Let's Talk about Easter Island and Saturated Fat
Including Jake's Story, Thoth's Prophecy, and More!
#28 Nina Teicholz - The Big Fat Surprise and Dietary Corruption
This week, we are sharing our interview with author and science journalist, Nina Teicholz. She is also a member of the Global Food Justice Alliance, an amazing organization that advocates for the rights of all people to have access to nutrient dense animal foods. Nina’s book, The Big Fat Surprise, is an instrumental compilation of scientific research, interviews, and history which describes how we’ve been profoundly misled about dietary fat for over 100 years. In this episode, we break down all of these ideas, talking about the vilification of meat and saturated fat, the dubiousness of epidemiology as a basis for scientific research, the dangers of pushes toward a global diet, the disastrous consequences of food policy, the abysmal state of current health, the horrors of vegetable oils, and so much more.
How to Start a Goddamn Documennary
Ah yes! Hello, dear Substack subscribers. I am looking forward to having a little space that will hopefully inspire me to actually write. I believe Hunter S. Thompson or someone of the sort once said “I write to know what I think”. Sometimes I have no idea what I think, so having an outlet for some writing will do me some good. I am not nearly as much of a writer as Maren (obviously) but I find it to be a very rewarding practice and often I walk away from a writing session feeling like I have meditated.
I hope you all listened to Nina’s episode. It was an honor to go and speak with her at her home. While planning “Death in The Garden” (the Film), I spent a lot of time and still do, thinking about how much time I wanted to spend on the “Diet Wars”. That is a war that will be fought until the end of time and possibly has no real overarching conclusions. All I have the answers for in this regard is my own experience. I have spent time experimenting with my body with various diets and I know with first-hand felt experience what works for me and what doesn’t.
If you have been following this project at all, you are probably aware that I used to be a Vegan. It’s something I bring up a lot because in many ways that experience with veganism fuels so much of what I do and was the beginning of the part of the “Death in The Garden” journey for me.
Flashback to a few years ago: I was your typical 20 something-year-old white kid (probably still am) who was rightly angry, passionate, and afraid of the direction of the world and was susceptible to stupid ideas (again probably still am). Climate change was and still lingers over my head and at the time I thought I had found the personal action option that would abate all those worries.
VEGANISM…
(fanfare trumpets play) is the cure for all you and the world's ills!!! Line up – soy hemoglobin, kale, and pretentious conversations about those carnies bringing down humanity’s vibrations are on the menu!!! You will be healthier, happier, more beautiful and you will be saving the planet all at once! Because, as it turns out, animal agriculture is the cause of all the environmental destruction and all the illnesses humans experience. I could go on about why I went vegan, but I will leave that for the film or maybe the next post.
As the story goes, my health eventually failed on a vegan diet. And once I reintroduced animals back into my diet (to great undeniable success) I had to reevaluate so many things about my worldview.
I went vegan for 3 reasons and a quasi 4th: human health, planetary health, animal welfare, and spirituality. After my years in the plant-based world, I found none of those things to be true. Again another story for another post/movie.
But the important part here is why I wanted to talk with Nina about her work. Why did my health fail on a vegan diet?! You may know and have read The Big Fat Surprise and if you haven’t, do yourself a favor and go get a copy. It’s some real journalism. She knows her shit. As you will hear in this week’s podcast she talked to EVERYONE… meaning all the researchers involved in all the grand dietary recommendations.
When we got to meet her in person, I was elated! I knew we had found our “Diet/Nutrition” person.
In the whole production of this film of ours, I have had an abstract running script in my head about how to tell this story. How do I get from “plant-based seems like a good answer” to “all the so-called solutions to climate change are bullshit death-denying fantasies from a culture that is going stale and on its last breath”? For me that is the biggest challenge. But ultimately I am living that story. It is Maren and I’s story (I’s? Neither of us know how to properly phrase this).
We are living it.
If I am going to tell this story genuinely, why not start with health and nutrition? If we can’t save the world and have happy healthy humans at the same time then what’s the point?
Getting to talk with Nina is like getting to talk with Michael Jordan… I guess. She knows her shit is what I’m trying to say. You can throw anything at her, bring up any researcher or piece of research that “What the Health” haphazardly (still confused as to how to pronounce that word) put in their film, and she knows everything about it.
Our conversation with Nina has been on my mind a lot the past few weeks, not only because we are releasing the podcast but as I said I have spent a lot of the past few weeks trying to figure out how to best tell this personal story of mine. I have been editing “Death in The Garden” and I am in those awkward early stages of putting a film together. What is the first frame? The first bit of audio? What can I do to not immediately bore the fuck out of the audience and lose them there?
What I learned from our conversation (along with some footage of me being a grimy little hippy living in a Hari Krishna Temple) seem to be a good place to get an audience interested. “Hey, you know how for the past 50 years we have been told to not eat meat and saturated fat? Well, that’s all bullshit. Here is mine and literally thousands of accounts of the malnutrition that sets deep into your bones as a Vegan. Do you want to hear what else is bullshit? Keep watching and Hare Krishna!”
In my vegan years, I had spent so much time watching vegan documentaries, watching slaughter and suffer-porn online, and listening to podcasts. In preparation for my own recounting of these topics, I went back and revisited some of the documentaries (What The Health, Game-Changers, Cowspiracy and it’s very originally named sister, Seapiracy, etc.)
Here are just a few of the critical pieces of the Diet Narrative that the Vegans will repeat in every goddamn stupid copy-and-paste documentary they make on the health and the environment and all the goddamn stupid copy-and paste-arguments I heard and repeated during my stint as a Vegan.
Meat: The Nexus of Evil (Part 1)
In all the documentaries you will watch, they usually open with some shocking statistics such as:
“World-wide, we are looking at 350 million people with diabetes.” - Dr. Robert Ratner, What The Health.
They emphasize the health epidemics that we are in such as diabetes, heart disease, and cancer all of which are on the rise, and in which we all know someone afflicted by these rising diseases. It’s all very relatable. They emphasize truths such as 1 in 3 Medicare dollars is spent treating diabetes. 1 in 10 healthcare dollars is spent on diabetes.
wHaT iS GoInG oN?!
And then we always get to hear a little about the main character of the movie. A young guy on a mission (sound familiar ;)) to solve the all too relatable ill-health of his family. His father and his grandfather, etc – all dying from heart attacks. They qualify themselves as being health-conscious, doing all the right things, being martial artists, their long list of accomplishments so that you trust them blah blah blah…
EEEERrrr (sounds of car tires scratching) BREAKING. And this is where they all really begin. MEAT CAUSES CANCER. Very quickly, after a brief but effective painting of all the world’s problems – ill health, environmental destruction, social justice – the premise of the film is introduced: The Nexus of Evil.
MEAT.
We are told that the W.H.O (who doesn’t trust the W.H.O?) classified processed red meat as a Group 1 carcinogen (in the same group as tobacco, asbestos, and plutonium) and that red meat is “probably” a Group 2 carcinogen as well.
“Hotdogs and bacon are just as dangerous as smoking cigarettes.”
We then see the quintessential shot of our main character internet sleuthing and scrolling through government agency websites, finding the grand conspiracy in the fine print. We are informed that the cancer institute recommends eating meat as a “Group 1 carcinogen” on their website! Oh no! The main character then goes and calls some poor intern who answers the phone, and is asked questions about huge institutional policies and recommendations that this intern has no power to change nor enforce why they are recommending such things on their website.
Got em.
IARC - Red Meat
At the core, but not limited to, so much of the vegan health debate comes from this W.H.O statement from 2015. IARC (International Agency for Research on Cancer) which is a group formed by the W.H.O, came to a startling conclusion after 22 scientists from around the world met in France for 2 weeks. After considering 800 studies, they came to the conclusion that for every 100 grams of red meat eaten per day, there was a 17 percent increase in colon cancer risk. They also concluded that for every 50 grams of processed red meat, there was a risk increase of 18 percent. They went on to classify red meat as “probably” carcinogenic to humans.
But here is the part that is left out of all these movies. In 2018 a detailed report on their findings revealed that only 14 of the 800 studies were considered in their conclusions – and they were all OBSERVATIONAL EPIDEMIOLOGY. Included in the group that was left out of the final conclusions were studies that were interventional and did not show a relationship to meat and cancer.
What is Epidemiology!? Glad you asked! I’ll let Nina Explain this one. And why the IARC report is a fucking sham and dogshit reason for calling an overworked intern at the Cancer Institute.
Of the fourteen epidemiology studies that were included in the IARC report, eight showed no link between the consumption of meat and the development of colon cancer. Of the remaining 6, only ONE showed any statistical significance of the correlation between red meat and cancer. And interestingly enough this study was on the Seventh Day Adventists in America. Ahem… Healthy User Bias (more on that in the future)
Excluded from the IARC report were all of the INTERVENTIONAL studies performed on animals that had mechanism and causation over correlation.
Epidemiology goes to the core of the vegan debate. Without it, there is very little substance in the argument and the Doctors that are its proponents.
I could go on and on and at some point, you probably will hear me go on and on whether in a podcast or in the film. But this is the nutrition research hell that I am in. Knowing first hand that the best I ever felt was on a Carnivore diet I became super obsessed with all these silly claims that these doctors make. In fact, I have a whole document where I have started to collect all these research papers. Guess who authors a lot of them? These same doctors.
The underlying cause of it all… MEAT!!!
Anyways, as I continue to put the pieces together for this film I hope to share some of the research and thoughts behind it all along with some clips from our upcoming film.
The Myth of the Fall of Easter Island
If you haven’t yet listened to “Fall of Civilizations Podcast”, I would highly recommend it. There is no podcast like it in my experience – the production quality is masterful and incredibly immersive. Paul Cooper’s intellectual integrity is unmatched, as well. In this episode, he deviates significantly from the common narrative around what caused the collapse of the Easter Island civilization, the people of Rapa Nui, which generally indicts humanity’s “natural” tendency toward hubris and ignorance of limits.
Authors like Jared Diamond (in his book Collapse) popularized a very particular narrative around this event which I’ve also seen expressed in the books A Short History of Progress by Ronald Wright and A New Green History of the World by Clive Ponting. This podcast compelled me to look deeper into his particular take on what happened to Rapa Nui.
This narrative is primarily predicated on the theory that trees were cut down to roll the moai from the inland quarry to the coast, which would explain the deforestation and help support the narrative that the Rapa Nui peoples were as greedy and terrible as the rest of the world. Cooper expertly outlines the fallaciousness of that narrative, taking seriously a claim made by the Rapa Nui laid out in A New Green History of the World: “When they were asked by the visitors how the statues had been moved from the quarry, the primitive islanders could no longer remember what their ancestors had achieved and could only say that the huge figures had ‘walked’ across the island.”
Could they really not remember? The most “convincing” explanation for the statues movements in Diamond’s book would have required 500 people working 5 hours a day, apparently consuming more food than the island could provide. Maybe they should have investigated the claim of the moai “walking” with a little more than superstitious skepticism.
As Cooper outlines, and as Ronald Wright neglects to point out, a lot happened between the first contact with the Dutch on Easter Day 1722 and Captain Cook’s encounter 50 years later. The Dutch killed six Rapa Nui people with guns on that first day. A culture that hardly knew war, let alone gunfire, would undoubtedly be shaken by the arrival of these mysterious, weirdly dressed strangers with incredibly deadly weapons. Why is it the presumption that human folly caused this society’s decline and not the exploitation, disease, and disruption that without fail followed colonial contact?
It’s a compelling story. “Look at this perfect case study of how terrible humans are no matter what! We’ll destroy anything we touch! We truly are cursed, as Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden!” As you’ll hear in this episode of “Fall of Civilizations”, that narrative is far too simplistic, and only serves the perpetuation of a colonial mindset.
Diamond’s assessment of the Rapa Nui is entirely biased by his filter of competition. He even describes a hypothetical scenario to depict how the creation of the moai must have been a “show of one upsmanship.” The importation of his cultural worldview upon these people stops his frame of inquiry dead in its tracks: everything and anything was due to competition between the people who lived on that island.
Diamond does not mince words when describing the carvers of the moai statues as “possessed” by “megalomania”, which, in my view, is an exceedingly ironic indictment coming from someone of our culture* like himself.
Ponting is equally unforgiving in his testimony of Easter Island, which of course, includes no mention whatsoever of the negative consequences that befell the people upon colonial contact. Instead, he paints a picture of an insane people, desperately sawing down trees and frantically making statues to “secure prestige and status” as their civilization mysteriously crumbled around them.
These books all perpetuate a narrative based upon seemingly well-educated inference, which, unfortunately, seems to be blinded by the realities of colonial conquest and the mythos of the dominant culture. They all impose a particular frame upon the island, one which places the authority of the story upon our culture’s inference of reality, one which is highly limited. In asking of how the Easter Islanders moved the moai, Diamond actually writes: “Of course we don’t know for sure, because no European ever saw it being done to write about it” as though the only useful information in the world can come from a European, written source.
But the Rapa Nui people did know. They just weren’t listened to.
This is not meant to be a crucifixion of any of these writers, rather, a call for us to question our assumptions, our filters, and our biases. Diamond, summarizing over 100 years of colonial atrocity (including outright murder, disease, kidnapping and enslaving of 1 half of the surviving population of Rapa Nui by the Peruvians, and then Chile’s annexation and turning of the island into a sheep farm) in 2 pages of a nearly 40 page chapter, still concludes that this civilization collapsed because they overexploited their resources. A civilization, which by all accounts was doing fine prior to 1722, mysteriously falls after hundreds of years of colonialism. Huh, what could possibly explain this decline?
He even goes so far as to outright ignore how violent colonial contact could have impacted Rapa Nui, explaining that the “only” two factors that could explain their decline is due to native management and the schizophrenic competition by clansmen to create bigger and better statues. He declares that Rapa Nui had “no enemies” of which to blame their demise upon. Really?
Isn’t it amazing how the most obvious conclusion can be so obscured by our cultural filters?
The reason I am pointing this out is that these narratives firmly outline one of the main myths our culture has about human nature: That we are inherently bad and destructive. All of the authors use this “story” as a warning to humanity, compelling us to be better. But when we operate from this perspective, the onus of blame is on the wrong people entirely, so how can we possibly learn anything productive? How can we implement change when the lesson is that humans inherently fuck things up?
The truth is that the people didn’t eat themselves alive, they were swallowed by the culture that consumes everything: the culture that is consuming the world still today.
The culture that can actually be changed, if only we know how to look for it.
* When I use the phrase “our culture” I am referring to terminology created by Daniel Quinn, meaning, our culture is the culture that puts food under lock-and-key, utilizes totalitarian agriculture, and follows particular mythologies of man’s teleology. Quinn points out that this culture has infected East to West and encompasses the majority of the population of humans on the planet.
Grief Will Touch Us All
There is profundity in the unifying quality of grief. No human being will find themselves unencumbered by loss and the pain associated with it in their lives. We all walk through this rite of passage eventually. We all face death, one way or another. I see this as an incredible opportunity for us to deepen our relationship with life and with one another. An exchange with a friend inspired this poem below, and as I wrote, I felt the energy of all the people in my life who’ve been through the deep throes of grief and loss, but also those who haven’t had that initiation yet. So this poem is a prayer to all: that we may honor ourselves in the beauty that we all love so deeply, knowing that it all comes to death in the end.
But death is not an ending anymore than a flower growing is a beginning. It’s a transition, one phase shift of life onto the next, and with it, more life always flourishes. The love we feel never fades. It’s always as real and vibrant as it always was, which is why we grieve. Grief rings in the frequency of our witnessing this incredible drama of Creation. It’s a beautiful, sacred thing.
Learning from Thoth’s Prophecy
I’d like to end with an animated video (by the wonderful creator, After Skool) of Graham Hancock reading Thoth’s Prophecy. Here you can find a link to the transcript of Hermes Trismegistus (Thoth) prophesying to Asclepius about the fate of humanity as we cast reverence for gods aside.
“O Egypt, Egypt, of thy religion nothing will remain but an empty tale, which thine own children in time to come will not believe; nothing will be left but graven words, and only the stones will tell of thy piety. And in that day men will be weary of life, and they will cease to think the universe worthy of reverent wonder and of worship. And so religion, the greatest of all blessings, for there is nothing, nor has been, nor ever shall be, that can be deemed a greater boon, will be threatened with destruction; men will think it a burden, and will come to scorn it. They will no longer love this world around us, this incomparable work of God, this glorious structure which he has built, this sum of good made up of things of many diverse forms, this instrument whereby the will of God operates in that which be has made, ungrudgingly favoring man's welfare, this combination and accumulation of all the manifold things that can call forth the veneration, praise, and love of the beholder.”
I recently read the book The Book of the Damned by Daniel Quinn. The book details the ways in which we have stopped our evolution because we now believe that we are not held in the hands of the Gods. This isn’t a religious perspective at all, in fact, our ability to consign that there are mysteries to the universe that are outside of our realm of measurement is merely contending honestly with reality. The scientist knows that there is far more about the universe that we don’t know than we do. The scientist aims to learn and to be curious.
Have we forsaken ourselves through our misunderstanding of God? In our hubris, we narrowed our imagination. We imagined God as ourselves, because that much was obvious: God was in Man. Our mistake was not that we selected ourselves as the Godhead, but rather the narrowness of our imagination– that we thought God ended with us. Had we widened the aperture, we would see the manifold expressions of God– among us, God is found in the foxes, the sagebrush, the trees, the elephants, in the wind and the rain.
God is simply Creation itself, in all its expressions.
Of course, cultures living today around the world find all of this to be self-evident. Thoth’s Prophecy is for us – for those who have been severed from the reverence we feel toward the universe. The beautiful thing about reverence is it cannot be destroyed, only obscured. We can change the way we see the world. We can adjust our conditioning every day, and be those who don’t need to be washed away by the floods.
“Such is the new birth of the Kosmos; it is a making again of all things good, a holy and awe-striking restoration of all nature; and it is wrought in the process of time by the eternal will of God. For Gods will has no beginning; it is ever the same, and as it now is, even so it has ever been, without beginning. For it is the very being of God to purpose good.”
How do we purpose good? How do we serve the Gods?
We serve the continuation of Creation.
Books I’m Reading:
Bright Green Lies by Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith, and Max Wilbert, 2021
Memories, Dreams, Reflections by Carl Jung, 1961
The Rape of the Mind by Joost Meerloo, 1956
Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Niezsche, 1883
We by Yevgeny Zamyatin, 1924
Biopiracy by Vandana Shiva, 1999
The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, 1973
I’m trying to finish these books by the end of the year, so please pray for me y’all. If you want to follow me on Goodreads to see what I’ve read this past year, click this link.
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