Transcription
did want to talk a little bit about the Atlantic's attack on tallow, which is just incredible. It's so laughable. I guess I'm still surprised at the vigor and the venom with which they're going after Kennedy. It is shocking to me. So, know, again, in the vein of big food, big pharma, big ag, they're all the enemy. Sometimes they're in cahoots, and sometimes they're not. We talked about Bovir last week, the methane-reducing food additive for cows. Many months ago, we talked about appeal, the grade coating that can be put on produce, including sometimes organic produce, which reduces gas exchange between the outside and the inside of the fruit and therefore allows them to be stable for transit for longer. But it also means that you can't rely on your senses to tell you how fresh a piece of fruit is.
There are many examples of newfangled technologies that solve one little problem that the market has identified. In the case of appeal, how do we keep fruit fresh for longer so that the fact that our long supply chain doesn't get in the way of making a profit? Also, people in North America want peaches in January, right? It is our demand for it. The problem has been partly created by a description of something real wherein carbon is the thing that needs to get reduced. That's where we have Bovir and the other methane-reducing food additives for cows. But into that insane mix, we now have the Atlantic this week talking about tallow. America stopped cooking with tallow for a reason. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s view on fats is about bucking convention, not promoting health.
Let's just start with that subtitle, which again, the author may not have anything to do with the title or the subtitle, but I've seen this critique before. It's, oh, he's just a contrarian. We've been called just contrarians, and it's one of the most insipid, wrong, and ridiculous contentions that actual scientists can be slapped with. If that's all you're doing, you're going to be wrong a fair amount of the time. Your predictive power, if you're just a faithful believer or just a contrarian, is not going to get better over time. Whereas if you are saying, actually, here's why I think this is true, you're likely to have predictive power. So the idea that Kennedy is just a contrarian is based on no fact at all. But it's an easy thing to accuse him of.
I would also point out that if you look at any of the places where Kennedy is present for this accusation, he always pushes back and says, "Show me any case where the evidence is not supporting my position." The person, of course, fumbles. Sometimes they come up with something, and then what you get is an encyclopedic response from Kennedy, where he's looked at this countervailing argument and here is why he doesn't believe it. That is not the hallmark of a simple contrarian. That is the hallmark of somebody who has evaluated all the evidence and, for whatever reason, reasons that have a lot to do with this, the actual highest quality analysis is not the one that you are hearing from the institutions.
What the Atlantic is doing here is reinforcing the status quo and being knee-jerk negative about anything Kennedy says. We have here Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s latest spin on MAGA: "Make frying oil tallow again," which is surprisingly straightforward for a man who has spent decades downplaying his most controversial opinions. That sentence is just insane. It says, "This is how we cook the maha way."
I've highlighted in the next paragraph some of the ways that this author is making her arguments. Conventional medical guidance, in contrast to a fringe theory. Most nutrition scientists greatly dismiss this idea as a conspiracy theory. As if science is a democracy, which it's not. What is true is true regardless of whether or not the majority believes it. This is the mistake that many in journalism are making and convincing hapless members of the population into believing as well. If only a few people believe a thing, it must be wrong because science says. No, it's not science as it's Simon says, as you have said recently.
It is Simon says, but I would also remind people that every great idea, the stuff that becomes the bedrock of science, starts as a minority of one. If you have the naive notion that either a consensus or the majority tells you what's true, then the point is progress is over. You are taking the thing that allows us to overcome the places where we are confused and ruling it out going forward. But if you go back to that sentence, just not on your screen here, it said something like, "Most nutrition scientists dismiss it as a conspiracy theory." Exactly. What does that mean? Most nutrition scientists squarely dismiss this idea as a conspiracy theory. Where is that recorded?
Well, the viewpoint of a majority of the science. The majority of nutrition scientists, if you think about what Heather and I were talking about at the beginning of the podcast, you've got a system in which somebody who came through the system and said, "You know what? This is actually not true. Seed oils are dangerous because of the extraction methodology and the impurities that are left in the oil that is produced." Somebody like that would not likely survive to get into the category you're talking about, nutrition scientists, right? They would leave because they would not find any support in the system for their heterodox perspective, which would then leave you with a majority that, yes, had reached some kind of agreement, but as a result of the fact that you threw out the people who didn't agree with it.
Beyond that, it's one thing to say this is not the mainstream view within the current academy on this question of nutrition. It is another thing to claim that you know what the majority of nutrition scientists would say about this conspiracy theory is an accusation. You are putting into the mouths of the majority of nutrition scientists a specific accusation about why they don't believe something and other people do. The point is you just made that up.
I guess I find that the least of my complaints about this piece because I have now gone into a number of these papers that are written by so-called nutrition scientists. They don't have a lot of thinking. They are not evidencing thinking, and many of them are cited in places like the Atlantic and the New York Times. They just talk about authority. They just talk about, "Well, if the FDA approved it, I'm sure it's safe," right? It's those sorts of claims. Again, a complete reversal of conventional health beliefs. This article is totally insane.
The research has continued to bear out the dangers of saturated fats. This is one of the very few scientific articles actually cited here by the Atlantic. What it links to is a review in the journal Circulation in 2017 called "Dietary Fats and Cardiovascular Disease: A Presidential Advisory from the American Heart Association." This is from the leadership at the American Heart Association, which, when you click through to them, incidentally, you find that right now, for 24 hours only, you can make an eight times life-saving impact with your donation. That strikes me as really familiar.
Yeah, bizarre. That's the same Kamala Harris election playbook. I don't know what necessarily to make of that. They're using as evidence the Atlantic article that this presidential advisory from the American Heart Association, which seems to have scrubbed its site of exactly how it was formed. It's celebrating 150 years, I think now. Maybe it's 100. I can't remember. I guess it's 100. They do have some of their financial reportings on their site, and they're not getting that much of their funding from actual pharmaceutical companies. But the vast majority of their funding is from non-specified, non-corporate donors. I feel like that's where the bodies are buried.
I don't know what all is there. But just one more thing from this tallow article. The American Heart Association, if I remember correctly, was founded as a trade group that effectively was pushing seed oils. What I'm saying is you don't find that on their site. I don't find it elsewhere with a relatively quick look. I have seen that claim. I've heard you make that claim. There is nothing easy to find about the origins.
The author is going through why we should want animal fats. The first question is the validity of the research that established the harms of saturated fats, right? As if margarine is good for you and anyone thinks that is the case. The second category alleges the harm of seed oil. Oh, I'm sorry, saturated fats, which is the heart questions the harms of saturated fats. These are the claims that people like us are making: that butter, lard, and tallow are actually good for you, based on really basic evolutionary analysis that that's what humans were eating all along and didn't have the number of cardiovascular events that they have now.
Secondly, the harms of seed oil, the unsaturated fats. And then third, which is perhaps the most puzzling, she says, comprises a bona fide enthusiasm for tallow. Americans aren't just eating beef tallow; they're also smearing it on their faces as a supposedly natural alternative to conventional moisturizer, despite a lack of scientific evidence and sometimes the faint smell of cow. It's supposedly natural. What's supposed to be bad?
What I did not have time to do today was go and find some of the moisturizers that presumably women like the authors of this piece are using. I don't actually even know what those might be, but some of these elite expensive beauty brands, right? Just look at the list of ingredients, which are not going to be supposedly natural. They're going to be explicitly and undeniably unnatural, synthesized from things like petroleum products. What they're trying to do here is use disgust to sway you. You don't want to smell like a cow. You don't want to put fat on your face. That's a little gross.
I actually find it much more gross to put the refined oils from the petroleum industry on your face. And also, surprisingly, you don't think that might have long-term negative health benefits. This is another thing we cover in our book. Yes, once upon a time, prior to the massively technological phase of humanity, your senses were a decent indicator of hazards. They were a decent indicator of hazards because natural selection would endow you with the capacity. If a fish smells funky because it's been in the sun, it doesn't make you want to eat it.
It's not good to eat; it has microbes that you can't detect, but you can detect this proxy of the way that the fish comes to smell. The problem is that modernity breaks this pattern so that things that are dangerous to you do not trigger your warning senses. In fact, one of the things that was done to seed oils is the off-flavor notes and smell have been deodorized away so that this unnatural, unfoodlike substance can be embedded into food, and it tastes good.
But the point is they're gaming your senses. Increasingly, the story of their gaming the narrative over how healthy Americans or citizens of the West are is an analogous process. Are they gaming your olfactory sense so that you will ingest a fat that you shouldn't eat? Are they gaming? You should have the sense of risk when you are taking a synthetic moisturizer and putting it on your face. Does it cross through your skin? Does it carry things with it in that crossing? What is the effect on your health long-term for using it, etc.? You can't intuit those things.
You should have a sense of peril that you don't have when using the synthetic stuff. They're trying to trigger your sense of disgust to turn the tables on this, they say, supposedly natural, arguably natural alternative. Well, less natural if the cows from which the tallow has been pulled have been treated with (Music) that you already know and what you can discern from what you can experience.