Joe Rogan discusses Meat, Saturated Fat, and Cancer with Dr Rhonda Patrick

Well, you know, it's really interesting when it comes to data, when it comes to diet, because, you know, the whole throw the baby out with the bath water thing. One of the studies that I read pretty recently was about the amount of people that suffered ill health consequences that ate red meat five days per week versus people who didn't. But what they didn't take into account was what the people ate with the red meat. When they drank soda, how did you get your form of red meat? Was it grass-fed beef? Was it bison or wild game? Or was it a burger from Wendy's with fries and a sugar bun and all the bullshit that people eat along with the food? And that you literally, and people would cite these things as being evidence that something is negative for you, that red meat is negative for you. But you're not taking into consideration all the things that were eaten with that red meat. So these studies that come out like that, they're really annoying because it's like you have to talk to people about it and you have to sit down with them. Okay, sit down. Okay, this is a long process. Like to try to figure out what is the cause of these issues. You're talking about a lifetime of abuse. You're talking about all sorts of different health consequences of a variety of different foods and you're attributing it all to one part of your diet. And that's very difficult to do unless you've isolated everything else and done a bunch of different studies where, okay, I ate nothing but fruits and vegetables and I ate really healthy and I ate red meat five days a week. Or I ate nothing but shit and fries and buns and pasta and I didn't eat red meat at all. And now here's the results. Right. You're making a really good point and that is the combination of how these different foods are interacting in our bodies. Extremely important. Like we talked about the refined sugar and saturated fat combo. Well, you know, the red meat and even just protein itself, like essential amino acids that are coming from animal protein itself and how that is interacting with eating a terrible diet like refined sugar which is causing damage to our cells, also exercise. And this is something really, the protein exercise thing seems to be really key but there was a recent study that was published that was the largest study, observational study done so far looking at protein intake and all-cause mortality and cancer mortality. And it found, like a lot of other studies, that higher protein consumption, higher meat, protein consumption from meat was associated with a higher all-cause mortality and a higher cancer mortality. But then when the data was subanalyzed and other unhealthy style factors were looked at, so if someone had one other unhealthy lifestyle factor being either obesity, smoking, excessive alcohol consumption or being sedentary, then they had a higher all-cause mortality and a higher cancer mortality if they ate meat. But guess what? If they had zero, none of those other unhealthy lifestyle factors, they didn't have, they had the same all-cause mortality and cancer related mortality that the non-eaters had. So I think that really highlights the importance of other lifestyle factors, other foods that's really important when we're looking at these observational studies. When you were talking about saturated fat and the negative consequence of eating refined sugar with saturated fat, is there a corresponding negative consequence? Like if you had negative or if you had a diet that didn't have any saturated fat in it, but you ate refined sugar, like say if you eat a vegan diet, does saturated or does refined sugar have less of an impact? So the refined sugar- Because the LDL, it's an issue with fat. Yes. Yeah. I think it, yes. So the LDL will go down if you're eating a vegan diet and even though you're still eating cookies or some whatever vegan stuff. So refined sugar is probably less dangerous to someone on a vegan diet? Is that- Yes, I think so. And the thing with that is that if you look at refined sugar, also refined sugar is associated with heart disease risk. In fact, it's like one of the, there was a big, big study, like 400,000 different individuals looked at refined sugar, people that had the highest refined sugar intake, but again, saturated fat's a confounding factor there. So you had like a four times higher risk of having a heart attack. But it's perfect. You illustrated it perfectly and that is, and that's where I think a lot of these guidelines like the American Heart Association come from. If you, on a population level, if you say to someone, reduce your saturated fat intake, you're going to lower the LDL risk. And regardless of all the other stuff they're doing, it probably will on a population level lower their heart disease risk. But on an individual level, like someone like you and I, we don't eat all that other stuff. We're very health conscious and do all these things. You and I, if we stopped our saturated fat intake, likely, for me, I guess my genes are a little different, but likely wouldn't have the same effect. So if you were to take that same population of people and say, okay, eat your saturated fat, but take out the refined sugar, we may see the same thing where the heart disease risk goes down just like it does with saturated fat. In fact, there have been studies where replacement foods have looked at replacement foods for saturated fat. And if you replace saturated fat with refined sugar, it does not lower the risk of heart disease. So basically, that's kind of a proof of principle there. But I do think that it's an important point and it's something that the American Heart Association, they're now starting to at least mention the small dense LDL particles. So I think that moving in that direction is good because it means that possibly then, you know, over the next decade, we're going to start to see, okay, now we got to start, it's not just the LDL. I'm confused about something you just said. You said if you replace saturated fat with refined sugar? If you replace the saturated fat with refined sugar, if you, sorry, refined carbohydrates, which I usually think of as refined sugar, refined carbohydrates, it does not. So the idea is if saturated fat was so bad, if you took the saturated fat and replaced it with refined carbohydrate, it would lower the risk of heart disease and it doesn't. It doesn't lower the risk. So basically, you know. So it's not the saturated fat. It's the saturated fat along with refined sugar that has some sort of a negative synergistic effect. That's what the data in aggregation, looking at the clinical trials, looking at the mechanism, looking at the observational studies and understanding the interaction of all these foods together. The problem is when the American Heart Association puts out sort of a blanket statement like that, a lot of people take it as fact and then what my research has shown, my reading rather, I shouldn't say research, I'm a dummy, but the people that I've read who have criticized this, that are actually scientists and researchers, they have a huge issue with that statement. They think that this is just, it's too simplistic. It's not taking into account all the various nuances in genetics, diet, ancestry, all the different factors, but people read that and it's sort of like this cookie cutter approach and then they parrot it out to everybody else. Yeah, it's true. I mean, that's exactly what happens and the same thing goes with the protein and it being bad as well and there's all sorts of nuances in the combination of the protein with the bad diet and also the exercise, which is, one of the things with the protein is that it increases IGF-1 and IGF-1 is a growth factor and it can allow cells that are damaged that should otherwise die, not die and so it can allow precancerous cells to form a tumor and that's, we know that from mechanistic studies and that's kind of a big part of the eating protein, essential amino acids specifically, what does it do this and they're found in animal protein and that's sort of the big argument there. There's also this whole argument where if you are, one, exercising, the IGF-1 goes into your brain, it's been turned across the blood-brain barrier, it goes into your brain and also in your muscle where it grows new neurons in the brain and actually repairs damaged muscle tissue and helps grow muscle tissue, which is also a predictor of all-cause mortality. So again, the exercise comes in there and then also the fact that if you're eating a good diet and you're not causing as much damage to happen in the first place, then those growth factors being there aren't as big of a deal because you don't have all these damaged cells from all this refined sugar you're eating that can basically become cancerous cells. So that's kind of, with that study, the observational study that looked at people that were eating meat, if they didn't have any of those unhealthy lifestyle factors, guess what? Their all-cause mortality and cancer mortality was the same as the vegetarians and I think that's kind of highlighting that issue.