- The fat I eat is the fat I wear.
The body does the most efficient thing possible with fat.
It just moves it.
It moves it from the fork and spoon
to your abdominal fat stores,
from my lips to my hips.
The fat I eat is the fat I wear.
Why would it do anything else?
- Hey, everybody, this is Klaus from Plant Based News.
If you know anything about the doctor
featured in the previous clip,
Dr. John McDougall,
you'll know that he's a pioneer
in the plant based medical space.
He's often known for his messaging
about the fat you eat is the fat you wear.
Recently, however, Dr. T. Colin Campbell,
who's best known for being author
of the bestselling book The China Study,
and a bit of a godfather in the plant based medical space,
has heavily criticized this rhetoric and messaging.
Let me know down below what you think
but check out this interview
with Dr. T. Colin Campbell's son, Nelson Campbell.
I hope you enjoy.
- Another idea that I hear a lot of in the community today
is this phrase the fat you eat is the fat you wear.
And of course,
when it comes to the consumption of refined oils,
I think there's some merit to that idea.
But I hear a lot of people
advocating against the consumption of whole foods
like nuts, seeds, avocados and coconuts.
What do you think about that
and this notion of the fat you eat is the fat you wear?
- First off, the fat you eat is the fat you wear,
that's a very superficial comment to make.
It doesn't work that way biochemically,
we should not be making that statement, first off.
Secondly, that we talk about
that may be problematic
is the added oil isolated from the whole food.
The food itself,
like nuts and seeds and so forth and so on,
there's a reason for nature putting that in there.
It enables them to get a kickstart
when they start growing new plants, as an aside.
But to say that the whole food is the problem
also is not correct.
In fact, the evidence shows that nuts,
lot of evidence, very convincing evidence,
that nuts if anything, have a benefit.
They're rich in vitamin E, for example,
and that, I've known that in the trade for decades.
Lot of us in the business have known that.
And to eat nuts,
of course, is higher in fat for a specific reason.
We don't want to just make a whole meal
just of nuts and seeds, quite frankly,
but that's good food
and evidence shows it's good food.
It's that simple.
- I know that you just did a really deep dive
into all of the research out there on nuts
and you were quite impressed by what you saw.
And again, we're talking about modest consumption of nuts.
So consuming nuts as nature would present them to us.
So not eating bags of shelled nuts,
but maybe it's a handful of walnuts
on your oatmeal in the morning or something like that.
- Of course.
- And the evidence all suggests
that that's actually heart healthy
according to what you found.
- Yes.
- And that makes sense
when you think about it on an intuitive level
because you always argue that a plant based diet is optimal
because it comes from nature,
it's what's natural to us,
it's what we evolved on over time.
And I always remembered being a kid
and mom shooing us out of the house
and we were outside most every day
and I used to hike and camp and ride horses
and the forests were littered with nuts.
I could ride across our farm in Virginia
and find three or four different kinds of nuts
and would stop and eat and go on to the next thing.
And of course, in the tropical regions
where humanity spent so much time,
there are avocados and coconuts.
And somehow, I don't see our ancestors
having walked around with lab equipment
measuring the fat content of an avocado.
- Yeah, it is part of nature, as you said.
It's silly.
- The other thing that you've mentioned before,
and you might want to comment on it here,
is that the logic behind the statement
the fat you eat, the fat you wear,
is the very same logic
that the diary industry used to promote diary consumption.
Basically what they said
is eat these calcium rich foods
because the calcium you eat
is the calcium that your bones will wear,
that you'll wear in your bones.
It's good for your bones.
When in reality now we're finding
that societies that consume high levels
of dairy and meat products
actually have weaker bones.
In fact, their bones are not wearing the calcium.
It doesn't work that way.
Biology's not so simple.
It's not just what you intake,
it's how the body utilizes what you consume.
- I think the best answer for that calcium question,
this is evidence it was available
back in the 1980s and before,
friend of mine, by the way, but that evidence,
simply if you plot the calcium intake in different societies
against the rate of bone fracture,
which in turn is related to osteoporosis,
the higher the calcium intake,
the higher the fracture rate,
just to go along with what you just said.
More calcium, excessive calcium in form
causes health problems, not solutions.
- Right, so just eating more calcium rich foods,
like milk and cheese
doesn't ensure that your body's gonna retain that calcium.
- That was a good example of reductionism, by the way,
giving special value just to that one element, calcium.
Of course, calcium's important
but it has been used to sell a food product.
- Yeah.
So when you hear that the fat you eat's the fat you wear,
you're hearing kind of reductionist thought
because it's not taking into account
what happens after you eat the avocado
or the nut or the seed.
It gives no consideration to what happens in your body
and how it's utilized.
- It's a superficial comment
from one point of view,
and that is that we're thinking,
that suggests all fat's the same.
It's not, so you leave that out.
- So another category of ideas circulating in the community
is this notion of eating certain foods
because somehow certain plant foods
are better than other plant foods.
And I've heard for example,
the advice to overconsume really, greens,
and having multiple servings of greens a day
because maybe it promotes I guess production of nitric oxide
and helps with endothelial function,
maybe somehow prevents heart disease.
But in reality,
heart disease is an incredibly complex process
that occurs over time.
So does it make sense
to seize on one sliver of that process
and then look at a food that may affect that one sliver
and then advocate for the overconsumption of that food?
Is that something that makes sense?
- It is.
It's simply not appropriate
to focus on one mechanism.
It can be used for discussion
to illustrate how things work
but it should be left at that.
One mechanism being used to describe a whole condition,
that's inappropriate because what happens
if we take that approach,
if somebody wants to come along
and find a chemical to let's say enhance it or block it.
- Or a food.
- Yeah.
- Another idea, kind of in this category
is this notion of nutrient density,
the idea that some foods
are more "nutrient dense" than other foods
and therefore should be consumed in greater quantities.
And of course, if we accept that line of thinking,
maybe we shouldn't even be eating the lowly potato.
What do you think about this idea of nutrient density?
- I've been involved with that concept
since I was in graduate school
but the concept of nutrient density
has been really seriously distorted.
First off, in order to determine
how nutrient dense let's say a food is,
you have to know
how much of different nutrients are in there, in theory,
you have to decide on how much value to give
to individual nutrients.
So it's all a constructed bunch of nonsense actually.
I can remember the day when milk
was the most nutrient dense food of all.
Now today it's something different,
maybe it's spinach or kale or something like that.
No, that nutrient density concept
should be stricken from our language.
It has nothing to do
with the scientific evidence that we have.
- And there may be some foods,
like the lowly potato,
that maybe it's not as "nutrient dense"
but it's still important, right?
- Well, the potato,
I can make another comment on that one there too
is a great source of energy
but interestingly that potato alone, or potatoes alone,
have enough protein, by the way,
has enough protein.
We don't need any more protein
from other sources like animals.
- And there's value to just starch.
- There's value to yeah of course.
- So there are many of these kinds of ideas
and I just wanted to discuss a few of them
as examples of kind of the reductionist thinking
that I know has bothered you
that's emerging in the very community
that you helped to spawn.
So this brings us to the really key point
of our discussion here
and this is what you always say,
and I love it when you say this,
which is that it's really simple.
There's no need to obsess about all these details.
Just focus on eating
all the different parts of the plant,
make sure you get plenty of color in your diet,
and it's okay to use a little bit of salt and sugar
to flavor your food
so that you can enjoy it,
so that you can derive pleasure from it
and it's as simple as that.
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