Overview
For many of us, growing up we were told that eating foods high in fat is bad for you. Many people still believe that eating cholesterol and fat, especially saturated fat, causes heart attacks. Yet recent studies show there is no association between saturated fat consumption and adverse health outcomes like coronary disease or heart attacks. We also don’t hear enough about insulin resistance as a main driver of cardiovascular disease.
In today’s episode, I talk with Nina Teicholz and Dr. Aseem Malhotra about the origins of the hypothesis that dietary fat raises cholesterol, subsequently increasing heart disease, and how it caught hold. Nina Teicholz is a science journalist and author of the New York Times bestseller The Big Fat Surprise, which upended the conventional wisdom on dietary fat—especially saturated fat—and spurred a new conversation about whether these fats in fact cause heart disease.
Nina is also the founder of the Nutrition Coalition, a nonprofit working to ensure that government nutrition policy is transparent and evidence based—work for which she’s been asked to testify before the US Department of Agriculture and the Canadian Senate.
Dr. Aseem Malhotra is an NHS-trained consultant, cardiologist, and visiting professor of evidence-based medicine at the Bahiana School of Medicine and Public Health in Salvador, Brazil. He is a founding member of Action on Sugar. In 2015, he became the youngest member to be appointed to the board of trustees of the UK health charity The King's Fund. He is a pioneer of the lifestyle medicine movement in the UK and in 2018 was ranked by software company Onalytica as the number one doctor in the world influencing obesity thinking.
Full-length episodes of these interviews can be found here:
Apple
