Dr Lundell
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Over a century ago, a 'scientific breakthrough' ushered in radical dietary changes that saw the US, and eventually most of the world, put on a low-fat diet. The discovery that high cholesterol levels were associated with coronary heart disease led to saturated fats, particularly animal fats, being singled out for elimination from meals. In theory, they told us, people will get less heart attacks and become healthier.

But what actually happened?

Rates of coronary heart disease rose to today's staggering levels. Some 75 million Americans currently suffer from heart disease, 20 million have diabetes and 57 million have pre-diabetes. Today, nearly half of all Americans can expect to get cancer at least once.

This week we're going to be talking with Dr. Dwight Lundell, who spent 25 years performing over 5,000 heart surgeries before realizing that the theory he believed in and promoted was not just wrong, it significantly contributed to the explosion of disease.

Running Time: 02:00:00

Download: MP3


Here's the transcript:

Niall: Hello and welcome to SOTT Talk Radio. I'm your host Niall Bradley. And with me in the studio this week is Jason, Juliana and Scott. So the title for this week's show is Physician, Heal Thyself: Disease and Modern Diet. We're going to be discussing with our very special guest, Dr. Dwight Lundell. Dr. Lundell is the former Chief of Staff and Chief of Surgery at Banner Heart Hospital in Mesa, Arizona where he also had his own private practice. After spending 25 years performing over 5,000 heart surgeries, Dr. Lundell left surgery about a decade ago to focus on the nutritional treatment of heart disease. He is the founder of Healthy Humans Foundation whose vision is to "Help the human race free itself from chronic diseases caused by improper nutrition and misleading consumer information". Dr. Lundell has published two books: The Cure for Heart Disease and The Great Cholesterol Lie. Welcome Dr. Dwight Lundell.

Dr Lundell: Well thank you very much.

Niall: Thanks for being here.

Juliana: Hello.

Jason: Hello.

Niall: I think your name will be familiar to a lot of our readers and our listeners today because your article 'Heart Surgeon Speaks Out on What Really Causes Heart Disease', I think it was one of the most popular we ever had.

Jason: I think we got huge numbers. People really liked that article.

Niall: I think we picked it up and then someone else picked it up and next thing you know it was literally viral. It went around.

Jason: Wasn't somebody saying that Rush Limbaugh was talking about it?

Niall: I think so. He referenced SOTT.net and this article. And he was talking about it and I don't know what the chain of events was, but it was heard far and wide.

Jason: It's kind of like Satan talking about it.

Niall: That's not cool.

Jason: Not for sure because if you're the pope and Satan's talking about you and you know you've done right and everything, you know? {laughter}

Dr Lundell: Well it was interesting. My son called me and said "You're going to be on Rush Limbaugh in a few minutes" and he spent a half hour and went over into the next segment, and read the entire piece and apparently he loves SOTT.net.

Jason: And didn't have a heart attack.

Niall: Oh I see. Did Rush Limbaugh then get you on his show?

Dr Lundell: No, he did not get me on his show. But Fox News had me on three times to comment on heart disease.

Niall: I see.

Jason: What did Limbaugh say about it? I'm curious because when I was growing up as a teenager I used to watch Limbaugh all the time because I just thought he was hilarious. But what was his spiel? Do you know, Dr. Lundell?

Dr Lundell: Yes I do. I listened to his show and I think what appealed to him was that we were going against the government's current dietary recommendations. But he read the whole article on his show.

Niall: Wow, awesome. Well, you began it with a confession in which you admitted that you had been wrong about the cause of heart disease. Now considering this is - I don't think I'm wrong in saying this - is an epidemic, but what is it eighty million people have some degree of heart disease or other? What's wrong? Where do we begin this? What it is that officially has been so wrong?

Dr Lundell: One of my very smartest professors in medical school told me when I was a young student the worst thing that can happen to a patient is a diagnosis.

That puzzled me greatly because I thought we were here to make a diagnosis. And his response was that when we make a diagnosis then everyone stops thinking about what's wrong.

When you stop and think about it that's profound. We put a name on a disease and we think that means we understand it completely. And he used a little example of certain diseases, if we don't know the cause we call them "idiopathic". And his response to that was the doctor is an idiot and the patient is pathetic. {laughter} So his advice was that we should always keep our minds open and look and look and if we don't really honestly know the fundamental biology of a disease then we really don't understand it, even if we have some treatment that's moderately effective for it.

Jason: Well can I ask you, it seems when I encounter doctors, now I'm kind of ignorant about this because I'm not really a scientific person or scientifically minded or anything like that, but I have a lot of experience with doctors as a patient.

And it's my understanding - it's unfortunate I've spent quite a lot of time in hospitals and spent time in a hyperbaric chamber as well healing after surgery so I've met specialists of all kinds - the one thing that I've really noticed about them is they never seem to know what's wrong. And so I really want to know, how much does medical science really know about disease to begin with? I mean they all say that they're so sure, but what does medical science know about heart disease? Like really know? Like a fact about it, sort of thing?

Dr Lundell: Well we know a lot more than we did. For example when I first started in school we really had basically no effective treatment for heart disease. There was a lot of excitement about heart disease because about 90 percent of the young soldiers killed in the Korean War had some form of heart disease, some of them relatively severe, and so there was a lot of excitement about it and we really had no treatment for it until the coronary bypass came along. So to me we could take someone who was near death and do this little coronary bypass, little rearrangement of the plumbing and give them back their life, give them back to their families, give them back to their wife. And so, even though I didn't understand the disease, I had a solution for it, at least a moderately temporary solution that really worked 99 percent of the time. And so I think that's what happens a lot of times in medicine. If we discover somehow that there's a treatment that's effective, then we'll use it even if we don't understand the fundamental biology of what's going on behind the scenes.

Juliana: There's something very interesting that you said in your book actually, which we're highly recommending to all our listeners because it's really, really well explained, and you make a comment at one point where you say "I had become a mechanic. And it's great to have mechanics but why is there a need for mechanics when we can prevent the heart from breaking in the first place?" And maybe you can expand a little bit more on that in terms of how medicine is nowadays?

Dr Lundell: Sure. Cancer for example, we don't know what causes cancer. We have lots of treatments for it; we can cut it out, we can burn it with radiation or we can try to poison it and everything else with chemotherapy. And indeed for some cancers we really have a very effective treatment. We understand some of the biology of cancer cells but we don't really understand what triggers it in the beginning. And so our ability to prevent cancer in a wide array of things, because we don't understand what causes it, we can't prevent it.
Now, some of the nutritional strategies involved in treating heart disease are also important in cancer but nevertheless we don't fundamentally have an understanding why suddenly cells will begin to divide abnormally and turn into a cancer.

Niall: When it comes to heart disease, on the one hand we've got the mechanics working the best they can with what they know, but it's been underpinned for decades, in fact nigh on a century, by what has turned out to be an assumption about cholesterol and its dangers. Can you expand on that a bit? I did some research before this show and I was trying to get information on this and sort of a timeline, cholesterol and how it became a fundamental basis for treating heart disease and other illnesses, and I realized that I was searching in cholesterol theory and what the results I was getting was that there were criticisms of this idea. And what that told me right away was that maybe it once was considered a theory, but it had very much become fact. So I think this is going to be a key to understanding how it all went wrong here. What was it about cholesterol that made it the number one target for treating people with heart disease?

Dr Lundell: Well you've read the history recently and correct me if I'm wrong but old pathologists, going all the way back to Virchow, took a look at the plaque that was in the artery and indeed there was cholesterol in the plaque. And so I think that's what started him and other people thinking about cholesterol was that here was something abnormal inside the artery and it contained cholesterol so there must be a connection of some kind.

Niall: Right.

Dr Lundell: Is that how you read the history?

Niall: Yeah, exactly, as I understand it, it was a build-up of cholesterol that encases itself around a person's arteries and that this was the problem. And step-by-step that leads to the recommendation that people lower the amount of dietary cholesterol they're taking. And that's how we came to get the dietary recommendation that people eat a low fat diet. And what's clear to me from what you've been saying, and others too, is that we seem to have gone completely in the wrong direction based on this assumption that the problem was cholesterol to begin with. Does that sound about right?

Dr Lundell: That is right. And I cover some of the history of it in the book, about who some of the major players were and how it developed. But yeah, it started because we looked under the microscope, even crude microscopes 150 years ago, and saw cholesterol. And then we started experimenting and we fed large amounts of cholesterol to a rabbit that is fundamentally a vegetarian biologically, and saw that lesions developed in the arteries. And so then the famous Framingham study was started in Massachusetts to observe people over long periods of time. And they made a correlation between cholesterol levels and the incidence of heart disease. And it just began to build momentum from there without anybody ever asking why in the world would a normal substance that we produce in our liver and that every cell in our body needs, why would it collect in the wall of the blood vessel?

Juliana: Absolutely. Well maybe for those listeners who are not familiar with this topic, could you summarize a little bit what you say in your book? You start by saying that half of the patients that you saw with heart problems had normal cholesterol levels. So that couldn't be a cause and many of the studies proved that it's not the cause of heart problems. It's just maybe a consequence of the inflammation that starts way before when you're talking about us being time bombs. So could you explain just in simple terms the principle behind inflammation and why cholesterol ends up there and what type of cholesterol, this bad cholesterol that everybody talks about, why is it there and is it really bad?

Dr Lundell: Whoa you gave me a big topic to make very simple there. {laughing} I'll try because it's very important. We can make observational studies. We can do epidemiological studies and we can do correlations and whatnot. But that never tells us the fundamental biology. And that's where we have to go to understand all of the diseases that afflict us. So once again we made a diagnosis about heart disease was elevated cholesterol and all we had to do was either bypass the lesion or treat it with cholesterol medication or along in the mid-to-late '80s along came angioplasty, a less invasive way of treating it, by sticking a little balloon in the artery and blowing it up and then that was followed by putting a little piece of metal in there called a stent.

Well, when the stents began to fail and re-close very quickly, that made us wonder about our diagnosis. So once again, we'd all stopped thinking about what was wrong until we had a treatment that wasn't working. And so that's when people began to take another look back at the fundamental biology of what goes on in this blood vessel. And that's when we went back actually and looked at Virchow's work from 1880 or whatever and saw that he saw indeed, not only did he see cholesterol in the wall of the blood vessel, but he saw white blood cells. The white blood cells, as you know, are inflammatory defenses. They defend us against the bacteria and viruses and everything else that comes along.

So not only was there cholesterol but there was active white blood cells and a bunch of dead white blood cells and a bunch of decayed cholesterol in the wall of the artery. And so as people began to look at angioplasty and why they failed, we began to see that it really was fundamentally inflammation was the only reason that cholesterol would ever collect in the wall of our blood vessel.

Now let me back up a little bit and say that inflammation always follows injury. If we're never injured, then we'd never have inflammation. And injury can either be viral or bacterial or chemical but there has to be a little injury. Once there's an injury then a cascade of events happens that's called inflammation. And if we didn't have acute inflammation, we would die from every infection or injury or virus that came along. So we need it. It's fundamental to us.

Niall: It's a kind of warning system.

Jason: It's like a protection system.

Dr Lundell: Absolutely. It's our defense. And what happens is the white blood cell is triggered by this cascade of chemicals and signals, and it becomes very aggressive. And if it sees anything that's abnormal, anything that's antigenic, or that it recognizes abnormal, then its job is to gobble it up and eat it. And that's what's called a phagocyte. And so its job is to eat bacteria, or a virus, or debris, or foreign particles of any kind. So that's fundamentally the job of the white cell, to defend us, is to go out there and kill the enemy by actually eating it.

And so what happens then is if we do something that injures the wall of our blood vessel, or if we injure us somewhere else and we have all these inflammatory signals going on, then the lining of our blood vessel, which is called the endothelium, which is really the key cells that control our blood flow and whether our blood clots and if you stop and think about it, everything that we take in, the air and the water and everything else, has got to go through that endothelium to get to our cells. So it's the key critical layer in not only controlling our blood flow, but in controlling what goes in and what goes out.

So if this gets injured or if there's an activation of inflammatory cytokines, then the white cells go into the wall of the blood vessel looking for the bad guys to kill. And if a bad guy comes along that's an LDL that's normal, there's no antibody on normal LDL. It goes right past, they ignore it. But if it sees an LDL that has been oxidized that LDL is now abnormal or if it sees an LDL that's glycated, that is it has a sugar molecule attached to it, it deems that one as abnormal. And it gobbles them up because it thinks it's an enemy. And that's fundamentally how cholesterol gets into the wall of our blood vessel, by being gobbled up by an inflammatory cell.

Jason: So basically what you're kind of saying is the crud that's inside the artery is basically white cell excrement from it gobbling up abnormal-looking cells? Just to see if I follow, because I'm not a science person, so I don't know.

Dr Lundell: Yes. It basically is. For some reason these cells can't completely dissolve and destroy the cholesterol that they take in.

Jason: Right.

Dr Lundell: Fundamentally because it's abnormal. And so if you look at this white cell under the microscope in the wall of a blood vessel, it looks like it's got little bubbles of fat in it and it's got its name called the foam cell. This is the very, very beginning of heart disease. So you're correct. It's basically excrement of white cells, if you will.

Jason: Okay. It's just because my mind is so simple I can't really follow the scientific stuff. You're dancing around the issue but you're basically saying I guess is that there's these abnormal reactions going on; the inflammation starts, the white cell goes in there because it's an inflamed area, need to take charge, must eat, brain's kind of zombie cell thing, goes in there, sees all this stuff that's now weirdified, consumes it, pushes it out the back end and that's what's left in there, which is really weird, to be honest. The human body does strange, strange things.

Juliana: Yeah, well what's really interesting here is that you say that the cholesterol was there for a purpose. It has protective functions. It wants to be able to recycle in the body. It's essential for the living organism but when the sugar comes in, that's when the real problems start. Hence, sugar is the culprit, not cholesterol, right?

Dr Lundell: That is correct. And the way sugar is a problem is because it causes inflammation in these endothelial cells. And there's a reason for that. But we'll back up and just say that when these endothelial cells are injured by high sugars, then the white cells, and the cholesterol for that matter, come there to fight the enemy and to repair the damage. And once again, the only LDL so-called bad cholesterol, which is really false because it's a low density lipoprotein, it's a big particle with cholesterol in it, but when that particle gets oxidized or glycated, that's when we have trouble.

Jason: Yeah, but one thing is, I was always confused. People are saying that sugar was bad for you and I was surprised to find out that when it comes right down to it, sugar doesn't necessarily mean that white stuff that you put in your coffee. Doesn't sugar mean other things? It's like the foods that you eat get converted into sugar inside your stomach. So if you're eating a piece of bread or you're eating some sort of high-processed food, even though it might say on the back there's "x" number of sugar, when it goes into your stomach and gets broken down, your body is actually getting a whole bunch of different types of sugars and breaking them down, right?

Dr Lundell: It takes a whole lot of different kinds of sugars and breaks them down fundamentally into glucose. And you remember the chemical formula for that right?

Jason: I have no idea. {giggles}

Dr Lundell: {laughing} C6-H12-O6.

Jason: Yeah, okay.

Dr Lundell: Yeah, so at any rate, yes, we only absorb glucose and fructose and maybe a few other little simple molecules, once again, that are broken down to the 6 carbon elements. So if it's a potato, if it's a piece of bread, if it's some delicious pasta from south of you there in Italy, it's broken down into glucose and into our bloodstream.

Jason: So it doesn't really matter if its bio or not bio, it's still going to end up being sugar in your body, right?

Dr Lundell: Correct.

Jason: So the sugars and then there's fats. There's like stuff like that. So there are only those two types of things. When you eat food, they're going to get broken down into amino acids and things like this right? Can you explain that process, because I'm curious?

Dr Lundell: Yeah. There are three macronutrients actually. You mentioned two. Carbohydrates are one, fats are another and proteins are another. So those are the three macronutrients that we need to survive. And as you pointed out, certain things are called essential because the body can't produce them. And we have 21 or so essential amino acids and we have a few essential fatty acids that we can't make, that we have to consume. Interestingly enough, there's not an essential carbohydrate.

Jason: Yeah, because your body even apparently it makes them out of protein - what it gets from protein in glycolysis or something like this. I can't remember. I read some Wikipedia page about this. {laughing}

Dr Lundell: Yes, fundamentally if you go without fat you'll die. If you go without protein you'll die. If you go without carbohydrates you can produce enough carbohydrates in the liver from protein and a little bit from fat to provide the glucose that you need for those cells that only can use glucose. But lots of cells are very happy and in fact much happier burning fat than they are carbohydrates although carbohydrates, as you've read, supposedly the easiest source. Just because it's easy doesn't always mean it's the best source.

Juliana: Absolutely, yeah. Well you know we have a discussion forum where we talk about all these subjects. And Laura who unfortunately is not here, she actually had a very interesting experience way back in I think it was 2006. It's too bad she's not here because she tells stories better than I do.

But anyway, she had a herniated cervical disc. And they gave her a ton of steroids, an anti-inflammatory drug. She had lived with chronic problems since she was nine. She had arthritis at the age of nine.

Niall: She had chronic pain.

Juliana: Constant pain. And then from one day to the other when she got the massive dose of steroids, she was pain-free. And she as like "Well wait a minute, this is an anti-inflammatory drug. I must have inflammation." She didn't know what living pain-free was. So we started to research all that and we found the research on gluten, casein, and grains in general. And several of us decided to give it a try and eliminated those from the diet and it made a huge difference because you already remove a bunch of toxic carbohydrates from just eliminating gluten. And then we found the paleo diet or some people found the Atkins diet, but we moved into the Paleolithic diet and it made a huge difference for a lot of our group members who said "I'm pain-free". People even curing diabetes.

Niall: Yes.

Juliana: It made a drastic change. And now since 2010, 2011, we started trying the ketogenic diet. Have you heard about it?

Dr Lundell: Oh yes. How's it working?

Juliana: Well for most of the people whom we've heard of, it's really, really working great.

Jason: I could tell a little bit of a story about that, on the whole diet thing. So I started getting really fat actually probably when I was about 9 or 10. I started to get pudgy and people started making fun of me for being fat. And as I got older into the teenage years, I was 14 I think, I was 240 pounds.

Dr Lundell: Wow.

Jason: And finally when I got to be about 25, 26, I weighed over 340 pounds. Despite being very fat, I'm also naturally athletic which everyone knows I do all kinds of crazy stuff that, even though I have a lot of girth, I also have a lot of muscle mass. I can lift a lot of weight, but I also had this thick layer of fat over my body. And I went to this doctor because I have a genetic disorder called Verneuil's, which is Hidradenitis Suppurativa. And I went to this doctor because I had one of these things and he said to me "You're morbidly obese. You need to come under the knife. We're going to tie your stomach off". They install this like rip-board to your stomach and it's got a hole outside your belly and you're supposed to tighten it or something. I mean, it was totally insane. So I felt really, really bad about this and then I got sick with Sigmoiditis. It was just sort of random inflammation of the colon. And I have had this repeatedly over the years. My colon would become very, very painful. I would have blood in my stool and all this different stuff. And I went to a doctor and the doctor said "Okay, we have to give you a colonoscopy". He said "For the next two days, you need to be on a non-residue diet". And I said "Well what's a non-residue diet?" and he was like "Well, basically we need to clean out your colon and stop the irritation so that I can go in there with the camera".

Juliana: Stop the inflammation.

Jason: Yeah. "And in order to do that you have to clean it out a bit, so you can't eat any vegetables. You can't eat any fibers. You can only eat some meat and maybe like a little bit of mashed potatoes or rice" basically. And so my mom was there and actually Juliana was there at the time and it was just sort of like this light bulb came on because here's this doctor, he's about to stick a camera into my colon, look at it, and he's saying the thing that's going to calm it down so that he can inspect it and clean it out, is for me not to eat fiber and to only eat kind of like meat and just sort of non-residue foods. And so then I said "Well why don't I just eat that all the time?" {laughing} You know, why don't I just stop eating those grains and stuff? So that's what I did. And I lost 64 kilos, which is almost a hundred...

Niall: Hundred-some pounds.

Dr Lundell: 130 pounds, yeah.

Jason: Yeah, it's about 130 pounds. I lost 130 pounds. I'm not completely hyper-skinny and stuff. So I went on that. Basically I stopped eating rice, which was my staple food. I stopped eating any of that. I just sort of ate kind of like meat and fatty stuff and every once in a while mashed potato or something like that, something that would be really easy on my colon, totally cleared up the problem. I stopped having the swollen colon. Like every 3-6 months I would have these horrible, horrible cramps and blood in my stool. That stopped. I had Irritable Bowel Syndrome and that just completely disappeared. So that's kind of my story, with my experience, one of my hospital experiences.

Juliana: Yeah, so like Jason and we have several stories like that, of people who stopped eating what's recommended in the nutritional pyramid basically, and they cured all kinds of problems. Now we're still researching this ketogenic diet, but I don't know. I'd like to hear what you think about it. Do you think it's something you would recommend?

Dr Lundell: Well the answer is yes. Just before we had this conversation I said that carbohydrates are the one macronutrient that we can actually live without because we have the capacity to produce the small amounts, maybe 200 grams that we need, we can actually manufacture. And lots of cells prefer fatty acids and ketones over glucose and function better on those things. But over and above that, the idea that some things are inflaming our intestine and that's a big bunch of inflammation because the surface area of our intestinal tract, if you laid out all of it flat, completely flat, would be about the size of a football field.

Jason: That's a lot in one person.

Dr Lundell: So in view of if that's inflamed, that's why you were so sick. Now it wasn't all inflamed, but lots of it was and lots of it apparently was inflamed from the gluten and other elements that are in grains. And although the people with true gluten sensitivity in a medical diagnosis are not rare, but they're not that many, the people with minor reactions to it, who don't get overly symptomatic, now maybe they're just as gluten sensitive as anybody else but they don't have quite the dramatic response so lots of athletes, professional athletes that we know of who had a huge amount of GI troubles during events, were able to calm those all down and compete by eliminating grains from their diet. Actually Bill Davis wrote the book Wheat Belly. I don't know if you've seen that one.

Jason: Yeah.

Dr Lundell: But he's a friend of mine and we've corresponded actually for quite a few years now about this, that and the other. And the gluten I think he's right on. And he reports every day about reader after reader with stories similar to yours who are suddenly much improved in terms of irritable bowel and all those kind of thing by eliminating wheat from their diet.

Over and above that, over and above the toxicity from the gluten and the gliadins, the toxicity from the high amounts of carbohydrate we get from most foods made with wheat, is just as important in inflaming our blood vessels as gluten and gliadin are in inflaming our bowel. And so when we eat wheat, we get a double whammy.

Niall: Yeah. You could even add a third branch to that, the psychological impacts. I mean of course if you're inflamed and/or in pain, you're not going to be thinking straight. That's something that, for myself, I had no obvious physical symptoms that were telling me something was wrong when I was eating a regular balanced diet with lots of carbs. But making a change and testing out, upping the fat intake and reducing the amount of vegetables and so on, is an amazing effect on your concentration levels, on your ability to be productive, your energy levels.

Jason: Here's one thing that I've noticed that nobody really talks about or is told about and I don't know if it's consistent across others, but I do know that it's something that I have definitely noticed. When you cut out carbs, you do see improvements. But then if you try to go back to the same level, if you go off processed foods and high carbo, high sugar, all this different stuff, you go off that and then you think you can have a hamburger from McDonalds or you think you can have some french fries or something like that, and you go and have it, it hits you like a ton of bricks. If I eat anything - I can detect if things have gluten in them. People will say "oh, it doesn't have gluten". I went over to somebody's house and they used something, they put a sauce on it. I asked "Is there any gluten in it?" and they said "No". I ate it. I knew it had gluten. I know because I had a very strong reaction to it.

Niall: That's your warning system.

Jason: It's gotten worse. It's gotten actually worse, my reaction to it. It's gotten stronger, clearer so that if I have something like high carbohydrate processed food, that hits me like a ton of bricks and the next day I feel like total crap.

Juliana: Is that something you can confirm, Dr. Lundell, from your patients or people who talk to you about becoming more aware of the sensations they get?

Dr Lundell: Oh absolutely, yes. And that's why I called wheat the double whammy. Not only do we have the reaction in the wall of the intestine that then triggers off all of those cascades of irritable bowel and allows lots of bad things to get in our blood that shouldn't get in there, because the bowel wall was so inflamed it doesn't work properly, but over and above that is the high glycemic index of all of these products that are made out of flour. They can call them whole grain Cheerios, but that's a lie. I mean, you can go out in the field and get a handful of wheat in your hand and chew it up and it turns into gum. That's gluten, its glue. That is where the word came from.

Niall: Yeah.

Dr Lundell: So if we don't take this wheat and grind it very finely and process the heck out of it, you really can't eat it. I don't think I could survive on real kernels of wheat because, once again, it turns into gum. The other thing that Dr. Davis says is that elements in wheat are addictive.

Juliana: Yup.

Dr Lundell: And I don't know, I don't want to argue with him, but I don't know for sure if it's the glucose or the gliadin that's addictive, or both. I won't argue that because we know that glucose is addicting and triggers the pleasure centers in the brain very much like other drugs of addiction, cocaine and morphine and heroin, and all those kind of things. So the pleasure centers, the dopamine, all the rest, if you do a PET scan, the same centers get activated. And as you look at people that overeat, just go to the buffet and watch and its compulsive behavior. And you look, I mean, you were a smart guy, you controlled many other things in your life. But you couldn't control what you ate. And it's an addiction. It's not as quick. The results and the complications are not as quick as the addiction to drugs are, but they happen and they're just as strong, in my opinion. And that's not to diminish the tragedies of drug addiction, but what's not tragic about diabetes and an amputation and dialysis and blindness?

Juliana: Exactly.

Dr Lundell: Just as in heart disease. They're just as tragic. And they come from this element in our diet called carbohydrates. I gave a talk a few weeks ago on the low carb cruise, and I said the most toxic molecule in the human diet is glucose. And somebody tweeted that out and it caused a bit of an uproar, saying that I didn't know anything about physiology because glucose is necessary and on and on and on, it's kind of funny.

Juliana: Oh god!

Niall: Yeah, well they would being junkies. {laughter}

Jason: Well I've noticed, because when people will come to visit, they freak out when there's no bread on the table. And they ask things like "Don't you have any bread?" And we say "No, we don't eat bread". And they're like "You don't eat bread?" It's really kind of actually a bit funny. It's sad, not really funny, but it is sort of like you see them freaking out that there's no bread. And when it's just there on the table and everybody eats it, nobody thinks about it. But when there's no bread on the table, people will come to our house to visit, and then they'll go out to eat. "Oh, no, no, no, you guys just eat by yourselves." {laughter} And they go out of their way to be really polite. "No, no, no, it's okay. No, you don't have to cook for us. No, no, we'll just go out and find something." And they're going out to get their fix, type of thing. It is kind of sad.

Niall: Yeah, and people feel sorry for you, like "Oh my god, you're living such a restrictive life. How do you keep beating yourself up to stay on it?" The thing is you don't crave it anymore.

Jason: Well people like that - I'm not going to say anything because being a person who was fat for most of my adult life, realizing at a certain point because when you're in it and you're eating that stuff all the time, like he was saying before, you go to a buffet and you see these people going up and a lot of people sort of laugh at it or make fun of them, they mock it or they make a moral judgment about it, but having been somebody who was in that, who was one of those people at the buffet - you just are not in a place where you can see that there are so many wonderful things in life to do which eating is not. It's such a small part of your life and should be such a small part of your life. And for people who are compulsive eaters, eating is everything to them. It's something they do. It's something they look forward to. It's the only thing that assuages whatever it is. It fills the hole that makes them feel better about themselves. And so you have these other people "You live such a restricted life" and I say, "Yeah, but I used to not be able to go for a run or skateboard or do any of these other things because I was so fat". So you know what? I'm happy eating a restricted diet if it means I can do these five, 10, 15 other things that fulfill me much more than food does. So I have a strong reaction to people who say that.

Juliana: So why weren't we told these things Dr. Lundell? Why is it that the government keeps promoting grains so much and carbohydrates and that almost every single doctor you go see tells you about the balanced diet nowadays? Why is it kept so separate from what should be?

Dr Lundell: {chuckling} Well, it's a combination of bad science and bad government. And the bad science I talk a little bit about in the book. And it starts back with feeding a vegetarian animal cholesterol and looking at heart disease and it moves on. I think one of the most important players is Ancel Keyes who wrote the seven nations studies wherein he correlated the consumption of saturated fat with heart disease. And so that became a key piece that everybody quotes to say that saturated fat raises cholesterol, cholesterol causes heart disease; therefore we should eat no saturated fat. And the sort of sad thing that nobody paid attention to at the time - well some people did and raised objections, but got overruled - and that is that he had data from 22 countries and he cherry-picked the seven that met his preconceived notion. And even over and above that, on page 256 of this seven country study, he admits that there's a correlation between the consumption of carbohydrates and heart disease, but he covers it up by saying that "Well, when they ate more carbohydrates, they also ate more saturated fat. Therefore it's the saturated fat and not the carbohydrates that are causing heart disease". So he had a fundamental bias and he ignored the data and manipulated the data and, god rest his soul he's dead now, but I think he bears responsibility for this epidemic of obesity and diabetes, in part.

Jason: I think it is interesting that the power that scientists have today to cause damage in people's lives is really actually sometimes a bit scary and horrifying, that the capital self-interest of one man or even maybe it was just a psychological kind of he just liked his carbohydrates and just couldn't admit it, or whatever it was, but there's a lot of suffering in the world because of that.

Dr Lundell: Oh yes! And George McGovern, the senator that chaired the senate committee in the United States that issued the dietary guidelines also recently passed away, but that committee was just as guilty of bias. They hired a vegetarian, a vegan as a matter of fact, to write the report. They were completely biased.

They ignored the protests of many, many scientists, that this wasn't the answer, that fat wasn't the problem and that replacing saturated fat with vegetable oils wasn't the answer and that replacing fat of any kind with carbohydrates wasn't the answer. But he's famously quoted as saying "We don't have time for all the science to come in. We have to do something now".

Niall: Yeah, "the science is settled. Let's just get on with it." And what they got on with was recommending a low fat diet, the very thing, it would seem, that has been central to causing this explosion in heart disease, diabetes and everything else. That's just insane.

Dr Lundell: Absolutely insane. And one more thought about the compulsions, never, ever have I seen a compulsive eater going for the butter, or going for the cream, or going for the sauces. They're going for the carbs.

Niall: No.

Dr Lundell: Never once.

Niall: You hit your limit, you find satiation and you leave it and get on with other things. I was going to ask you, after reading your article my first thought was how did it all go wrong? We've touched on it here, the influence of one guy in particular Ancel Keyes, but from there, there was science being done in parallel that contradicted this idea, but still even to this day, even when there is more information that directly contradicts, such as the information that you've pulled together, it's still the dominant idea that you need a balanced diet, you need a low fat diet. It just staggers belief that they can still be recommending this in the face of the evidence that it's so tragically wrong.

Dr Lundell: It's tragically wrong that we keep recommending it. And unfortunately in this day and age it involves money. And I think that in a couple of years that we will see PhD theses in business analyzing how the drug makers influenced regulation to such that everybody now needs a statin medication. It was absolutely brilliant. It wasn't out-and-out bribery. It was much more subtle than that. They would say "Dr. Lundell, we recognize you as a great authority on heart disease and would you please give a talk at a convention and we'll pay your way and to a fancy place and put you up and you can be the authority and you educate your colleagues on the evils of cholesterol and the benefits of taking this medication" well, that's irresistible to a lot of people and if I'm a university researcher and my tenure and my salary depends on research grants and I can go to some big drug company and say look, I need $100 million to do x, y study and if they think I'm influential, then I get $100 million. That gives me a huge amount of power. And then I get my buddies to agree with me and together we sit on the national cholesterol education panel. We make all the recommendations.

Niall: Yeah, "you cite my papers, I'll cite yours".

Juliana: But you know that really makes me angry the whole thing about fat? I'm hoping you will say something more about this because there's an amazing amount of people who take statins for life.

Niall: Dr. Lundell is claiming that a quarter of all Americans are taking statins.

Juliana: Yeah, and the list of side effects. Okay, you mentioned that one thing that statins will do is reduce inflammation, right?

Dr Lundell: Maybe.

Juliana: Maybe.

Juliana: That's not even proven?

Dr Lundell: Not proven, no.

Juliana: All their claims about reducing heart diseases, it's false, right?

Dr Lundell: Yes, absolutely false.

Juliana: Absolutely. Okay, so they've been lying to the public and we see people with Alzheimer's, with serious, serious problems, memory loss, and anything. How come they keep lying to people and people are just, it just makes me mad. Sorry.

Dr Lundell: I think somebody did a little film recently, I don't remember the title but at any rate, there are 30 billion reasons to recommend statins.

Juliana: Uh-huh.

Dr Lundell: Bernie Madoff, the famous fraudster in this country, is in jail for cheating people out of $30 billion over 30 years.

Niall: With his Ponzi scheme.

Dr Lundell: With a Ponzi scheme. Well we spend more than $30 billion worldwide on statins. And we spend another $100 million on testing and doctor visits. And we recommend statins to healthy people. It's become in the United States a standard of care. And with the electronic medical record, if I'm a doctor and I don't recommend statins to someone who shows up on that record with a high cholesterol, then I've fallen below the standard of care and I'm guilty of malpractice. If that person should have a heart attack for some reason or another, then they would come after me for liability for that. So that's how deep and how dark this has become in that I'm almost breaking the law if I don't prescribe it to you whether I believe it or not.

Juliana: Jesus! Never mind that it's associated with three hundred diseases!

Dr Lundell: Well listen, there's some recent evidence that statins cause an increase in the rate of diabetes. So if we have 25 million people in this country on statins, and 10 percent of them get new diabetes, that's 2½ million cases of new diabetes. If there was something in our water that caused 10 percent of the people to get diabetes, we'd go to the ends of the earth to get rid of that compound, whatever it was. And yet we punish our doctors if they don't prescribe this other poison. And my very first professor in heart surgery always called them liver poisons, statins because that's exactly what they do. They prevent the liver from producing cholesterol by inhibiting an enzyme. So he called them liver poisons and I always liked that.

Juliana: And as far as I understand it, they deplete your body of CoenzymeQ10, right? CoQ10, which is...

Dr Lundell: Yes they do.

Juliana: ...the most beneficial thing for your heart health.

Dr Lundell: One of the most, yes.

Juliana: Unbelievable!

Niall: Juliana, you were saying earlier today that someone has suggested we start pumping statins into the drinking water?

Juliana: Yeah, there was a UK scientist, I don't know if you've heard about that Dr. Lundell that they were saying that statins should be put in the drinking water?

Dr Lundell: Yes, I've heard that. And there also was the idea, it's been around for a long time, about a poly pill which would take an aspirin and a statin and a low dose blood pressure medicine that everyone should take it. Well sort of the sad thing is that the nice looking pharmaceutical rep, the young lady with the more than ample bosoms that come to my office to bring me articles about statins, and of course most of the doctors read the abstract and who could even concentrate on the abstract with an attractive young lady there telling you about the benefits of this statin over that statin, but over and above the crass nature of humanity {chuckling}, it's just that nobody reads the data. And we think it's authoritative because it came from a university and little did we know that they really had to work hard to manipulate the statistics. I don't know if you've ever heard term "p-hacking".

Niall: No.

Juliana: No.

Dr Lundell: Well the p value is a statistical term meaning it's statistically significant. And so if you play around with the numbers long enough you can get it to be statistically significant. And so that's what's called p-hacking. If you play with the numbers long enough, then you can get what's called statistically significant. Well the sad thing is that then it is interpreted to be a significant difference. What to you and me is a significant difference is black versus white or sick versus healthy. But to a statistician, a significant difference means that it's more likely than random chance to be correlated.

Niall: Okay.

Dr Lundell: That's all statistically significant means, more likely than not.

Jason: So it could be 51 percent, as opposed to 50 in the coin flip?

Dr Lundell: Yes, basically, or 51 percent likely to be not a random circumstance.

Juliana: Wow!

Dr Lundell: Then they also invented this term called "relative risk" which changes it. If I drive with the windscreen in my car, how do you like that for throwing in a British term instead of windshield, anyway, if I drive with a dirty windscreen/windshield and my chance of a wreck are if I drive with a clean one its one in 100; if I go a year, then I have one wreck. If I have a dirty windshield I have two wrecks. So you would say I doubled the risk of a wreck by having a dirty windshield. The relative risk is doubled. The actual risk is that I only have one percent more chance, but by calling it relative risk, it suddenly becomes 50 percent. And this is the way it is with statins. You see the Lipitor ad; 39 percent less chance of a heart attack. Well, that's relative risk, that's just what it means. If you take 1,000 patients and put them on statins, one will have a heart attack. If you take 1,000 patients and you put them on no statins then two will have a heart attack. The difference is explained by lots of other factors besides statins. And yet we say "Look, you've lowered your risk by 50 percent. Who wouldn't want to take this?"

Jason: But you haven't really, because...

Dr Lundell: No, you haven't. You've changed it from one percent to two percent. And the likelihood of that is only two percent.

Juliana: But let me ask you, this might be a stupid question, but there are a lot of people who supposedly are told that they have to take statins for life. Now is it possible that somebody who gets informed and stops or reduces their carbohydrate intake and everything, might be able to get off these drugs without any problems? Because that's an argument that I come across very often "Well I can't stop them now because I've got a stent and I can't stop the medication". Or "The doctor told me that it was better to reduce it by half but keep taking it". Is that true, or is it still part of the whole propaganda for statins?

Dr Lundell: I'd call it a manufacturer's dream if I can make a product that you need to take the rest of your life.

Juliana: Exactly.

Niall: Captured market.

Dr Lundell: I've suddenly got an annuity that I don't have to renew. I have an annuity forever. Once again, the only evidence that statins help anybody is in a very limited population. And I have some questions about whether that data is valid. But, even an honest physician or scientist will tell you that middle-aged males with previous heart attacks have some benefit from statins. You can't deny that it has never, ever been proved in any other population to be of any benefit.

Juliana: Except in people who have had a heart attack, middle-aged men, right? That's what you're saying?

Dr Lundell: Correct. That's the only population where there is a statistically significant difference in the outcome and the outcome means heart attack or death from heart disease.

Juliana: But at what cost and have these people who make part of this conclusion, have been off carbs? Is it really scientifically proven? Has it been compared to a low carb diet? And is it safe to let go of them if you're willing to?

Dr Lundell: Oh, of course it's safe. Unless you're in that population of a middle-aged male and I don't think you'll ever get there...

Niall: No, not Juliana!

Juliana: {laughing}

Dr Lundell: You don't need a statin.

Jason: But the question being is, if you're a middle-aged male or a later middle-aged male even, you've had one or two heart attacks, you had a stent put in and you've been prescribed statins for life. There you are popping your pills every day, bopping along. Suddenly you get this idea in your head "You know what? I don't want to take them anymore. I'm going to try this other thing where I will stop, I'll manage my diet, manage my stress and everything like that, cut out the processed foods, cut out the carbohydrates, cut out the gluten, cut all of these other things". Can you actually stop taking statins at that point? If you've committed to doing something else and you've started to see some health benefits from cutting out gluten and cutting out carbs and then can you stop taking the statins or will you drop dead immediately?

Dr Lundell: Okay. Let me ask you a question then, to answer your question. If cholesterol is not the cause of heart disease, how stupid is it to take a medication to lower your cholesterol and subject yourself to all the side effects in that medicine?

Juliana: Well exactly! That's what I'm saying. I mean even the argument that middle-aged men with a history of a heart attack would need this medication sounds crazy to me because there is a much more natural solution. Okay, it's proven to have some effects, but do they have effects on people who were already making changes in their diet, or are we talking about the guy who had the heart attack and still keeps eating at McDonald's?

Dr Lundell: Yeah, I'll go back to my statement. If cholesterol is not the cause of heart disease then lowering cholesterol is completely idiotic. And so before we leave I want to come back, we talked about some fundamental biology of how the cholesterol got in the wall of the blood vessel and we talked about carbohydrates. But sometime in this conversation I want to get down to the biology of the endothelial cell...

Jason: Please do.

Dr Lundell: ...and see if we can figure out whether sugar hurts it or not and how it does, how it might.

Jason: Well let's go there. Let's dive in.

Dr Lundell: Okay, I'll mispronounce the French I'm sure, but there's a term called milieu interior.

Juliana: Perfect.

Dr Lundell: Did I do okay?

Juliana: Yes. Perfect!

Dr Lundell: And it means internal environment. And the other word we use for that is homeostasis. That means that our body likes things to be stable. We control our temperature, for example, in a very narrow range. And we work very hard to make that temperature in a very narrow range. If you don't believe that we have a strong desire to keep our carbon dioxide and oxygen in a very narrow range in our blood, just hold your breath for a few minutes.

See how strong the body's desire is to keep those levels normal. If our sodium, for example, gets too low, we die. If it gets too high, we get really sick. The range is relatively narrow, same for potassium, same for lots of things. So the body likes to control all these things in a very narrow range. Now glucose is one of these things that it likes to control in a very narrow range. So we'll go to the basics of blood sugar control and that is when we consume carbohydrates our pancreas senses an elevated blood sugar and produces a hormone called insulin. Insulin then triggers a glucose transporter to transport the glucose inside of the cells, the primary purpose being to control the level of sugar in the blood, glucose. We'll use the term interchangeably. It might not be 100 percent accurate but we'll use it interchangeably. And so when the glucose comes back within the normal range, the pancreas stops making insulin. If the blood sugar goes a little too low, the pancreas senses that as well and makes a hormone called glucagon. Glucagon tells the liver take some of this glucose that you've stored and convert it into glycogen, and convert it back to glucose and let it go into the blood stream so we keep the blood glucose in a relatively narrow range. So those two hormones fundamentally control the level of sugar in our blood, even though we eat carbohydrates intermittently.

Now, there are insulin-sensitive glucose transporters. It's called a glut4. And it's most predominant in the liver and the muscle and in the fat. And these are the big reservoirs. If you go out and have, let's see yesterday was National Donut Day in the United States, so if you go out and have two or three donuts...

Juliana: Oh god!

Niall: Was it really?

Dr Lundell: {laughing} Yes it was. And if you go out and have two or three donuts, that glucose is going go into your liver until it's full and then the liver is going to make fat out of it and then it's going to go into your muscle until they're full and they're going to say "no more". And then all the rest has got to go to the fat cells to be stored in relatively long-term storage. And those cells have a glut4 which is very sensitive to insulin. Now many other cells are not. They have glucose transporters that are not insulin sensitive. And critically, one of these cells happens to be the endothelial cell which lines our blood vessels, all 60,000 miles of them. This endothelial cell, the glucose inside is the same as the glucose in the bloodstream because it can't say no. So what happens when we get too much glucose inside the cell? Well let's back up, if you want to take it back to simple chemistry, plants take sunshine and carbon dioxide and water and make energy. The energy is glucose because that's what plants make.

In simple molecules, all the way to fiber, and all the way to seashells for example, are carbohydrates. But at any rate, then humans and animals, we take that glucose that the plant has produced and we extract some energy and we produce carbon dioxide and water. That's the fundamentals of life for that simple chemical equation. But when we take glucose and produce energy out of it, we move electrons from one molecule to another. It's called oxidative phosphorylation. And in that process we always end up with molecules that have an extra electron. That molecule is called a free radical. And those free radicals, if they're not neutralized pretty quickly by removing that electron or adding another so as a total pair - and actually that's what happens is we add another to pair it up - that molecule becomes toxic and damages cells. And this mitochondrion, they produce these free radicals all the time and at a certain nice, homeostatic level, everything is controlled and free radicals are neutralized. Think of it as a furnace in your house in the winter. Your house is nice and toasty. There's a nicely controlled fire down there. Someone comes along and dumps a bunch of gasoline on that fire. It becomes an out-of-control fire and it's a mess. That's what happens when we dump all the glucose into the endothelial cells. We have a mess.

Niall: An internal fire, inflammation.

Dr Lundell: An internal fire, inflammation, absolutely, very good. Now think about diabetes, which is characterized by high blood sugars and a unique set of complications that go along with diabetes and they are blindness, kidney failure, limb amputations, and premature death from heart disease. So diabetes is sort of the extreme example of what happens to everybody when they have high blood sugars from our high carbohydrate diet. And it all goes back to two things; one is the oxidative stress that occurs and we just overload our little energy factory and as a function of overloading is it ends up with bad by-products and those bad by-products are free radicals. The experiments have been done. We take endothelial cells in a chamber and expose them to high glucose and you see them curl up, you see them change shape, they no longer make the same chemical they did, that's called endothelial dysfunction. So they don't work anymore. And so fundamentally, we watch the telly in the United States at least and there are 15 ads for ED, that would be erectile dysfunction, but really its endothelial dysfunction that's causing the erectile dysfunction.

And so I gave a couple of talks on that recently. At any rate, so when you think about the fact that the endothelium controls our blood flow, whether it clots or not, what goes through it, what passes back into the blood, when we have endothelial dysfunction, we have lots of other dysfunctions. It can be subtle and it can take a long time to happen. Now, in the article I talked about a sunburn or a wound where you did a wire brush. Well I'll use a sunburn example. You can go out and get a sunburn once and the next day, day-and-a-half later it's healed. But if you get that sunburn six times a day for 30 years, your skin will be a mess. So my statement is that we're sun burning, we're injuring the lining of our blood vessels every time we have an overdose of carbohydrates. And over time, this causes those blood vessels to have inflammation, to scar up, and this is why the blood vessels in the eye go closed and I go blind. This is why the blood vessel in the kidney closes and I can't make urine anymore. And it's why the little tiny vessels in my toes plug up and I get a foot ulcer and then I get an amputation. And it's why plaque builds up in the coronary arteries.

Niall: Is this also related to problems with blood circulation?

Dr Lundell: Yes. When the endothelium doesn't work, then the blood vessels can't dilate or contract, so that gives us hypertension.

Now there are other things, let's be honest, there are other things besides sugar that injure the endothelium. Cigarette smoking, for example, we know that. Other chemicals of one kind or another and bacteria and all sorts of things can do it. But the most common injury that we get, and some things we can control and some things we can't, the most common injury we get is hyperglycemia, or high blood sugar. So fundamentally, if you can control that one, then you can work on the rest.

Jason: I've got a small question. So I'm a contrary person, to be quite honest. I mean, you know that. You've probably met people like me before. And when somebody says "everybody knows something", I'm the first person to say "I don't".

Dr Lundell: Okay.

Jason: Because I'm just that way. It's part of my personality. So when you say that everyone knows that smoking damages such and such and my first response was "But I don't know it", maybe you could tell me a little bit about that.

Dr Lundell: Oh, okay. And actually thank you for calling me on that, because that's not something a scientist ought to say, is "everybody knows".

So thank you for insisting on that. Let's keep this down to science and fundamental biology. Actually those experiments have been done. We measure endothelial function by what's called flow mediated dilatation or we put a cuff on the arm and blow it up and stop the circulation for a little while. Then we open it up and we see how much bigger the blood vessel got and how much more flow occurs. So if you do the test and have a certain amount of flow, and then you smoke a cigarette, you will have less flow.

Jason: I see. What kind of cigarette did you smoke?

Dr Lundell: Gaulois, whatever the French call it.

Jason: Oh god!

Dr Lundell: It doesn't make much. But at any rate, we also look under the microscope and expose the cells to those things or we take an animal and we smoke and we then look microscopically at the blood vessels. And so when I say everybody knows, that's incorrect. The data is demonstrating that the chemicals in cigarette smoke damages endothelial cells.

Juliana: Okay, so we agree that it's the chemicals. It hasn't been proven that its tobacco per se, right?

Dr Lundell: No, and I don't know if we've isolated exactly which one. I don't think it's the nicotine, for example. It's the other things that come from burning.

Jason: Well here's the thing that makes me very sensitive about that. There's a thing called the Truth Campaign. I don't know if it's still going on. Do you remember that? It was years ago in the U.S. When I was growing up there was something called the Truth Campaign and they basically got like poppy-looking kids from Abercrombie & Fitch and they would run around and do these things telling people about how cigarettes are going to kill them. And one of the things they did is they created this big billboard and they put a list of all the chemicals that are inside of a cigarette. And it was a lot of things like formaldehyde, arsenic and a couple of other chemicals that actually are kind of like everyone knows are listed as being toxic chemicals.

And I was like "do they grow on the plant?" No. And so they had this big list of all these chemicals and then a few years back there was this brand of tobacco that came out called American Spirit. And their big thing was that it was all natural tobacco grown by Indians on the reservation or whatever it is, right? And that was their whole thing. But the surgeon general made them put a little disclaimer on them that said "just because it is natural tobacco does not constitute a safer cigarette". And I said now hold on a second. If I have a choice between two glasses of water, one of those glasses has one drop of arsenic and the other one has half full of arsenic, one of those glasses is safer for me to drink just by virtue of there being less of a poison in it, right? It's just pure logic. If I had to drink one of those, I would pick the one with one drop of arsenic as opposed to half full with it, right because I have the ability to think.

So that immediately alerted my contrary "wait a minute, hold on a second, that's not right, that's not logical". And so that makes me very sensitive about it because people will say "well we did this study with cigarettes" and I said "yeah, but there's 80 brands of cigarettes. Which one did you use?"

Dr Lundell: Yes.

Jason: It's important, you know. What was in the cigarette? Was it just pure nicotine? Did you inject the nicotine in and see what happens? So yeah, I get really sensitive about that.

Dr Lundell: Oh, I think you're absolutely correct there. And once again, it's sort of Big Brother, Big Government preaching at us. All the data on second-hand smoke I think is pretty dubious, although there might be something to it.

Jason: Can I say one thing about that?

Dr Lundell: Go ahead.

Jason: About the whole thing that second-hand smoke is worse than the first, right? That was this mantra that they had for years. And it's so idiotic because if I'm in a room and I'm smoking a cigarette with somebody who's not smoking a cigarette, I'm getting the first-hand and the second-hand so second-hand smoke cannot be worse than the first because I'm getting both. And the other person's only getting the second-hand. So that's illogical. It's just the product of a puerile, ignorant mind.

Juliana: Well doctor, we have to confess, we're four people sitting here in the studio and the four of us are smoking! But we promise we're smoking 100 percent natural tobacco!

Dr Lundell: {laughing}

Juliana: So it's kind of a sensitive topic and we do deal with it and we have done some research about it and it's really amazing how the whole propaganda about smoking started. And there are doctors, even like you, who said "I've opened thousands of lungs" and we have one here. Niall was reading it earlier. And she says "It's not possible in any way to distinguish between the lungs of a smoker and a non-smoker". And it's true. In my opinion it's part of this government campaign. And if they care so much about our health and they're bombarding us with things about smoking, why don't they talk about carbs?

Dr Lundell: Well, not too long ago we couldn't talk about smoking because tobacco was so influential with their lobby.

Jason: Until Hitler came along.

Dr Lundell: So big tobacco controlled the conversation until the data on cancer and whatnot became so apparent.

Juliana: Until carbs and drugs became more important.

Dr Lundell: So big sugar and big soda are now the big tobacco. And in fact Gary Taubs and another woman, in Mother Jones recently did an article, an exposé on the data that big sugar had hidden about how they tried to influence regulation. And they were part of this process. Ancel Keyes got the big grants from the sugar association to do studies and so once again, the same thing that went on with big pharma in promoting statins, big sugar has done for years and the nice thing is, there's beginning to be some sensitivity because Coca Cola's got all these ads now about happiness in children and sharing and trying to say that their product is happy and good and all those kind of things.

Jason: This is the same product that they clean Chevy engines with?

Dr Lundell: {laughing}

Niall: There is a lot of research out there that frankly counters the assumption people have when it comes to tobacco smoking. One thing that's very interesting and ties into our discussion today is that smoking tobacco is anti-inflammatory.

Juliana: Pure tobacco.

Dr Lundell: I haven't seen that one, but that's interesting. Not all smokers die prematurely, only about 20 percent do. I think I mentioned that in the book. I've never been a smoker except as a teenager, but if we make an informed choice, knowing a risk, then we ought to be free to make that choice.

Jason: Exactly.

Dr Lundell: But what's happened with sugar is that we didn't get a chance to make that informed choice. We still don't have an informed choice. If you choose to be obese and hyperglycemic, as long as you know that you're going to be sick and unhealthy and die prematurely, I don't care how much you eat or all the rest, as long as you assume the risk and unfortunately, I have to pay for that risk because I'm part of the insurance pool that pays for your illnesses. And so in a real way, I'm subsidizing your bad choices. Now I'll admit that you don't have the information to know that it's a bad choice.

Niall: And this, I'm thinking, is what has motivated you today to tell people, to educate people about this issue. You've realized that people are not informed because they do not have the choices before them and this is what motivates you to get them thinking about what's really going on here. Namely that their diet is a key to understanding what is wrong with them. You of course come from the background of being a heart specialist, but I think it's clear from our conversation today, you realize that all these things are connected. Just about every ailment can be tracked back to the same fundamental, underlying problems. I think it's great that you're doing this and I really just wish more people would - I'm sure there must be others who have been there, done that who do have access to the real science, so to speak - I just wish more people would speak out like you have.

Juliana: And not get as much attack as you have too, right?

Dr Lundell: Right. There's a British doctor by the name of John Yudkin who wrote a book called Pure, White and Deadly. And Ancel Keyes and all his supporters destroyed him, his reputation because he dared say it was carbohydrates and not fat that was causing these illnesses. In his book Pure, White and Deadly, it's not as fun as reading a novel but it's good and contains the information that he knew. And he presented this and he and a bunch of other people tried to bring this out when we were making the dietary guidelines but they once again got overwhelmed by Keyes and his allies and big government.

Jason: Well you know, I'm a big fan if juxtaposition just to understand something. Back in the days of the enlightenment when science was still called natural philosophy, one of the big problems that everybody had was that they were making observations in the real world, things were happening and the church wasn't really able to explain them. And when people tried to explain them they did things like put them on trial for heresy, punish them in various different ways. And that kind of led to a revolution against the church. And you see today that you have almost the exact same problem but in reverse. You have people who are making observations about reality, about the world, about the health of people, and you've got scientists who are, half of them burying their heads in the sand and the other half of them are in this Eichmannesque kind of position where they're just sort of signing the papers that are sending people off to health concentration camps, in a certain sense, just basically sending people to their deaths.

And we all say "Oh, it's understandable because they want money". No, it's not understandable. If you sign a piece of paper and a lot of people die, killed them, it doesn't matter if you did it with a pen, or if you did it with a knife, or you did whatever. You're responsible. When you tell lies to get money that lead to people's deaths then you've done something fundamentally evil. And so that's kind of the way I see this whole situation. And I wanted to get your opinion on that, that the situation that we find ourselves in is that science has become a very religious organization with a kind of priesthood that then puts people on trial, sometimes actually quite real. People do get put on trial when they dissent and speak out and say "Hey, the observations are wrong. No the earth doesn't travel around the sun" in a certain sense. And then they're put on trial for various different things and they're slandered and driven sometimes even to their deaths or to suicide or other types of things. So what do you think about that?

Dr Lundell: I think that's brilliant, actually. I had the privilege of having dinner with Dr. Robert Atkins' widow a few weeks ago. And there was testimony in Congress that he was killing people. And he endured withering attacks from his colleagues and medicine in general for trying to re-popularize reduced carbohydrates and saying that fat wasn't damaging. Now, the other amusing thing to illustrate your point is that I watched a video of a big conference on insulin levels. And there are a whole lot of diseases associated with high insulin levels. So these researchers go on and on and on about insulin levels and this disease and insulin levels and that disease. And I'm screaming at the screen and say, "Yo! What is it that causes high insulin levels?"

Juliana: Seriously.

Jason: Exactly.

Dr Lundell: Nobody would dare say the G-word, you know, glucose. Nobody would dare say it. And so this illustrates your point of the priesthood of science and if you dare say that the globe is not warming, you're a denier. If you say fats not harmful like I do, then I'm a fat denier. And I'm discredited, I'm reviled and all the rest. But there's a nice quotation that says "In a time of universal deceit, speaking the truth is a revolutionary act."

Niall: George Orwell.

Dr Lundell: George Orwell.

Jason: It's dangerous to be right in matters where the established authorities are wrong.

Dr Lundell: Yup.

Niall: It just still applies today. They'll hit you in different ways of course, but it's the same as ever.

Jason: Yeah, I think the problem is that we've always tried to solve the solution by turning over authority to different sets of people. First we turned it over to the authority of kings and then they kind of screwed us over and then we said "Oh well, I'm going to turn the authority over to this or to religion, turn the authority over to science" and each time we just keep turning the authority and the responsibility for making informed decisions and getting ourselves informed over to other people. We want a scientist to tell us, or a doctor to tell us what's true and what's false. And I think that the lesson that people should take away from it, it'll probably take us another 10,000 years before we actually figure this one out, if we survive that long, but basically that you have to make your own choices pretty much and that if you keep turning over things to a select group of people in authority, you're just going to get led down the primrose path and to pain and suffering. How many people a day die from heart attacks or heart disease, or something like that? What was it two thousand or something like that?

Juliana: I think you said 2,500 per day?

Dr Lundell: Yep.

Jason: Almost as many people as died on 9/11 die every day from a heart attack. And then people are all like "Oh let's move some terrorists". But nobody's saying "Hey, wait a minute, modern medicine"!

Dr Lundell: They're dietary terrorists, you know. How about we search out the American Dietetic Association?

Jason: Yeah, they're killing people.

Dr Lundell: The Heart Association, the American Diabetes Association, they still recommend a high carbohydrate diet. They list all the things that carbs do bad and then they say "But you still need 60 percent of your calories from carbohydrates".

Jason: Well you know I've given up on things making sense.

Juliana: It's one of the things by the way, going back to the idea that people have the power, it's one of the things I really enjoyed about your book is that you do say the public are the only people who have the power to change the system. And that's what we're trying to do on these radio shows and on SOTT.net and everywhere. So we'd really like to recommend your book. By the way listeners, the book is called The Cure for Heart Disease: Truth Will Save a Nation by Dr. Dwight Lundell and Todd Nordstrom. So you can get it on Amazon. It's on Kindle as well.

Niall: Do you have a website Dr. Lundell?

Dr Lundell: Thecureforheartdisease.net although I'm not very good at posting a lot of new information. You guys are way better at that than I am. Getting information and truth out and I appreciate the opportunity to have been on with you today and try to spread a little truth.

Juliana: Well you did the research. We just spread the word, so.

Niall: Yeah, it's been a pleasure talking to you Dr. Lundell.

Juliana: Before we finish, you mentioned the omega-6 overload in the book and there's a lot of people who don't know really about it, about the ratio. Could you tell us a little bit more about it for our listeners and trans-fats?

Dr Lundell: Yes. When we published and promulgated the dietary guidelines for Americans and then it spread around the world, we were told to reduce our consumption of saturated fats and if we wanted some oils we should replace them with vegetable oils, which would be soybean and corn oil and to a certain extent canola and other seed oils. These oils contain an essential free fatty acid called omega-6. The cell membrane is really two layers of lipids with some proteins in there so it's called a bi-lipid layer. And lipid is fat so our cell membranes are fat. And the cell membranes control what goes in and what goes out and how our cells function and all the rest.

If we have too much omega-6 in our system then these cell membranes don't function properly and they produce pro-inflammatory chemicals that aggravate this process and all the rest of the disorders that are based on inflammation. In fact if we get right, {laughing} I'm laughing because the United Nations is now calling all of these things non-communicable diseases once again as if they're putting a name on it and thinking we understand it better and I think they're idiots and we're pathetic for listening to them. Nevertheless, I would be so bold as to propose that inflammation is the fundamental cause of aging, premature aging, and even cancers because it ends up disturbing our homeostasis and reducing the length of our chromosomes, the telomeres, causing all kind of perturbations in our cellular functions which then, one of those cells is going to start reproducing abnormally because its chromosome has been shortened by inflammation.

And so I think all of these things are related to chronic, low-grade inflammation. And once again, that can come from lots of places, but the predominant cause in today's world, or predominant source of chronic inflammation today is hyperglycemia. It's aggravated and accelerated when we overload our bodies with omega-6 from vegetable oils, once again, the official government recommendation. I was amused to see somebody go back and get the data from Australia; the study is almost 30 years old where they said that omega-6s were better than saturated fat. Well, it turns out that a re-analysis of the data shows that that's not actually true.

Juliana: Unfortunately I don't have it with me, but one of the recent studies about fat, the conclusion was fats are bad for you. And they had a little star there at the end and if you actually followed the links you end up finding out that the studies they were doing were based on trans-fats.

Dr Lundell: Yeah.

Juliana: But the conclusion that they used to promote the whole low fat thing was fats are bad for you. Well of course, you're using modified fats. You're using a huge amount of omega-6s. You're using a molecule that is almost closer to plastic than to oil.

Dr Lundell: That's correct. So for your listeners - and I want to ask you some questions about the ketogenic diets - but we need to go back to the way that great-grandmother ate, with bacon grease or lard at the side and cooking with real food. I don't want to eat anything with a bar code, or somebody said "in terms of diet, think outside the box" and I said "pun intended" yeah, don't eat it if it comes in a box. {laughter} So fundamentally we need to get back to natural fats because there's more and more papers coming out every day that there is no correlation between saturated fat and heart disease. The linkage was always flimsy. The linkage was through cholesterol, and I think that we've destroyed the idea that cholesterol causes heart disease. Therefore, why would I avoid saturated fats? The linkage was weak and now it's gone.

Juliana: Especially when you see that more and more people are getting sick and more and more people are following the low fat diet.

Jason: I was going to say something about his out of the box thing. I was going to mention because when I got out I spent 10 days in the hospital when I had the inflammation of my colon. I was on multiple antibiotics because it was sort of non-specified. He didn't know what it was. It was just terribly inflamed and terribly infected. And it's basically because the fibers and things like that, they seem to really irritate, they actually they cause damage to the inside of the wall. It starts to become bleeding and bloody like somebody scrubbed it, or whatever it is and that became infected so that's why I was in the hospital for 10 days. And I came out of the hospital and I said "Well I really have to get control of my eating. I have to learn to eat a new way." And one of the ways that I did is I came up with something called The List. And everything was about what is or is not allowed. And basically it was nothing's allowed. And one of the rules that was on the list was, if it comes in a plastic container - sometimes you go down to the store and you get meat and it's wrapped in plastic - and one of the rules was that you can't eat food if it comes wrapped in plastic.

Dr Lundell: Yeah, good advice. Don't eat anything you can get at the convenience market.

Jason: Exactly.

Juliana: So what was it you wanted to ask us about the ketogenic diet because our listeners are asking actually?

Dr Lundell: Well I'm very interested in it, and I just spent a week with a man who's documented a one year of staying in nutritional ketosis and there's a triathlete who's going to try to complete Iron Man Canada in August in ketosis. And since I enjoy, maybe that's the wrong word since I compete in endurance events like Iron Man Triathlons, I'm interested in trying to increase my performance by burning fat instead of carbohydrates without being so dependent on carbohydrates. So do you have any information about athletics and ketogenic diet?

Jason: I do.

Scott: Yeah, actually.

Jason: I see where this is going. Okay, so like I said, I used to weigh 340 pounds, lost a whole bunch of weight and stuff like that. And we decided that we were going to do some work around the yard. And I've notoriously throughout my entire life had no energy and no stamina for doing anything. And I went onto the keto diet and stayed on it for 2 ½ months straight. Before that I couldn't get up in the morning, couldn't wake up. I had this low energy level, very low stamina when working out, very low stamina when going outside to rake the yard or do anything. And when I was on the ketogenic diet, I was getting up at four o'clock in the morning, and I was working until about seven o'clock at night straight, only stopping to have my little keto meal and just drinking lots of water too and other stuff, and was working constantly, very hard labor. And this is something that I had never really done before in my life.

I didn't have injuries whereas normally when I would try to do yard work or repair a wall or something like that. Lifting things was really hard. I would constantly injure myself. Doing this very hard core ketosis I had one minor injury to my shoulder that's a recurring injury but within the next day I just took like a very, very cold shower. At the same time I was taking cold showers, doing this cold shower thing. I ran cold water over the injured shoulder. By the next day, it was better and I was just able to keep on working and go, go, go, and I sustained that for two months straight. And the only reason I stopped doing all the work is because I had an attack of my genetic disease that I had to go in for surgery and I spent two months in a hyperbaric chamber and stuff. But it was not because of the ketogenic diet. It was what I have. So that's my story.

Scott: Well I could maybe respond to that question with my experience because I was doing the paleo diet for...

Juliana: About a year?

Scott: Probably about a year. And I noticed I usually do workouts that would be classified as resistance training. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not an iron man.

Jason: He is. The man is insane. He is!

Scott: That's a little bit too extreme for me.

Juliana: He doesn't look like one but whoa!

Scott: So anyway, I was doing the paleolithic diet and I do resistance weight lifting, but it's resistance training so it's sort of short bursts of as many repetitions as you can at higher weights until your muscles kind of give out, then you do a short rest period and then you move on to the next set of exercises and I do all the muscle groups in my body and that sort of thing. So while I was on the paleo diet I noticed that I seemed to have all my sort of blood sugar swings, as I called them, they vanished. I had to eat lunch at noon every day before paleo and if I didn't have lunch at exactly noon I would start to get headaches, I would get irritable, I would be cranky, my stomach would start growling, I would get hunger pangs and it was rather a severe reaction and when I went paleo all that stopped. I had high blood pressure, my blood pressure was normal. And I noticed that I had more energy for my workouts. It was better but it wasn't really amazing I would say.

Dr Lundell: Okay.

Scott: So then when I switched over to the ketogenic diet, I hadn't actually been working out. I'd been slacking off. So usually I would work out twice a week. By the time I switched to the ketogenic diet, I was down to maybe once every two weeks, I would work out. And so anyway that made the results that much more amazing which was that I switched over to ketosis and I pretty much instantly increased the amount of weight I could do by about 20 percent on most exercises.

Dr Lundell: Okay. That's impressive.

Scott: So that's the first thing. And the second thing I noticed was that being on the ketogenic diet, I could be doing something physically intense for most of the day, building something, whatever, chopping wood, that sort of thing, and at the end of the day I would go "Ah jeez, I was supposed to work out today. Well yeah, what the heck let me go for it" and I would do a full workout and then I would go to sleep and I'd wake up the next morning and I don't even have sore muscles anymore.

Niall: Yeah.

Scott: So there's strength and there's also something that it does to you in terms of endurance and the body's ability to heal itself or regenerate, I'm not sure. I just know that it's been rather phenomenal.

Jason: It's the same thing that I noticed. Once I came to France I got onto eating way too much carbs, before I had been pretty energetic, even though I was very overweight. And then I had just completely tanked in my health because all I started was eating French baguettes and candies and ice creams and stuff and once I switched over to paleo things got better, lost a lot of weight, switched to ketosis and really amazing results too. I don't think I could really describe how awesome it was actually.

Juliana: It was probably about 100.

Dr Lundell: Do you measure it with urine or blood, or do you just try to avoid...

Jason: We measured with ketosticks but they're not very reliable. You kind of get this weird smell, like an acetone kind of breath that lets you know that you're there. But you feel the difference. You know at a certain point because you feel the difference.

Niall: Yeah. There is a transition phase to take in mind. I would not be trying it and then off you go on an Iron Man competition because a lot of changes are taking place. If you think about the fact that most of our evolution took place in a nutritional ketosis state for a hundred-odd thousand years or more.

Jason: Three hundred thousand.

Niall: Then to be spending the last 100-plus years addicted to sugar and then to switch, there is a transition phase.

Juliana: Yeah, and one of the things that a lot of papers mention in them and I'm really looking forward to your opinion if you're interested is the difference between resistance training and aerobic training. A lot of people apparently report a reduction in their efficiency when it comes to aerobic exercise but quite an impressive increase in terms of resistance training. And it seems to be related to the changes that have to take place in the mitochondria. So if you're interested I'm really looking forward to your opinion on the matter. But there seems to be a very different, from the way bodies use the oxygen, a very marked difference between resistance training which would be more like what our ancestors used to do.

Niall: Yeah, short bursts of activity forced on them by the environment.

Dr Lundell: Right. First of all let me say that resistance training and short bursts of activity in terms of health and all sorts of things, are probably way smarter and certainly way more efficient in terms of time use than endurance events even though I got hooked on doing these endurance events for whatever reason. At any rate I think that there is not a lot of really hard data yet. Voleck and Phinney have written a book on low carb performance and they have their theories about keto adaptation. And their experiment with cyclists indicated that they didn't have a diminution in performance but they didn't have an increase in performance. The recent study with gymnasts shows that they actually did as well or maybe better in ketogenesis than they did in a "balanced diet". By the way, what's balanced about overdosing yourself with a toxic substance?

Niall: Exactly.

Dr Lundell: Anyway, so there's not a lot of data yet and one person in an experiment of one is Peter Attia has been in nutritional ketosis for a little while and he actually, depending on the level of exertion at below aerobic threshold, he actually became considerably more efficient on his nutritional ketosis, but trying to be at 100 percent peak for sprinting and this kind of thing, it may not increase performance. But I don't think at this point in time we have data that once someone's adapted to ketogenesis that it diminishes performance.

Juliana: Exactly.

Jason: That's the thing I wanted to say. I read the cyclists study on that and the first thing I noticed is that they kind of did it as a very short period of time where they had the guys on ketosis. And they had been before that carb addicts anyway. They had been really doing the carb stuff. And then they dropped them off that and said "Here go on ketosis. Does it increase it?" And they said "no" and one thing that we've noticed is that there's actually a decently long transition period. And it's different for different people. So ketosis is something you have to be on for a while before you can probably even start to measure that stuff. So you can't just take a guy off carbs, say "Here, go keto" and then a week later put him on a bike and say "Did you increase?" And I don't think that that's really the best way to test it.

Juliana: Yeah, it's true.

Dr Lundell: It is not the best way to test it. And they've pretty well demonstrated that you need a little period of time. And we know that all the chemical reactions that happen in our body are facilitated by enzymes. And if we don't do something then the level of those enzymes goes down. So we have to up our lipoprotein lipase. And we have to up lots of other enzymes to make us efficient again.

Scott: We have a question from one of our listeners. He was wondering if there is anything regarding increasing fat intakes and improved brain health or mental function? Is there any research that you've done or come across about that?

Dr Lundell: I can't cite anything right now. There's, as you know, hundreds and hundreds of anecdotes about people feeling mental clarity when they reduce their carbs and increase their fat. But when you stop and think about the brain is 60 percent fat and most of its saturated fat, and that cell membranes need those saturated bonds, but I have not seen a paper testing cognitive performance by increasing the fat in the diet.

Juliana: Well it's interesting that there's been studies about the ketogenic diet and neurological problems, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and that's what actually got us started on this research because we had a group member who was noticing some Parkinson-type syndromes. And we found out about the ketogenic diet thanks to that study. And it's amazing what they've achieved, actually. And we're not talking about too much of a long-term study or anything but they notice a huge increase in neurological functions and less memory loss, etc.

Jason: Yeah, a lot of remission of symptoms for Parkinson's. I think epilepsy is...

Niall: Well that was it, the very first mention I think of the term ketogenic diet comes from studies done very early on with children with epilepsy.

Juliana: Yeah, in the '20s.

Jason: I do remember there was a funny anecdote. I don't remember who it was who was telling me about it, that apparently our brain is like omega-3 fats predominantly and that the chimpanzee's brain or something like that is more like omega-6s. And so I always thought that it was kind of interesting that the people are constantly getting pushed on these omega-6s and they keep getting dumber and dumber. {laughter} And I was like well maybe it's because their brains don't have enough omega-3s so it's basically turning into a chimpanzee brain. {laughter}

Niall: Dr. Lundell, you mentioned that Ancel Keyes who became an authority on "low fat diet will save you". Well he was a vegan you said?

Dr Lundell: No, he wasn't necessarily a vegan.

Jason: He's the guy who wrote the report for McGovern, he said.

Dr Lundell: Yeah.

Niall: Oh, well then someone else. Well I've seen something that says that vegetarians have smaller brains.

Jason: I could have told you that. {laughter} No, I don't want to say that. I take that back.

Niall: No, but I think it was discovered quite by accident. It wasn't someone setting out to show this, to demonstrate this, but there seemed to be some kind of correlation there that the lack of essential saturated fats in their diet was having a direct result on their brain size.

Jason: These are the same people that use the argument to try to convince you to eat vegetables. They say yeah, but we're related to monkeys. And they're frugavores. And I said yeah, that's why they're still in the trees. {laughter}

Dr Lundell: That's right.

Jason: It's like you want to go back there?

Dr Lundell: If you look at evolution of the human brain, it happened when we got close to the sea and consumed more omega-3s.

Jason: Yeah, started eating those fats, you know.

Niall: Did you say when we got close to the sea?

Dr Lundell: Yeah.

Niall: Is that the aquatic ape theory? Have you heard of that?

Dr Lundell: Not in that term, but I've seen studies that say when we started getting more omega-3s we started getting bigger brains and smarter.

Niall: So, from consuming fish and seafood.

Jason: Yeah. There's a theory, there's a competing theory to the normal ideas about how we developed. Somebody wrote a book, I can't remember what the person's name is but the title of the book is The Aquatic Ape Theory.

Niall: She's a little old English lady.

Jason: Yeah, she's a little old English lady and she talks about it. And it explains a lot of things about why we have glands in the places that we have them, why we have less hair, why we walk bipedally. She has some good explanations for it.

Niall: Yeah and why our fat is subcutaneous, under the skin.

Jason: Yeah, like sea animals. Like dolphins and things like that. We have some differences from apes that are actually not really explained by any normal theories. And so that was an interesting book. I only read the first couple of chapters of it and mainly me not being too interested in science, kind of put it down. I said "oh, it's science stuff" I don't have the education to understand it, so I don't try to fool myself.

Dr Lundell: Well all of those things are interesting and fascinating and great topics, but what I've tried to do today is get down to some fundamental biology about why carbohydrates hurt us and why fats are good for us. And we can have a theory about evolution or a theory about this or that or the other, but it's not a theory about high sugars causing oxidative stress and damaging our blood vessels and high sugars causing glycation of our proteins and giving us cataracts and osteoporosis and arthritis and chronic inflammation and all the rest. So those are fundamental, provable points of biology. Not to diminish the fun and the intellectual stimulation from thinking about the theory of why we developed this and why we developed that.

Juliana: Yeah, but it's clear though we have to do something now about the way we're actually affecting our environment and our internal environment and how we're causing all these problems.

Niall: So, on that note, Dr. Lundell, I think we'll wrap it up. Thank you very, very much for agreeing to come on this Sunday. We can't recommend highly enough to all our listeners that they get his book The Cure for Heart Disease: Truth That Will Save a Nation. Very informative and you'll see from it what you can do to inform yourself, and inform others. Thank you Dr. Lundell.

Juliana: We hope you keep writing.

Niall: Keep fighting the good fight.

Dr Lundell: Thank you very much.

Jason: Good to talk to you man.

Dr Lundell: It's been a pleasure.

Jason: Alright. You have a good evening.

Niall: Thank you once again to all our listeners and chatterers. We'll be back, same time next week, on SOTT Talk Radio.