Written by Christopher Kelly
May 28, 2015
[0:00:00]
Christopher: Hello and welcome to the Nourish Balance Thrive Podcast. My name is Christopher Kelly. Today, I'm joined by Richard David Feinman. Richard is a professor of cell biology at the State University of New York Downtown Medical Center in Brooklyn New York. His current interest is in nutrition and metabolism specifically at the areas of diet composition and energy balance.
His work in this area are simulated by, and continues to influence his teaching in the medical school where he is a pioneer in incorporating nutrition into the Biochemistry curriculum. And Dr. Feinman is also the founder and former editor in chief of the journal, Nutrition and Metabolism. Dr. Feinman has a BA from the University of Rochester and has a Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of Oregon. That's quite an intimidating bio. And I'm a tiny bit nervous now interviewing you, but thank you so much for coming on to the show, Richard.
Richard: My pleasure.
Christopher: The reason I wanted to have you on was I've not long finished reading your new book, The World Turned Upside Down: The Second Low Carbohydrate Revolution, which describes how the science of carbohydrate restriction arising from a ragtag collection of popular diet has created the path for low fat, defeated the low fat army and became the default approach to health, which I think is a fantastic book. Thank you so much for writing that. I really enjoyed it.
Richard: I'm glad.
Christopher: There's a dry humor that runs throughout the book, which I really appreciated. I think this paragraph from the book really sums it up: Nutrition in crisis. Almost every day a new study shows that you are at risk for diabetes or cardiovascular disease or cause mortality brought on by newly appreciated toxin which turns out to be something that you just have for lunch. Now, I can't say the number of times I've had this happen to me. Tell me, what inspired you to write the book.
Richard: Well, to some extent, it's like the question is to why people climb mountains. Because it was there. I've been teaching nutrition and metabolism for a long time and there's a mention in the book, I'm a person who is confiding fat most of my life. And it's as in the passage that you read, you can't avoid running into the political effects. So all of those things were there. I would say it was difficult to write the book because they're all so intertwined and also I think that it's -- The problem we have is that we have a lot of experts who I'm not really knowledgeable. And we've been getting a lot of advice that is not really helpful.
Christopher: Yeah, I would completely agree. Just to give you a tiny bit of back story, that's how I arrived at this place. For most of my life, I really didn't feel very good at all. And, obviously, I grew up in the UK. And I eat a lot of packaged foods, a lot of foods which I know that I'm now very sensitive to. Most of what I knew about nutrition came from my parents and most of what they knew came from just the mainstream media.
And so they spent a bunch of time with paper towel, mopping the fat off of bacon and throwing away perfectly good fat that just could be cooked out of meat and that type of thing. And by the time I got to 30 years old, I was a real wreck of a human being. I looked to the internet, just the blogs really, for more information about why this might be happening to me. I stumbled across a few people whose message really resonated with me.
I followed their advice. And many of them, you would have heard of, people like Chris Kresser and Mark Sisson and Dr. Peter Attia and a handful of others. And really for no other reason than authority, I suppose, which might be considered a really poor choice for listening to what someone has to say, I followed their recommendations and got spectacularly better, and then wondered whether anyone else would also be affected by those sorts of recommendations to not eat a low fat diet, for example. And I was right. I've now reached a point where I'm running a business helping people implement those or similar changes to the ones that I made.
[0:05:03]
And getting also fantastic results. But now, I don't really know how to dig into this deeper and fully understand exactly why these recommendations from the experts are working. And so, obviously, the first place you turn is the scientific studies. It seems like the whole thing is a mess. Do you think that's true or -- That's the goal of this interview, is to give me the tools I need.
Richard: Yeah. First, it's a mess. I think the title of my book or the subtitle is The Second Low Carb Revolution, is actually accurate because things are changing every day. I am concerned that I will not have promoted my book before the revolution is over. That's actually a joke. The nutrition society in the United States, which has renamed itself The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics and is abbreviated AND has criticized the US Department of Agriculture recommendations saying that they should pull back on their condemnation of saturated fat.
Well, that's astounding. I mean, they, of course, say it in passing, in low key, without making big noise about it because it's outrageous. They and the USDA and Harvard School of Public Health and everybody else has spent 40 years condemning saturated fat. And if you're changing your point of view now, the question is why? What was the problem before and what has happened since?
It's all changing but what I under -- What I didn't describe in my book is how the American revolution is not really characteristic of revolutions. Political revolutions tend to be more likely a French revolution or the Russian revolution or for that matter the Libyan revolution, and usually involved extensive reigns of terror. And this is going to be a lot of feedback here. And I think you had sent me an article that you wanted to discuss and I think I talked you out of it.
Christopher: Right. So that was kind of -- I've gotten great results by not following these guidelines to restrict saturated fat. I wanted to dig into this deeper. I bought myself a book on Biochemistry that was recommended to me by a doctor that I very much respect. And within two pages of opening it, there it is, saturated fat should be limited to a 30% of calories, cholesterol no more than 300 milligrams. And then I'm wondering can I really trust anything else in that book when I know those two statements alone are within a couple of pages are probably wrong?
And at the same time when somebody sends me an article that suggests that high fat diets are dangerous in the long term, I want to be able to investigate those claims and understand whether or not it's true. I'm a computer scientist. My degree is in computer science. But I've never done science. Certainly, not all computer scientists do. It's a bit of a misnomer. If anything, they're engineers.
I really don't think that science is intuitive to people. The thing that they really do understand is story telling. I heard about this guy. They eat a high fat diet and he had a heart attack. Because that's something that people understand and they remember. So what do the general public to do at this point?
Richard: Alternative to nutrition expertise is you got to go out there and research all the stuff yourself.
[0:09:59]
Christopher: I think chapter 16 of your book provides a useful framework and it starts with this idea of the first three rules which I think are really interesting. And those three rules are if you're okay, you're okay. If you want to lose weight, don't eat. If you have to eat, don't eat carbs. If you have to eat carbs, eat low glycemic carbs. And three, if you have diabetes or metabolic syndrome, you have to try a low carb diet first. So how does someone know if they're okay? That's my problem with that.
Richard: Well, if you're not overweight, you get some exercise and you feel okay, then you probably are okay. If you want to try a different diet, you can. If it seems you feel better. The first recommendation is actually surprising to my students and some people. I'm not truly a low carbohydrate advocate. I think that we don't really -- What we know about anything in diet is much less than what we don't know.
Christopher: Right.
Richard: My criticism of the low fat hysteria is that it prevents us from ever finding out what's good or bad about high fat or high saturated fats. Or we don't see any real risks, but who knows? Maybe there is something for some people in some situations where saturated fat may not be good. Certainly, it's not good if you also keep carbohydrate high. But the real problem is that by crying wolf, we've been prevented from really finding out what's going on. You got to judge yourself. If you feel okay, you feel okay. Now, if you think that what I'm describing in my book is compelling, then it's at least worth trying a low carbohydrate diet of some kind.
Christopher: And then how do you define low carbohydrate, out of interest? Do you mean relative to a standard American diet or low in terms of number of grams?
Richard: Yeah. Well, I think it's continuum and it depends who you are. A lot of people are fairly not sensitive to relatively high carbohydrate intake. I have recognized since I was a child that I am. And right now, if I have more than 100 grams of carbohydrate, I don't feel good. But there are lots of people who, if they don't have at least 100 grams, don't feel good. So you have to decide that for yourself. The area where we know a lot is as in terms of therapy. There's nothing better for losing weight. It's the easiest way to do it. It involves the least hunger.
It's the probably the very safest way as indicated by the fact that the medical establishment has spent 40 years trying to find something wrong with it. And if they couldn't, that's probably the best certification we could get.
Christopher: Right.
Richard: But there are lots of other ways to lose weight. I mean, as I mentioned, I've been fighting fats since I was a child. And when you're 20 years old, there's 100 different things you could do. I remember vending me 'nothing but fruit before 5 o'clock' diet. And if you're 20 years old, that's going to work great. As you get older, that's not going to be as effective. And if you really want to lose weight, you can go on a very extreme diet. You have to take in some protein for health that you can go virtually without food for a long time. And again, if you're 20 years old and you stand up from the table and you almost pass out, that's an experience. When you get older, it doesn't have that kick.
Christopher: It's true. I can remember. I think this comes back to your idea of if you're okay, you're okay. But some people -- I didn't get fat but I definitely had a problem with carbohydrates. And it wasn't until I stuck my finger with one of those lancets and put a blood on to a test strip that I really understood that I wasn't okay.
[0:15:07]
Richard: Yeah. We're always advised to get medical checkups. It's an unrealistic recommendation, but that doesn't mean it's bad.
Christopher: Right.
Richard: But did you have diabetes or do you now?
Christopher: I never got that diagnosis, but I was consistently waking up with fasted blood glucose of 120 milligrams per deciliter, so definitely not a good place. I know now that I'm really sensitive to carbohydrates. I can't tolerate very much at all without going back to that place. And I think I made a lifetime of bad decisions but it was the sugary sports supplements that I was panning down as an athlete. I raced at the elite level of the mountain bike and that definitely didn't help me. I really put myself into a very bad place consuming those. And that's what happened.
Richard: Well, the final part that I was going to say is that -- Well, on the second part, I've said that if you want to lose weight, don't eat. I say that as a joke. But there's something to it. You don't have to eat all the time. The real point that was if you're going to diet, you need to do a low carbohydrate diet for the first shot because that's going to be the easiest. But again, for different people, when you're younger just about anything will work.
The other thing that's a real import in that idea is that the low glycemic index is really a politically correct version of low carbohydrate diet. And it's strictly in third place on that scale. But the third part of those recommendations is if you have diabetes or truly metabolic syndrome, you really have to try low carbohydrate diet first. Because that's what the science says. I have no stake in this.
If anything, my career would be a lot better off if I didn't indicate the benefits of a low carbohydrate diet. But that's what you need to do. That's what the science says. And in my view, it's one of the worst history, one of the worst scandals in the history of medicine, that people, physicians are continuing to recommend carbohydrate for people with diabetes.
Christopher: Right. So how do you -- If I was to send you a new paper and it was a nutritional study, I'm interested to know how you go about reading it, reading, deciding that it's worth reading. And it popped up you're a great guy to follow on Facebook, by the way. Go find Richard on Facebook. He posts some really, really fun and interesting stuff that's definitely got me engaged. But one of the points you raised recently is on citations. Can you do that? Are you allowed not to cite someone else's work? If someone else has shown something, can you then go on and write another paper that completely ignores it? Can you do that?
Richard: Yeah, you certainly can. Whether you should is a different question. The whole mess here is due to that, the only thing that you can say is that there are hundreds of journals. We have a new Nutrition journal every week. I mean, that really is probably an accurate description, not an exaggeration. And what happens is that nobody can read all the papers. People tend to read the major journals like New England Journal and American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
And these editorial boards are so highly biased and in some cases so totally ignorant. I mean, the New England Journal must be a major journal in real medicine. In Nutrition, it publishes stuff that I wouldn't accept from an undergraduate. And so that's a real problem. So you can see why people would not latch on to any paper that was outside of the half a dozen things that they read.
[0:20:06]
So that's giving an excuse to the low fat people. But it's not a good excuse. They're at fault. I usually discuss this by analogy with the courts of law. And in the court of law there is what's called gray materials, which refers to exculpatory evidence. And [0:20:40] [Indiscernible] was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. He got his sentence reduced because he showed that his accomplice who had actually accomplished had actually done the murder, had made the confession, which was not introduced in his trial.
You can't do that. You can't leave that exculpatory evidence. Of course, you can't even look the other way. You can't even not look at the journals you don't like. If there's serious journals, you got to read them. So that's one of the problems we have. And what that means is that you'll find a paper that says high fat diet is detrimental because it raises blood glucose, it raises cholesterol, whatever.
But if you read the paper, you'll see that there's a high fat diet that's also high in carbohydrate. And you have to ask, supposed it's low in carbohydrate because we're really providing the alternative. And under those conditions, things get better, not worse. So that's the major, one of the major problems in the literature that they refer to high fat diets without saying what else is going on there. I mean, probably, that's due to poor definitions. High fat diet covers a range or fat and, therefore, a range of carbohydrate. That's not really informative.
Christopher: Right. As a lay person, on the outside, that's one of my biggest problems, is the weakness of the definition. And then you can be even more specific and say a ketogenic diet and it'd still be not really saying anything at all. So what is ketogenic for one person is not ketogenic for the next. And it still doesn't tell you anything about what type of fats the person ate or whether they were meeting their full requirements of the micronutrients. I think that's a real problem.
And you presented an idea in Latin which I won't try and pronounce now. It translates to show me the body of the data. Is that something that you always look for? When you see a new study, are you always looking to see whether they describe exactly what's eating or do you think that's not necessary?
Richard: Oh, no, that's, of course, absolutely necessary. My recent blog post describes a paper. First off, there's Gary Foster and that's very important because he did what I described as -- He did the experiment that I described as the shot heard around the world, by analogy with the American revolution. Because there he says in public, he gave a lecture in which he said they set out to trash the Atkins diet.
Well, that's not the best way to do research but in any case, what they found was that he couldn't trash it. In fact, it did better than the low fat diet. And he did a follow up. That was a one year study. He did a follow up, a two-year study, whose conclusion was that only calories count. It doesn't matter about the macronutrient composition of the diet. So I described in the book how a student was annoyed that I dismissed that paper without reading it very carefully. And I tried to explain that I'm a professional. I get in there and look at it fast and tell you it's not a good paper.
[0:24:59]
Well, obviously, this was not particularly convincing. So I had to go back and read the paper and to tell. First thing I noticed is it was very long. So that was already suspicious. It had a lot of words but not a lot of data. So what I looked for first -- Let me answer the question that you ask me for. What do I look for first in the paper is the paper. I know that sounds funny but we call them figures in a scientific paper.
But the presence and the quality of the figures will tell you a lot about the scientific paper. Because for most scientific studies, I know this is extreme generalization, the figures will give you more information than the tables. It's not universal, isn't it? Nothing really universal in science, but that's a good rule. In fact, the way a lot of people write scientific papers, me included, is you make up the figures and then you write the text around them.
You lay them out to see what the story is. A good scientific paper, even a good mathematical paper is a story. And if you can't write a good story, then that's suspicious. Now, of course, a lot of scientific things are technical so it can't be -- It's not going to be a story that everybody can read. But it should have some literary impact. I mean, you should take the trouble to explain things. I quote in the book what I call the golden rule of statistics, which statistics itself is a major problem in the literature.
It says: You should make it clear to the reader that the burden of proof is on the author to make it clear to the reader what's going on. And if you don't do that, as they say, the study isn't clear before you did the statistics. You should be suspicious. So what I look out first are the figures. So coming back to Foster's paper, the figures were a little odd. The titles of them were predicted values which I don't know Latin but I think everybody knows habeas corpus, which means 'let us have the body.' So I morphed that into habeas corpus daturum, 'let us have the body of the data.'
I quote this from a statistics book, which says before the statistical shenanigans begin, that's what you should do. So anyway, with Foster's paper, I started to look for the primary data which in the case of the diet study is always how much carbohydrate, how much protein, how much fat. Well, I couldn't find it. And as I say, it was a very long paper because it went into great detail about how they counseled people.
I think this was a reaction to the fact that their first paper they just gave people the Atkins's book and said go out there and do this. But anyway, I couldn't find any of those and I was about to call Foster when I saw somebody's blog found an article in the LA Times by a reporter named Bob Kaplan, and he had written to Foster and to Jim Hill, who was one of the authors. They hadn't measured this. I mean, it's kind of astounding. He described it, Kaplan described it as 'what any high school student would know to do first' or something like that. So it was just outrageous.
Christopher: It seems if the data is not there, then probably they don't know. It's unlikely that they withheld something. It's probably that they just didn't measure it to begin with.
Richard: I think they -- What they said is true, they didn't measure it. And what that means is that once you find that out -- Now, admittedly, they are at fault, at minimum they are at fault for not saying that they didn't measure it. You can't just not measure and leave it out. I think that's like -- Well, it didn't take as gray material but it would be some fault if you brought that to a court of law. But anyway, it means that their conclusion is not justified by their data.
[0:30:29]
So why do you have to do that kind of work to find out that the paper is no good? And the answer is because that's what you got to do. I can tell you I think nutrition is very important and for many people it can be critical. And you do have to do that work. The other side of it is that you do have to learn something about chemistry. And our educational system is a little lax in that area.
The chemical curriculum as it's done in high school and college doesn't get people up to speed on what they want to know right away, and they could. So that's one of the things I try to do in my book is give you at least a bit of rough idea of what goes on Biochemistry. The reason it took me a long time to write the book is that it's really three books. You really have to know the chemistry and I could only do it in a rush sort of way. And then you have to know the nutrition. And between those two, you can see what's going on in the politics. And so the sequel to my book is three books, which I'm working on now.
Christopher: Oh, wow. It's one of the things I mentioned actually was how bold you were in the amount of ground that you covered. It's just sort of everything from the kind of the history of how we got to where we are now through law of thermodynamics through -- There's even a section on recipes at the end. I can't believe it. It really is three books in one. I enjoyed all of it immensely.
I realized from what you've just been saying that I'd been making a critical error. Whenever I see one of these PDFs of some nutritional study and I want to read it, the first thing I do is I send it to my Kindle, which is a quite a primitive black and white device that doesn't render pictures at all. And so all I'd been reading is the text and I don't really look at the figures. And even the tables on that device are not rendered very well. And so that I see now as a problem.
Richard: Look at their figures first. And the author, the burden is on the author to make the figures clear. And if they don't do that, they are already coming from behind. It's already suspicious.
Christopher: Right. That's something you said in the book which I thought was really interesting, that presentation and graphic form means that the author is trying to explain something to you. So if the pictures are really good and you spend some time looking at those, then you know that the story is worth reading. So I think that's a really helpful piece of advice. As far as the body of the data, I'm really interested to know what you think is enough. You just mentioned the macronutrient ratios. Do you not care about what type of fat was consumed? If they're just drinking a whole bunch of polyunsaturated seed oil.
Richard: It depends on what the question is.
Christopher: Okay, okay.
Richard: If the data show that fat, probably described by the author as a particular fat, better or worse. And the data is clear. The data doesn't rely on small statistical changes. Then you got to go to the next question and say, "Well, what will happen if it's different kind of fat?" But you can't answer every question all at once. So in that sense, it's always about what question is being asked. And that's why one of the things that I criticize in the book is this idea that is coming in the medical literature that is standard of evidence different types of studies that are better or worse. That's not really part of science.
[0:35:05]
That's made up by people who don't have real experience. The idea that a random controlled trial is a gold standard which you see in the literature depends on what you're trying to find out. Sometimes a random controlled trial is not what you need. Sometimes you need a short trial, small number of people but clear cut data because the bigger the N, the more people you have in the study, the longer the study goes, the more unreliable the data becomes.
Because you don't know who's conforming to the protocol and who isn't and so on. I don't think there's any fixed approach. The answer is, again, because I'm working on a paper now describing an analogy between courts of law and what they call evidence based medicine, the courts have spent a lot of effort trying to decide what constitutes scientific evidence. And basically, a lot of it arrives from what are called the federal rules of evidence, which were laid out by congress.
And the bottom line is that evidence is admissible in the court of law if it helps, if it really is relevant to the question at hand. So that's really the question. We don't have a -- There aren't cut and dry rules of science. Enough data is enough for you to make a decision. But it's got to be the reason I made up that rule that we have to have a whole body of data is that figurely what you'll see in epidemiologic data is data that's already been manipulated.
And I gave a couple of examples in the book and in my blog where you have data that's already been gone, that has already gone through the computer and finds a particular thing. But if you look at the raw data, it actually goes the other way. And that's not legitimate, or at least it's not easy to accept without a lot of explanation.
Christopher: So you should look out for that then, if the author dives straight into hazard ratios and all these kinds of sophisticated statistical techniques that are difficult to understand, it's not a good sign.
Richard: That's a good rule. As I say, there are technical issues. Partly because we had a number of foreign graduate students, I used to teach a course on scientific writing. And I used to ask and it includes scientific presentation as well. And I said, "What are you supposed to do in a scientific paper or in a scientific presentation?" And students would try to come up with convoluted explanations.
That's the kind of question that a professor asks you and is so incredibly annoying. I try not to carry it too long. Finally, I said, "Well, just give me in one word what you're supposed to do." And the answer is teach. That's the main thing you're supposed to do. When you give a scientific paper, you should not be trying to snow the editor. You should not be trying especially not to snow the audience. You should be trying to explain things. Now it is true that you're also selling. You have to make your idea cogent. But first, you're teaching.
Christopher: Yeah, I think that's important. For someone like me, it's incredibly easy to snow me because I don't know much about chemistry and nutrition and biochemistry. I'm smart enough to know that I don't know much. And so it's easy. If you hit me with some stuff like that, I'm just going to say, "Well, I guess, I just don't know." But it might actually, he might actually be right, I wouldn't know.
Richard: It's easy to snow me. And part of the problem is that it's easy to snow yourself. I mean, I don't think a lot of the stuff in the medical literature that's so terrible is quite honest. They don't see fallacies.
[0:40:09]
And I'm not saying it from on high, we all make five mistakes a week. I mean, that's the essence of doing science. Maybe what is the difference between science and medicine is that medicine, you don't have that privilege to make a lot of mistakes and you don't, for that reason, you're disinclined to admit mistakes when you do make them. But no, I always say it's not really false modesty, my wisdom is like [0:40:54] [Indiscernible]. My wisdom consists of knowing how little I know about most of these questions.
Christopher: Yeah, I think that's an important point. So what am I to do then? We've had this long discussion. So do you think it's a complete waste of time for me to try and just read some random paper that I found somewhere on the internet, say, and if we--
Richard: Yeah, clearly, you should read my book first.
Christopher: Your book first, which I've done. But I'm wondering, which papers I should read. We've discussed that there's some problems with the major journals and also they're probably quite expensive for someone like me. So that might not be the answer either. What do you think should be my first point of contact when I'm looking to read a study? I'll tell you what's been helpful so far, at least I think it's been helpful, is I've met a number of doctors that I respect over the past year or so mostly through this podcast, actually.
Those people had been really helpful in sending me papers which are of a good quality and relevant to what I'm doing. I found that extremely useful. Of course, I don't really know what they're not sending me. What would you do for, what would you recommend for someone like me? What should be my first point of contact?
Richard: Well, it's a very good question. I'm not sure -- I could tell you what I think you should read first. And I think the major people in low carbohydrate research are the people you should follow up on. Let me give you one place to start. Usually, what you want is a reliable review article that has enough different points to follow up. So I will send you a paper that we wrote in the journal called Nutrition. It came out in January.
And it's about diabetes. It has the 12 points of evidence that support the use of low carbohydrate diets as the first line of approach in treating diabetes. And what I would do there is go through the 12 points of evidence. Go back. It is a scientific paper. It's not written specifically for layman. On the other hand, it tries to be as straightforward as possible. Go through each of those points and see what our arguments are and ask yourself: If I were buying this, if I really had diabetes, we're really concerned, would I buy this piece of evidence? And if not, what's missing?
And then that gives you something to ask, well, the next person on your podcast or the next person that you'll meet. And then each of the points, it's really not false modesty when I say that I'm the senior author on the paper. It's not false modesty when I say that what I really did there was to organize major work by the other authors. Their contribution is what's most important. And nobody writes one paper. So follow up those authors.
[0:45:00]
I don't remember exactly but I think we tried to include at least one figure for every one of the main points. It is a traditional journal in the sense that it comes out in a hardbound version. We did make it to be -- With those journals, you have to pay to make it open access. But it is open access. And you can see it online. We also think that color figures are important so we also had to pay to have the figures in colors. Given those two, we're sort of limited by how many figures we could have, but we try to have at least one for every major point. And look at those and ask what's the follow up and what have the authors done themselves to follow up on those points?
Christopher: Okay. And so for people listening, is this the journal, Nutrition and Metabolism?
Richard: Okay. The journal is called Nutrition. It's volume 31. And it's page one. Actually, the journal, we're the first one in the journal.
Christopher: Excellent.
Richard: And it has 26 authors.
Christopher: Wow, okay.
Richard: So it's authoritative.
Christopher: Okay. So when you got one expert, that's good. When you got 26, it's presumably better.
Richard: Well, I would say most people probably don't even have to be in science to understand that getting, compared to getting agreement among 26 authors, peer review is nothing compared to that.
Christopher: Right. And then finally, I wanted to ask you which is your favorite biochemistry undergraduate level text, something that I could read to get a better understanding of this stuff?
Richard: The strategy is simple. Just find out what the biology text being used by your neighboring university is. I'm trying to think of the author. Like I said, it's not a course that I actually teach. But anyway, the introductory chapter, most of the good biology texts are very good. And the big biology texts for big university courses are very good. They are not affordable but the earlier additions are perfectly good and they are affordable.
I mean, even one that's 20 years old will get you right into good biochemistry. I mean, there's no -- Chemistry is, there's no Marxist chemistry, there's no Christian chemistry. It's just chemistry. That would be my recommendation. If you want to go up to the next level, of course, you have to recognize your buying a book for the first 25 pages. But as I say, the old editions tend to be very affordable. And, of course, the text themselves are very good. They branch off into all kinds of biology that you may not want to know right away. So that would be my recommendation.
Christopher: Excellent. Those are some fantastic tips. Thank you very much. I really appreciate your time.
Richard: And then the book, the bestselling biochemistry text that our students use is by Harvey and it's called Lippincott book because it's published by Lippincott. It's a review book but it's really very cool and very thorough. Except on nutrition. One of the early editions described how obesity increased as the amount of carbohydrate in the diet increased. And the book said this has led some uncritical observers to say that carbohydrate was fattening.
So I wrote to the author and I said, "Well, I'm one of those uncritical observers." I have to give a lecture and they look in the book and says, "I'm critical observers. I think you better change that for the next edition." So the next edition said that 'this has caused some observers to say carbohydrate is fattening.' So, I guess, that's as much as I could. Harvey himself actually -- Well, like I say, it's a very good book. I don't think you put a lot of care into figuring out whether low carb really is important.
[0:50:02]
But the major texts are all very good. Some of them take the party line on nutrition in some places where they don't have the time to sort it out for themselves. But [0:50:20] [Indiscernible] on the biochemistry, they're very good on citing relevant material and they make it clear. I mean, these texts are encyclopedic. Personally, I can't imagine how -- And some of them are multi-authored. But even so, I can imagine how people produce it.
Christopher: Yeah. I have the Marks' Medical Biochemistry book which I just got. And, yeah, that was my first thought when I saw it. I'm like, "My god, how long does it take someone to produce this?" And you see these multiple authors. But even so, it's not surprising that some of it is out of date.
Richard: And it's not surprising that especially given how much effort was put into the selling the low fat propaganda, it's not surprising that they would just cut and paste that in. I mean, that's really the problem in medicine. My own internist many years ago said he didn't know nutrition. He didn't have time to learn it and he sent his patients to a dietician. He did come to our low carb conference and he said it really opened his eyes. But he still didn't feel like he was an expert. That is part of the problem.
Christopher: Yeah, absolutely. I could remember reading that in the book, that a medical degree is not any guarantee of expertise outside of your area of specialty.
Richard: And you should. We have to recognize that that expertise in that area can be tremendous. I mean, that's part of the problem. Modern medicine is very powerful. And the flipside of how great it is might be how easy it is to think that you know everything. I think it's hard for somebody who's just done the multiple bypass to admit that they're not sure about what's the best thing to eat.
Christopher: Well, this has been very enlightening. Thank you very much for your time. I really appreciate it.
Richard: Thanks so much for having me on.
Christopher: Yeah, no problem. I'll find these. I'll hunt these books down and link to them in the show notes so that people can find them easily.
Richard: Okay, great.
Christopher: Cheers, then. Thanks, Richard.
Richard: Okay, thank you.
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