Dr. Chris Knobbe: Navigating Health Threats Hidden in Our Modern Diets - #99

Jack Heald 0:01

Hey , it's Stay Off My Operating Table with Dr . Philip Ovadia . Thanks for joining us . We've got a guest today that is , I think , has a really , really important message for anybody who likes seeing . Phil take it away .

Dr. Philip Ovadia 0:20

Yeah , seeing is good , so we're really excited to have Dr . Chris Knnobe on today . Chris has a new book out which I really think is the definitive reference now on vegetable and seed oils . It's called The Ancestral Diet Revolution And Chris's background is as an ophthalmologist and comes at us with a little bit of a unique perspective that I don't think we've really covered on this show before , so really excited to get into it .

Introduction Dr. Philip Ovadia 0:55

Chris , why don't you give our audience a little bit of your background and kind of the backstory as to how you got to this point .

Chris Knobbe 1:05

Here , Philip , first of all , thanks for having me on . It's good to see you And I appreciate this opportunity . So yeah , my background is well, I'm a conventionally trained physician , like Dr . Ovadia , and I'm an ophthalmologist .

Chris Knobbe 1:32

That led me down a path of discovery , really , and I began to research nutrition in 2011 , after just sort of a partial paleo diet and improved my arthritis a whole lot , and that eventually led me to the work of Weston , a Price that I discovered in myself in 2013 . And I eventually hypothesized that processed foods , which I then understood were driving most all of this chronic disease everything from heart disease to cancer to stroke and diabetes and so on . And I hypothesized that the same processed foods might be driving age-related macular degeneration and indeed the leading cause of irreversible vision loss and blindness in people over the age of 50 worldwide . And so I began to investigate that for about a year and a half while I was still in practice , and I was so convinced that that hypothesis held water that by February of 2015 , I left practice to pursue that full time . I was kind of towards the end of what I thought might be my career in ophthalmology anyway . And anyway, so I investigated that with a small group and we looked at data of processed food consumption data , tracked by sugar and vegetable oils in 25 nations , and the data supported that hypothesis in every single nation . That is , that , as processed foods went up as marked by sugar and vegetable oils , which are good proxy markers of processed foods and they are processed foods , you know themselves .

Chris Knobbe 3:17

Of course . That supported the hypothesis strongly , and so I published a paper on that along with our group and published a book , and then but eventually by about 2018 , 2019 , Philip I just I was so convinced that the vegetable oils and high omega six diets were driving the bulk of this chronic disease that I went public with that in 2019 at the Ancestral Health Symposium which was held at the University of California , San Diego , that year , and kind of been on this trail ever since . So in this latest book The Ancestral Diet Revolution it's called basically I've worked really hard , or we've worked really hard to connect vegetable oils to virtually all chronic diseases , so coronary heart disease , cancers , type-2 diabetes , metabolic syndrome , overweight , obesity , Alzheimer's , dementia , age-related macular degeneration , all of those and more , and the autoimmune diseases , so sort of . As you know , I've basically gathered data to support the hypothesis , and that in the form of a lot of graphs , essentially , and so that's where I've been over the last few years .

Dr. Philip Ovadia 4:39

Yeah , amazing work , and I guess we'll get right into maybe one of the big questions , because you bought it up already . I would have maybe built up to this , but the correlation versus causation and we've discussed many times on this show how that same sort of correlative data was used to vilify things like saturated fat and how erroneous that is . And so you just mentioned these correlations between vegetable oil consumption and these health outcomes , but how do we know that this is actually a causative and a real effect ?

Chris Knobbe 5:28

Well , I think it's, you know, that there's a lot of perspectives to that , Phillip , But so my perspective is different than a lot of physicians and perhaps a fair number of other researchers in that .

Chris Knobbe 5:44

First , of all just we've not seen any randomized , controlled clinical trials with diet that have ever properly controlled diets or controlled diets for very long . And , as you know , most all the chronic diseases that we're so interested in , they have very , very long incubation periods . Obviously you don't see heart attacks or coronary heart disease very often before age 40 . We don't see age-related macular degeneration very often before age 40 , Alzheimer's disease , you know , even much older than that . Many of the cancers seem to hit in midlife And really the longest that any studies have entirely controlled diet is about six months and in very small numbers of people , because you , in order to completely control a diet , you have to put people into a metabolic ward , you have to prepare all of their food in a metabolic kitchen .

Chris Knobbe 6:48

You have to track everything they eat . They can't leave the metabolic ward . They have to be prisoners of the ward because if they leave they can go to McDonald's and have a hamburger and French fries and Coke and this study is ruined . And so we have all these problems and all these studies that really haven't convincingly told us anything about diet . It's primary, I mean diet and most chronic disease because they can't .

Chris Knobbe 7:13

They've never been properly done and they never will be because it's like I said , it's impossible to properly control diets in people . So I believe , just like Weston Price did in the 1930s , as he observed people that transitioned from their Western , from their native traditional diets to Westernized diets , he saw what was happening to these people . They developed dental decay , arthritis , cancers and all sorts of degenerative diseases , including birth defects and growth abnormalities , and but he didn't do a randomized controlled clinical trial . Obviously he observed what was happening in nature, essentially, and that's what I do , primarily because that's the best thing that we have and we can track food consumption very accurately over the past 50 or 60 years in most of the world . And we have data that goes clear back to the mid-19th century and even earlier on food consumption in the United States .

Chris Knobbe 8:26

And so if you look at that in relation to the prevalence or even the incidence or both , of all of these chronic diseases , that is powerful information . And it's I think it's by a landslide phenomenally better than anything we have in randomized controlled trials . Now , some of the random , some of the trials in diet trials in animals, they're very telling in terms of Omega six consumption , seed oil consumption in animals versus those that do not get those We don't have .

Chris Knobbe 9:02

Well , I can give you one example , you know , for example , I've got that , I've got a graph right here . I have a few things around me that I need to pull up some data , but give you an example . Like in one study, researchers gave , put rodents , mice , I think it was on multiple different kinds of diets . But the one that, so let me just say they had, I'll just mention three of those diets . Okay , because there was more than that . But in one of those there was no seed oils whatsoever and the rodents were raised on standard rat , standard child , and that was 1.2% Omega six linoleic acid . So those , those mice I think they were , grew to typical size and we'll just call that an average of 170 pounds for a man . This is where they grew to . This would be appropriate for rodents , all right .

Diets' Impact on Obesity and Health Chris Knobbe 10:02

So then they had another diet where they put the animals on 19% soybean oil diet . Now that's 10% Omega six linoleic acid .

Chris Knobbe 10:12

Now let me tell you this is important because these animals were getting less seed oils than Americans do . We're getting about a four , more than a fourth of our diet , or round a fourth of our diet , from seed oils , all right , but anyway, so so they were getting less seed oils than Americans and less Omega-6 , but they became morbidly obese . They grew to a human equivalent of 261 pounds . And in , in , and what's interesting about that one was that they gave them 25.9% fructose , so extreme high sugar . All right , so that's where they end up 261 pounds .

Chris Knobbe 10:51

Now a third group was given 19% soybean oil , the same amount , but no sugar at all , and they became by far I mean they become the most morbidly obese . They grew to a human equivalent of 277 pounds . So they outweighed the mice on the soybean and sugar whale diet by a human equivalent of 16 pounds . And this was in 32 weeks . This is eight months worth . All right , and interestingly , the sugar was actually protective in this study , and this is what we've seen in a number of studies . You know that the sugar actually may be a benefit over , you know , the the just these high seed oil diets alone . But there's , you know , this is what I've seen .

Jack Heald 11:37

Let me back up . There's not really a human , a human analog to those two types of diets . I should back up to the type of diet that's strictly seed oil We're not getting .

Chris Knobbe 11:52

I think we see it all the time , I just, but you can't separate out , you know , on at a population level who's consuming the higher sugars and who is not . But I think that almost all of the population in almost all Westernized populations are consuming very high levels of seed oils and Omega 6 .

Dr. Philip Ovadia 12:15

With the sugar, I think is what Jack was getting .

Jack Heald 12:18

Yeah , that was my hard .

Dr. Philip Ovadia 12:20

It's hard to consume seed oils without sugar in our modern food environment . Although , as you point out in the book , you know we can find different populations where that experiment was sort of run . You know that the seed oil was introduced maybe without the sugar components .

Chris Knobbe 12:43

Yeah , you see some of those . for example , like in . I'll give you an example like in China . This is in the book too . In China , the sugar consumption is among the lowest in the world . I think they're the eighth lowest sugar consumption in the world and we've got excellent data . All the data since 1961 comes from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations , the FAO , and so you know , all researchers basically use that kind of data , but anyway, so the sugar consumption in China was only around 20 some calories a day back in 1961 , never elevated above around 80 calories per day . In the last four decades it's been only about 2.5% of their total food consumption 2.5% So again , eighth lowest in the world .

Chris Knobbe 13:40

But their vegetable consumption started off at 30 calories a day back in 1961 and ended up, by by 2018 at 204 calories per day , which was I can't remember exact percentage of their diet, that is ,sorry , but nevertheless , here's what happened to them during this period . So their cancer during this period increased 3.2 fold between 1990 and 2017, diabetes increased from 3.7% to 6.7% , so it increased 78% approximately doubled right . Overweight and obesity combined increased from 15.3% in 1991 to 42% in 2015 . So it almost tripled right , their overweight and obesity . They had a 465% increase in lung cancer , while the smoking went down .

Chris Knobbe 14:39

So these are the kind of things that I see you know around the world . For example , in the United States since 1999 or 2004, sugar has been going down , while obesity and diabetes have taken a much steeper ascent, right ? In Australia , since 1961 , sugars and carbohydrates have been going down , while obesity and diabetes go through the roof . In the United Kingdom , sugar's been going down since 1961 , while their obesity . I gave you exact numbers , but their obesity and diabetes has gone way , way up Right . Similar situation in Israel and in Japan, the data is striking and we could go through that if you want me to , but oh yeah .

Jack Heald 15:26

Japan's always a good , a good population study , because it's a very homogenous population and they're geographically isolated .

Chris Knobbe 15:37

Which one ?

Jack Heald 15:38

Japan . Yeah , yeah , tell us . I want to hear about Japan .

Chris Knobbe 15:43

Yeah , okay . So so in Japan , you know this . we have excellent data on Japan , on their food consumption , and you know , we know first of all that in the Japanese have been eating a diet that is very rich in carbohydrates, you know , for centuries .

Chris Knobbe 16:06

We know that you know , they , as some have said , they've lived off of white rice and fish for thousands of years . But and then the Okinawans , again a subset of the Japanese, their diet for

Impact of Japanese Diet on Health Chris Knobbe 16:21

several hundred years three to four hundred years that we know of was primarily sweet potatoes with pork and vegetables . All right . So again , mainland Japan , you know , mostly white rice , fish and vegetables , and Okinawans , mostly sweet potatoes , pork and vegetables . All right So in 1960 , their total calories was twenty eight hundred and thirty seven , and that declined to about nineteen hundred and fifty calories by summer , by around 2004 .

Jack Heald 17:00

Wait , the average person , the average Japanese , was consuming twenty eight hundred calories a day .

Chris Knobbe 17:06

Now this is now . These are not corrected for for losses , So that's total food consumption availability . Okay . And that's what most of the data is presented , as is total food consumption availability , you know , because there's always some food losses and nobody exactly how to track that All right , so their carbohydrate percentage was in 1961 , eighty four percent by 2004 . That have dropped to fifty six percent . Their saturated fat , the lowest in the developed world at seven percent recently . And their sugar consumption you know was a hundred ninety eight calories in 1961 .

Chris Knobbe 17:49

It peaked at three hundred and twenty nine calories per day in 1989 , and then start going down , ended up at two hundred eighty three calories by 2004 . Okay , so we've got recently , total calories going down , carbohydrates going down , sugar going down since 1989 . But here's the one thing that went up seed oils . So there's seed oils were nine grams a day in 1961 . That increased to thirty nine grams a day by 2004 . So it increased four and a half fold . And there and that made their omega six increase from one percent in 1961 to seven point eight percent in 2004 . Here's what happened to them during this period .

Chris Knobbe 18:37

Obesity in the men doubled and increased from sixteen percent in 1978 to thirty one point two percent in 2010 . Breast cancer increased five fold , or approximately five fold , between 1975 and 1999 . Diabetes increased three hundred and forty five fold between 1954 and 2007 . . 02 % went from percent in 1954 of the population to 6 . 9% percent in 2007 . All right , their macular degeneration increased from . 2% in the mid to late 1970s to 16 . 37 in 2013 , that's an 82 fold increase . Okay , so again , calories went down , carbohydrates went down , the sugar went down and they say at the calories without their omega-6 went up . And their obesity , diabetes , macular degeneration , cancer , right all through the roof , right ? What else ? What are you going to blame it on ? You know it's , the one thing that's going up is their seed oil consumption and their omega six consumption .

Jack Heald 19:53

So do we know the mechanism , or at least we have a theory about the mechanism ?

Chris Knobbe 19:57

Yes , I do . Yeah , Yeah , that's a very long , it's a long theory , but I mean , I think there's many pathways to get to get to these diseases , but ultimately , the seed oils and the high omega six is ultimately pro-oxidative, pro- inflammatory , directly toxic and nutrient deficient . And you put those four I call those the four pillars of hazard together and you've got the recipe for all of this disaster . Good , Basically , that list goes again .

The Four Pillar of Hazard Chris Knobbe 20:33

Pro oxidative , pro inflammatory , directly toxic , you know , cellularly toxic and nutrient deficient . So we could talk about those a little bit , but I don't know if we really . You know , if you want to take the time , but it's , it's up to you .

Dr. Philip Ovadia 20:48

And well , I think we will unpack that a little bit , but just to stay at a high level for a moment , your you know hypothesis , which again , I think there's lots of evidence for, I do want to point out in the book you have over 1300 references , I believe , So I'm very well referenced , but your hypothesis is that it's the linoleic acid you know omega omega-6 in particular that are harmful within these oils .

Chris Knobbe 21:20

Right , absolutely , Philip , that's exactly it . So the omega-6 consumption, modeled this the American diet , for example , in 1865 , before there was any seed oils and when , all of you know , all of the food would have have been naturally raised, ancestrally raised . . We didn't have , we had no seed oils , but we also didn't have any , you know , corn and soy fed animals and we didn't have nuts and seeds in huge quantities like we do now , which are all things that add tremendously to the omega-6 load , but anyway . So the diet was provided about 2.2 to 2.6 grams of omega-six linoleic acid in 1865 . That was about 1.1% of total calories . So that , without giving you the numbers in between , by 2008 , we were consuming 29 grams of omega six linoleic acid on average per day . That's 11.8% of calories . So whether you look at it in terms of the percentage increase in omega six or the mass of omega six , either one comes out to be about 11 fold increase in omega six consumption between 1865 and 2008 . And that you know to me everything I see , this you know , fits with this .

Chris Knobbe 22:47

But , for example , I've looked at , you know , multiple hundred hunter gatherer populations the Masai , the Tokulaoans , the Katavans , the Papua New Guineans , the Tukasinta , the Oshay of Paraguay and there's others . And all of these , what I found was that , in analyzing their diets , that their omega six consumption is all basically under 2% . They're most of them are under 1.7% . So those that have really high fat consumption , like the Masai , who consume milk , meat and blood and their diet of 66% animal fat and 40 to 46% saturated animal fat , their diet was only 1.7% omega six linoleic acid . Where are Americans ? Well , you know we're , as I mentioned , we're at 11.8%

The Increase of Omega-6 Consumption Chris Knobbe 23:38

now and you know we , you know 1999 , we were at 7.8% , I believe it was . We've had this trend , you know, where it's just been increasing since around 1900 , as our own . Well , really since 1866 , when vegetable oils entered the food supply , and the omega six has just been climbing ever since And with that we just see an explosion of all this chronic disease that was rare in the 19th century .

Dr. Philip Ovadia 24:08

Yeah , and again , the Omega 6 content is one of the differentiators . What people will sometimes get confused about is things like olive oil and coconut oil that have been shown to be health-promoting and they say , well , isn't that a vegetable oil, and that Omega 6 content , as well as the process that goes into making it , is what distinguishes that from those oils , from the seed oils that we're talking about .

Chris Knobbe 24:44

Right, exactly . Yeah , so there , when you start talking about vegetable oils , you've got to get into the nuance because it's critical to understand that . But the seed oils , as you just said , Philip , they're high Omega 6 linoleic acid . They range from approximately the low in canola oil , which is around 20% Omega 6 linoleic acid , to soybean oil , that's 54 to 56% Omega 6 linoleic acid , and then safflower oil , the highest at 78% . But if you contrast that to naturally raised animals cattle , pigs and chickens their Omega 6 linoleic acid on their proper diet will not be over about 2.5% of their fat . So that's what we should be getting and that's what the whole world consumed was essentially , was almost everywhere .

Chris Knobbe 25:48

They didn't have any olive oil . They were consuming animal fats , and that is butter , lard and beef tallow , and all of those would be no more than maybe 2 . 5%, 2 to 3.5% Omega 6 linoleic acid . And again , contrast that to the seed oils which would be, I'll just name them soybean , corn , canola , cotton , seed , rape seed , grape seed , sunflower , safflower , rice bran , sesame and peanut oils . All of those range from about 20% to 78% Omega 6 linoleic acid and they average in, if you look at population-wide studies , they average about 38% to 40% Omega 6 linoleic acid . That's what's in those vegetable oils sort of worldwide . And again , that's the massive change in our Omega 6 consumption or accounts for that .

Dr. Philip Ovadia 26:49

So just to dig in a little bit more there again , how do we separate the vegetable and seed oils from the processed food ? So some might make the argument that and you even said it yourself earlier that vegetable and seed oil consumption is really a proxy for processed food consumption . And many would just say , well , it's the processed food . And let's say , you just use these oils to cook your vegetables in or cook your meat in , is that going to be as bad ?

Chris Knobbe 27:32

Well , I guess first of all , Philip , I'd just say that number one processed foods , which I've always vilified to me are four things . They're refined flowers , refined sugars , vegetable oils, and trans fat . So to say , can we separate out vegetable oils from processed food ? I think , well , not really , because they are processed food . I mean , they're the number one ingredient of processed foods on a caloric basis pretty much worldwide to my knowledge , certainly the number one ingredient in processed food in the United States , with 32% of our calories coming from vegetable oil in 2010 . So , again , that's not corrected for losses , so it'd be a little bit lower than that on average . Like I said , it's maybe around a fourth of our diet , but possibly up to a third, but nevertheless , could you just consume these vegetable oils in a healthy way , just by cooking with them at home or avoiding the processed foods ? It certainly would be better . It definitely would be better because the heating process of the oils adds to their danger because when you heat these oils , you create the advanced lipid oxidation in products . These are things like four hydroxynonenal, malondialdehyde , MDA , Carboxyethylpyrroles , Acrolein , and there's literally hundreds of others of these chemicals that the lipid chemists understand . And so when you heat the oils, you're going to produce more of those , so you'll consume more of those .

Chris Knobbe 29:20

And those are all dangerous .

Danger of Omega-6 Oxidation Chris Knobbe 29:24

They're collectively those advanced lipid oxidation end products , or ALEs . They're collectively cytotoxic , genotoxic , mutagenic , carcinogenic , atherogenic , thrombogenic , obesogenic, and diabetogenic . So you can't get much worse than that . So they contribute to all of those problems . but that's just part of the scenario And what I tell people and what we clearly understand is that even if you don't have those advanced lipid oxidation endproducts , in the oil , when you consume them you can produce all of those endogenously because you've raised , when you consume Omega 6 , it accumulates in your body fat and then when those oxidize , you'll produce all of those same chemicals .

Jack Heald 30:14

So just make sure I understand what you just said . Sure , Even if you're not getting the incredibly toxic list that you just described , if you're consuming the seed oils themselves , once they're in your body they do their work and create those toxic reactions anyway .

Chris Knobbe 30:37

They do .

Jack Heald 30:38

I realize that's grossly simplified , but No , that's exactly right .

Chris Knobbe 30:44

They oxidize and you can't stop the oxidation . So , in other words , it's the Omega 6 linoleic acid , which is an unsaturated fat , that is , those are the most subject to oxidation because of the multiple double bonds . So when these accumulate in your body and your body fat , which they do to very high levels , then you're a setup for these processes , for the oxidation , and then the inflammation and the toxicity and all that . And so that's what I'm talking about . You can't avoid that just because you didn't heat the oil or cook with it .

Dr. Philip Ovadia 31:28

Yeah , and I think that's an important point , because I've actually heard a number of people in the space making the argument that the oils , the Omega 6 itself , is not the issue . It's only when it gets oxidized that it's problematic . But , as you said , once it's in you , there's no way to prevent it from getting oxidized .

Chris Knobbe 31:55

That's right . It's going to oxidize , Yeah , And there's no way to consume higher levels of these and not accumulate these in your body fat . That's what they do . Our body is , for whatever reasons, we accumulate these , any kinds of the fatty acids and they are reflected on a percentage basis based on what you've been consuming over the past approximately three years . So , for example , we see in ancestrally living populations there's four , or really five of these studies that have been done, back in 1969 , a group of researcher Ian Pryor and colleagues, they studied several populations and looked at their body fat , Omega 6 linoleic acid , and it averaged 2.83% . Well , Americans averaged 9.1% Omega 6 linoleic acid in 1959 in their body fat and they averaged 21.5% in their body fat in 2008 .

Jack Heald 33:16

In 50 years we've more than doubled it ?

Dr. Philip Ovadia 33:21

Yes .

Chris Knobbe 33:22

Absolutely . And what did we more than double our seed oil consumption ? You bet we did . In 1961 , we were consuming 19.5 grams of vegetable oil on average per day . 2010 , 80 grams per day . So again , everywhere you look , you see that as the vegetable consumption goes up , that Omega 6 , LA consumption , linoleic acid in the food goes up and your body fat,

Chris Knobbe 33:51

Omega 6 , LA , goes up precisely in correlation with that And as I keep showing that they'll overweight , obesity goes up . Diabetes , metabolic syndrome , all coronary heart disease, all of these diseases go through the roof in parallel with this .

Jack Heald 34:11

Okay , you've convinced me of the bad news . Do we have any course of action ? Can we turn the Titanic around and maybe not hit the iceberg ?

Chris Knobbe 34:27

I think so , absolutely . So the bad news , the further bad news is that it takes, the half life of any fatty acid in your body fat is 600 to 680 days, just let's round that off to about two years . One study showed that you can completely replace all of your fatty acids in your body in three years . So that's better than what I expected it to be . So it's three years . So if you, so this , you can turn the Titanic around , but it might take you three years to do it .

Chris Knobbe 35:06

If you go from , let's say you're a typical American, you're getting a fourth of your food, I use the term loosely from vegetable oils and you go to zero and you get, you know, you also eliminate the high omega-6 six fats coming from KFO, you know corn and soy fed chicken and pork , and you , you know , you eliminate nuts and seeds . So now you're at an ancestral level of omega-6 consumption .

Chris Knobbe 35:31

If you do that for three years , you're going to bring your body fat down from , let's say , typical American 21 and a half percent down to where it should be , which is under under probably 3% . You can do that in three years and I think you turn the tide on all of these conditions . But it's going to take you a while and the only thing I know to do is get the seed oils , get the vegetable oils and these other things to these other methods, you have to implement those and everything else you can do that's healthy in the meantime to support yourself , and probably exercise will help to burn those And but yes , you'll turn the tide and then you'll , and then you will drastically reduce your risk of all of these overweight and all these chronic diseases . And many people, they stop vegetable oils and literally in six or eight weeks they're seeing tremendous Health benefits and weight loss .

Dr. Philip Ovadia 36:30

Do you ? Are you a fan of testing, you know, omega-6 levels ? And there are a number of ways to do that these days . You know you can do it in the blood , you can do it in the red blood cells Finger stick home test . What are your thoughts on testing these levels ?

Chris Knobbe 36:49

Yeah , well , I wish that we could, you know, that we could do what they , what they've done in the studies routinely , which is to do a adipose biopsy . So you know , biopsy , the body fat , which is done with a tiny , neat oh well like a 16 gauge needle , Philip , and you get out in the buttocks or in the abdomen and just get a little tiny sample of fat . You can have that analyzed . But it's that's not done routinely anywhere , it's only been done in studies . But that would be the by far in the way the gold standard test and as far as all the other tests that look at the , the fatty acids in the blood , there's been some good correlation with some of them and not so good in others .

Chris Knobbe 37:36

And I just have not seen enough evidence yet to to make me believe that the blood studies of the fatty acids are are all that , they're the best , there are an excellent thing to do . I just don't know that it that they really are not saying they're not , but I haven't seen enough evidence to to prove it one way or another . I've seen that a couple of them had pretty good correlation to that adipose fatty acids , but I'm just again , there's just not enough evidence there to convince me that would be the way to go .

Jack Heald 38:14

What do ?

Dr. Philip Ovadia 38:15

you think , Go ahead Jack .

Jack Heald 38:18

A couple of related questions . One So you've got this buildup of linoleic acid in your body fat . It's half life is two years . Is there anything that can be done to neutralize this , this fat , this linoleic acid , when it's in your system while you are gradually

Testing Omega Six Levels and Macular Degeneration Jack Heald 38:45

getting rid of it ?

Chris Knobbe 38:47

Not to neutralize it , Jack , but you can, you can further protect yourself while you're bringing your omega six in your body fat down by consuming nutrient-dense a diet and of course , that's always protective . So I would say you know a diet that , especially , is rich in in any antioxidants , but higher vitamin E consumption and you know any , perhaps any antioxidants coming from plants that could be beneficial all of those will help to protect you while the you're bringing your omega six down in your body fat .

Jack Heald 39:34

For those of us who don't actually track that stuff , give us some examples of those foods .

Chris Knobbe 39:41

You mean, like high in vitamin E .

Jack Heald 39:44

Yeah , anti-oxidants high in vitamin E .

Chris Knobbe 39:46

Yeah . So I would say , you know, well , animal sources would be excellent . For that . I mean , i'm trying to , i'm trying to give you examples that I would recommend consuming too . Animal sources would be excellent , for that , you know , could be , it could be animal meats , organ meats , eggs , milk , whole cold milk , whole raw milk , all of those would be would be good sources .

Jack Heald 40:21

So , in other words , anything that we should eat all the time .

Chris Knobbe 40:25

Yeah , anything that gets you know would give you good antioxidants . That is would generally be considered healthy . So if you can you know if you can get those from plant sources , those would be, those would be potentially beneficial too .

Dr. Philip Ovadia 40:46

It's what, what continues to be interesting to me is how many different perspectives you can come at this from and end up in the same place , which is , you know , eat real food and mostly animal foods And you end up at the same place . Let's dig into, you're certainly the first ophthalmologist we've had on the program And I know you really , you know , kind of came at this because of macular degeneration And I don't, I think that's something that people don't know a lot about . So I think this would be a great opportunity to talk a little bit about what that is , how it affects us , and then , you know , kind of circle back to why this approach to combatting it is going to be better than the mainstream approach will say for this disease .

Chris Knobbe 41:41

Sure , yeah , yeah . So age related macular degeneration , or AMD is , as I think I mentioned earlier on , is the leading cause of irreversible vision loss and blindness in people over the age of 50 worldwide . And and this is sort of where I entered this this field of nutrition is with macular degeneration . Because back in 2013 , when I was , when I had first learned that processed foods are driving all of this chronic disease and I theorize or hypothesize that processed foods are driving macular degeneration , you know , as I mentioned , we investigated that in 25 nations and the results supported the hypothesis . Well , so the macula is the central retina , counts for about the central 10 degrees of vision , and you know , the macula can only be seen by an ophthalmologist or optometrist or whoever with a , with a , an ophthalmoscope or a slit lamp or whatever to look back there . So this , so , when I , when I first hypothesized this, Philip, back in 2013 , the first thing I needed to know was is when could ophthalmologists actually even see the retina , you know , in order to diagnose it ? Because I knew that If , if macular degeneration is a disease driven by processed foods , then there had to be a time when it was exceedingly rare or didn't exist . And so I went back and began investigating this . Well , and I didn't know any of this . We're not taught any of this in medical school , as you know . You don't know anything about the history of even your own specialty . Well , so macular degeneration or I mean sorry that the macula could first be seen , visualized in the living eye in 1851 , because Herman von Helmholtz had designed the ophthalmoscope so that physicians , ophthalmologists , could start looking into the back of the eye , and they and this technology spread around the world within a decade . And by 1880 , for example , there were 86 ophthalmologists , different brands , types of ophthalmoscopes and use , and by 1900 , I think , was over 200 . And But anyway , in the first 80 years of potential discovery , and these ophthalmologists , they're looking , they're , they're documenting, they're photographing , they're drawing pictures, in first 80 years of potential discovery , between 1851 and about 1930 , there was no more than about 50 cases of macular degeneration in the entire world . This is documented and there's extraordinary evidence that they're , they're finding all these other retinal diseases , but not macular degeneration . And then Macular degeneration just began to really be noticed in the 1930s in the , especially the United States and in Europe , and then by the 1970s were epidemic proportions, by 2020, there's 196 million cases in the world and it's estimated there will be a 288 million by 2040 . And so , but anyway .

Chris Knobbe 45:03

So this disease , it robs a person of their central vision .

Chris Knobbe 45:07

That so the vision that we use to see somebody's face or a stop sign , or read a book , all those kind of things is your central, you know five , 10 degrees of vision , and it , that part of the eye , degenerates , and so you have degeneration of a layer called the retinal pigment epithelium which supports the photoreceptors , the rods and cones , and what you see in there is you see atrophy of the retinal pigment epithelium , which causes the rods and cones to atrophy or die , and you also see loss of the vasculature , the choriocapillaris , the layer beneath the retina that supplies blood to the retina . And it's much more complicated than just this . But those are some of the major things that we see in the back of the eye when we look there , and and so with that , people have , when they have , when they develop this disease , they , they generally have a progressive loss of vision , which generally they don't notice anything for the first number of years and they have precious little vision loss and hopefully it's during that stage that they're they're diagnosed and what .

Chris Knobbe 46:23

I would recommend changing their diet because there's been almost no benefit whatsoever with the standard treatment which is , you know , for dry macular deg eneration which has been AREDS formula vitamins has been , you know , been had , had , has almost no benefit at all . And so anyway , I started .

Chris Knobbe 46:43

You know , I went public with this theory and this evidence and this and the research in 2016 . We published a paper on this . In 2017 , I published a book and we've had people following this and as they went from their westernized diet to an ancestral diet in 2016 , we have a lot of people that have been doing this now for six or seven years . Hundreds of people that report to me , and virtually almost every single one of those has stabilized in terms of their vision loss and their progression of macular generation when they follow the diet , and they'll tell you if they're following it or not . So we've got good anecdotal evidence , but we don't . You know again this you know there are no formal studies being done on people yet .

Jack Heald 47:35

So again , I apologize for asking the question , but any speculation as to the mechanism , what's going on that's doing this to the eye ?

Chris Knobbe 47:49

Well , that's really oxidation Yeah absolutely , it's all of these things . So it's a combination of oxidation , inflammation , toxicity and nutrient deficiency , just like everywhere else in the body . And so you have damage to the retinal pigment epithelium that comes from all of those things . You have thickening of Bruch's membrane , which is a membrane that sits between the retinal pigment epithelium and the photoreceptors , the rod and cones , and that Bruch's membrane thickens and behaves exactly like an atherosclerotic plaque . So it's doing almost the same thing that what you see in the heart , you know , in a coronary artery with the disease , it's thickening and it's creating a barrier between the blood supply , the choriocapillaris and the retina proper . And so this is , this is , you know , feeding , this entire mechanism .

Chris Knobbe 48:48

Then you have , you know , the , the . When you're substituting vegetable oils for for animal fats , you have loss of vitamins A , D and K2 . Right , and so this is another mechanism . So you actually have nutrient deficiency as well on top of all this . But that's , that's the really dumbed down version of what I'm trying to tell you here , because this is incredibly complex disease and there's a lot of , you know a lot of arrows , a lot of things going , you know , all conspiring together to create this disease . But the bottom line is it is a degenerative disease , just as its name implies , and it's driven by the toxicity and the nutrient deficiency of processed foods .

Jack Heald 49:38

So I think we've identified the what , the when, we've talked briefly about the how . We've talked about Some ways to at least arrest the process , if not reverse it , depending upon how it's presenting in your body . I and I realize this is not an area of research , but you probably know as much about it as anybody we've had on . Let's talk about the who . What the hell's going on here ? Why , why , why is this being allowed to happen ? What's , you know there's, there's always a reason this stuff happens . Speculate for us , if you don't mind .

Chris Knobbe 50:27

What do you ? what do you mean ? the who ? and I'm not following your question , really , Jack .

Dr. Philip Ovadia 50:33

I think what Jack's getting at is if this you know and you've laid it out so well in the book , you know , but if it's so obvious that these are causing these issues , you know , how did this stuff get into our food supply to start with and why does it persist in our food supply now ?

Chris Knobbe 50:53

Exactly , you're saying the vegetable oils , the vegetable oil Yeah .

Chris Knobbe 50:57

Okay , okay , gotcha . Yeah , good question . So so it , you know this

Vegetable Oils and Health Impact Chris Knobbe 51:04

is so . This goes back to when the first vegetable oil was introduced in the United States , really , and that was cotton seed oil , which which entered the food supply right after the end of the American Civil War and again 1865 . And the , the manufacturers had produced cotton seed oil . So Americans had never heard of or seen any kind of oil before , with essentially the exception of olive oil , which was incredibly small amount up through the American Civil War . And so the , but the manufacturers of cotton seed oil , which was just had been used as a lamp oil and machine oil , and then fertilizer , and then , and then cattle feed . They figured out that they could feed it to cattle and the cattle didn't die . So they wanted to . They wanted to make profit . That's what the whole goal is profit , it's always profit . And so they decided to try to sell it for , you know , human consumption . But Americans weren't buying . It didn't make any sense to them to use a machine oil or a lamp oil for food , right , and so they . That's the case . If you would have said the term vegetable oil in 1865 or 1866 , nobody would have anywhere on the planet would have known what you're talking about , because there was . No , the term didn't exist .

Chris Knobbe 52:23

It came about in the in the early 20th century , but anyway . So they couldn't sell it to people to use as food . So they first began to adulterate . They created margarine and that's a mixture of butter and an oil like cottonseed oil , and then they began to adulterate olive oil with it and sell it . Because , again , people were , they , people were buying olive oil And they were using cottonseed oil . So they mixed it together and sold it . And there was complaint that came out of France in 1880 . We said over , I think , hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil . And they knew it wasn't olive oil , it was adulterated olive oil . And they could . They knew that just by tasting it .

Chris Knobbe 53:09

And then , so then , Procter and Gamble , in the early 1900s , they began in experimenting with cottonseed oil And they worked with German chemist EC Kaiser , who helped them to partially hydrogenate the oil to produce what looked like lard , and that was Crisco . And so Crisco contains that , you know , the partially hydrogenated oil , which is trans fat , right , and so these are the things . This is how they got into the food supply . They margarine , they adulteration , and then Crisco , and then it just gradually grew . And all of the other vegetable oils then came into use to . They went once they were making so much money out of these other oils cottonseed oil , and then soybean oil in 1909 . And then we got all the others corn , canola , cottonseed , rape seed , grape seed , sunflower , safflower , right , all those and gradually increased and people gradually got sick while they told us that they're healthy , right . And then , you know , by the 1950s and 1960s , we , you know , then this is when the American Heart Association .

Dr. Philip Ovadia 54:29

Yes , exactly .

Chris Knobbe 54:30

That's it . Then we go into that story , which I won't go into . That's why I was pausing . I don't know if we even go there , but Ansel Keys , American Heart Association , all you know , figure out that vegetable oils make the cholesterol go down , and indeed they do , and so for that reason alone , that's , that's the only reason they've really ever had , as far as I can tell , to recommend vegetable oils .

Chris Knobbe 54:51

And this is how they get away with it . Still today is total cholesterol does go down when you substitute vegetable oils for saturated animal fat , right , Philip ? And with that alone that you know that that's still the argument that they're using today to tell us to consume this . So you've got all the major organizations you've got Harvard , Tufts , Mayo Clinic , Cleveland Clinic , American Heart Association . They're all telling us the same thing, consume these vegetable oils . They're healthy and make your cholesterol go down and they're good for your heart , right ? And ? and they're good and they're good for you . And so this is how they continue to get away with this . They're not going to get away with it forever . I mean because more and more and more people are are you see it everywhere are beginning to understand this , this story and the fact that we've been fed a lie for 60 years . And we're , but that the you know , the people wise up to this .

Dr. Philip Ovadia 55:50

So , along those lines then , what are your thoughts about some of the recent efforts to maybe create a better vegetable than seed oil , so a low linoleic acid , you know , manufactured oil ?

Chris Knobbe 56:09

Yeah , well , I don't really know why we should do that , Philip . It doesn't make any sense to me that we should ever go down that path , because I think it would be another experiment . I think it would just be kind of like going back to you know , or we first , when we first introduced cottonseed oil . You know it's an experiment on the people and we don't , we know we don't have any reason to do that when we have good , healthy animal fats . And we still have large butter and beef tallow when they're especially when they're all properly raised . That would be very , very , very healthy . And if everybody just substituted butter for their vegetable oils and if they just got the vegetables out of their diet , I think we , I think we'd solve 80 to 90% of our chronic disease with that one fell swoop . That's all we'd have to do .

Jack Heald 57:03

There's our , there's our poll quote right there Exactly .

Chris Knobbe 57:08

Well , that's my belief , that's , I may be biased . This is what I've been investigating for a decade , you know . So I may be biased , but that's everything . I see still leads me to this conclusion .

Jack Heald 57:20

Well , I haven't studied it , but you know I began observing in the early 80s . It just seemed like people started getting slowly fatter , and I know that the early 80s is also about the time that high fructose corn syrup took over from sugar as a preferred sweetener in manufactured foods . And as I pondered it over the years , it seemed to me that many of the things that we vilified, it just didn't stand up to observational evidence . But the one thing that's been a constant in the increase in just general ill health has been the introduction of what I think of as just artificial food things . For the last 40 years, I've seen it over and over and over and over and over . So I wish you'd find something happy to tell me to end this year because frankly I'm a little depressed .

Chris Knobbe 58:40

I don't think you should be . When you know the cause , then you know what to do about it . And that's the brilliant , and it's so simple . I mean , there's a very simple answer . Number one is just get rid of processed foods , that's , refined flour , sugars and vegetable oils . Just basically . All you need to do is try to eliminate those , or just eliminate those . And now you're 90% of the way there for most people , and probably you've solved most all of your risk for these chronic diseases . So I think it's . You know , there's a light at the end of the tunnel and it's bright and it's . The potential is great to reverse all of this , but you have to understand what it is . And , by the way , Jack , when you're right , we've seen a huge explosion of obesity since 1980 . And this is a lot of researchers or authors .

Chris Knobbe 59:46

They pin this on the fact that we were told to go low fat in 1980 . Our dietary guidelines told us that And that's what we did . We followed what we were told to do . We did drop our fat down from something like 41% to 33% over the next decade And we got a lot more obese and sick and diabetic and all that , but the thing that kept going up was the vegetable oils . So while our fat consumption went down , we were replacing more of our animal fat with vegetable oils . That's exactly what we did And that's what we continue to do through the most . At least the most recent data proves that that's the case .

Jack Heald 1:00:31

All right , so get rid of the processed foods . eat whole real foods , Phil , I feel like we've heard this somewhere .

Dr. Philip Ovadia 1:00:39

I think we've said it , we've heard it once or twice , certainly , and , like I said , you can come at it from all the different angles we've heard about . We've heard from so many different medical specialties now on this show And it's amazing how it all leads back to the same place It does .

Chris Knobbe 1:01:02

It absolutely does . Whether you're talking heart health or brain health or eye health , or preventing cancer and reversing obesity , it all comes back to the same answer . And yeah , getting rid of the processed foods . To me , the beauty of this is in the simplicity of it . I'm not saying it's not easy to do , and I think it's hard to navigate our food supply today because it's so complex , but with a few fundamental principles I think you can make a massive headway very easily And you can do it today . For those who are on a standard American diet , they can begin today . They can stop the vegetable oil consumption today . It's a massive step right there .

Jack Heald 1:01:57

Very good .

Dr. Philip Ovadia 1:01:58

Excellent . Well , again , the book is widely available now . The Ancestral Diet Revolution . Where else can people find you and connect with you , Chris ?

Chris Knobbe 1:02:12

So we have two foundations the Ancestral Health Foundation and Cure AMD Foundation . You can find those online , all the Ancestral Health Foundation . That website's not quite available yet but will be very soon . We do have Facebook pages , Twitter pages for those and Instagram for those foundations , and people could find me with a lot of YouTube videos , presentations and podcasts And anyway . But , Philip and Jack , I want to thank you for this opportunity And I appreciate being able to be on your show .

Jack Heald 1:02:56

We appreciate your work , both the research and the publication , and if we haven't made the point yet , by golly , we'll just keep working at it . Dr Chris Knobbe , that's KNO BBE for our listeners . The contact information will be in the show notes . Go ahead and press that subscribe button so you get updated every time we get a new show out . They drop every Tuesday And I think we're done today , Phil . Thank you , Jack . All right , we'll talk to you all later . Thanks , jack . Thank you .