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Chef AJ: What Is The Best Diet Raw Fruits Veggies or Cooked Starches | Chef AJ LIVE! with Doug Lisle
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[Music] hey everyone and welcome to chef aj live i'm your host chef aj and this is where i introduce you to amazing people like you who are doing great things in the world that i think you should know about today we have one of our very favorite guests who often graces us with his presence once a month and sometimes even more none other than our resident psychologist dr doug lyle now whenever we have a doctor on the show but dr lyle in particular we get so many questions so to get priority please consider signing up for my newsletter at chefaj.com we only email you about once a week to tell you who's on the show and then you just respond with your questions and boy have we got a lot of them how are you doing dr lyle yes great aj and i want to say you look fabulous well thank you i figured you're an evolutionary psychologist and so i wanted to wear something that they might have worn in the stone age absolutely that's right thank you so you never shy away from controversy so why don't we just get the controversial one out of the way right away how's that good because there's actually two questions about raw food and let me just preface it with saying that i try to be i like to be respectful to all my guests and i like different opinions because my feeling is is even if somebody's right if you can't do it maybe somebody else has another system that might work for you so last week we had raw food week on chef aj live where we had doctors and people that have been following what's called an 80 80-10-10 raw food diet a very healthy version no sugar oil salt processed food these are people that are athletes and they are thriving on it for 30 years and more and so many people were interested for example mandy who said what does dr lyle think of maybe doing a 10-day raw vegan challenge but then karen writes he said could you please ask dr lyle i would like a reconciliation of the schools of thought put out by dr doug graham and dr john mcdougall i would be curious to hear dr lyle's response because dr doug graham who also follows the low-fat diet just like dr mcdougall feels we're natural fruit eaters and should eat just fruits and vegetables with a little bit of fat and of course dr mcdougall is based on starch and it's not even so much who's right but what does the science say at least maybe from this evolutionary perspective that you're so familiar with um yes so here's the so now we've had everybody weigh in and now we're going to get the truth of course the all right so there's uh there's a lot of different ways to try to arrive at the truth i actually heard a little bit of these two people's statements i didn't listen to uh uh doug graham's statement in its entirety i just heard part of it that i heard what doc mcdougall says and it sounds like uh my friend jen hawk calls it a stump speech you know what i mean that's what politicians they get their speech and then they go around on the train and say the same thing over and over again and it's not too long before you're hearing john stump speech and uh it's solid as a rock uh there's there's a few things that i would uh that i would disagree with but in in substance i i'm i'm with everything he says and i think that some of the whoever was interviewing them some of the questions uh that were being put to is is that graham the doctor should i call him doctor he's a chiropractor okay like dr goldhamer right so uh the the i think i think he misinterpreted some uh this is what happens when uh when when things aren't being said in real time and you're not getting exactly what the person is saying so john had said hey you know the people stored these uh the foods in a way that you can't store fruit and they were you know freeze dried in the ground or whatever and doug graham said they couldn't have been freeze drying food because they didn't have vacuum packers ten thousand years ago that's not what john meant john just meant that you could store you can freeze a potato that can be naturally stored in the ground all winter so that there was a there was foods for uh humans in the wintertime and those would have been starches and then uh and and john goes on to say you can't eat uh fruit is very seasonal so our ancestors couldn't have been uh surviving on fruits because they didn't have fruits all through the year and then drug graham says well now wait a minute that's ridiculous you can have food shipped from anywhere john wasn't answering that question john was using a theoretical question looking down through evolution and doug is answering a question that has nothing to do with that okay so that's a that's a misunderstanding is what each other was talking about and so that so now we're going to triangulate on essentially two different questions because there's a few two entirely different questions here in the winter uh would be the the the evolution of the human diet what the human diet sort of looked like over time and what did our ancestors eat uh in their evolutionary history that's one question and the second question uh which we think is related uh and it is related but it is not exactly the same question which is what's the healthiest diet for us to eat those are actually two very separate questions folks and very often we get debates and confusion as people sort of tumble those two things together and then they get very defensive about the evolutionary history because as if the evolutionary history is the checkmate argument about what it is that we should be doing today okay and our evolutionary history a lot of times people didn't wear shoes and there are people today that say you shouldn't be wearing shoes and maybe they've got a point but i have to tell you where i walk i need to be wearing shoes okay so if i'm walking across the parking lot with little shreds of glass in it i wasn't evolved by nature to be able to handle that so i'm better off with shoes on so just because something and shoes aren't natural so just because we understand what our ancestors did uh they also they also did tribal warfare with spears and all kinds of coming of age weird stuff that killed some people so the bottom line is should we be doing that thing too okay so no so what we want to do is we want to answer two very separate questions an interesting question is what did our ancestors eat and the second question is what should we be eating and how are those two things interrelated well first of all john is going to say well we were a star cheater okay doug graham is saying no we're a fruit eater well actually um both are true and both are wrong so the truth of the matter is this truth of the matter is there's no question that human beings were are omnivores that ate very significant amounts of animal food across human natural history there is no doubt about that you can jump up and down and you can point to digestive systems and teeth and you can make all kinds of arguments but the problem is you cannot deny the following truth that in 175 gather uh societies that have been looked at for the last 50 years by cultural anthropologists doing field research every single one of them is omnivorous okay it doesn't matter whether we're talking about east africa where uh near the gorges where it is that human beings this species probably originally uh was spawned uh in its something like its current genetic form probably three or four hundred thousand years ago uh obviously evolving out of uh earlier versions all the way back through australopithecus all the way back to the common ancestor with the chimpanzee all the way back to the simian monkeys it's like for god's sakes how far back do you want to take it what a monkey eats and what you eat has nothing to do with each other what a chimpanzee eats and what you eat has nothing to do with each other okay in fact what australopithecus two and a half million years ago ate and what you eat has nothing to do with each other so the uh doug graham was making some little comment about evolution clearly that uh these folks are not clear about their understanding that there has been very very significant evolution in the human lineage in the last million years so we are uh we are all off a long ways from the from a chimpanzee or gorilla which are our closest living relatives but you have to understand closest living relatives you go back a long ways i don't know if you've ever been to the zoo but when i went to the zoo and i saw the female chimpanzees i didn't get sexually interested i'm sorry i just did we're a long ways people you know you're also heavily is related to an earthworm for god's sake so they said where where do you want to put it that your house cat is looks something like an ocelot okay in other words but an ocelot don't try to bring one home and then turn it into a nice friendly little house cat you're in for a really tough go so the same thing with an arctic wolf an arctic wolf is an awful lot looking like a german shepherd but it's not the same thing it is a great deal wilder and much more trouble so you are not a chimpanzee you're not even remotely close to chimpanzee and just because chimpanzees would like to eat a lot of fruit and eat raw food diets you are not the same thing and that's one thing that john was trying to say i.e he's trying to say we're the greatest thing like i know what he means so to you you see anything else out there that's walking and talking and going to the moon of course not i don't know what you want to call it uh all animals to me are i'm in in in one sense equal in other words we're all products of uh evolution and we all have complex design and and we have a lot of us have feelings and warmth and families and romance and those there's a lot of commonalities but if you had to pick who's the big kahuna it's us all right let's not joke about that who else builds skyscrapers and bullet trains now it's going to turn out that that very same extraordinary mind did something and what they did was uh certainly in the last 500 000 years as humans but likely before when they were proto-humans going back maybe another million years maybe more uh they used fire so fire was an extraordinarily important change and clearly as you look around the world uh animals are generally terrified of fire my house cats aren't which is really interesting to me by the way now most animals if they smell fire they instinctively know that they're in real trouble and they try to run away from it my cats are happy sitting in front of the fireplace that's like hey morons what do you trust me that you're not going to get burned but the truth of the matter is they're domesticated so if you think about that when were they domesticated in the last 10 last 10 000 years where they did what they snuggled up to people around fireplaces so if you were a little kitty cat a feral kitty cat 7 000 years ago somewhere in babylon uh if you happen to have the genes to be spooked by fire then you didn't stay around the humans but if it turns out that you were a little genetic freak and you didn't didn't happen to be that worried about fire you're like somebody today that's not afraid of heights okay almost all human beings today if you put them up in a tall building and they look out over a balcony they're freaking freaked you know what that feeling is that's from your ancestors that at some point realized you know what we have to be extremely careful in these trees because if we fall we're going to die now we have more worry about that than a modern chimpanzee because a modern chimpanzee still lives in the trees and those things can absolutely fall 40 feet and do and it has been observed by jane goodall scientists uh that that if you can you can they've dropped 40 feet sat there winded you know and then and then and then get up and walk off wow a human drops 40 feet lands on its back and it's almost certainly dead okay so therefore in order to make sure that you didn't die through the process of us becoming a terrestrial animal you had something that we're going to call a fear of heights that you still have okay so i forget where i was going aging where i'm coming from but the the story is this we are different than we were two million years ago in a million years ago and so it is going to turn out that one of the most extraordinary changes that took place in human life was our love of fire we're not just okay with fire we love it we love the look of it it's freaking romantic to look at fire okay so you're looking at this extraordinarily dangerous thing and it turns out you're attracted to it you like the colors of it you like the feel of it you like the sound of it you like the smell of it and then most importantly you like the taste of it so it turns out our ancestors were obviously the first animals on earth that started to systematically cook their food and it turns out that they instantly liked it and we know that they instantly liked it because experiments have shown that animals instantly like it if you cook their food okay why would this be it would be because the cooking of animal flesh will actually denature the protein in other words it partially digests it and makes it therefore easier for you to digest more efficient for you to digest it's actually softer for you to eat and it also kills parasites so there are tremendous advantages to cooking meat there are also tremendous advantages to cooking john mcdougall's what you know lovely starches okay so it's going to turn out that you're not going to be able to make very much use out of a raw potato or god forbid try to eat raw rice or try to eat raw beans it's like you're going to crack your teeth and you're not going to get any calories out of it but if you cook it in water you you gelatinize the starches and you know what that process looks like when you put oatmeal and then you put water in and then you cook it it expands doesn't it so suddenly it becomes big you put pasta in water it expands you put beans in water and cook them they get bigger that's that process of breaking down the starch molecule so that you can taste it you can chew it you can access the calories you can tell that you can access the calories because you can taste it and it tastes good that's your signaling device that there's calories in there that you can use notice that you're not crazy about the taste of romaine lettuce because you can find out that there's hardly any calories in it notice you love the taste of the snickers bar why it has 30 times as many calories per pound as the lettuce that's why and so what your your taste preference mechanisms can pick up the fact that you have gelatinized the starch in that you can get access to the calories so it turns out that cooking became a massively important part of the human human evolutionary story now obviously cooking could have been damaging to human physiology when it comes to the cooking of the food and caused people to develop chronic degenerative diseases that they never saw on the stone age because they're all dead by 40 anyway they're dead by 40 not of diseases folks they're dead by 40 of accidents tribal warfare you know being gourd by by by an animal in other words people just didn't live that long you're you you are if you made it to 40 in a stone age environment you were pretty smart and you were somewhat lucky there's a good chance women are going to be dying in childbirth fairly often little kids are going to have accidents or get eaten by predators you know when can you imagine babies crying like what on earth are they doing and the answer is they are it's better off the cost benefit evolutionary is better off squawking to your parents if you're lonely and you're not interacting with them even if it uh attracts a predator uh because because if you don't if you're quiet and a predator sniffs and and finds out where you are they come and eat you and you didn't get any help so go ahead and yell like hell even though you're attracting predators because you're attracting your mom and your dad and that wound up being an evolutionary benefit thank god it stops by the time they're like three okay but notice incidentally aj that children that are four five six seven eight nine on a playground are extremely noisy this is very likely because they were designed evolutionarily to be close to their mothers who are watching them because they are actually still they need mom's protection because mom's bigger and stronger and therefore they need to constantly getting mom's attention that's why they shriek on the playgrounds they would cause a mom that was watching them nearby to stop her conversation with her friend and look over at junior and then the kid laughs after that and then you realize no predator so this is a constant it's like a smoke alarm that keeps going off and keeping you on edge notice that when kids get to be 13 or 14 they don't do that okay the junior high school and the noise on a playground doesn't look anything like a kinder a a fourth quarter that's because of the evolved differences in the changes of the problem human beings have changed dramatically over the the millennia and we are now very different than we were a million years ago and one of the huge differences is that the brain has gotten much bigger uh over the last million years and the stomach cavity and the digestive system and the genes that uh have been selected for starches for amylase this is very clear that john is right that the starch molecule has been an enormously important feature in human evolution for a million years now the uh so we have gone away from being a raw food eater that our ancestors uh three million years ago were all raw food eaters anybody that says well we came from rocky eating animals very true of course you did all the animals on the planet are well animals we are very much like chimpanzees we share 99 of their dna that's true you share 99 of your dna you also share 70 of your dna with a yeast molecule so don't give me numbers that you don't understand okay you are that one percent is massively different and by the way it's much more complicated than anybody ever understood a whole bunch of dna that we did not understand we thought it was junk dna turns out it's not junk dna so everything everybody thought they understood about human genetics turns out to be vastly more complicated and not what they thought it was so don't even think about the idea that you share 99 of your dna with the chimpanzee because that is a meaningless statistic okay now so the uh and completely misleading you know so you know some some poor fool that can't add two and two and is drooling in a hospital somewhere of severe retardation that guy shares 99.9 of his dna with stephen hawking okay so just keep that in mind now the uh so now what it is that that we want to think about our ancestors clearly ate a great deal of starches on average in different areas of the world their diets were different if you're over in in east africa you're different than if you're in northern africa if you're in northern africa you're different than you are in the middle east if you're in the middle east you're different than you are in northern europe and if you're in northern europe you're different than you are in china and in the last hundred a hundred thousand years ago all human beings to the best of our knowledge were in africa in other words this is where this species came from maybe it was 125 000 estimates go back and forth the geniuses are trying to figure it out maybe it was 170 000 years ago but at some point human beings started migrating out of africa and some of them that migrated out did not die and so then they seeded populations and as they moved around the earth they start looking different because the different ecologies call for different physical morphologies so as you go north you need more vitamin d from the sun and so as a result you need to uh protect yourself less from the sun and let more of that solar energy in and so your skin lightens up okay so when you look at northern asians and caucasians their skin is lighter for one purpose that purpose is to you to actually make sure you don't die of diseases like rickets as a result of a vitamin d deficiency you don't need uh so therefore you know i know many of us with lighter skin are like boy the people with the darker skin have it better because they don't show they're aging as much because they're better defended against the sun okay that's true uh so uh that's because they were evolutionarily those genes when you see darker skinned people from around the equatorial regions of the world they don't all have the same hair they don't all have the same facial configurations they don't have the same body morphologies but they have darker skin why because they're getting more sun and they need to defend it they defend the system against that excess and the problems of the sun possible damage so we start to see differences in that we start to see other differences in morphology some people get taller some people are shorter in the amazon basin for example interestingly enough it looks like the ideal size for an average man in the amazon basin is about five seven and 140 pounds uh uh in other areas where they're not in the jungle uh men evolved to get bigger for example in some areas that is useful for sexual dominance or for other work tribal warfare problems or whatever what i'm getting at is that you see quite a splintering of individual differences all around the world and you see groups of people looking very similar etc and guess what the different ecologies have different diets anybody that thinks that quote human beings evolved on fruit and it's a fruit-eating animal is not answering exactly what john is saying what the hell do you think they were doing in norway 10 000 years ago they couldn't possibly have been a fruit eating animal they have been in norway for at least 50 000 years maybe 80 maybe a hundred so how on earth did they do that they couldn't have possibly been a fruit raw fruit eating creature because there's no fruit in norway and the fruit that's there is only going to be there for about six weeks so what did they eat they did not live their life spans out on a raw fruit they didn't do it and not only that no human beings have been shown to be raw eating animals none of them in every single tribe oh let me point out also aj my commentaries about the tribes and why i'm very interested in them and why they're very important if we're going to try to understand human evolution you have to understand something fascinating when you meet somebody that is very different from you in terms of the continent that they evolved on so you meet an african person right down at the grocery store or you meet an asian person down at the grocery store those jeans you you those jeans haven't met your genes for 80 000 years if you have you have some friend on the internet from northern china and they're going to come here for a visit and you meet them and they speak english okay and they're a purebred northern northern uh asian person and you meet them and you sit down uh and you go to lunch with them and your chit chatting about john mcdougall and dean ornish because it turns out that the young lady is a doctor and she's she's really interested in this right you have everything in common you're all humans but that person and your genes you don't have a common ancestor for the last 80 000 years and so when you're looking at them you're looking at okay how must this have evolved we know that they couldn't have evolved on a fruit diet because they've been in northern china so that's impossible i know i couldn't have evolved on a fruit diet because i look at myself and i see big-nosed englishmen staring at me from the mirror it's obvious my mother's maiden name was fairchild that is is that is as english as it gets okay my dad had a little bit of redhead in him his uncle's names were wroten and they claimed they were dutch in world war ii which was a lie they were germans okay so i got some a little hint of redheaded redheaded german uh redhead that's that's still out of me as my hair turns gray it's still there okay now so what is this i'm a european that's what i am uh europeans there's no possible way that europeans in the last 80 000 years we're living on fruit diets that's impossible okay for exactly the reasons that john is saying so i hope that uh dr grant isn't thinking that that is the evolution of human history because that would be impossible he may be saying of course you can eat fruit if you want all day long doesn't matter where you are because we can manufacture and ship it i hope that everybody understands that that has nothing to do with human evolution so now who could have eaten all fruit diets could have been the people in equatorial regions that had fruit all over the place did they well guess what we get to go see them because they're still there and we can get go back and look at hunter-gatherer tribes from all over the world and we can see actually what they eat and they haven't changed what they've been doing for 80 100 200 000 years okay so we know for example uh in looking at the aboriginals in australia we can see that they have hand axes that they until until the westerners found them and then started talking to them and given snickers bars to learn about their art we know exactly how they lived they're living with the same technology that hasn't changed in a hundred thousand years so when we look at their diets guess what we're looking at they're doing what their daddy did and they did what their daddy did and they did what their daddy did they're not doing anything new and different so what are they doing okay they're digging in the ground for tubers they are harvesting some wild grains if a nut tree is anywhere near them and they get it once a year they get a few nuts they actually in many many places they go after honey interestingly enough is a very fascinating and important prize when they get a hold of it they like that a lot they aren't going to get to that honey very well without fire because you're going to need to smoke those bees if you're going to steal their stuff they hunt so hunting is a major enterprise and it's a major sociological force in human affairs that the men that are the best hunters are prized and they get fancier mates and more mates and they father more children if you're a very successful hunter it's very possible that you'll have about 25 children if you are not a very successful hunter it's very likely that you may have four or five okay so the women care about who the heck the hunter is so anybody that says that you're just a star cheater and that people tolerated me etc this is not consistent with the anthropological evidence at all we can go right back into africa and know that we are basically in a time capsule going back a hundred thousand years and we see that need is prized and the people work extremely hard to get it okay and we can see that they're not eating the same meat in the same animals and the same vegetables are as they are in norway if you're in norway what do you think the norwegians have been eating for 80 000 years fish okay of course they are okay they live on the north sea it was full of fish they would be insane not to so to when you start saying well what was the human natural diet well what human where when what are you talking about they're going to be so what we would have to say is well what's the commonality well the commonality is that they're opportunistic omnivores and they ate whatever it is that didn't kill them and it turns out that when we look at humans not surprisingly that human beings have the widest palate of any land animal and actually probably any animal on earth so the what do we mean by the whitest palette they have the most different things that they can eat interestingly enough that is a small subset of organic matter of all of the plants and animals out there of all the plants out there there's very few that you can eat but it's the widest range of any animal why because we are evolved by crossing all kinds of rivers lakes domains etc we spread out over the planet and we're the widest ranging land animal on the planet it's no surprise that we meet that with the widest ranging capability of eating the most diverse foods fascinatingly if you were to eat a chimpanzee's diet you would die because they can actually eat foods that would be poisonous to us okay just as i think people found out i don't know if this is true or not i'm sure you probably know aj i don't think dogs can eat like salmon or something i know they can't eat raisins for sure um and they can't eat onion that i know for sure okay so the um so the point of this is that that there's in other words certain animals can't eat certain things when you look at what humans can eat it's very vast it is absolutely omnivorous okay so we're not an evolved vegetarian we're not an evolved vegan we're not an evolved fruit eater none of that's true we are an opportunistic omnivore and you're going to find that the diet was going to be made up of the following components in human evolution whatever animal food they can get there it's very likely that they're going to have survived because they have some major starch resource otherwise if they didn't have it they wouldn't even bother going into that environment it would be too dangerous so they would have needed a starch source that they can aim at and they they didn't like pack their bag and then go 20 miles that's not what human beings did you grew up where your parents grew up and then you might have moved a mile away maybe two miles away so you're in the same total habitat and then a generation later your kid moves two miles away and then the next generation moves two miles away and 10 000 years from now they've moved several thousand miles they've moved across the continent but they didn't do it at once they didn't pack their bags in africa and head for beijing that's not what they did they just headed down the road to get away from their parents so that they could have sex and have parties or their parents didn't know what was going on and then pretty soon they had kids and then they started all over again that's human evolution that's how it worked so uh so it turns out that this is these are incremental little little movements that take place generation by generation uh you know a mile at a time now as they did that they they wouldn't have gone into the habitat you know you got 360 degrees to go when you leave mom's house you go dunor two degrees off due north do south to the east to the west where do you go where you're going to likely go where the food is so one of the things you might do is you might follow the coastlines and so it appears that human beings one group of people coming out of africa a lot of people coming out of africa consistently followed the coastlines down along the coast of india so it appears that that being near the ocean has been one major way that people have gone about their business other people would have looked at that and said there's competitive pressure there i want to go somewhere away from those tribal sobs that are coming after my girlfriend and so as a result they went somewhere else and they went inland so human beings went all over the place wherever it is it was best for them but if they were following the maritime line they would have eaten a lot of fish that would have been important they uh and they would have sea vegetables and therefore you know if uh there would have been large iodine there and then if you go somewhere else and there's no iodine maybe you wind up with a goiter etc okay so now the but that as you're going to move inland you better have a starch resource because there isn't anything like wild you know tons about wild fish along the coastline there's nothing that rich there isn't a bunch of gazelles just sitting there waiting to be slaughtered so it's going to turn out that of course you're going to be doing some hunting but you better have a starch resource there better be some fields of wheat there better be fields of rice there better be potatoes in the ground all out over africa tubers have been have been found in the ground that were a major resource for human beings over the last million years so what did humans do clearly you can tell by the how many genes they have to code for amylase which is what an enzyme you need to digest starch clearly they have been very focused on starches that's been an extremely important thing for human beings to be focused on so absolutely as john has said the backbone of every civilization has been starches it doesn't matter where you go on the globe you're going to find them okay nowhere will you find anybody that's main caloric resource is raw fruits and vegetables that is not going to happen chimpanzees can do that that's because they can't make fire and they don't have a big brain that needs a tremendous amount of calories and so it's going to turn out that the average chimpanzee which would be my size is only burning a thousand calories a day and they get that from chewing for six hours a day on low calorie density fruits and vegetables that's fine it's all 100 calories 200 calories that's what they're doing and they just chew through a tremendous amount of it they digest much larger amounts of food than i do etc we can see that our stomach has shrunk over the last million years we can see that our dentition has changed we can see that we don't have to chew the very harsh food that they eat on a raw food diet and it's going to turn out that the entire body has this digestive system has morphed around a higher calorie density fair uh up up to you know five six seven hundred carries a pound and it's going to turn out that's going to be extremely useful because you're going to need it because you're going to be burning a tremendous amount of calories as a human being not because you're working very hard physically but because you've got a huge brain so a human being is going to be burning vastly more calories than a chimpanzee because of their enormous brain okay so our ancestors invented a new muscle it's called your brain okay and that brain needed big time calories and it got it from starches and it got it from meat uh and it certainly decorated it with the old food from its previous uh lineages which is raw fruits and vegetables true okay so now i think i've answered the question as to what the evolution of the human diet was it would look different in the last hundred thousand years depending upon which continent we're on but it had already evolved in africa into its pretty much its current state uh a hundred thousand years ago it evolved as an opportunistic hunter-gatherer that cooked foods including starches and animal food dominated the caloric intake of the diet it was then decorated by by the raw fruits and vegetables that people could also have access to that's what it is okay how do i know this i don't have to speculate all i have to do is go look all i have to do is go look at modern hunter gatherers and that is exactly what it is that i'm going to find okay now now that takes us up to the present and the present is well what does this have to do with me and the answer is well your chassis was was built out you know your skin tone may be light but your chassis your digestive system your your brains everything about you is already built out in africa 150 000 years ago okay so that's that and so you and an african in an east african village that's jeans have not left that continent the two of you would sit down and if they could speak english or you could speak what they're speaking everything about their life would make perfect sense to you you know and and what they eat would even make sense to you it would all look completely reasonable because that is you that's just you a whole bunch of generations later because uh your guys uh got kicked out of that or they over they're wild enough to decide to leave town and uh and slowly move out across some different expanse on earth so that's what it is so now we say okay well what's the best diet to eat well actually there's only one way to determine the best diet to eat so we can look back through all of this triangulation of knowledge in human evolution and understand quite a lot that different different lineages of people would probably have slightly different diets that might be ideal for them but it's going to be pretty similar we can tell this because if we have somebody with some kind of a problem if we put them on a google diet they're going to get well okay if it's a dietary related thing if it's something else if it's malaria that's a whole different thing but the point is is that uh we don't have a group of people that if they eat a vegan diet they wind up developing heart disease and strokes that it doesn't happen so the basic chassis is there we can see how it evolved and what it evolved from we can be honest and open about all of the evidence and we can actually see what it must have taken in order we can see actually the northern europeans and northern asians would have been in a situation where they couldn't have had as much of their diet from raw food and raw foods fruits and vegetables they couldn't have because it wasn't available and it has not been available for a long long long long time and it turns out that human beings could evolve in those situations just fine okay now where does that leave us today that leaves us with the only possible way that we can determine the healthiest diet we cannot do it theoretically theoretically is what everybody's trying to do they're trying to pull the trump card out and say well i know more about human evolution than you do and the trump card says kaboom this is what they ate i already know you're wrong because you can't possibly know what people were eating in madagascar versus what people were eating in norway versus what people were eating in shanghai versus what people were eating in australia fifty thousand years ago you can't possibly know that so there have been mutations since then that could have been important so you have no idea so you cannot solve this problem theoretically our ancestors ate the diet in their in their habitat that statistically maximized their personal likelihood of maximizing genetic reproduction what was that diet it was the widest possible diet of the richest food that they could possibly get their hands on to make absolutely sure that they did not die of starvation that is what the diet was in whatever circumstances that was that diet changed from eighteen thousand years ago on the rhine river to eight thousand years ago on the wine river in the very same location because of climactic and natural history changes so they ate more raspberries less robberies more hogs less sheep who knows what they eat we don't know we know they're an opportunistic omnivore now now where do we go with this there is only one possible way to determine the optimal diet and you can't even do it for humanity because humanity has individual genetic differences so what you can do is you can guess and the only way to do it is to do it scientifically so science does not uh is not wedded to theory in principle it could be that the most healthy diet might be peanuts exclusively okay how would you know there'd be no possible way for you to know that the healthiest diet wouldn't be just to eat peanuts and they might be cooked okay maybe it's peanuts and mint off your mint bush maybe that's the healthiest guy okay what we can do is we can use the science of nutrition and we can actually study by using millions of observations we can use epidemiological analysis and we can attempt to determine are there patterns of dietary behavior that wind up causing people to be susceptible diseases and therefore reduce the length of their life and their well-being yes we can do that so we can talk to somebody for example if we don't want to go do it ourselves because after all we don't have a million lifetimes to figure this out we might actually uh get benefit from experts so we might talk to experts that have actually been involved in that research or are experts in reading that research that are have great scientific training that it can actually understand how to analyze and look at other people's observations and to look for patterns that indicate the truth so that when one observation lines up maybe somebody was sloppy or somebody was paid off by some food company or drug company or they had some other axe to grind politically or something else so instead we want to look at a pattern of observations to see if human beings can use science to actually triangulate on the truth that is the science of nutrition and i have the opportunity to be talking to one of the greatest in history calling campbell about two weeks ago so we sat down and we chatted the afternoon away and we talked about things like that and many other things that were interesting and i praised him on his extraordinary new book called you know the future of nutrition uh and so but that is where the question will be answered and so colin and people like colin and john and dean ornish and ssc and another thousand important people have actually looked at this question very carefully and there is no evidence to suggest that a raw food diet is superior in any particular way it turns out the raw food food diets would have been impossible in human evolution uh in the sense that that they are too low in color density and very quickly in the modern environment lead to large percentages of women becoming infertile okay so we know even as small change in fertility rates would have doomed the species okay so there's no possible way that that could be the way this ever happened so now it's an open question as to for example whether a 100 raw diet is somehow the magic fantastic diet that is better than any other other diet is there any theoretical reason to think so oh i don't know maybe you could say well gee is did did people make a bad trade-off when they started cooking the food and and but because they got access to more calories they were more likely to survive but if we don't have to do that we go back to a more raw food diet and it has more phytochemicals and therefore potentially and we stay out of animal foods because those two don't need to be is it possible that the raw food diet is actually better than some other than an omni well that isn't such an absurd hypothesis folks it's an absurd argument theoretically from an evolutionary standpoint that is ignorance that makes no sense at all okay but is it theoretically possible that it is the healthiest diet available to humans right now oh yes that's theoretically possible how would you ever know you have to subject subjected to scientific experimentation analysis okay and what what do we find well the women may get really skinny and they may stop their ability to reproduce but they don't die okay so what's your what's what question is on the table then so the question isn't what diet leads to maximum reproductive success the question is what leads us to optimum longevity and the minimal minimum minimizing disease it might be to eat a diet so lean that it shuts down menses for all kinds of people but it turns out that they're very skinny and that they live longer and they have less de you know disease processes maybe it's an open question okay now the uh the truth of the matter is i think such a diet is uh such an odd variance with human natural history of its last million years um i think that that it's certainly tolerable okay absolutely there's no question about that you can go back a million years in time and start reading a raw diet and it turns out that you've still got the machinery for it of course we do everybody that opens up an apple and a peach and eats it knows that of course i can use this food okay the question is is it optimal well that's an interesting question and my and my belief is hmm i'll bet you we start winding up with interesting problems so we're going to have sarah from you know newfoundland that has some quirky little problem as a result of either genetics or she took you know some kind of drug 13 years ago when she had massive headaches and then that wiped out something in her microbiome and then something else happened and she's got some physical problem and if she eats a mcdougal diet she doesn't do well but if she eats a raw food diet she does great you are you thinking that i'm not going to believe that i would totally believe that that is possible okay so what i'm getting at is this starts to get individual so don't don't get into a pissing match over trying to think that you have a diet that you can prescribe for all of humanity and be sure you're right for every single human being that doesn't make any sense to me at all okay so now we start saying okay well what's the best guess and now we have to start looking at mainstream science and find out what mainstream science says the mainstream science says that hey the kind of diet that mcdougall and campbell and esselstyn and ornish are talking about and furman and goldhamer that all looks really good and the subtle differences between what any of those guys personally eats or would success you eat looks like it's pretty subtle hard to know okay so so now we look at a raw food diet which is fairly significantly different from these guys but not super different okay but it is significantly different you say well we think it's better hey prove it to me give me a random assignment to control you know let's take a look at this do you actually have any evidence to suggest it's true and my my belief is gee i don't know you got a problem you know you i already know you got a problem you got some problems to come up you know how often do they come up well i don't know how often how often the problems come up with an esselstyn diet so what i'm getting at is that this is probably a perfectly viable reasonable thing that you could do in the modern environment because you can get access to 2500 calories a day of raw foods in a way that you could not have all over the globe throughout human natural history that would have been impossible okay can you do it yes is it optimal i don't know you're you're you're gonna have to show me some pretty compelling evidence to show me that you can beat um uh the conventional uh uh standard diet that i would look at out of a mcdougall ornish campbell system pretty tough uh i i don't know that and that's what we use at true north we just use a strict version of it but that's what it is alan goldhamer's never advocated a raw food diet okay he does not see any reason when he has actually used that at times before you can bring him on your show but he'll tell you you know what i'll see people with you know once in a while you'll see some fungal infections you're looking at a high sugar high fat diet uh that's what john mcdougall is criticizing he's saying look that's an awful lot of sugar you know i'm not so sure that's ideal okay now you might say well you might say that but i've got a nice random assignment to condition trial here and i've got 500 people that i've had on that diet for two years and they look better than the 500 people on the mcdougall diet for the last two years so what do you say about that well when you show that to me we'll have an interesting discussion okay when you show that to me uh all we have now is we've got we've got a triangulation of evidence that has come around from thousands of dozens of nutrition studies that it aims it does not actually um it doesn't indict animal food but it makes puts it under a lot of suspicion as colin campbell will say all the regression lines indicate that the best place for the russian line to go through for animal food to minimize your disease is zero okay but we would also recognize that at very low levels of animal food probably going to be pretty hard to find a difference between a five percent or ten percent animal food diet yeah uh but the other ninety percent is healthy food uh versus a hundred percent pretty tough but what we can say is it looks like when you start getting animal food twenty thirty forty percent of calories we start statistically and reliably showing an increase in disease processes okay but can you show me that a raw food diet is superior to the cooked food diet that our ancestors have been eating for 100 you know a million years nope i don't think you have any evidence for that at all there's no reason for me to suspect that it's there so that is the long answer to this question it's i hope i hope that i have treated this with respect uh i i'm we're going to say that the argument cannot be solved theoretically because actually nobody's thinking here is actually informed about the entire uh cinemascope of the problems of human evolution in its diet if people are interested probably one of the most informative books that they can uh that they can look at is going to be called catching fire by richard rangham and i think he takes us through a great deal of data and theory and that and it's going to be one of the most informed things you're ever going to read on this topic but there's more there's uh there's cultural anthropology there's all kinds of there's all kinds of people we can talk to they're studying little bits of this question it's really not that important it's clear omnivore cooked food also there's another thing there's there's comment that john made i'm not meaning to criticize this comment at all i want to point something out uh there's an open question in in nutrition right now and colin actually raises this question briefly somewhere in the future in nutrition it's a very important question um and yet you know so let me just raise what it is we don't know how destructive animal food is and the reason why we don't know how destructive it is in others we can point to correlations which indicate that it's a pretty serious problem but those could be to some degree misleading and the reason is the very same peoples and cultures that are eating large amounts of animal food the rest of their vegetable food is terrible it's french fries and twinkies okay and chocolate cake and and and chocolate shakes it's crap it's very possible that the evolved human that uh that started incorporating animal food at some point probably two million years ago the um that creature also is eating a whole natural foods vegetable diet and if you were to eat 90 of your calories from whole natural vegetarian sources and you are organically grown and you were to match that up with ten percent of your calories from wild game i don't believe there's any reason to think that the the pro the process of digesting and assimilating the wild game is harmful to your health my guess is that it's not my guess is that the antioxidants in the vegetable food neutralize the problems associated with animal food metabolism and that could be true very well all the way up to high percentages of animal food in the diet it could be that you could eat 30 of your calories from animal food which i suspect is pretty consistent with human natural history in most places and 70 percent of whole natural organically grown plant food cooked and raw if you put those two things together my guess is that's a very healthy diet for humans is it as healthy a diet as a vegan diet maybe not but the difference might be so small that it would be absolutely undetectable in evolution in other words you might have a few people somehow because of bizarre biology is dying of heart attacks and strokes at 82 but who the hell is going to get to 82 in the stone age nobody so the truth is i have a feeling that the animal food is not as bad as we have been thinking because the animal food has been doing its damage and not being mitigated by healthy plant food when we study this question in u.s and western populations colin is well aware that that is an open question that he doesn't know the answer to and the reason i bring this up is to bring to people a sense of humility about what we know and what we don't know we don't even know that animal food is bad for you we just know that animal food in its present form even in the context that it's eaten now is bad for you okay so that's why this is uh there are still open questions in nutrition uh but we believe thank goodness the behind people like campbell and mcdougall and esselstyn and ornish and barnard people like that have done research to show us at least that we think we are pretty close to often if it turns out there's another trick on the on the table uh for an all raw diet hey show us okay um i think i would give this to the raw fooders i think we're probably better off eating more raw food than the average healthy vegan eats okay i think uh it i think that uh my diet would probably be approved if i was more fastidious about eating more raw food the um allen eats more raw food than i do he always seems like he looks a little healthier and more energetic and arm rear right so the point is is that do i think that we should be listening to and paying attention to the message of more raw food is probably better i think we should okay do i think that it is a is a next generation improvement over the mcdougall vegan diet no do i think the mcdougall vegan diet is an improvement over the diet of our natural history that included significant amounts of animal food i don't know i don't know because we don't have evidence of pristine wild game juxtaposed to huge amounts of unprocessed organically grown plant food eaten together with the same diet over a lifetime that research doesn't exist okay i do know that the mcdougall vegan oriented diet is vastly superior to the conventional diet that i do know okay and so what we know and what we don't know you know where we stand right now is we know we're on the right track we know we have nothing no reason to fear or boo-hoo or be disturbed about cooked food at all it's a long a part of the essential part of human natural history uh now and i think you're you're probably right uh dead grain is probably right that we'd be better off with more raw so i would go ahead and encourage that if you want to take your diet to the next level but that's where that's where it ends that's where the knowledge ends and anything else past that point is speculative and cannot be solved by a theoretical approach it could only be solved by a painstaking multi-dimensional long-term set of investigations that you know and you know with the vegan diet and heart disease it began i think with dean ornish okay so somebody had to do it first and then we wrap ourselves around that and then we look at colin's epidemiological work indicating worldwide evidence with diet and cancer on on animal food that's a very interesting piece piece by piece by piece we can arrive at new information right now i believe uh the mcdougall style mcdougall campbell ornish esselstyn concept uh reigns supreme scientifically at this moment in time well so that's how you feel that was amazing that was this is why we have to have questions in a mess you know you spent the whole hour on that one question and i mean i appreciate it because you really did unpack it you know because when i i don't know if it's because i'm gullible or i see both sides but when dr graham talks the way he talks i'm inspired and when dr mcdougall talks i'm inspired because one of the things that dr graham said that i thought was interesting is if if somebody dropped us off like just in a wheat field we wouldn't survive right no and and and he also said and i have trouble with this concept because addiction is something i'm very interested in that the reason we like cook food is because it's addictive and i'm thinking i don't see anybody going to arugula anonymous you know maybe maybe processed cooked food like you know cakes and stuff our so i don't know i just find it so interesting this this discussion oh yeah cooked foods are not addictive and uh and you that that's ridic it isn't the cooking that does it okay and that is the cooking is not it's not the story it's that's a completely different issue so that's confusing a variable so yeah people been cooking foods for a million years and then and not suffering from an addictive process behind that so that's a misunderstanding ts says i absolutely love how dr lyle is able to show how science and evolution work he's able to explain things in layman's terms well i'm guessing you probably don't have time for more questions so maybe you'll come back because we don't have you on the schedule for until seven weeks from today so we got a lot of interesting questions we'd love to have you answer at another time if you're available all good you know i'm here hi we love you thank you thank you so much dr lyle and thanks all of you for watching another episode of chef aj live please come back tomorrow when we have another fabulous doctor who was mentioned today none other than dr john mcdougall who will be discussing fish fat and oil thanks again dr
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