VIDEO - Georgia Ede - Presentation (Denver 2019) Dr. Georgia Ede: This presentation, grew out of a critique I wrote for Psychology Today, of the EAT Lancet Report, which came out in January of this year, and it's essentially a document which seeks to control the way all of us eat. So before we get started, just to disclose... which I think everyone investing in nutrition should disclose their biases and conflicts of interest... I have no financial conflicts of interest, but a girl can dream. I am not funded by the meat industry, even though I am convinced by the science that meat, seafood and poultry belong in a healthy diet. So, this report... 47 pages is entitled "Food in the Anthropocene" by the Lancet commission on healthy diets. So, its lead author was Professor Walter Willet, of Harvard School of Public Health, and it envisions a great food transformation, which seeks to feed a growing global population, a diet, a healthy diet that will do minimal damage to the planet. So, that's what we all want, we all want that, it's really really important for us to understand this document, but before we can do that, we have to first understand, what is EAT , what is Lancet and what in the world is the Anthropocene. So, EAT is a non-profit start up dedicated to transforming our global food system through sound science, inpatient disruption and noble partnerships. The Lancet is one of the world's oldest and most respected medical journals and it commissioned this report. The Anthropocene, if you ask me, is a pretentious word laid out as an unwelcome mat basically to say, don't bother trying to understand what's in this report... you won't understand it, let us just explain it to you and we'll tell you what to do. But, if like me, you didn't know what this word meant, this is the definition... the current geological age, viewed as the period during which human activity has been a dominant influence on climate and the environment. So, what does EAT Lancet propose we do about this predicament in which we may have some negative impacts on our environment? This is their great food transformation and its cornerstone is the minimization of... or complete elimination of all animal foods. In this diet it's okay to eat zero grams of all animal foods, if you wish, but if you do choose to include some animal foods in your diet, you may have, up to three ounces, combined of all animal foods, so meat, seafood and poultry, etc...
and when it comes to red meat in particular, you are allowed 7 g per day, or one quarter of an ounce. So, according to EAT Lancet, if you eat two or more of these bad boys, you've shaved years off your life. So after this proclamation was issued, there was a worldwide media blitz and articles are still being published every single day and most of these articles essentially echo the main message of the report without scrutinizing its content and that's a real mistake because this report is not your average nutrition study to be debunked. This is actually, a grand masterplan to control the way all the Earthlings eat. So a quote, "The scale of change to the food system is unlikely to be successful, if left to the individual or the whim of consumer choice", and they intend to use every lever of power available to them, to implement their mission. Quote "By contrast, hard policy interventions include laws, "fiscal measures, subsidies and penalties, trade configuration and other economic and structural measures." So, that's what inpatient disruption means to them. So regardless of whether or not you eat meat, or whether you're low-carb or high- carb, a document this authoritarian really deserves our attention. If you just look at the cover of the report or just read the media headlines you will be left with this impression that meat is a dangerous-- dangerous for the environment and dangerous for our health. But if you dare to open this report, what you will actually find is an airtight case for meat as an essential component of a healthy diet. Surprise! So, one of the foundations of EAT Lancet is supposed to be sound science. So, what kind of science did the commission use? Well, there are lots of different types of evidence to choose from and they did use various kinds. Most scientists would say that experimental evidence where you're actually changing someone's diet and then seeing what happens... but that maybe a better type of evidence than epidemiological evidence, which Robb did such a beautiful job of describing, and-- so most people think that randomized control trials, or RCT's, are a superior form of evidence to some other types of evidence. Now RCT's have their problems too, they're not perfect, no study is perfect. But the EAT Lancet commission is biased heavily towards epidemiological studies and epidemiological studies are not experiments, they do not change foods and find out what happens. Instead they administer these food frequency questionnaires, or FFQ's, to people, and they gather the answers and then they look for patterns in the answers to try to guess what types of foods cause what types of diseases.
Now, these types of studies have been increasingly discredited by very reputable scientists, but yet they still form the lion share of nutrition studies that we see in the headlines. And this particular methodology as it applies to nutrition was essentially invented by Professor Walter Willet, the lead author of this report. So, these food frequency questionnaires deserve to be exposed. So, here is an actual question, from an actual food frequency questionnaire; "Over the past 12 months: How often did you drink milk as a beverage? "Not in coffee, not in cereal, please include chocolate milk and hot chocolate." So, you know, you can choose once a month or less, two to three times a day, five to six times a week, and then what kind of milk did you usually drink... you have to remember what percent. So, how many of you could answer this question, easily? Most people can't remember what they ate three days ago, let alone twelve months ago, and notice what's missing here... you're not allowed to say, "I don't know, I don't remember", or you're not allowed to say, "I gave up milk and dairy in August", or you know you're not allowed to say, "You've got to be kidding me!" So, these are the kinds of... excuse me, these are the kinds of study, these are the kinds of data... your answers become the data, your wild guesses become the data that these scientific studies are based on, and furthermore, this particular food frequency questionnaire contains 66 questions and some of them contain a few more than that, but the typical modern diet contains thousands of ingredients. It's really impossible to imagine being able to construct a questionnaire capable of capturing that kind of complexity. So, I would argue not that some epi studies give weak results, or the associations aren't strong enough or this or that, but there's no data to begin with. These studies should not be used to form public policy. They can be used to generate hypotheses, guesses, when they're very well constructed, guesses about which foods might cause which diseases, and then those need to be tested in clinical trials. So, you know, one of the other things that happens, with looking at scientific studies, we ignore all of the other kinds of evidence available and this is where I spend a lot of my time, is reading about other types of science, to try to figure out what's going on because you can't rely on epidemiology. And so, the vast majority of the time, the hypotheses, the guesses, the people who use this kind of methodology, the guesses they come up with fly in the face of biology and find there's every other type of evidence available. This is why I think nutrition epidemiology is really mythology, because when they actually get around to testing these guesses in clinical trials, they're wrong more than
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