - the goal there is
to kick-start your epigenetics and - and deal with the problem of epigenetics
that we - that many of us deal with in our 60s. Now Valter Longo's mentor was Roy
Walford. He was the father. He was at UCLA and he was the father of caloric
restriction. You've probably heard of that term. You've heard specially folks
like Jason Func criticized caloric restriction. Caloric restriction is just
chronic low calorie eating so watching your diet in terms of the amount of food
that you're getting. Longo's said, you know his mentor, Doctor -
Dr. Walford got some great results on it. However, he looked like a - a Holocaust
survivor and he was hungry a lot. So he said, that's - there's got to be an
easier way to do that. Now let's go look at the why obesity is an issue. Adipokines.
Leptin is the major adipokine but there are a bunch of them. They
mediate inflection inflammation and insulin resistance. Didn't know that? Well
here. This is TNF alpha. Many of you have heard of that IL-6, interleukin 6, leptin
free fatty acids, other Adipakines. They have a receptor. When they hit that
receptor on the cell wall, that receptor sets up a whole new set of mechanisms
which decreases insulin receptivity. So one of the major drivers of insulin
resistance is obesity. That's where that all comes into play and that's where
obesity becomes such a big issue. So to get back to the - to the issue at hand, we
are - here's - here's America 2011 obesity rates. Now,
prevalence of obesity rates. Here you see a lot of green, relatively speaking, not
nearly as much green as you would have seen back in the 1950s because again the
average American had gained 24 pounds. Actually over 24 pounds between 1960 and
2000 but orange is getting higher levels like 22 what - no 30 and 30%, 34%.
Here is the 2017 number. As you see, only 3 states- Washington DC, Colorado and
Hawaii are now in the green. The rest of the
country is in yellow, orange and deep red and the orange and deep red have grown
dramatically. There are actually now 7 states with an obesity rate
greater than 35%. So this is - it's huge and it's continuing to grow.
So back to my response to vegans or idiots, I'm not gonna use that term but
I'm tempted to use that term in describing someone who doesn't
understand the positive health impact of losing a hundred pounds. So no I'm not a
big potato mono diet fan. I don't recommend it. However, if we focus way too
much on the way we lose weight and not enough on how much we weigh, we are
fiddling while Rome burns. So again another rant, but I think it's something
that clearly needs to be said. Let's give up that we have on arguing about types
of diets and first let's make sure we're at a proper BMI. Thank you again for your
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