When an 18-year-old trailblazer named Grace Price joins our show, you can't help but feel the presence of a burgeoning scientific mind.
Our latest episode captures Grace's remarkable story from a personal tragedy to a profound quest. With a remarkable self-taught understanding of biology, chemistry, and epigenetics, Grace explains why she questioned conventional nutritional wisdom, and addresses some hard truths about the food on our plates and the impact of ultra-processed products on our bodies.
With guidance from experts like Dr. Thomas Seyfried, she's developed an expert understanding of the metabolic origins of cancer. It's no surprise to listeners of this show that she now challenges the healthcare system's entrenched focus on profitable, (and largely ineffective), treatments of cancer rather than inexpensive, (and largely non-monetizable) prevention of the dreaded disease.
This episode isn't just a deep dive into the science; it's a critical look at the food industry's deceptive marketing, the inadequacies of dietary guidelines, and the urgent need for a pivot toward prevention in medicine.
Grace's experiences at Alpha School—a hub for innovation in education—exemplify how young minds are being shaped to tackle significant challenges, from personal health crusades to broad societal shifts. The desire for change is palpable as we discuss the impact of dietary revelations on a generation ready to fix the broken parts of our food system.
Knowing there are young people like Grace working on the problems of health and nutrition, this is perhaps the most hopeful episode yet in the history of Stay Off My Operating Table.
Join us on this enlightening expedition through the intersections of health, nutrition, and the power of informed choices, led by a voice that is as commanding as it is youthful.
----------------------
Learn more about Grace Price
Chances are, you wouldn't be listening to this podcast if you didn't need to change your life and get healthier.
So take action right now. Book a call with Dr. Ovadia's team.
One small step in the right direction is all it takes to get started.
How to connect with Stay Off My Operating Table:
Twitter:
Learn more:
Theme Song : Rage Against
Written & Performed by Logan Gritton & Colin Gailey
(c) 2016 Mercury Retro Recordings
When an 18-year-old trailblazer named Grace Price joins our show, you can't help but feel the presence of a burgeoning scientific mind.
Our latest episode captures Grace's remarkable story from a personal tragedy to a profound quest. With a remarkable self-taught understanding of biology, chemistry, and epigenetics, Grace explains why she questioned conventional nutritional wisdom, and addresses some hard truths about the food on our plates and the impact of ultra-processed products on our bodies.
With guidance from experts like Dr. Thomas Seyfried, she's developed an expert understanding of the metabolic origins of cancer. It's no surprise to listeners of this show that she now challenges the healthcare system's entrenched focus on profitable, (and largely ineffective), treatments of cancer rather than inexpensive, (and largely non-monetizable) prevention of the dreaded disease.
This episode isn't just a deep dive into the science; it's a critical look at the food industry's deceptive marketing, the inadequacies of dietary guidelines, and the urgent need for a pivot toward prevention in medicine.
Grace's experiences at Alpha School—a hub for innovation in education—exemplify how young minds are being shaped to tackle significant challenges, from personal health crusades to broad societal shifts. The desire for change is palpable as we discuss the impact of dietary revelations on a generation ready to fix the broken parts of our food system.
Knowing there are young people like Grace working on the problems of health and nutrition, this is perhaps the most hopeful episode yet in the history of Stay Off My Operating Table.
Join us on this enlightening expedition through the intersections of health, nutrition, and the power of informed choices, led by a voice that is as commanding as it is youthful.
----------------------
Learn more about Grace Price
Chances are, you wouldn't be listening to this podcast if you didn't need to change your life and get healthier.
So take action right now. Book a call with Dr. Ovadia's team.
One small step in the right direction is all it takes to get started.
How to connect with Stay Off My Operating Table:
Twitter:
Learn more:
Theme Song : Rage Against
Written & Performed by Logan Gritton & Colin Gailey
(c) 2016 Mercury Retro Recordings
All right, we're live. Hey folks, welcome. It's the Stay Off my Operating Table podcast with Dr Philip Ovedia. I'm Jack Heald and today we have what is easily the youngest guest we've ever had not even close, In fact. If you'd have told me a couple of years ago, when we started this show, that we would be interviewing a teenager or a show on metabolic health, I would have laughed out loud. But apparently that's what we're doing, Phil. What the heck.
Dr. Philip Ovedia :What the heck? Indeed, no, this is really. I'm excited every week for our interviews, but this one has really gotten me excited. Our guest, Grace Price, I think, just hit me up on Twitter a few months ago To talk about what she's doing, and then I figured out she was only a teenager, like you said, which makes it even more awesome what she's doing. So really looking forward to this conversation. So with that, grace, I'd like to have you introduce yourself to our audience and then we'll get into some of the very cool stuff that you've already accomplished and are accomplishing in your young life.
Grace Price:Yeah, thanks so much for the intro. I'm super excited to be here. I'm Grace Price and I'm an 18 year old and I'm a senior in high school. I am based in Austin and I go to a really cool school where we basically have time to work on passion projects in the afternoon that are super ambitious, and so around this time last year, I decided I wanted to focus on finding a way to prevent and cure cancer by using the food that we eat every single day. So I started reading a ton of science papers and I'm super interested in biology and chemistry, and when I combine that with my connection to the disease because I've lost someone just like everyone else has to cancer, it seems at this point I've found some really interesting things that I am now creating a documentary on. So I'm really excited to be here and talk about all of that.
Jack Heald:Okay, that's like 12 things that a typical 18 year old doesn't even think about, let alone do so. Let's start with a year ago. You get interested. Take us through the process of how you landed on this idea of metabolic health being related to cancer, and eventually we're going to get to the documentary as well. But how did you get there?
Grace Price:Yeah. So, like I said, I've lost my grandfather to cancer and I was just really frustrated when that happened because I felt like doctors were basically saying to me there's not much he could have done, not much you can do, so you just kind of have to accept it and move on. And I'm definitely not the type of person to just take whatever someone tells me at base value. I like to ask questions and stuff. And so after I took like AP biology and I felt pretty confident about how I could break down scientific papers, I was like, okay, maybe I could start reading up some more on this, because I genuinely didn't think that there was nothing that my grandfather could have done. He believed that he could have somehow, even if it was the slightest bit, done something that would have helped him avoid the disease. And while at the time I did think, like everyone else, that cancer was a genetic disease and that it was completely up to luck whether you were diagnosed with it or not, I had hopes of maybe finding some kind of answer that would satisfy me more than what the doctors had told me. And so last year in the beginning of the summer, I was reading a book called Deep Nutrition by Dr Kate Shanahan and she introduced a term to me that I'd never heard before and it was called epigenetics. And what kind of blew my mind about that is. It was a very scientific term but it basically said that everything we do in our environment and our lifestyle factors impact us at the cellular level, specifically to the point where it can change the expression of our genes.
Grace Price:And that blew my mind because I thought that DNA and all that kind of stuff was untouchable to me. That's what you're born with, you get what you get and then you just kind of deal with it. Some people get diseases. It doesn't really make sense, stuff like that. But I was like, wait, so we do have actually some control over the thing that I thought we had zero control over. In fact we have control over what is being expressed in general. So once I first learned about that term I was like, ok, there's also a connection between food and epigenetics. And that's where it got really interesting. So I decided I'm going to spend every afternoon reading as much as I can and just tweeting about it to see if anyone else is as shocked as I am by this one and two, if I can get connected to people who can give me more answers, because I just wanted to learn more about what I was uncovering, and so that's kind of how it started, but along the way I Okay, real quickly, I just want to summarize.
Jack Heald:So we've got a high school student who has the freedom to pursue something that really matters to her, and has been given the tools to pursue what really matters to her, and then is able to take that natural curiosity combined with the tools and connect with other people, and one thing led to another. Ok, this is seriously cool. I have several grandchildren who are moving in the same direction. You're moving, and I'm just so excited to see an example of somebody who's. I think the bar for what our kids can do is just so low, and it just thrills me. As a grandfather, I'm, but I'm also really interested. So you've connected, you've reached out on Twitter and yeah.
Jack Heald:Epigenetics are now rolling around in your brain.
Grace Price:Yep, the fact that we could have control over our health really is what epigenetics taught me, and so I continued to look into stuff, and the first thing that I realized was one the fact that I wanted to find a cure was kind of this broken idea that I think a lot of people think is the answer to chronic diseases, especially certain ones like cancer. And the reason why is because this idea of finding a cure one wasn't the most effective way to do this, because clearly, if we could just figure out what caused cancer, then we wouldn't even need a cure, because we could just avoid whatever was causing the disease in the first place.
Jack Heald:It's like what a unique idea.
Grace Price:I wonder I wonder why we're not focusing on this. And so I was like, hey, maybe a cure isn't even the right way, because it seemed, the more I was looking for cures, we weren't going to ever find the kind of cure that everyone was looking for, which had to do with immunotherapies and all of these different genetic predispositions and stuff like that. It just didn't make sense to me. I was like this doesn't seem like somewhere where I could really have an impact or somewhere that we're really that close to finding the end all be all for cancer. So I decided I was going to focus in more on maybe there's things I can do to prevent the disease. And that's when I started to learn a little bit more about the different food groups and specifically ultra process foods, which are super high in excessive amounts of refined sugars, sodium, chemical additives, industrial oils that we refer to as seed oils or vegetable oils. And I was kind of mind blown, because the foods that were being called ultra process is what everyone in my generation eats every single day at basically every meal, and then we have a snacks too, you know. So it's literally our entire diet. So that kind of blew my mind, and so when I saw the statistic that greater than 60% of our diet is comprised of these ultra processed foods, I was like that is just terrifying, because these foods are totally tied to increased risk for all of these chronic diseases, because they have compounding effects when you eat them over time and so they lead to things like hyperinsulinemia or insulin resistance or hyperglycemic you know things in our blood and whenever you have all of those issues, then that's what's going to eventually lead to diabetes or you're going to have increased risk for cancer. And so we weren't really looking at it as like, okay, we need to find, you know, the foods that are going to lead to these diseases. I was like, wait, we need to just find the foods that are causing issues in general.
Grace Price:And so that's what I realized was true about ultra processed foods, and I started tweeting about that because that blew my mind, and my first thread that actually went viral was on seed oils, because I realized that when these oils were reheated because they were comprised of a large amount of linoleic acid, which is high in polyunsaturated fats these fats are actually really fragile, so when you reheat them a ton of times, then they're prone to becoming oxidized and they basically just set fires in your body because they are going to be stealing electrons from these other molecules and they just lead to oxidative stress over time when you have them at time. So I was talking about that and that seemed to really resonate with people because they were like I didn't even know I eat these foods and also that's terrifying that it could increase risk of heart disease too if it oxidizes LDL. They're like what I didn't even know oxidized LDL exists. They're like I thought LDL was just bad in general. They're like that's just equals bad, you know.
Grace Price:So talking about all of that and forcing people to think like let's actually break down reading every day, that was kind of what I shifted to. And out of that I was able to meet with experts such as Kali Nienz, who's an X-Coke whistleblower so he has really interesting thoughts on all of this, because he's been behind the food industry which I'm about to get into but there's a lot of corruption there as well but also people who taught me that the origin of cancer is most likely from our metabolism and it has a metabolic origin, not genetic origin, which everyone else seems to believe, which is Dr Thomas Seafreed, and I got to go and interview him, actually in his lab at Boston College, which was really cool. But all that is to say, I just kept getting hit with these different things that were challenging these almost ideological dogmas that I believed for a long time and I was like, why is everything wrong? There has to be something or someone that wants me to believe all of these things, and that's when I started looking into the food industry and stuff.
Dr. Philip Ovedia :So we just had a high school senior, 18-year-old basically completely expose what's wrong with our medical system, with our medical approach, and, quite frankly, figure out things that career people in the healthcare field can't figure out.
Dr. Philip Ovedia :And what I find so interesting is, I mean so many things to go into, but I'm going to bring up the fact that you know, the US government declared a war on cancer. I believe it's more than twice as long as you've been alive Might even be three times as long as you've been alive that they originally declared the war on cancer. It's been redeclared, I think, a number of times and it's basically made no headway, and largely because exactly what you just said, you know, focus on treatment instead of prevention. So, you know, going through kind of the journey that you've gone through already, I guess, take us back a little bit. What's your perspective on why that is Like? Why haven't, you know, the leading scientists in the American Cancer Society and the you know US government and many other world governments who have been trying to, you know, make headway against cancer? Why do you think they have this obvious blind spot against, you know, preventing it rather than trying to figure out treatment for it?
Grace Price:Yeah.
Grace Price:So that was kind of the huge question that really bothered me, because I was like, if there's such a clear way to prevent this disease or any kind of way that we could help prevent it, why are we not doing this?
Grace Price:And the sad answer that I've found to be true multitudes of times across a ton of different chronic diseases, not just cancer, but when it comes to treatment for them, it all comes down to money and who is getting the most money from this, and so I think it's a mix of that and the fact that we all blindly believe that cancer is a genetic disease, without really even understanding why or what that even means.
Grace Price:And then, even when you get more to a detailed level than people are like, oh well, it's caused by somatic mutations, and you're like, okay, but what do you think caused those somatic mutations? And do you think maybe that could be because there is an imbalance of mitochondrial health, which then goes back to metabolic health, and so I just think that there's strong evidence showing that cancer is a metabolic disease, but there's been too much money that has gone into an entire industry that bases its belief off of cancer being a genetic disease for them to turn back now. I think it would hurt them too much and I think that it would also cause them to lose a lot of profit, because one example that I always use that kind of was just absurd to me was that the American Cancer Society accepted a $1.8 million fund from Coca-Cola, when we know that cancerous cells have 200 times the glucose uptake of a normal cell and Coke.
Jack Heald:Oh, stop, stop, stop, say that again.
Grace Price:Cancerous cells have been found by Otto Warburg and his experiments, which were a long time. These are old, they're not like new experiments.
Jack Heald:Like 100 years ago.
Grace Price:yeah, yes, that cancer cells consume and metabolize glucose at 200 times the normal rate of a normal cell. So I mean, when you understand that and you see that this national health organization that is supposed to be helping us find the big cure for cancer is accepting funds from the number one sugary drink place in America Like you don't get more sugar filled stuff than at Coke Then you're like, okay, maybe they just don't want to either find a cure or at least help people get better. They definitely are not prioritizing us getting better in general or our health. So yeah, that's what I would say for.
Jack Heald:There's a very famous quote attributed to St Augustine when he was experiencing his epiphany about his relationship with God. He was kind of a notorious playboy and the quote, the prayer that he prayed, was something along the lines of Lord make me chaste, but not yet. And that kind of sounds like the American Cancer Society yeah, we'll help us find a solution for cancer, but not yet. We've got lots of money coming in and we like the money. Okay, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to throw you off.
Grace Price:No, that's.
Jack Heald:I want to ask you how have you spread that's not the right question. You've spread this what you found out to your peers. How have your peers responded?
Grace Price:Yeah, so this is an interesting one that I'm definitely trying to improve myself, because Twitter has been great to just talk to all these incredible people in the health field and experts like Dr Evadia, who are just so cool and talking about all these things that I love.
Grace Price:But my generation doesn't really care, and that's the truth, and I've told them before too.
Grace Price:Like my friends, I've been like foods that you're eating, like you eat this every day it has been proven to increase your risk of cancer, obesity, all and I just list off all of them non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, everything you can think of that we've seen has increased in unprecedented levels, in my generation specifically, and they just don't care because they're like, well, it's going to happen a little bit later and you'll know you only live once, and so I'm like, okay, well, we need a different way to approach this, then, and what I found has been the most effective actually is bringing it back to this.
Grace Price:When you approach health in a way that treats the root cause, you're going to fix a whole another slew of issues, too. You're not just preventing these big diseases, you're also going to help fix your acne, your sleep, all these things that are real everyday struggles for a lot of people in my generation, and so I think bringing it back to we're not trying to just target one specific disease and prevent it. We're trying to optimize your health so that you can be your best self, like we seriously want your productivity to increase, so maybe let's like stop eating so many carbs so you can maybe experience the benefits of ketones you know stuff like that, and so it's just, I think, when you bring it back to something that's relevant for them, that's definitely resonated, especially with my friends when I talked to them about it.
Jack Heald:I was pondering this whole high fat, low carb thing that I've taken up as a result of living with Phil here for two and a half years. On this show I was thinking back to what I used to eat as a teenager and in my twenties I could, I remember I could eat ridiculous quantities of food, ridiculous numbers of calories, and I really didn't pay any attention to that type of stuff, and I don't recall experience, being aware of experiencing any negative effects, until my early thirties, and that seems to be a fairly common story for a lot of people.
Jack Heald:Early thirties, I guess, is when it all kind of kicks in. So the question I have is Do you think it's just as simple as I'm not experiencing with your peers, I'm not experiencing any negative side effects. I don't know anybody who's experiencing any negative side effects, and it's just this ultra short-term focus.
Grace Price:I think it's a mix. I think it's ultra short-term focus, but I also think and this is something I've been actually focusing a lot of my research on lately but I think that when it comes to food, people view food as either you can choose whatever you want to eat and it's fine. Maybe it's a little unhealthy or it's healthy sometimes, but it's up to you. The thing is, I don't think that when you Sorry, let me restate this, because I've thought about this a lot when you say that food is just a normal choice, then it's fine. When you say things to a teen okay, are you going to go smoke? How often do you smoke? Do you want to smoke every day? They're like well, no, because we know smoking is bad.
Grace Price:Smoking is just viewed as bad, toxic. We know it can cause cancer. But when you look at French fries, no one thinks that's something that if I do it continuously it'll cause cancer. They think this is just a food and maybe it's unhealthy, but that's fine, until we really bring the same level of fear that surrounds cigarettes and these things that people for some reason seem to think like oh well, I know this is really bad and I want to try to avoid this in my life, then it's going to be difficult for people to see why food isn't something more than just I can eat whatever I want, or I'll try to be healthy some days, so I'm going to just go be healthy. It's not like, no, this is literally like when you're eating this, this packet French fries, it's the equivalent of 25 cigarettes smoking.
Jack Heald:25 cigarettes, you break it down, there's a great image, huh.
Grace Price:Yeah, no, literally, and I've done the math recently and I've quantified it and the amount of acroline that's in one thing of smoke from a cigarette is the equivalent to 25 cigarettes and a large packet French fries. And there's a study that's literally on this and I'm like and it's in a rigorous journal, so it's just, yeah, I think those things are maybe better images for my generation.
Dr. Philip Ovedia :Yeah, I mean, and to follow up on that. Well, the first thing that we need to acknowledge and recognize is that your generation is getting wrecked by metabolic disease and one of the differences between when Jack grew up.
Dr. Philip Ovedia :Even when I grew up, metabolic disease in teenagers was rare.
Dr. Philip Ovedia :Yeah, yes, obesity's been increasing, but to have 12 and 13-year-olds diagnosed with type 2 diabetes like is now occurring on a regular basis, and then to see them in their late 20s and early 30s developing heart disease and ending up on my operating table we need to be able to acknowledge that and figure out what's going on here.
Dr. Philip Ovedia :And I was recently doing a live stream with someone and I was asked, if I was president, what's one thing we could do, and I bought the idea up of setting a age limit for consuming sugary beverages, just like we have a smoking age and just like we have a drinking age. Why not say, okay, you can't drink soda until you're 18 or 21 years old, because you're exactly right. We need that strong messaging instead of what's out there today that it's okay if you moderate it, you control it. So very much agree with that. But so, circling back to maybe drawing upon your grandfather's experience or some of the experts' authorities that maybe you've already had conversations with, again, I'm so curious as to you figured this out as a teenager and yet most cancer doctors, most oncologists, most cancer experts really don't pay much attention to the link between what we eat and our risk of developing cancer. So I'd just kind of like to hear your experience around the conversations that you've had and what your perspective on that is.
Grace Price:Yeah. So I've definitely talked to a couple of doctors at this point. One of the first things that I've asked them is specifically oncologists, and I've asked them so how much time did you all spend in medical school learning about nutrition? And they're like, oh, like three hours. And I'm like, okay, that's interesting. How much time did you all spend learning about the pharmaceutical industry and pharmaceutical products? I was like a whole semester. I'm like, okay.
Grace Price:So I think that the issue is, when the industry already specifically big food and big farm, like you know, all of these big monopolies they're getting so much profit off of this, these one it's when it trickles down as nutritional information, it's not being valued as much and it's not good quality nutritional information. So what they're getting taught in medical school to isn't the type of nutrition that would genuinely help someone. It's the whole, like you know, eat the rainbow, that kind of stuff where you're like, what? Okay, so I just eat basically whatever I want and say I'm healthy, that's what it is they're being taught. And so you're like, okay, that's wrong. And then you're like, well, maybe there's a reason why they want me to eat more of those foods. And there is, and that's the truth, so there's an incentive to why you're getting such little bad information, and so I think that for a lot of cancer doctors that's one of the reasons. So I definitely don't blame them as much as I do the system itself, because the system doesn't prioritize it. Then it's most likely not going to be taught to them, and then they're also for them to go against everything they've been taught at that point, which is that you need a value.
Grace Price:You know treating the disease and treating it properly and how to diagnose it correctly and all those kinds of things. Then your mindset isn't even on prevention. That's like a whole different world and most people, when you bring up prevention, like they don't even understand. They're like wait, is this like a new way to treat it? You're like no, it means like you literally don't get the disease.
Grace Price:And when I was talking to Dr Seafreed, what I thought was so interesting is he's published some incredible studies that have shown you can reverse like grade four glioblastoma with the ketogenic diet and without any chemotherapy or radiation, which in both of those treatments are not optimal too. We were like, oh yeah, there's. You know, we've made so much progress. It's terrible getting diagnosed with cancer and having to go through those treatments. I've talked to so many patients and it's just an awful experience. It's terrifying too. You think you're just going to die and you feel like it's out of your control and you're also losing hair and it's brutal, you know, you're kind of getting mutilated in a sense, and Dr Seafreed was talking to me about all of these incredible treatments. He's like I'm just trying to convince I can barely even convince people that this is a valid treatment, let alone like prevention would blow their minds off, you know, because we're just so stuck in a treatment mindset. So, yeah, I don't know if that answers your question, but that's kind of what I was feeling.
Dr. Philip Ovedia :Well, I'm just, you know, in my mind I'm so torn between, you know, saying you have to go to medical school and save the system and saying absolutely do not go to medical school and get corrupted by the system, because, you're right, it is such a struggle for physicians and you know, it's just the whole system that we're now operating in really, you know, just doesn't doesn't allow for this type of thinking and discussion. And we had Dr Seafreed on quite a while back and, quite frankly, he's, you know, he's an outcast, he's been marginalized in the cancer community.
Grace Price:It's so unfortunate. My goal of my documentaries just to highlight his work because it needs to be heard. The fact that, like the majority of people diagnosed with the disease, haven't heard that the ketogenic diet is an option for treatment just appalls me, because it's so radically different from every other treatment that's out there right now, and so I really think that, like I just want to keep pushing it out there because it's just incredible. His book's incredible. I love his work so much.
Jack Heald:So let's, let's follow up then now with this. So, in addition to doing graduate level research into cancer as a high school senior, you've you've started a documentary, and I watched both of your your trailers, which are on Twitter. The work that I saw and you know, no one will ever accuse me of being a professional filmmaker Nevertheless the work I saw looked top quality. Maybe I'm just too freaking old to understand that an 18 year old with an iPhone can do that, and I'm willing to grant that. But talk about this documentary, and you know why a documentary and how is it happening and what's the rollout plans for it. Give us the 411 there. Oh, by the way, that's an old old saying.
Grace Price:I recognize it. Don't worry, they're not that old and so you're making me feel okay.
Jack Heald:Yes, this is good. By the way, I'm really glad we've connected, because I feel like I finally got a. I've got a line into how Gen Z thinks. I'm going to ask you all kinds of questions, so great.
Grace Price:Well, yes, I am currently on the final stages of releasing my documentary, which is called cancer food for an illness, and the goal of the documentary is to just highlight that cancer is connected to the food that we eat, and the food that you eat can impact whether you get diagnosed with this disease to a large degree.
Grace Price:And so I have kind of a three you know, three thing takeaway that I want people to have when they watch this film, and that's really just that they need to stop eating as much ultra process foods, stop eating as many foods that contain seed oils and stop eating as much sugar.
Grace Price:And the way that I wanted to present this is I basically felt like I had so much information that I had accumulated over the past year because I've been tweeting a ton and I'm like I just I want something that really shows my journey, all of the different initial beliefs I had and then how they got knocked down once I learned all these new things, and I felt like the documentary was the best way to display that, because the hero's journey was kind of.
Grace Price:You know, I wanted to find this cure and then I ended up leaving with a way to prevent it through lifestyle factors, which is completely different from what you expect with a cure. So the goal is of the stories to kind of show my entire journey of the past year, all of the incredible experts that I've met there are some really cool interviews on there that I'm super excited about and it's to highlight their work as well. I think that I so I interviewed Dr Kate Shanahan is one of the people and I think that sometimes when you say something that is so against, like I said this, like overall widespread belief, it's easy to get ostracized, and I think that her and Dr Thomas Seaford have such incredible research that they've done that needs to be shouted from the rooftops and needs to be told to my generation, and so I kind of want to act as the messenger, in a sense, just to highlight their work, and so that's what the documentary is trying to do.
Jack Heald:Well, forgive me for asking this question, but where in the world did you come up with the audacious belief that you could make a documentary?
Grace Price:Well, it's actually kind of the way that my whole school works. We are at my school. We basically encourage students to have super ambitious projects. Like I said, mine was, like you know, just finding a cure for cancer. That's like what I wanted to do.
Jack Heald:It's kind of pretty big. That's a pretty ambitious project.
Grace Price:So you know, you know, and so it led to all of this, which is really cool. But yeah, I mean at my school if I say like, I want to like, I think the next step for me is to film a documentary. They're like great, okay, you need to find your crew. I'm like great, I'm going to start typing out the script, and so it's very important.
Jack Heald:So your school has actually facilitated this work.
Grace Price:Yes, they've helped me a lot along the way, but I did have to talk about the school. Yeah, of course.
Jack Heald:And here's the thing we've got. Our audience is kind of composed of two different big groups. We've got a super for lack of a better word highly educated professionals in healthcare and healthcare related work, and then we've just got the lay people like me. Phil and I kind of represent the two groups of the audience, and both of these groups are going to be listening to this podcast and saying I want my children, my grandchildren, my nephews, my nieces, my cousins, I want them exposed to this type of educational opportunity.
Jack Heald:So I realized we're kind of going a different direction, but it's going to happen, so help us out here. Yeah, tell us a little bit about this school.
Grace Price:I would love to. I love getting to talk about alpha and so it's called alpha, all right.
Grace Price:It's based in Austin and we also have one location in Brownsville and we are a startup private school that does two hour learning in the morning where we learn all of our core subjects through AI adaptive apps, which most people are. Like what? Through AI? Like at schools, that's normally banned. At our school, we say if you don't use AI, you're falling behind. So that's one of our big priorities using that in the morning to help us learn twice as fast as the average student, and then this opens up time in the afternoon to actually learn life skills.
Grace Price:So one example is my nieces go here as well, and one of them does this really cool karate class. Another one of them is practicing to write her college essay that would get accepted she's like a second grader, by the way. So they're doing this like super young. It's super cool, and then, once you get to the high school level, you can use that time in the afternoon to work on an Olympic level project is what we call it. So it's a masterpiece here, and so we all have our own and mine. Before it was all of this that we've been talking about. It was actually something music related, because I love music as well. It's like my other hobby. But yeah, we can pick any kind of area of interest and we decide what the most ambitious goal would be in that, what Olympic level goal? So without being an Olympic athlete, how can you achieve something that's just world class in that?
Jack Heald:So what you're telling me is that your peers are not remotely impressed here. It's like oh yeah, grace is going to cure cancer. Yes, it's definitely figuring out how to find travel.
Grace Price:One of my best friends. I'm sure you might have seen her on Twitter. Actually she goes by the handle Austin Scholar, but she has an incredible sub stack that is going to be top 10 sub stack, like that's her one liner.
Jack Heald:Another one of my friends is right down Austin Scholar Okay she's a great account for talking about alternative education.
Grace Price:And then another my sister wants to create a Broadway musical, so she's working on that, she's already scripted it and is meeting with producers like this next month. So she's yeah, tons of crazy things happening here and they're all very real world and it's just incredible. Alpha is the reason why I have been able to spend any time doing this, because I would literally have no time to read as much and tweet as much and talk to as many people if I had five hours of homework every day.
Jack Heald:Oh yeah.
Grace Price:Extra curriculars, that I don't really even enjoy stuff like that, that the normal high school process, the normal high school system really pushes on you.
Jack Heald:So yeah, All right, well, so let's. Let's go back to health. When you began uncovering all these, all this corruption, all these lies, did it change the way you ate? 100%, so my parents and did you and have you ex? What physical, mental, psychological, social, emotional, spiritual changes have you experienced as a result of changing how you eat?
Grace Price:Yeah. So I would say I am lucky because my parents have always been interested in health. So that's the only reason my dad recommended the book Deep Nutrition to me. He had already read it. He was like this is really good, Grace, you should look into it. So I've never really Like I wasn't allowed to eat at certain fast food places when I was little and stuff like that.
Grace Price:But that doesn't mean I still didn't like Whenever I had the chance of going, eat a ton of french fries from Chick-fil-A or something like that, you know.
Grace Price:So I had this idea of health, but I didn't really understand. I would eat bread that was, For example, it would be one of those grain breads, or when it's non-wheat and you're like okay, this is healthy. And you're like well, if it's carbs, which are carbohydrates, and they're going to break down a sugar, it's not really much different. Your body doesn't view different kinds of sugars as something that they need to react to differently, and so once I started reading about all of that kind of stuff, I totally changed my diet. I used to drink orange juice all the time, because juice is something that people try to say is healthy. They don't even say like oh yeah, it's kind of bad. They're like this is a health drink. We need to get a juice cleanse and stuff like that. It's awful. And fructose itself has already been shown in multiple studies that it can encourage the cell to fall back onto glycolysis, which is basically what cancerous cells use for their metabolism.
Jack Heald:So it increases your risk of developing cancer significantly, and that's what this I think we got our sound bite Phil, who just increases your risk of developing cancer. We're going to love that one.
Grace Price:But yeah, it's crazy. And these juices have like 36 grams of sugar, so basically equivalent of drinking Coke. And you're drinking it first thing in the morning as well, so you're totally offsetting your day. And when I wrote a thread about that, I got a ton of hate because I basically said in my thread it's child abuse to give children juice. I was like you are, you have to give them juice and know that you are significantly increasing their risk of multitudes of chronic diseases and that's something that parents have to accept. And I got tons of hate because parents did not like that. They were like it's not to that degree. And I'm like well then, what degree does it have to be for you to not let them? Okay, so maybe it just increases their risk of diabetes a little bit for the rest of their life. Is that still any better? Is that really? It's like okay, what's it going to take? And so I stopped drinking juice. I stopped eating as much carbs because, like I said, I realized I'm like okay, there's not much difference between the way that my body is going to break this down compared to any other kind of sugar that you view as dessert. Maybe you're a treat. So I stopped eating as much bread and I tried to do the ketogenic diet and I still try to do that. I just find that sometimes it's difficult at school with school lunches, but I've also kind of figured out a way to break that down.
Grace Price:So my goal is to expand onto Instagram, actually to just give tips to my generation on how to avoid all of this stuff, because I think that it's so hard when literally the number one source of profit for this food industry. We're targeted since the day that we're born by these ads that have colors that are known to make us want to eat a donut. More stuff like that. And you're like okay, we need to go against this. And one of the biggest things that I've found is I used to believe that, oh well, I have the choice to eat unhealthy you know, it's my choice and stuff like that. The truth is, it's not free choice when the choice has already been made for you by the people who are selling you the food.
Grace Price:We live in an abundance of ultra process foods. It's hard to find foods that aren't ultra processed. It's so hard. I try to find foods where I'm like oh my gosh, okay, maybe this is good. And then you're like oh no, it has emulsifiers. Like why do they have all these different chemicals? And it's because it's not something we're supposed to be eating. But it's hard, it's. The most difficult part is changing your mindset from thinking this is normal to our entire system has completely shifted from what it used to be in the past 50 years. 50 years ago, like my grandparents would be mad at me if they saw what I was eating right now, just thinking that way, like this, is not something they would recognize. Then you realize so there is actually a big problem here. This is not just a matter of me eating unhealthy or healthy.
Jack Heald:Not just you're making a bad choice, you should make a better choice.
Grace Price:No, it's that you are being manipulated and you are being used to make money by your industries in the nation.
Dr. Philip Ovedia :Yeah, and, like you said, they've really set up the system that when you think you're making a good choice, you're still not really making a good choice, exactly.
Dr. Philip Ovedia :It might be positioned as being better than the obviously bad choice, but the reality is that it's still not anywhere close to optimal for human consumption, so normally I guess I'd be a little hesitant to ask this to a teenager. But how do we change it? And since you've got, you're already on your way to amazing things. I'm actually hopeful. Doing an interview like this is what gives me hope for the future.
Jack Heald:Absolutely.
Dr. Philip Ovedia :Because people like you and others in your generation are the ones that are going to be able to fix this. One of the sayings is that science advances one funeral at a time, basically meaning that you got to all. The old scientists have to die off before new ideas can come through, so it is going to be your generation that's going to turn this ship around. So what are some of the things that you would like to see happen?
Grace Price:Yeah Well, I would say that's a great question, and one of the biggest ones is I just want the food industry to be held responsible for the foods that they're giving us. I think that their 100% needs to be regulations, and it needs to be treated, like you and I were talking about earlier, as if it's alcohol or cigarettes, because this is truly not something that you can just. I mean, we've seen, too, that they're including all these different chemicals and stuff in the food to try to leave you unsatiated, so that you want to keep eating more. So I think that there's risk of addiction that's super high in these foods, that we need to acknowledge, and we need to create tighter regulations on them. I also believe, though, that we need to shift our focus in science from, I mean, in general, from looking for a cure, to searching for prevention, and I do think that we actually are entering a new era of medicine, where we're moving on from just trying to find a cure and from trying to treat these acute conditions, you know, and we're now trying to treat chronic disease, and I think that the best way to go about that is early detection and prevention, because we already have kind of created our own form of treatments for each of these and it's clearly not helping because these are still the number one killers. I mean, heart disease and cancer are literally two number one killers in America. But we have statins, we have treatments for cancer that have helped a lot of people get treated, but we still have seen an 80% increase in early onset cancer in the past three decades. You're like, okay, well, we need something better than that. We need to actually move on to preventing it, to see more of a difference in that. So a shift to really prioritizing prevention.
Grace Price:And the last thing I would say is I want to see my generation hope for more. I want to see them wanting to feel better than they do right now, because I know from my own experience that it does not feel good to eat the way that we are being told to eat by all of these different nutritional guidelines, or just by the way that our parents might think is healthier, but our grandparents would disagree with all of these different things. It's not. It doesn't make us feel good and there is a better way that you can feel.
Grace Price:I mean, I feel so incredible when I don't eat a ton of carbs, when I've had incredible sources of protein and fat during the day, and that's something that I think everyone in my generation deserves to feel, especially if we're supposed to be the future. Like if we are serving donuts, frappuccinos every morning, burgers, pizza, pasta anything you can imagine instant ramen to the people who are supposed to be our future innovators, painters, inventors, doctors. That's not the right way to treat them. If we expect these big things from them, because they're simply not going to even have enough time to do that, because their lifespan is going to be shorter than we've ever seen before, we're already seeing, with how many chronic diseases they're being diagnosed with early on, that this is going to be an ugly future if we don't fix it now no-transcript.
Jack Heald:If anybody my age or Phil's age said what you just said, we'd be marginalized and ignored, Not because it doesn't have any, not because there's a lack of truth, but just because there's a lot of voices our age saying it. And the fact that we've got you I mean, we're on your team now this is amazing. You're able to say some things simply because you're so young and have it gives it a power that isn't there, and you've got an audacity that's really, really useful, really, really helpful. I'm very, very excited to get this episode out Before we let you go.
Jack Heald:I've got to ask this question. I was scanning your website. What is it Traveling, jeans?
Grace Price:It is TravelingJeanscom.
Jack Heald:I'm not going to ask about the question about the name of that website because with me run out of time, but I want to ask about something that I read there that had to do with Harvard and Bribes and the food industry, and I want to say the early 50s. Remember that.
Grace Price:Yeah.
Jack Heald:Can you fill us in on that story?
Grace Price:Yes, so I'll just say a quick summary of it, but basically there were some bribes between Harvard and the American Heart Association to blame fat as bad and as a large culprit of heart disease, and the reason why is because they wanted to start using these oils that are full of polyunsaturated fat, which they were mainly upset with saturated fat.
Jack Heald:That's what they got, they being who was it who wanted to use?
Grace Price:The, specifically the food industry.
Grace Price:They want to use it? Yes, because they want to make more money off of their products, because they're basically just a manufacturing industry they're not trying to sell you real food and so they wanted to eliminate fat and they wanted to replace it with these oils so that the people who are making the oils as well could make more money off of that. And these oils were initially supposed to be used for industrial purposes, and so they decided to blame cholesterol as the number one culprit for heart disease. Like this is what is bad. It's all about cholesterol, specifically LDL, and what I find so funny about this is that people, when you bring up LDL to people and this is how I figured out about Dr Ovidia, because I just love, I love everything that he's about but when you bring up LDL to people, they just go, oh, that's bad. I have low LDL, so I am so safe, like I'm all good, I make sure that my cholesterol isn't too high. But I'm like what are you even saying? Do you know what LDL is? Do you know what it stands for? They're like I don't know. I'm like, okay, low density lipoprotein. Like let's, let's learn the names first. And then they're like okay, well, it's bad still why? Why do you care? I'm like well, why do you think it's bad? And they're like because Harvard and they all say it's bad. And I'm like why do they think it's bad? And they're like because it's been scientifically shown that it's bad. And like do you know that? Have you looked into the science? And they're like well, based off of what I've seen. And the issue is, people don't go that far, they don't go to that last step, because once you get into all of the jargon and the papers and stuff, it just gets too confusing for people who aren't weird like me and enjoy reading about science in general. And so I'm happy, I'm like okay, well, I'll go read about it for you.
Grace Price:And then you find things like the fact that there were bribes involved, and you're like okay, so there were studies that were funded to be published to blame this specific thing that our bodies have always contained. Ldl did not suddenly appear in our bodies just whenever heart disease appeared as well. Like this is a natural part of our body, that specific cholesterol. And then they just decided to say that this, because it is this way, then all of these other things are true. So then they've built this whole empire of ideas off of all based on this one thing, where they're like saturated fat is bad and saturated fat increases your LDL, which is bad because LDL is bad, which means that you need to eat more of these healthy polyunsaturated fats. You need to have more grains in your diet, you need to be more balanced, more vegetables, blah, blah, blah, blah, and avoid protein, because that's also bad, because you know, red meat heart attack, big, no, no. And you're like that's not based on anything. It's not based on anything.
Grace Price:And when you start to really read about it, you realize that it's so much more complex what leads to heart disease and that, if anything, ldl is being blamed for what poor metabolic health is causing.
Grace Price:And that's the sad part, because it's just true and these industries, these companies that are thriving, they know that. They know that poor metabolic health. It's not hard to find the information is my point, it's on Google. Like, people are like oh, you know, you're a teenager, you really know how to look stuff up. I'm just going to Google, or even Google scholar, if you want to be fancy, and you look up, like LDL and heart disease risk, and you just see what you find and it's really not that hard to find that clearly. There's a lot more things that are causing inflammation, which then maybe causes the LDL to be oxidized or for plaque to form in your arteries and then leads to heart disease. It's just so much more different than what everyone thinks it is, and so, yeah, that was really fascinating when I learned about that and I love to talk about it, but Dr Ovedi is the expert in that.
Dr. Philip Ovedia :I've read a lot of his stuff as well, so he's Well, I was going to say that you know, anytime you want it, you have a job with Ovedi, a heart health but in reality what I should be asking is please keep me in mind when you're hiring for your first you know what I'm sure will be unicorn multi-billion dollar company, and when you need a dumb old heart surgeon to come along for the ride, I'm available. But yeah, just really amazing work that you're doing. Really look forward to the documentary. So tell people again when you're expecting to release it and where they can kind of follow this journey along and connect with you.
Grace Price:Yeah, I so I'm on Twitter and Instagram under Traveling Jeans with 1G it's so Travel In Jeans, kind of, and I tweet regularly. And I'm becoming more active on Instagram and I'm tweeting updates about my documentary, so there will hopefully be an official release date soon on there. And, yeah, just reach out to me whenever you want to. I have a website where my email is there as well, and I'm very active to respond to things.
Jack Heald:So, yeah, you know, phil, this show getting to be a part of this show has been so encouraging to me, meeting all these experts who are out there doing great work to bring the good news of metabolic health, and I regularly tell people about Thomas Seyfried and Chris Palmer. Those are probably the two interviews that have stuck out the most in my mind, but I can say without question this has been by far the most hope-inducing episode I've ever been a part of, to know that there are young people like Grace out there who can get it and have the audacity and the energy of youth to get this message out there. I am, I could not be more pleased that we're able to do this. So thanks, I really appreciate it. All right, well, I guess this is a. This is a wrap. I'd love to just keep going, but we don't want to tax everybody For Grace Price. Dr Philip Ovedia, this has been the Stay Off my Operating Table podcast. Thanks for joining us and we'll talk to you next time.