Daniel Trevor: How Carbs, Sugar, and Oils Make Us Fat, Sick, and Addicted

What if the foods we were told are “healthy” are actually driving the modern epidemic of obesity, heart disease, and type 2 diabetes?

In this episode, Daniel Trevor — citizen scientist and heart attack survivor — breaks down the science behind his book Unholy Trinity and explains how refined carbohydrates, sugar, and industrial seed oils are fueling insulin resistance, metabolic dysfunction, and chronic disease.

After suffering a heart attack despite believing he was healthy, Daniel dove deep into peer-reviewed research and uncovered what he believes is the true root cause of modern illness: hyperinsulinemia and insulin resistance.

In this episode, you'll discover:

• Why 93% of Americans are metabolically unhealthy and don't know it
• The one blood test your doctor almost never orders — but could save your life
• How big food engineers your food addiction at the molecular level
• The 70-year cholesterol lie that's still driving billions in statin prescriptions
• Why "heart healthy whole grains" may be spiking your blood sugar more than a Snickers bar
• The silent role of insulin resistance in heart disease, Alzheimer's, cancer, and fatty liver disease
• How to reverse metabolic disease through diet — without expensive supplements or prescriptions

If you’re concerned about obesity, prediabetes, heart disease, cholesterol, fatty liver, or metabolic health, this conversation will challenge what you think you know.

Most chronic diseases don’t start with symptoms — they start with silent metabolic dysfunction.

Transcript

Meet Daniel Trevor And His Mission

FLORENCE 0:02

Hello and welcome everybody to an interview today with Daniel Trevor. Let me uh share his bio with you. So he is a known as a citizen scientist. He's a serial entrepreneur. He has launched multiple startups, including 300 plus employee tech companies, as well as a nutraceutical brand that's been promoted nationally on TV and radio. After heart attack up-ended, shattered his illusion or delusion that Daniel was Mr. Healthy. He began to research how did this happen? I'm active, I eat well, like how did this happen to someone like me? And he just went down this rabbit hole of a an ocean of really high-quality research and science that points the finger, you know, at the unholy trinity, as he calls it, the three, the big three that are really damaging us and really damaged him as well. So after he kind of uncovered the root cause of his cardiovascular disease and reversed it for himself, completely transformed his body and his mind, he decided to write a book about it. And you can see it in the back of his. I read mine on Audible, so I can't hold the copy up. But it's called Unholy Trinity. And it's honestly brilliant. I it's been in my um audible like must-read list for a long time. And it never made it to the top of the pile until Daniel reached out to me to say, Hey, I think we have a shared mission here. We should have a good conversation, we should have a conversation. And I dusted, I'm like, okay, I'm gonna read this book. But one of the reasons why it stayed in my Audible account for months and months and months is my assumption was that I have read all the books that you've read, I've been in this space for decades, that it probably wouldn't be anything too new. I knew I needed to read it because it was an upcoming, really powerful book in the space, but I didn't expect to be so touched by blown away by this science, how clear it was, how written how well written it was. Even if you know the stuff backwards and forwards, this book is still a fresh read. I I thought it was really well done.

SPEAKER_01 2:06

Wow. What an introduction. Thank you so much. Yeah, it was uh it was quite an adventure. Um, well, you know, I I with regard to writing it, you know, I it's my first book, but uh and I've written a lot before, but they're more like business reports and uh, you know, essays and that kind of thing, but never anything like this. And I think that um I'm told that I'm pretty good at uh reducing complicated things to simplicity because I've always I always like what Einstein said. He said something like if you can't explain something complicated to a third grader, then you don't really and truly understand it yourself, right? You need to go back and hey, what part of this don't I understand? Because you need to be able to break it down uh so that anyone can understand it. And I think I write like I speak, I try to include the reader when I'm writing, like the reader's in the room with me, and I'm explaining them. Uh, and if I have to use a technical term, like I don't know, endothelium. In parentheses, right after I'll put lining of the arteries. And after I've done that two or three times, the reader goes, Oh, endothelium, lining of the arteries. I know, and because that's very important, because that's where a lot of the damage starts uh from the uh refine and process carbs and sugar. I mean, they just we can get into all that, but thank you so much for that wonderful introduction. I really appreciate it.

FLORENCE 3:32

Yeah, yeah. And one of the things you did really well at the beginning of the book was you said, I've I've looked at the the medical research, the science that's been published that backs the kinds kind of message you have in your book. And you threw out anything that wasn't peer-reviewed, that wasn't double, like really high quality, you know, you're all kinds of research out there, but you narrowed it down to very specific peer-reviewed journals, high, highly respected medical journals, and you kept those and you quoted from them. And I, and this study, and I quote, and you just did this really well. Like, talk about building credibility for the science that you share that's still buried, that's still making its way into the medical system.

The Silent Drivers Of Modern Disease

Insulin Resistance Explained Simply

SPEAKER_01 4:12

Yeah, well, I want I also made sure that I didn't pay any attention that had uh studies that had funding from big food, big pharma, and big medicine. I didn't want to have any of those. Uh, so it's it's right down the line with RCT uh randomized control trials, uh, you know, where there's two groups, and you, you know, you you real there's some real science behind these things. And so after my heart attack, you know, I went to Google University and YouTube University and I just and PubMed, and I just dove into the science to find out you know how this could happen to me. And uh because I thought, again, I thought, like you said, I thought it was Mr. Healthy because I don't know. I just see the thing is the dangerous thing about it, these diseases of modernity is that they're silent. There's no signs or symptoms. I mean, unless you have a belly or you're overweight, that's your first sign or symptom right there, uh, of that the fact that you've got something going on. In fact, check out this stat. Over 60% of the people who have a deadly first heart attack, in other words, you know, heart attack they're and they die from it the first time. It's over 60% of them. Their very first symptom of having heart disease was their own death. It's like, what? And the doctors, they don't do the right tests. Uh, see, the thing is is that um, you know, the source root cause of all the modern diseases is having a diabetic physiology. In fact, the first I have uh in the book, I have a lot of images, um, graphs and charts and pictures and this and that. I want to uh have the reader have an easier time of it. And the very first image I have on, I think it's page three of chapter one, there's an image where in the middle it has hyperinsulinemia and insulin resistance. Hyperinsulinemia, that's just a medical fancy sounding word for hyper, too much insulin. Emian means in the blood, too much insulin in the blood, hyperinsulinemia. Why is that important? As I explained on the page before, the second page of the, I mean, I get into this right away on the chapter one. You have to understand the two most fundamental players in the processing of the food that you put in your mouth, and that's glucose, also known as blood sugar, and insulin. You eat something and your glucose goes up, the pancreas senses that and secretes some insulin in order to bring it down, keep it in a safe range, and that's a normal process that goes on throughout life. But when you're eating the wrong food and too frequently, or both, you have elevated blood sugar and insulin hour after hour, day after day. And within about a week, you develop what's called hyperinsulinemia. Or and then you and then that turns into insulin resistance where the cells come to reject or resist the insulin, which it needs, because of the overload. There's just too much. You can't get in any more into the suitcase, right? It's just no matter how many times you sit on it, there's nothing else that's going to go in there. So, you know, understanding that, and then you also understand that insulin is the fat storage hormone. You can't store fat on your body without having high insulin all the time. So, understanding these basics, and that's why I get into it all in in chapter one, that you really, because that leads to your inflammation in the arteries, which goes throughout your body and starts to generate or stimulate the genetics that you've got going on. But, you know, the genetics, uh, you may have heard this line before. It's genetics loads the gun, but it's your lifestyle that pulls the trigger or keeps the safety on. Right. So we are in control of where we're going with our diseases and everything. And I had four comorbidities, which I'll tell you about. Uh, but the main one is uh the reason why I brought up the chart is that in the middle I have hyperinsulinemia and insulin resistance, and then it has arrows shooting out to the sides, and it's shooting out to because those are the two things that lead to heart attacks, strokes, certain cancers, PCOS, uh polycystic ovarian syndrome, Alzheimer's. I mean, the list goes on and on, sleep apnea, uh, amputations. I mean, there's I just saw a new stat. There's 438 amputations a day being done in the United States. It's like, what? You know, the chopping off the toes and the feet and everything, and it's all something that they we have in our in our capacity to avoid, but we don't get this in in information. And I try to show in the first couple of chapters how do we get here, right? How do we arrive at the point? Because I think of the book as four things, basically or three things. It's one is it's a how-to book on how I personally reverse four comorbidities. Um, it's also an expose on big food, big pharma, and big medicine. It's also what I consider a uh data evaluation and and uh analysis of this. In 1930, the obesity rate in the new in the US was 1%. We're now approaching 50% in under a mere hundred years. Never in human history has a population gotten so fat and so sick so fast. You got to say, what the hell happened or what's going on here? And when you pull the strings and you do you do the data analysis and evaluation, you find that it's the introduction in the 20th century of the refined carbs, sugar, and seed oils in the amounts and concentrations we've never seen before. I mean, like in 1900 was uh Hershey's came up with the very first candy bar, right? So I'm thinking, like, what a way to start a century. And then Tootsie Roll and O'Henry and all the rest of them came after that, and um and so on. And uh, so it's pretty wild, and we we need to become aware of all this, and it's just a shame that you know, there was a big study out of Johns Hopkins a few years ago, shocking statistics. They found out that 74% of doctors, now we're talking family physicians and general practitioners, internists and cardiologists. 74% do not know how to properly diagnose and test for pre-diabetes or type 2 diabetes. It's like, are you kidding me? All doctors do, most of them, I mean, they're more and more are becoming more aware. They'll they'll test fasting blood glucose and A1C, which everybody knows about, pretty much everybody knows about it. And and if and you could test normal and still be a raging type 2 diabetic. I mean, you know, you test normal for A1C if a doctor says, Hey, you're good, I'll see you in a year. No, they don't do this other one. See, this was me. I tested normal for both of those, and I was a raging out-of-control type 2 diabetic because I didn't know. I mean, I wasn't eating, I knew enough to not be. In fact, Ken Burry was talking to me, he says, Daniel, what was your diet like? Were you sitting on the sofa eating Cheetos and Coca-Cola? I said, No, no, no. I knew enough to not do that. But what my downfall was, I was totally sold on the propaganda and the BS of heart healthy air quotes, heart healthy whole grains. I didn't know that these heart, healthy whole grains, I mean it says so on the package, even shows American Heart Association. You know, I didn't know that they turn into sugar when they when you ingest them. I didn't know any of that. I mean, I was just like the regular person, you know, eating the eating, thinking I'm doing fine. But then, you know, in the morning I'd start with a bowl of granola that had to have 50 or 60 or 70 grams of carbohydrates just there, and I'm sure with high fructose corn syrup and all that. Um, so I was I was fooled that way. And so I didn't know, and I had that was one of my so there you got two more of my sicknesses. I had the type 2 diabetes, which was the source of my cardiovascular disease. It was also the source of my NAFLD, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, because I don't drink, no drugs. I'm already silly enough, as my daughters will surely attest. And so, you know, I had this non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, which now is our the biggest liver disease on the planet. They're talking like, I don't know, two billion people globally. It's just amazing because of the Western diet, the SAT SAD, standard American diet, because it's loaded with high fructose corn syrup, and uh, which is really deadly. And because you know, all this none of the cells in the body can metabolize that. The only place it can get metabolized is it goes to the liver and builds up fatty, and then you get fatty liver disease. And uh, I discovered that. Well, it was not long before my heart attack. I um this one doctor did say to me, he said, uh, that all these were undiagnosed, right? He said, Hey, you gotta stop drinking. I said, What do you mean? Well, you got your GGT is elevated. I said, Well, I don't drink. What are you talking about? So GGT is gamma glutamyl transferase, and that's a liver enzyme. And usually most doctors they'll check ALT, ASP, ALT, and um, but they leave out this GGT, which is the most important one. Why is it important? Well, um, and I have this all in chapter 15, which I cover, you know, liver disease and fatty uh and kidney disease. And uh life insurance companies, they have to know who to accept and who to reject. And their number one predictor of all-cause mortality is having elevated GGT, gamma glutathione glutamil transferase. I mean, who knew? And then the more research I did, um, I found that if you have this elevated GGT, the usual cause of death is a heart attack. It's like, man, oh man, I was really connecting the dots, and I didn't know about these wheat and grains and everything. And then I discovered wheat raises your blood sugar higher than a Snickers candy bar. And I didn't know any of this stuff, so it was all blowing my mind. And I got to a point where I thought, man, oh man, I need to share this with my fellow human beings. And so I started chronicling everything along with all the studies and everything, and uh and this resulted in the book Unholy Trinity, subtitle How Carbs, Sugar, and Oils Make Us Fat, Sick, and Addicted and How to Escape Their Grip. How carbs, sugar, and oils make us fat, sick, and addicted and how to escape their grip. So, like that.

FLORENCE 15:14

Amazing. And I love that you put the word addicted in there because when I when we were first starting to talk about sugar and refined carbohydrates and ultra-processed foods, there was there was conversation about and how that it's detrimental to our metabolic and our mental health. But not too many people were adding that awareness that it can be addictive. It can be addictive for many of us, which means it's not as simple as, oh, now I know the information. Thank you, Daniel. It's done. I won't touch it again. I will just sail off into the sunset, a healthy woman, a healthy man now. But that isn't how it typically unfolds. Do you want to talk a bit more about how you understood that there's this addiction in play?

SPEAKER_01 15:55

Well, there's a whole lot of studies about how the um, I think I covered this at the end of chapter seven. There's this dope dopamine matrix that you can get into. Um it's uh, I call it COD carbohydrate overdose disorder or corporate carbohydrates overdose disorder, because they have these big food has biochemical geniuses and PhDs in their corporate labs and offices, trying to figure out okay, so what can we add to the ingredients that will make them eat the whole bag instead of half the bag, right? So, what I do is I I tell the person, I tell the reader, because a lot of people can't do it cold turkey, they can't just stop. So I said, look, what you should do is make a list of the few foods that you just can't live without. Okay, so it's this, this, and this. Well, your list might be a lot longer than that. So make that list, and then your first task is to find healthy but delicious substitutes for all those things you're addicted to. I mean, they might be not be ideal when you, you know, because you might want to trim, but you got to get to a point where your taste buzz and your palate change, and they will change over time. And it's amazing, it's an amazing freedom once you get there. And the hardest one is complete wheat and grain elimination. You got to do it little by little. I mean, but once you reach that state, it's just an amazing feeling. You just, you know, your energy and everything else just feels wonderful. And um, but you have to find those substitutes. Like, you know, I loved pizza, and um, you know, so I found out that the YouTube is a treasure trove of delicious recipes and you know, ideas and that kind of thing. And so I got a lot of help there. And so I found out about making an almond pizza, right? Uh instead of wheat and making it out of wheat and grains, because what you want to avoid is the bread, the pasta, the cereal, the biscuits, the waffles, the pancakes, tortillas, and pizza crust, and on and on. And so I would make that, and you know, eventually I got off that too, because I didn't want to have the almond almonds in my body. So do what you can little by little. Um, you know, you want to change your your diet, which you your your taste buds and your palate will change. So that's what I can say. That's what I how I escaped from the unholy trinity.

From Data To Diagnosis Failures

FLORENCE 18:19

Uh awesome. Okay. Um tell us a little bit more about fatty liver and fatty kidney. I never heard about fatty kidneys before. That was new to me. I don't know if you want to talk a bit more about that.

Food Industry Influence And Obesity Rise

SPEAKER_01 18:35

Well, that's a newer study where the researcher was saying, you know, we need to start addressing. We know about the fatty liver disease. There's also fatty kidney, too. We need to, you know, also include that in its description because it can get fatty as well. Because the, you know, when you have abdominal obesity or a belly, you um that's the most dangerous place in the body to have fat because it gets all around your organs, and your organs are affected very badly because you can get a lot of um, you know, there's a lot of cytokines, a lot of things that can do great damage to your gut and your uh not just your gut, but your all your organs and your kidneys. Um, and then there's some new information. There was, I think I covered this in the book too. Oh yeah. There's this, the way they measure it is with uh GFR, glomerular filtration rate, right? And for a while, ever since I've been getting healthy, the doctors have been saying, hey, um your kidneys are a little sluggish, they're a little slow. I'm going, what's going on here? And then I found this study that said, I don't know if you've gotten that far yet. And when they they've been mis mismeasuring it all for many years, and they found that people with um low muscle mass, like either sarcopenia or they just don't have much muscle mass, they were giving false high uh GFR readings. GFR is the main uh measurement that doctors look at on your and my doctors were telling me, hey, you your kidneys are look look looking a little sluggish there. And then they the study revealed that people with high muscular, you know, because ever since I got into this, I I went from heart attack to a six-pack, believe me. And so now I've got a lot of muscle on my body. I'm just all muscle. I'm lean and muscular. And so what they found was the more muscle you have on your body, the lower your GFR is. And so I'm expected to have, with my physiology, I'm expected to have low GFR. So this is another new study that needs to get out to the nephrologists, you know, the kidney uh doctors that specialize in kidney disease. Because they don't understand if you got somebody coming in your into your um practice that has a lot of muscle, he's gonna have low GFR naturally. It doesn't mean he's got other things, doesn't have other things going on, but uh I never had the muscle mass that I have on my body now uh with the amount of leanness as well, right? So, and uh yeah, so you know it is true they are addicting, and you know, you just have to get through it. And it's just it's such a shame that we don't get taught any of this in school. Our doctors don't get taught any of it because they get what, a week of nutrition, if that in medical schools. And then I think, well, you know, since most of the medical schools are funded by big pharma, they want them reaching for the prescription pad. They don't want them talking about nutrition and diet and exercise. They don't know anything about it anyway. They just write them a script. It's either drugs and procedures, and drugs and procedures, and more drugs and more procedures. And the food pyramid and all that has done so much damage. It's just uh super amazing. And I'm so glad to see that. Um, I don't know if you know our new FDA commissioner, uh Uh, Dr. Marty McCary. He I have some quotes. He he was just in a televised interview, and he said, um, and he's on the whole Maha, you know, might make America Healthy Again, um, which I was invited to on because of the success of the book. I got a call from Dr. Eric Berg, and he invited me, I said, Hell yes, I'll join that. You know, and so he these are great quotes. I got to read this to you. He said, and this is our new FDA commissioner. He says, We are rewriting the food pyramid, which was a broken piece of health misinformation that did a lot of damage to American health. No longer are we going to have a corrupt food pyramid and U.S. dietary guidelines. I'm thinking, oh, this is fantastic. Just a couple more quotes. He says, We are going to end the 70-year demonization of and war on natural saturated fat. And saturated fat is not the devil, the entire healthcare system has pointed to. I'm thinking, hallelujah. Because you know, the first thing I found was keto, and I had amazing gains on that. It was just fantastic. And keto is mostly, I think it's 80% or more animal products, uh, you know, eggs, beef, butter, bacon, cheese, that kind of thing, and and um non-starchy vegetables and that kind of thing. And then you have your carnivore, which is just animal products, like those ones I mentioned. And then the the lion diet, which is just, see, I had an I had a misunderstanding of all this. So lion diet is just the ruminant animals, they're eating just meat only. I'm at the carnivore. I because lions they don't eat eggs and fish and all that, right? But I'm I started with keto, I had amazing uh benefits from it. I was just like, I was discussing this with Dr. Sean Baker, because that's where he started too. He got into keto, he had amazing gains, he was recommending it to his patients and so forth. And then he went to carnivore. Actually, he went all the way to the lion diet. I'm not there, I'm just at the eggs, beef, butter, salmon, you know, that kind of thing. Uh, but anyway, so you know, you have to uh you have to uh do whatever is gonna um get you into our native ancestral state of ketosis, and that's what those diets it's keto, carnivore, or lion diet, because that's how we've lived and these bodies evolved over millions of years. Anthropologists and bioarchaeologists told us that we became the apex predator, and our diet consisted of what we could catch, kill, and eat, what we might pick off a tree or a vine, that kind of thing, but only when those berries were in season. So it was, you know, it was always a higher protein and fat diet and a low carbohydrate. And, you know, and we went off the rails in the 20th century, and then we started attracting all these new diseases. So um, I think I went off on a little bit of a tangent there in your question with uh kidney disease, but yeah, so um there's a lot involved to all of it, but it's just to become aware of it. And what I was really fortunate that I found this doctor on YouTube, his name was Dr. Ford Brewer, and he had this um video. The title was something like how to reverse um 20 years of arterial plaque, like I did. I thought, I gotta watch this. And this is several years ago, and I, you know, it was pretty complicated. So I had a lot of do a lot of definition uh clearing and that kind of thing. Um, but he was just brilliant at all the testing. So I reached out to him after after I got well into the book and I said, Hey, doc, really love your work, blah, blah, blah. I'm writing this book. Um, would you write a chapter delineating what are the most important blood labs and scans that anyone can get online without even needing a doctor's prescription? That way you yourself can find out if something's you got something going on and you need to adjust it, or you know, that kind of thing. So he wrote he wrote my chapter 22. Uh, it's called Don't Guess Test, because like I said, these diseases are silent. And I was just trying to uh have a family member I was talking to. I go, hey, you know, I I could see his body, and you know, these days they just look at somebody's body and go, okay, cardiovascular disease, fatty liver disease, heart disease, he's got all these diabetes, he's got just from you know, looking at people's bodies at the gym and so forth. So I said, Um, you know, I I got some tests I think you should probably do. And he said, Yeah, that sounds fine, but I'm not sick. I said, Yeah, well, I wasn't sick either when I look what happened to me, right? So, you know, you you have to find out what's going on because if you're I think that if you're not if you're over 40 or over even 35, or you're overweight, or both, and you're not testing on a regular basis, that's like driving down a road without a steering wheel or a speedometer. I mean, or a brakes, or uh, you know, um you're gonna crash. And so you need to test and find out if you got something that needs adjusting. And that's uh he was so kind to to do that. And he wrote my chapter 22, Dr. Ford Brewer. Brilliant guy out of Johns Hopkins, because he's taught thousands of doctors there. And like I said, he's so brilliant at all the testing.

FLORENCE 27:36

Yes, I thought that was one of the most unique parts about your book was that there was a couple of tests in there that and I thought I was up to date on labs. I was like, that's really interesting. So, yes, and then you summarize it again in your final chapter. But yeah, I think those two pieces of the book are gold, just helping you dig a little deeper with different tests that can give you an insight into where you're back, where you're where you're at metabolically. That, you know, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 28:00

Well, the most important one, which I forgot to mention earlier when I was talking about, you know, A1C and fasting blood glucose, the most important one that doctors don't order, which will tell you exactly where you are on the on your diabetic physiology, is a test that's called the OGTT with insulin, oral glucose tolerance test with insulin. Why is that so important? Because it will tell you exactly where you are on the diabetic spectrum. Are you normal? Are you pre-diabetic or are you type 2 diabetic? And we know that most people are because there were two big studies. One was um, oh my God, it was over 8,000 people, and they discovered that 88% of the population is metabolically unhealthy. That means there's only 12%. But then a couple years later, and this study was over 55,000. It was done by the um American College of Cardiology, which is the top place on the planet for cardiology, right? And they found that 93.2% of the population is metabolically unhealthy. That means it's what 6.8% is so you know, don't think that, oh, I'm fine, I don't have any symptoms, I don't need to do that test. Uh, anyway, that would be the first one. And I have all those up on my website, um, Danieltrever.com. And again, I'm not selling anything, I don't have any powders or vitamins or anything, which I don't have any problem with people doing that, but there's no, I don't have t-shirts or anything. So I just want people to get the information. Go to the website danieltrevor.com. I have a lot of videos up there. I've got uh, you know, there's a lot of really good information, and it's a page that covers the tests. And you can either order order them right there because I made a deal with uh Quest Diagnostic, which is the largest uh lab uh location. I mean, they have the largest lab company, uh Fortune 500, uh, in the country. They have thousands of locations around the country, or just write them down and take them to your doctor. Say, doc, I want to get this test and I want to get this test. And you got to be careful, you got to insist on it because too many doctors, and I was discussing this with Dr. Anthony Chafey, he verified. I says, Too many doctors will say, you tell them what the test is, and they'll go, Oh, you don't need that, you're fine. You don't need that, you're fine. And the only reason they're saying that is because they don't know what it is, they wouldn't know how to analyze the results anyway. And the last thing that doctors want to get from their patients is homework. They don't want home. They're all, I mean, I feel for them. They're already overloaded. Their average visit is like what six minutes, and then they got to do all this computer entry, and you know, and they're working in a system that has a lot of demands, and oh my God. So I feel for them, and a lot of the doctors they can't be the healer that they set out to be because, first of all, they don't get the education from the medical schools. Um, listen, having said that, my older daughter Chloe works in the ER, and she, along with many others, I call them 24-hour heroes. They're uh, you know, setting the bones and suturing up the wounds and removing the bullets and the steering wheels from our chests. I mean, they're just amazing. I love all of them. So, you know, I not look, doctors have saved my life, so I can't, you know, I'm not gonna, I'm not here to badmouth any of them because I love all of them, but they just don't get the information and you have to look out for yourself. It's just like I'm sure you're familiar with him, Dr. William Davis, cardiologist. He was an interventional cardiologist for many years, many years, and he in his he has a book called Undoctored, subtitle Why Healthcare Has Failed You and How You Can Become Smarter Than Your Doctor. And he has a quote in that book that I I stole from him, and I with his attribution, of course, uh, I put in my introduction. I it says, he says something like Um Hamburger contains no ham. There are no grapes or nuts and grape nuts, and health does not come from health care. You gotta find out on your own, sadly. So, you know, people are so glad to find your uh they should be happy to find your channel and everything that you're doing. And we need to spread the word and save some souls.

Sugar Addiction And Practical Substitutes

FLORENCE 32:25

Beautiful. Yes. So I want to just pause briefly to say that I I am agnostic on meal plans. Uh my one and only message is that sugar, ultra-processed foods, seed oils, all of those have got to go. What Whole Foods people choose to eat is is really dignity of choice. I think the low carb, the keto, the carnivore paths can be really interesting, helpful early interventions. Um, but it doesn't work for everybody. Some people I've it doesn't. It just doesn't. It's not the one size fits all. But what is the one size fits all is we all benefit from reducing, if not completely eliminating these ultra-processed foods, sugar and seed oils, et cetera. So I just want to say though, that I believe that, you know, for six months or a year, some of these extreme, like only eating meat, you know, can be really helpful as an intervention, but you don't necessarily have to stay there. Um, some people don't feel well longer term on it. You know, they feel better when they come back to eating more balanced foods, whole foods, that kind of thing. I just want to give you a chance to speak to that.

SPEAKER_01 33:31

Yeah, no, listen, I'm with you on that. Whatever, look, I found keto, I felt fantastic, right? And then the more I eliminated plants, the better I felt, number one. And number two, the better my blood labs were. So that's working for me. My body is not your body. Uh, we want to get into a diet that puts us, like I said, in this state of ketosis, which is, you know, it's a wide range. And but but you have we have we've evolved with higher protein and fat. That's all I'm saying there. And so you got to get some of that in you somehow, somehow, because that's what these bodies are used to and how we've evolved for many years. But again, you have to listen to how you're feeling how you listen to your own body and how you feel and adjust things from there. Or if something goes out of whack on your blood tests, you go, okay, so what am I eating that may not be that may be causing that? So I agree with that. When I was on with Ken Berry, uh, he was saying, look, people don't have to become carnivore or whatever. It says if they just remove the unholy trinity, as you call it, they're gonna get so much better just from there, from the processed foods. It's like, you know, they were never in our diet prior to a hundred years ago or so.

FLORENCE 34:43

Right, right, absolutely. And there's a fear that I'd like you to speak to about um doing more. So, and I also disagree disagree, and I'm not a medical doctor and I shouldn't be this cheeky, but honestly, we didn't have high-fat diets. Our ancestors didn't. The animals that they ate were unbelievably lean, and I know that because I'm Canadian, and I know that the animals that, you know, my friends that hunt, those lean, they're lean meats. And a lot of the fat that was on those animals were not omega-6 fats. They were omega-3s because they were eating natural vegetation and it was just higher in omega-3s. So I don't think we eat high fat. I think we ate meat, um, you know, seasonal fruits, vegetables, nuts, and seeds. Absolutely, we did. And then, you know, about 10,000 years ago, we started to bring in some grains. But I don't, I don't necessarily I think over time there's some people who don't do well high fat long term. It's a good short-term intervention, and then shit starts to go off the rails for them.

SPEAKER_01 35:44

I agree with you. I, you know, it when I say higher protein and fat, I mean protein fat less, and then down to uh the low carb because you know, it was like you said, if they're lean animals, you're getting a lot more protein than you are fat. So I'm in total agreement with you there on that. I just meant that the protein and fat is higher than the the carbohydrates.

FLORENCE 36:07

Absolutely. Yeah, and to not fat that that comes with me. That not to not fear the fat that's in an egg yolk, not to fear the fat on an avocado or whatever, right? Totally.

SPEAKER_01 36:18

Exactly.

FLORENCE 36:18

I just wanted to capture that because I know that there's people who've tried the higher fat and oh my gosh, you know, different things get out of whack. So, anyways.

SPEAKER_01 36:27

Yeah, no, no, no. You're yeah, go ahead.

FLORENCE 36:29

I was gonna say one of the fears that people do have about trying the lower carb, and you also just a little side rant for me, is that you can be in ketosis simply through fasting. There's I've had a number of guests on my show who've been ketotarian. I've had others who uh one of the head coaches with Dr. Feng's um organization called the Fasting Method, she's whole food plant-based, and she moves in and out of ketosis. He said, of all of the coaches, actually it was Megan Ramos who works with Dr. Fung, said she moves in and out of ketosis the best of all of our coaches, and she's the only one whole food plant-based. So again, it's a myth that you have to be eating, you know, pounding cheese and I don't know, like bacon and burger and better. Like you can move in and out of ketosis with any Whole Foods if you know what you're doing and fasting is a piece of the picture. But that's my little side rant. Here's where I'd love you to sort of talk to us a bit about cholesterol. There's so much fear about eating and introducing more meat and maybe the fat that comes with meats into their diet, because we're they're worried about elevated cholesterol and heart disease. Can you speak to that?

Fatty Liver And The Overlooked Kidney

SPEAKER_01 37:36

Oh my God, that's just probably the biggest lie in the last 70 years because where that started was uh I go over this in chapter one. Yeah. Because people, you know, I have a whole thing on I really debunked the whole cholesterol thing. And and as you know, Dr. Ovedia does that very well too. Uh that you appeared um on his channel like I did early on. And um yeah, what had happened was see, uh one of the charts that I have in the book is where um heart disease was going, there's a chart on I don't know, it's in the first chapter. Uh here's 1900, and here's 1955. And heart disease was going up like this, right? And at the time, um, in what happened in 1955 was president U.S. President Eisenhower, he was smoking three packs a day and he had a heart attack. And then years later, they they had this um, they just they developed this medical technology called electron microscopy, where they can snake up these teeny tiny cameras up into the artery and you know, find out what's going on. And they discovered this thing called the glycocalyx. What is that? What they found was smoking destroys this thing called the glycocalyx. Pardon me. Glycocalyx is this fuzz-like hairy lining of the arteries, which acts as the first line of defense against what's called small dense LDL particles, which can invade the artery wall through transcitosis, get stuck in what's called the intima media space, and then develop dangerous, soft, inflamed plaque over time. And that's the source of your heart attacks and strokes. And smoking destroys this protective glycocalyx. And that's, you know, people were dropping in the, you know, this is in the early 50s. And then there was this corrupt researcher that came along by the name of Ansel Keys, and he had a theory that it was the meat and the cheese and the butter and all that. It was clogging up the arteries. And I mean, it was he gave the analogy like there was a uh, you know, a shower drain that had the soap and the grease and the hair and it clogged it. Well, it doesn't work that way at all. And so, but you know, he he was very influential and people bought into it. Even at the same time, there were other researchers to say, no, that's not it. It's the sugar, it's these other things that are doing it. Anyway, he won out, and within five to eight years, big food got onto it and they started taking all the fat away from foods, and they started coming up with low-fat, non-fat, you know, cookies and all these different things and cereals and so forth. And and then when you look at the obesity rate, you know, from the time these new guidelines came out in the early 70s, it's like here's early 70s, US dietary guidelines, your food pyramid. And then, you know, it goes up like this the obesity rate, and it's date coincident. And another thing is is the and and and he had it all wrong. And that's why I have um my chapter five is called what you urgently know need to know about uh high cholesterol. People with high cholesterol live the longest, people with low cholesterol die much earlier and usually of some form of cancer. I mean, it's just totally backwards, totally backwards. And oh, I'm sorry, let me get out of this. Sorry, I thought I had that off.

FLORENCE 41:06

I just turned that off too. No worries, I didn't hear it. You couldn't hear it.

SPEAKER_01 41:10

Oh my god, yeah. So, anyway, um, yeah, so I really go into that and debunk all of that because there's so many studies that show uh there was this one study, big study, it was the longest study, a framing hand study, they showed that for every two points you went down, you had 11% increase of cardiovascular risk of cardiovascular disease. In other words, if your uh cardio, if your cholesterol level went from 200 down to 198, your increase risk for heart disease went up 11%. See, back in like 1950, I think it was like um the the range was 300, and then they lowered it to 250, and now it's down at 200. Because see, when you look keep lowering the numbers, you could sell more drugs, right? Hey, look, your your cholesterol's uh 220. When years before it was 300, and you were fine, right? I mean 300 uh on where they wanted you, and so now we can sell more statins, and statins have been the biggest cash cow the you know big pharma has ever seen, and they're not gonna let go of that. Um and so it's just any cardiologist in the know will tell you, but you know, too many of them don't. They need to get this education, they need my book, and look, none of it's Daniel's opinion. I mean, as you heard in the beginning of the book, I say, look, none of this is my opinion. This is basically just think of this as the best of what 21st century science has to offer for your health and wellness, and fix yourself. I did, you can too. These are all legitimate studies and all of the best technology, and where you really get to understand that it's not the cholesterol. People with high cholesterol live the longest, and uh it's all about the insulin resistance and hyperinsulinemia. All the centenarians they are insulin sensitive, they don't have any insulin resistant, they don't have any diabetic physiology and that kind of thing. So the whole cholesterol thing has been completely debunked. But um, you know, it reminds me of this uh there's a quote from Mark Twain, and he was this, you know, common sense philosopher from the 1800s. He said, It's easier to fool people than to convince them they've been fooled. It's easier to fool people than to convince them, hey pal, you've been fooled.

unknown 43:44

You know.

SPEAKER_01 43:45

And then there was this other, you know, you try to explain things to people and you they just don't get it because they're so convinced. And there's this other quote that I love. There was in 1934, there was this Pulitzer Prize winning author named Upton Sin Sinclair. And he wrote um something like it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

FLORENCE 44:11

Yeah.

Ketosis, Keto, And Individual Fit

SPEAKER_01 44:12

It's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary is making money off of him not understanding. He's just looking the other way. And I knew right away when I um I moved a couple of years ago and in the area, I like to get I'd like to keep an eye on my um echocardiogram uh to keep an eye on my what's called in ejection fraction. Ejection fraction is this for your audience. I know you know what it is. It's the left ventricle and how um healthy it is in pushing out the blood to the rest of the body. Um, you know, because it's got to reach your organs and your feet and your brain. It's it's just gotta it's gotta be at a certain range. And they want it healthy normal ranges between 50 and 65. So I like to get one of those since I've had the heart attack, and I'm still considered a heart patient. And so I went to this cardiologist to order that for me. Uh, because I don't, you know, I just wanted to get that. So I went in, I met this guy, and I see he's got this belly, and I'm thinking, oh my god, what kind of advice is he giving his patients? You know, so I said, Yeah, look, I just want to get the echo, I don't need any blood work, I just had my blood work because I just I know how to read everything now. I, you know, I he says, Oh, okay, so how's your LDL? And I I didn't roll my eyes, even though I wanted to. So I said, Oh, well, I said, Well, my LDL is out the roof, but I'm what's called a lean mass hyperresponder. My HDL is in the 90s, my triglycerides are in the 30s, and so I am good to go. And he was looking at me like I had two heads. He didn't know what I was talking about because he's totally sold on writing a prescription if I'm over a certain, you know, and it's not the LDL, it's just see, they don't differentiate between LDL, LDLC, and what's called small dense LDL particles, because those are the ones that can invade the artery wall, get stuck subendothelial in this space called the intima media space. They build up over time. And basically what happens in a nutshell is that in a future time of stress, whether it's physical stress, emotional stress, or both, that inflamed plaque can, it's soft plaque, it can rupture through the artery of the artery wall of the uh endothelium, and then it spills into the lumen, which is where the blood flows. It creates a clot, the clot breaks off and it goes downstream, so to speak. And if it goes to your heart, you have a heart attack. If it goes to your brain, you have a stroke, which tells you it can be anywhere. It's systemic, it's all over your body, this plaque. And so um, you know, you really got to make sure that you get this echocardiogram. You want to have your, like I said, your um ejection fraction between 50 and 65, because if if it's below that, you get in what to call you're you're in what's called stage one heart failure. And then below 40, between 40 and 50 is stage one, below 40 is stage two, and then by the time you get to stage four, you're you're in hospice or close to it. And so you really want to make sure that your ejection fraction is within range. And I just had one a few months ago and it's 65, it's right up there, you know. So I just like to to do that because I like to get to the gym and you know, not a lot. I it's mostly diet, but you do have to move because you know, when we were hunter-gatherers, we had to lift heavy things and it was a struggle. And so we uh, you know, that kind of thing.

FLORENCE 47:49

Right. One last question. I know we have to wrap up here uh pretty quickly.

SPEAKER_01 47:53

Yeah, sure.

FLORENCE 47:54

One of the stats that you share is that individuals who take statins tend have a 45% increased chance of developing diabetes. Why is that?

SPEAKER_01 48:05

You know, I can't speak to it chemically, but I can speak to it um firsthand in that I go to the gym and I talk to my gym buddies, and I, you know, sometimes I'll talk to them about this stuff. I don't preach it or anything, but the guy says, Yeah, I'm on a statin, I'm good, I can eat anything I want. And I'm thinking, what? I think statin takers think that. They think, oh, I'm on a statin, I can eat whatever I want. I'm good. I got my my cholesterol's low. They don't know that they're they've because of their belly and they've they're you know, they're eating this food that's just terrible for them. And so, you know, I'm not one that's gonna preach it at the gym or anything. And I, you know, some of them I'll tell them different things, but you know, that kind of thing. So I think it's that, but there's an interesting study I should tell you about it. This just take a quick uh and it's in that chapter. Uh, chapter 18 is all on statins, as you know. And there was this big study because you know, people want to know, patients want to know how much longer will I live if I take a statin every day for the rest of my life. So the researchers said, yeah, let's look into that. How much longer do statin take? Or six big study, 92,135 patients, two groups, and they found that the people in the group taking statins for primary prevention, in other words, no heart attack yet. They're just doing it to because their doctor says something goofy about cholesterol or something, they just say they lived a big three days longer than those in the group not taking a statin. And the in the group taking statins for secondary prevention, in other words, they already had a heart attack, they lived a big four days longer. So it's like I asked my readers in the book, I said, look, you still want to put up with the nasty side effects of taking statins because they for some people they can be pretty pretty damn nasty. Road rage and you know, you're you lose IQ points, at least 20 or 30 IQ points. You just that's why they call it statin stupid, right? And it's just, oh my god, it's just it's just horrible, and you know, aches and pains and that kind of thing. So, you know, if you want the extra three days or four days, go ahead and take it. But why if you're only going to get three or four more days, just change your diet.

FLORENCE 50:17

And wouldn't it be wonderful if there was a third group, third group with a lifestyle change, and then they don't get three or four days more than the people taking statins, they get three or four years.

SPEAKER_01 50:30

Exactly. Yeah, or or or even a lot more than that.

FLORENCE 50:34

Maybe more, literally, potentially, absolutely. I'm so sorry to say, everybody, we are at the top of the hour for this interview. I know we could go on all day. You really, really want to get this book. It's genuinely written from someone who's not trying to sell anything, he's just wanting to improve your life. And he goes right into the nitty-gritty of stuff. And his his piece about the labs is in and of itself gold because he explains what the labs are, what numbers you want to strive for, so you can go and do some, you know, nerdy citizen science scientist, you know, medical sleuthing on your own. So I'll I'll leave you with that. Is there any final words you'd like to share with us today, Daniel?

SPEAKER_01 51:15

Yeah, no, listen, um, just go to Danieltrevor.com. You can get on my mailing list. Once a week I send a newsletter out. It's not, you know, maybe it's a 10-minute read, but it's it's mostly things about the book, but it's uh, you know, more bite-size. And there's new, and if I have any new studies that I've spotted and that kind of thing. And when you do that, you get on the list, I offer what's called a free preview of the book. And what that is, is when you sign up for the newsletter, you're automatically sent a PDF of the first 48 pages. And I tell people, I said, look, just read the introduction and then you'll know right away if you're interested in seeing more. You know, and I don't know any other authors that do that, but you know, get on the list. You can unsubscribe at any time, but it's DanielTrevor.com. I got a lot of great information up there. But thank you so much, Florence, for having me on. I really appreciate and I love what you're doing and uh getting the word out there. But and again, you got to go by what your own body's telling you.

FLORENCE 52:10

Right. Wonderful. Thank you for having a heart attack, Daniel. Thank you for surviving your heart attack. Thank you for doing all this deep work. It's not easy to write a book. It's it's not easy. And that was a real gift uh of service that you gave to us all. Thank you again.

SPEAKER_01 52:26

Thank you so much. Really appreciate it.

unknown 52:28

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