Dr Chris Knobbe: Ancestral Diet & Disease Prevention
Join us on the latest episode as we delve into the world of preventive health with Dr Chris Knobbe, a distinguished physician, ophthalmologist, nutritional researcher, and author. Let’s explore the roots of preventable chronic degenerative diseases, challenging common beliefs about genetics and shedding light on the impactful roles of diet and environment. Dr Knobbe, Founder of the Ancestral Health Foundation and Cure AMD, shares insights on the dangers of highly processed vegetable oils and presents an intriguing question: Can the diet of our ancestors hold the key to preventing, treating, and reversing modern-day diseases?
I hope you enjoy this conversation I had with Dr Chris Knobbe
Podcast Transcript
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to Unstress. My name is Dr Ron Ehrlich. Before I start, I would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which I’m recording this podcast, the Gadigal People of the Eora Nation, and pay my respects to their elders – past, present and emerging.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:00:15] And as I’ve often said, we have a lot to learn from our First Nations People. The way they approach conflict, for example, is to start from a position of respect, then connect with all parties. After you’ve done that, you then reflect and finally you direct. What an amazing approach to conflict and tell me we don’t have a lot to learn in our modern world from our indigenous people.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:00:47] Well, today we are exploring diseases and we have an epidemic of preventable chronic degenerative diseases. We’ve explored this many times. You will hear about them many times. If you’ve been to see your doctor, if you’ve been given a diagnosis, for example, of cancer, you’ll be told, “Well, it’s genetic.” Genetic, that is, unless you have lung cancer where it’s now accepted that had to do with smoking. But guess what? The genes are certainly what loads the gun, but it’s our diet and our environment which pulls the trigger and that’s what we explore today.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:01:24] My guest today is Dr Chris Knobbe. Chris is a physician, an ophthalmologist, a nutritional researcher, an author, a speaker, a public health advocate and the Founder of two non-profit organisations – the Ancestral Health Foundation and Cure AMD. AMD stands for Age-Related Macular Degeneration. And we’ll be talking a lot about that in the podcast today. Since 2015, Chris has given scores of presentations and achieved international academic recognition for his work on the dangers of highly processed, polyunsaturated vegetable oils. You will know them as safflower, sunflower, canola, etc.. His goals, as you will hear, are altruistic and humanitarian, and he accepts no compensation for his work in this field. He asks an important question, in fact, gives a compelling argument for it being the compelling question. Could the diet of our ancestors prevent, treat and reverse most cases of practically all preventable diseases? And as you will hear, he puts it in a historical perspective. No, it’s not just that we are living longer. We deal with that question in the podcast, but we do have an epidemic of preventable chronic diseases. In fact, while the medical profession congratulates itself on the wonders of modern medicine. And hey, there are indeed many wonders of modern medicine are being the beneficiaries of that. You will probably have been too. I would also add that it at the same time unwittingly presided over the worst epidemic of preventable diseases in human history. And the key word here is preventable. And in this diet plan that he presents, it’s very simple. It’s effective, and it allows one to eat to the heart gene… To your heart’s content. In fact, as I say, as often as the world we live in becomes more complicated. The solutions are remarkably simple, cheap, accessible and most effectively affordable, they’re sustainable as well. In fact, we argue in this podcast that perhaps it’s all too simple for the medical profession. Look, Chris is the author of two fabulously well-researched books. In 2019, he wrote Ancestor… Ancestral Dietary Strategy to Prevent and Treat Macular Degeneration. The connection between processed foods and seed oils, obesity and chronic disease. And more recently, he has released in 2023 the Ancestral Diet Revolution: How Vegetable Oils and Processed Foods Destroy Our Health and How to Recover. I hope you enjoy this conversation I had with Dr Chris Knobbe. Welcome to the show, Chris.
Dr Chris Knobbe [00:04:36] Thanks so much. Ron. I appreciate you having me on.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:04:39] Chris, I’ve been looking forward to this conversation for some time, particularly since your publication of your book on ancestral diet, The Ancestral Diet Revolution. And I’m intrigued by your story clinically, professionally, maybe even personally, about your journey that brought you to the point of full-time focusing on nutrition and these foundations that you’ve set up. Can you just share with us a little bit about that story?
Dr Chris Knobbe [00:05:06] Sure. And I’ll keep it short, Ron, because it could get pretty long. My interest in nutrition research really is born out of my own suffering, and that started with arthritis when I was 33 years old. Way back in 1994 and it was in 2011 that my arthritis had gotten to a really severe point, mostly my knees, but also my elbows and my neck and even my fingers and toes. And I was… And I’d seen many of my, you know, call my own colleague physicians, you know, orthopaedic surgeons, family practice docs, internal medicine, a rheumatologist and I know it was always the same thing. I always was given medicines, even orthopaedic surgeons gave me injections in my knees. Steroids and such but anyway, long story short, I came across the Paleo diet back in 2011 is what changed my whole life course, I guess because I started really just a limited version of a paleo diet in 2011 and that radically changed my arthritis, improve my arthritis by like 80% and literally in about 7 to 10 days and…
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:06:37] Oh, my God.
Dr Chris Knobbe [00:06:38] Yeah, today my arthritis, you know, now that’s that was back in 2011. So 12 years later or so, my arthritis is about 95% better than where it was 12 years ago using really what I would I would just call an ancestral diet. So that… In that, in the process of that, Ron, I guess, you know, to get to my professional life now is, is that I… When my arthritis changed so radically with diet the first thing I did was I read because it was the paleo diet that was working for me at the time. I read Loren Cordain‘s book, The Paleo Answer, back in 2011, and I read that in that book. While sitting on the beach in Cabo San Lucas over a weeks long vacation, and I was stunned and shocked that all of this chronic disease, you know, that we are taught in medical school is the product of mostly ageing and genetics was really driven by diet and… But there were some things, you know, to be fair, that I didn’t agree with Loren Cordain about. And so I kept investigating. And eventually, that led me to Weston A. Price‘s work in 2013. And I read his book and that… Now I see everything through the lens of Weston A. Price. And in 2013, late in the year, I hypothesised… It finally hit me, I’m an ophthalmologist and so one of the diseases that we deal with commonly is age-related macular degeneration or AMD, which is the leading cause of irreversible vision loss and blindness in people over the age of 50 worldwide. And this is a rampant disease in America and most Westernised countries.
Dr Chris Knobbe [00:08:40] But anyway, I hypothesised that year that let me back up and just say that after I understood that processed foods were driving coronary heart disease and cancer and stroke, diabetes and metabolic disease after I understood all that, that it finally, you know, I had that light bulb moment when one day I thought, I wonder if processed foods might be driving age-related macular degeneration. And so that question ruled a lot of my investigation outside of my own practice. I was working on that question for about a year and a half. And in early 2015, I was so convinced that that hypothesis held water that I left practice to pursue that full-time. And I’ve never really looked back. I worked with some Pacific Island ophthalmologists and one nutrition researcher in Europe, and we published a paper related to processed foods, vegetable oils particularly, and age-related macular degeneration AMD and I published a book. And then in about 2018, 2019, the thing that kept coming back to me, Ron, is that, that the more I looked at all of this evidence, the more I was convinced that it was seed oils, the highly polyunsaturated vegetable oils that are the big driver of chronic disease. And that’s where my life’s work has been focussed ever since about the last 4 or 5 years has been really heavily invested in this. The data, the evidence related to seed oils and high omega six consumption and overweight, obesity, diabetes, metabolic disease, cancer, coronary heart disease, Alzheimer’s, dementia, macular degeneration you name it. If it’s a chronic disease the majority of these, I believe almost all of them have some relationship to our omega-six consumption.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:10:53] Hmm. Boy, there’s I mean, there’s so much there that we are going to be talking about in this conversation. And, you know, you’ve listed out a whole range of conditions. And I think the key there is that depending on your genetic predisposition there… That they will manifest in various ways. But the cause of these issues have a very important commonality, which we’re going to talk about. But I want to come back to this one point of view. In 1994, between 1994 and 2011. The number not not even including your own medical education, but the number of years of medical education that you sought the opinion of. And, you know, like there were specialists that had gone through 15, 20 years of education that have had clinical experience, and yet none of them, none of them until you discovered the paleo diet yourself. Mentioned any of this to you? I mean.
Dr Chris Knobbe [00:11:51] No.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:11:51] What does that say about our medical profession’s curiosity?
Dr Chris Knobbe [00:11:59] You know, to me, it’s absolutely true. There was probably… I probably saw 15 MDs of various specialities in that, you know, roughly, you know, between 1994 and 2011 regarding my or thought my own arthritis and never did any one of them ever mention that it could be related to diet. Not once and… But in their defence, I was in the same boat. I mean, I never considered it either. For the most part, I always wondered if I might be gluten-sensitive, but beyond that, I really didn’t have any inclination to believe that my diet was… Had any relationship to my own arthritis. But when I look back at when I finally began to understand that processed foods, which are primarily refined flours, refined and added sugars and vegetable oils, when those are a significant part of the diet, that those are driving all of these chronic diseases I was… I look back at my own life and to be 21 years after graduating from medical school and I absolutely had no idea that this was true all of those years and I never really questioned it. And I believe that probably 98, 99% or more of our colleagues are in the same boat, right? You know, this is… We’re taught in medical school that these are all different diseases with a lot of highly variable genetics and ageing driving them. And then they’re just bad luck, right? And I don’t… And now that I have the benefit of having, you know, been in this field really for 12 years, since 2011, I feel like at least I’ve been investigating this and full time for eight years. I look back at this and I think that the enormous majority of this chronic disease overweight obesity and chronic disease is self-inflicted. It’s driven by, I believe, mostly our processed foods that people talk about, you know, that it’s, you know, there’s a lot of environmental issues as lack of sleep and stress and amount, you know, EMFs and all these other things. And I’m sure some of those are true but I… But my belief is that the major drivers are our diet and westernised processed foods are the big driver.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:14:45] It’s almost too simple, isn’t it? It’s it’s just for. For those that have been that have done well at high school, got into medicine, studied for years, medicine. It’s really difficult. It’s really challenging. It’s almost too easy. It’s not intellectually stimulating enough to say, hey, guess what? All of these diseases that you are spending your life studying could actually be resolved by this simple intervention. And it’s almost like we’re distracted as clinicians by the overwhelming evidence-based medicine.
Dr Chris Knobbe [00:15:23] Mm hmm. Yeah, I mean… Absolutely and there’s… I think you’re right. I think it’s… It is almost too simple and I think that, you know, because of that, there are many physicians that will overlook this whole part of medicine. But, you know, that’s an enormous mistake and nutrition science is actually the deeper I get into it, the more complex I see that there’s there’s both ways of looking at it. It could be very, very simple when you look at just the big picture. But it’s also very complex because there are so many variables. And by that, I mean that you know, with 13 vitamins and I think we require 82 minerals and micro minerals in our diet and in our bodies. And you think about all of it and then the toxicities of things like seed oils and high omega six and then and so all of these complexities, they all come, they create a very, very complex environment, which is what has made nutrition science so difficult, is the fact that we’re dealing with so many variables. So even the most it, you know, even the most intelligent people like Einstein, you know, found this overwhelmingly complex to deal with. Again, just because there’s there’s so many… There are so many variables in these equations.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:17:05] Hmm. I think one of the challenges there is that we have been, I don’t want to say brainwashed, but we have come to accept that the gold standard in health care is the randomised double-blind controlled study where you isolate one variable at a time, which is terrific for getting a pharmaceutical product to market, but it’s just not how the human body works.
Dr Chris Knobbe [00:17:28] Exactly. That’s that’s exactly right.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:17:32] Now, listen, let’s kick in here because you’ve mentioned seed oils a few times, and I wondered if you might just give us seed oils 101. You know, the history, how they’re made, why are they made, etc.. Why is this so bad about and let’s start with the history. What is seed oils? What are they?
Dr Chris Knobbe [00:17:49] Okay, So that’s a great question and it’s a very, very long answer, but I’ll try to make this fairly, fairly short run. So if you look at the world’s… The history of the diet. You know, as far back in history as you can you’ll find that really for the most part, seed oil did not exist except in extremely small quantities and primarily only in certain areas, without getting into great detail here, but up through about 1865, the world had almost no seed oils. And the research that I have done suggests that 90 to 95% of the world’s population up through 1865, had never seen, smelled, tasted or touched a vegetable oil of any type. The rest of the world… So some of the world had olive oil and some of the world had tiny amounts of coconut oil, sesame oil, palm oil, a few types of oils, safflower oil in a few populations. But as I said, probably 5 to 10% of the population had ever had any amount of oil up through 1865. And this is when Americans introduced cottonseed oil into the food supply for the first time, was right after the American Civil War ending in 1865. So probably 1866 that the first people started to consume vegetable oils. But the industrial Revolutionists that were making these oils, they weren’t having a… They weren’t getting much success in selling these because people had only known cottonseed oil as machine oil and lamp oil primarily. They weren’t familiar with consuming any kind of oil other than possibly olive oil, which very, very few people would have ever had. They weren’t… So they weren’t familiar with this as a potential food. So the seed oil manufacturers, they began to put the you know, they first made margarine, which is a mixture of butter and cottonseed oil. And then they began that… But, you know, this was not a big money-maker And so then they began to adulterate olive oil in the 1860s. For certain, in the 1870s, there were adulterating olive oil with cottonseed oil. The French made complaint in 1880 about that after we shipped something like 55,000 barrels, I believe it was of oil to France under the name of olive oil, which they knew was an olive oil by the taste. And they quit importing our oils at that point for quite a long time.
Dr Chris Knobbe [00:20:55] By 1909, soybean oil came on the market. And then after that, you have the landslide of all the rest of the oil. So today, for example, now we have soybean, corn, canola, cottonseed, rapeseed, grapeseed, sunflower, safflower rice, bran, sesame, peanut oils. Those are really what I would call the seed oils. The branch of oils that are mostly coming from seeds and beans, but mostly seeds. And so all of those oils then have just exploded in the food supply, which really began in America and was shortly followed thereafter in the 19th century by the UK and then kind of spreading into the rest of Europe and then to… And then gradually to the rest of the world with Asia being really the last to take up our type of oil consumption. And so let me give you some figures. So in 1865, seed oil consumption in the United States was 0.0g per person per day, or 0.0000 is just virtually zero, right? By 1900, seed oil was about 1.2g per person per day. By 1909, it had jumped to nine grams per person per day because of soybean oil’s introduction. So at that time, we just had cottonseed oil and soybean oil and a little bit of olive oil primarily, and then all these other oils came by. By 1960, in the U.S., we were consuming 19.5g of seed oil per person per day, or vegetable oils per person per day. And by 2010, 80.5g of vegetable oils per person per day. 80g is 720 calories. That’s 32% of U.S. caloric intake. Now, this is not corrected for losses, but if you correct for losses, even in the worst, you know that the greatest losses, you’re looking at about 24% of the food supply, roughly a fourth of the food supply in the United States is coming from these factories that are producing seed oils, right? And so with that, let me just say, because a lot of physicians will be hearing this, I guess primarily physicians that are omega six consumption went from 1.1% in 1865 when we didn’t have any seed oils at all to about 2.2%, I believe it was in 1909, all to 7.8%. By 1999, I believe it was. And by 2008, 11.5% or 11.8%. One of those two by 2010 our omega six consumption. All right, so we had a 12-fold increase in our omega six. That’s just omega-six linoleic acid, which is about 90% of the total omega-six in any food supply.
Dr Chris Knobbe [00:24:05] So we we increased our omega-six consumption, whether you look at it by percentage or by mass, about 11-fold between 1865 and 2008, okay. And why is this so problematic? Well, the main reason is, is because we were not… We were never meant, I don’t believe, to ever consume seed oils, naturally. First of all, it’s known as a totally unnatural food with a very high omega-six content, which I can come back to and discuss in specifics. But we accumulate these omega sixs and omega threes in our body fat, our cell membranes that are in our mitochondrial membranes. And what happens is, is that the body fat begins to reflect the fatty acid content that is in the diet. And that happens over about a three-year period. So whatever you’ve consumed over the last three years roughly will be reflected in your body fat fatty acid composition. And so the omega six then goes very high. So let me give you an example. So in… There was four popular ancestrally living populations. I won’t go into which ones. That there was four of them that were in 1968, 69 that were completely ancestrally living in the Pacific Islands, studied by Ian Prior and colleagues and their omega-six linoleic acid in their body fat averaged 2.84%, I believe it was right around 2.8%, which I believe is a totally ancestral level of omega six in our body fat. Americans were at, in 1960 or 1959 sorry, we were at 9.5% omega six linoleic acid in our body fat on average. And in 2008 we were at 21.5% omega six linoleic acid. So instead of being 2.8%, we’re at 21.5% and since 19… And we’ve looked at… I’ve looked at almost every possible adipose fatty acid analysis type study around the world done… In the, I mean since it’s been available, which is the 1950s and since 1990 the average omega six linoleic acid in all the studies I think is around it’s a little over 14% so that’s where we are. We should be at to under 3%. And again, we should be under 3% on our body fat because we should be at about 1.1% roughly in our diet. And whatever’s in your diet will roughly double in your body fat. If you consume that for a long period of time, I say roughly. So I’ve looked at a number of different ancestrally living populations and they’re all under 2% omega-six linoleic acid. And all of these ancestrally living populations like the Maasai of Kenya and Tanzania, like the Katagans, like the Papua New Guineans of Tucha Centa, the Ache of Paraguay, for example, these populations, they they’re all under their omega six linoleic acid consumption in their diet is under 2%.
Dr Chris Knobbe [00:27:45] And as I said, they’re the body fat in those that were studied was averaged around two point… It ranged from about 2.6% to 3.2%, averaging around 2.8% omega-six linoleic acid. So when the omega-six linoleic acid accumulates in your body, in your body fat, which is also reflected in your cellular membranes and in your inner mitochondrial membranes, this sets up an environment that is number one, pro-oxidative, number two, pro-inflammatory, number three, toxic through advanced lipid oxidation in products. And number four, nutrient deficient. And number four, nutrient deficient means that the seed oils, the vegetable oils, all of them do not contain any vitamins, A, D or K2. None of them contain any A, D or K2. And butter, lard and beef tallow contain vitamins A, D and K2. Lard is not a very good source, but butter, for example, or animal fat and beef tallow are very good sources of vitamins A, D and K2. So not only are we… Could discuss each one of those mechanisms, but, you know, there’s a lot to unpack there about those mechanisms. But basically, I call those the four pillars of Hazard that the seed oils are driving. And so along with that, you know, if you look at all of the different chronic diseases, you know, for example, you know, coronary heart disease was extraordinarily rare, was practically unknown in the 19th century, cancer was once pretty rare. We can go through the details. Age-related macular degeneration essentially did not exist in the mid-19th century until very, very few cases in the entire 19th century. You know, diabetes was in the United States was it a 0.00 to 8% that’s in 19 or in 1890. That’s 2.8 per 100,000 people. Where was it in 2016? 13,000 for 100,000 people in the United States. So diabetes, for example, elevated 4,643 fold between 1890 and 2016. You know, metabolic syndrome was unknown in the 19th century. You know, there was a few cases noted in, you know, right around 1920 and noted again in the late 1930s or early 40s, I believe it was. And you know, but today it’s common, right? It’s more than a third of the population in…
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:30:36] And I mean I think our colleagues might… Some of our colleagues may argue well you know life expectancy then was you know if you got to 50 or 60 you were doing well. So this is why we’re seeing this uptake. This would be the common response to that assertion that these kind of processed foods are having that kind of impact. You know, what do you say to that?
Dr Chris Knobbe [00:31:00] Yeah. You know, so when I do a podcast like this, sometimes, Ron, I try to pull a few things that I think might come up and this is one of them. So because, you know, even physicians and even epidemiologists do not seem to understand that because the average life expectancy was low in 1800, 1900, that doesn’t mean that people were dying in middle age. It was because primarily because of the fact that children died very young in that era. And they do in all populations that that they don’t have clean, clean water, clean potable water and do not have sewer systems and do not have medical care at all. There’s a very high child death rate and so, for example, in the year 1800, 43.3% of the world’s children died before their fifth birthday. In 1900, it wasn’t much better, 36.2%. Excuse me, of the world’s children died before their fifth birthday. Even in Sweden, which had the one of the lowest levels of childhood mortality, their mortality in 1900, I think, was 22% for… So 22% of children did not live to see their fifth birthday in 1900 in Sweden. If you look at… So this is the statistics I have that so… But if people survive childhood, then they live to two ripe old ages. Generally speaking. Like we do and for example, this is the data on England and Wales. So in 1891, 50% of the population survived past age, 52, 30% past age 66, 20% past age 73, and 5% past age 85. In 1911, in England and Wales, 64% of the population was alive past age 50, 53% past age 60, 36% past age 70, and 15% past age 80. So, you know, right there, we… You know, fully answer the question about, well, people didn’t get chronic diseases because they didn’t live long enough. They absolutely always have. Throughout all of history, if you survive past age five, typically people would survive into their 60s, 70s, 80s and beyond.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:33:39] Yes, because I mean, it’s just simple maths, isn’t it? Because if somebody… If you had two people, one at 80 and one in dying at the age of two, well then the average life expectancy of the population is 40.
Dr Chris Knobbe [00:33:51] Exactly.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:33:52] Or something like that…
Dr Chris Knobbe [00:33:55] So yeah, if you have a family of three and the father lives to age 80 and the mother to age 70 and the child dies in infancy, that population of three, the average age of death is 50, right? And that’s basically, you know, in the United States and in the in the 19th century, the typical family had 6 or 7 children. They could expect to lose 2 or 3 of those children before age five. That would be ten.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:34:23] The other…
Dr Chris Knobbe [00:34:24] Other percent would die in childbirth. 4% of the women died in childbirth.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:34:28] Yeah. Thank you for outlining that, Chris. I’ve never heard it put quite as succinctly and analytically as that. And I think that’s a really important message and the other side of that, of course, is that type two diabetes, for example, used to be called late onset diabetes, where we had to drop that term because now kids are getting it.
Dr Chris Knobbe [00:34:50] Right. So, you know, when I was in you know, I graduated from medical school in 1990. And I don’t think that there was any children or teenage… Anybody under 18 really that ever had diabetes back in that era. Now we’re… Now it’s a common condition in childhood, right?
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:35:11] And you’ve mentioned the history of the seed oils, and you’ve mentioned omega six. I love that. Four pillars of hazard, oxidative, inflammatory, toxic and nutrient deficiency. Well, that is beautifully outlined there. That and the common denominator it should be reminding our listener, too, is in all of the diseases, depending on how your genes express those diseases, the common denominator is chronic inflammation.
Dr Chris Knobbe [00:35:40] Yes. Well, and I would say that the oxidation, Ron, I mean, this is I think it’s far more important than the inflammation.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:35:53] Interesting.
Dr Chris Knobbe [00:35:53] It’s a much more difficult concept, the oxidation, but the… When you accumulate unsaturated fats in your body, which you know, which we should not this the… Those unsaturated fats because of the double bonds, they’re a setup for oxidation. And the reason that they are is because we have something like well first of all, that the you know, the free radicals, which are really… Hydroxyl radicals, singlet oxygen, superoxide radicals and hydrogen peroxide. Those are going to… All of those collectively will react with unsaturated fats to produce an unsaturated lipid hydrogen peroxide. And those will break down then into the advanced lipid oxidation end products like 4-Hydroxynonenal, 4-Hydroxyphenylacetaldehyde, MDA, carboxyl pyrro acrolein. And there’s literally hundreds of others and all of these advanced lipid oxidation and products, they’re collectively known to be cytotoxic, genotoxic, mutagenic, carcinogenic, chromogenic, obesogenic, diabetic genic. They’re driving all of these conditions. Now, as far as that, let me go back to that… So that’s kind of the toxic part of it. The oxidation part of it, though, is very similar when you… So when you fill up your membranes, whether it’s cell membranes or mitochondrial membranes with unsaturated fats, one of the things that’s happening there is that and this is an exceedingly difficult concept to explain in words, but one of the things that happens there is this is damaging to the inner mitochondrial membrane, which is exactly where the electron transport chain is taking place. And that inner mitochondrial membrane is critically important, that it be secure and able to retain a hydrogen proton gradient and when you fill up that membrane with unsaturated fats and those unsaturated fats, then oxidise, you create pores in that inner mitochondrial membrane that allows the hydrogen protons to leak out. And that membrane then wouldn’t be… When it becomes leaky, you lose the ability for the electron transport chain to produce ATP number one, becausethose hydrogen protons are actually what fuel the production that the transformation of ADP to ATP. And in the same process, when you lose those hydrogen protons, you also produce reactive oxygen species.
Dr Chris Knobbe [00:38:56] And at the cellular level, the first thing that or the very next thing that happens in this scenario, Ron, is that the cell becomes insulin resistant and the cell becomes insulin resistant. I say because of lack of a better way to understand it that the cell is sick in this scenario and that to me, the cell is putting up the stop signs saying, I’m sick, I can’t handle any more food. You know, don’t send any glucose or any fatty acids, anything into this cell into the cell. Because I… You know, my electron transport chain is shutting down, right? My cellular energy production is shutting down and… But anyway, so the cell becomes insulin resistant in this scenario. And this is known and, you know, I always say that the cell is really just a microcosm of the entire body, right? And so the entire body then becomes insulin resistant. I mean, we talk about it at the level of the liver and at the adipose and then the muscle. But it starts with, in my view, it’s driven primarily by high omega-six consumption. I’m not saying that’s the only driver, but I think it is the major driver of this. Now, there are other things that can also drive insulin resistance and these are any… Almost any kind of nutrient deficiency can also add to insulin resistance for example, lack of magnesium, thiamine deficiency, vitamin C deficiency, increased cortisol, which might be driven by leaky gut, any kind of inflammation. All of these things contribute to insulin resistance. But that the thing that I have to go back to is, is that all of these populations, if I look at… If I gave you examples like, you know, Americans in 1890 that had 2.8 per 100,000 people that were diabetic, we know insulin resistance practically did not exist. And the thing that also did not exist was seed oils. You know, we had less than one or about one gram of seed oils for the previous 35 years in the food supply in 1890, right? And you know, as the seed oils increased right along with that tracking precisely with that increase in seed oils and omega six consumption should we have we see metabolic syndrome and diabetes go through the roof and so did cancer and so did coronary heart disease. They all run together.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:41:40] And to remind our listeners who hearing about, you know, you identifying oxidation as being the problem many people would know that’s why antioxidants are now considered such an important, perhaps supplement, but certainly always has been a nutrient. Antioxidants like vitamin C is a good example, an antioxidant to combat oxidative stress. I mean, just going back to 101 there to ground out our listener. And the other thing, interesting to hear you focus so much on the mitochondria and the electron transport chain. There’s a whole story there isn’t that, Chris? Because, you know, I’m just coming into the world of quantum biology and a lot going on in that space. But mitochondria and specifically ATP are where energy is produced. So many conditions now being seen as metabolic conditions, problems with mitochondrial function rather than genetic, isn’t it? There’s a kind of a little bit of a tension going on between no, cancer’s a genetic disease, it’s just bad luck and others could say, no, actually cancer is a metabolic disease. It’s a problem with production of energy to keep our body systems going.
Dr Chris Knobbe [00:42:59] Yes. And I absolutely believe that, that cancer is a metabolic disease, that’s where it begins. It doesn’t begin with the genetic mutations. It begins with the metabolic dysfunction and when you lose cellular energy production, cellular housekeeping goes down the tubes and, you know, the next… So I think what follows eventually is the mutations. And the more that I learn about cancer, the more I see that, you know, even a single cancer that like if you diagnosed a patient with a breast cancer and you say, well, she has a single type of cancer, but really that individual would have… If you analysed all the different cells, you would find that there are myriad different kinds of genetic mutations in that single individual, right? And why is that is because, you know, as I said, it’s a metabolic disease that’s driving… The downstream effects of which are all these mutations. And so I’ll go back and mention here, since we’re on the topic of cancer for a moment, Ron, that in the United States, cancer took the lives of 1 in 188 people in 1811. That was in Boston, Massachusetts, the town of Boston. It was a population of about 30,000 people at the time. But they, you know, physicians have been well acquainted with cancer for millennia. But anyway, so 1 in 188 people died in the US, or at least in Boston in 1811 of cancer. That’s about 0.5%. In 1900, 1 in 17 people in the US died of cancer that’s 5.8%. In 2010, about 1 in 3 people died of cancer that’s around 30, it was around 32.1%, I believe is the number. So how do we go from one and 188 in 1811 to nearly 1 in 3 dying of cancer in a period of 200 years? And the thing that’s changed is processed foods and, again, processed foods or sugar, refined flours and vegetable oils. And, you know, so I think that, you know, my view is that the vegetable oils are responsible for about 90% of the obesity. And I, I honestly believe it’s 98, 99% or more the cause of diabetes and metabolic syndrome is high omega six in the diet is my belief system. I absolutely believe that refined sugars and refined flowers are adding to this problem because of the fact that they’re nutrient-deficient. And just as you mentioned a little while ago, you know, the… So the antioxidant vitamins like vitamin E and vitamin C, well, we should be getting those from sources you know, that, you know, whole grain flours, for example, could be rich in vitamin E and you know, sugar is a nutrient deficient food. And so this is a contributor to the whole problem. So… But you know in 1865 and try to remember the exact number, but it was something like 2 or 3 or 4% of the diet was processed food, really. And that was just sugar. I’m sorry, I can’t remember the exact number. But by… But in the United States, by 2010, 63% of the American diet is made up of refined flours, refined sugar, vegetable oils and trans fat, right? And that’s the problem right there. Big picture big stuff. It’s just that, you know, my you know, the evidence that I’ve, you know, been digging up for the last eight years really is, is that I, you know, I just keep seeing over and over that it’s the seed oil is sort of the major driver.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:47:09] You know. And I mean, going back to your journey from 1994 to 2011 and visiting all of those practitioners, the vast majority of cancer research and treatment focuses on the genetic, you know, the genetic approach to cancer. And as you’ve observed, even within… A woman with or anybody with breast cancer or prostate cancer, for a man, if you took a sample of that cancer, there would be a myriad of genetic profiles within that one cancer. In one person so it’s like we do have our own genetic profile in our cells in a normal situation. But part of cancer is millions of mutations within the one person. So how do you target millions, you know? Anyway, that’s our story. Well, that’s all.
Dr Chris Knobbe [00:48:01] I want to answer that just real quick if I could. I want to say that there is and I have become very good friends with Dr Azra Raza, who is an oncologist in New York and a very well-known oncologist. But anyway, you know, now that I read her book called The First Cell, which is about where cancer is coming from, even she would completely agree with me that there is only one way to deal with this epidemic of cancer, and that’s to prevent it. We’re never going to solve this cancer problem by trying to treat cancers that have already developed. And the improvement in patient’s lives in the last 50 years of cancer treatment is almost nil. We’ve increased the survival about two months in the last 50 years across the board with major cancers. With all of this, you know, chemotherapy, radiation and surgery, right? so, yeah, we have to prevent it and the only way to prevent it is through healthy food.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:49:31] Gee… Though, Chris, with the trajectory of public health messages coming out from professional organisations, government, media and all that about avoid saturated fat and use seed oils as an alternative. And you’ve identified the four pillars of hazard oxidation, inflammation, toxicity, and nutrient deficiency. Are you optimistic about the trajectory we’re on as a society?
Dr Chris Knobbe [00:49:57] No, I’m not optimistic. No, unfortunately. But, you know, I but… I do know, for example, that we’ve reached a few million people with this message. Have we changed a few million lives? I hope so. I don’t really know. But there’s only one way to change this and that’s, I think I believe you know, we have to do this through science. If we don’t do it through science, convince people through the science like we’re talking about today, we’re never going to get anywhere. And so we you know, but I think we need to change. We need to change positions. We need to change the scientific landscape, and we need to change the public’s. And all of those coming together if physicians don’t change their patients, what will force them to change one day. They’ll come to them and say, Doctor, you don’t know this. You don’t know that these vegetable oils are dangerous or something like that, you know? And, you know, I think that will force physicians to reconsider their positions and start to take notice of the fact that we have no education in nutrition in our medical schools for the most part. And what we do get is probably wrong.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:51:19] Mm hmm. Well, I would add one extra thing to your call for it being science-based, and that is to remind our listener and any physician listening to this that when we’re talking about science, we’re not just talking about the study of pathology and pharmacology. We’re talking about the study of anatomy, biochemistry, physiology, histology. You know, the basic science is about how the body works and goes wrong. Yeah, but listen, let’s move on because you have focussed on two foundations, one focussed on macular degeneration, which you’ve mentioned, and the other on ancestral diets, which I have to say is music to our ears. But macular degeneration, let’s start with that. And you mentioned it earlier on and tell us what macular degeneration is. What can go wrong? What is it? How common is it?
Dr Chris Knobbe [00:52:15] Okay. So the macula is the central retina. It’s responsible for approximately the central ten degrees of vision. And macular degeneration is just, as the name implies, is a degeneration of that part of the retina. The most important part of the retina, which is where all the work is being done to process the central vision. So the macular sees people’s faces. It sees what we’re reading, it sees stop signs, allows you to drive, read, see your children’s and grandchildren’s faces and all those kinds of things. So if it… If the macula degenerates, you will lose to some degree that central vision. And so this disease what I found, Ron, was when I… Back in 2013, when I first, you know, the question came to me that, you know, could it be that processed foods are driving macular degeneration? I had to know was macular degeneration once rare because it needed to be rare if this is a disease of processed foods because I knew I had some, you know, some evidence even back in 2013 that there wasn’t a lot of processed food in the world and in the 19th… Mid-19th century, for example. And so what I found was that between 1851, when macular degeneration was first discoverable because of the invention of the ophthalmoscope and 1930, so about an 80-year period, there was no more than about 50, 5 0 cases of macular degeneration. AMD in all the world’s literature was no more than about 50 cases.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:54:02] Well, so this was between hang on, between 1851 and?
Dr Chris Knobbe [00:54:07] 1930.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:54:08] 1930. Yeah. No, this is when people were looking this is when they had a device to actually diagnose whether it was there or not.
Dr Chris Knobbe [00:54:15] And they were looking…
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:54:17] And they were looking?
Dr Chris Knobbe [00:54:17] They absolutely were, yeah. There was a horde of ophthalmic scopes developed in that period. By 1914, I believe it was, there was 200 models. This is different brands and models in use around the world. It was often the scope was in use in every continent by the 1860s. And anyway, yeah.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:54:41] So the foundation for this observation is laid down. I have a feeling it’s a very sad story we’re about to hear, but. Go on.
Dr Chris Knobbe [00:54:49] Yes, yes, yes. So let’s get to the end since we’re short on time. But the…
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:54:55] No, no, we’re not short on time, Chris. Okay. There’s no time restraint on this at all.
Dr Chris Knobbe [00:54:59] Okay. So we’re… So by 2020, it was estimated that 196 million people have macular degeneration. By 2040, that’s expected to grow to 288 million people with macular degeneration. And already by 2004, I believe it was, the World Health Organisation had determined that 14 million people in the world had severe vision loss and or blindness bilaterally due to AMD. So there’s so again, we went from no more than 50 cases in an 80-year period to a 196 million people affected by 2020. And you know, by 2004, 14 million people in the world with very, very poor vision in both eyes due to macular degeneration. It’s a very sad story. And of course, along with that, the whole world has followed really the United States example, and they’re consuming really what I consider our foods, our processed foods is you know and… So it’s just a… Again and all the other diseases have come with it coronary heart disease, strokes, cancer, diabetes, metabolic diseases all runs together. So it’s just to me, it’s just astonishing Ron, the more I would look at all of these conditions, how they were once all medical rarities for the most part.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:56:39] And how in today’s modern science, modern medicine world, how is macular degeneration treated?
Dr Chris Knobbe [00:56:47] Well, okay, So if it’s the dry type, there are two kinds, essentially two kinds of macular degeneration, a dry form and a wet form and the dry form is the most common form. I think it’s roughly 80% of the population… 80% of the affected have the dry form. And I think around 15% to 20% eventually will develop the wet form. But the wet form is certainly more threatening. The dry form it’s treated… Allopathic ophthalmology would treat the dry form with vitamin supplements that’s it for the most part. That’s been the mainstay of treatment for almost all of our ophthalmology history. And the wet form then was treated with anti-VEGF drugs. The anti-vascular endothelial growth factor inhibitor drugs, which help to prevent the growth of the vessels that grow underneath the retina when there’s a break in Bruch’s membrane. But anyway, it’s those vessels that they break and bleed. They leak fluid or break and bleed, and therefore they can rapidly damage and destroy the macula and therefore lead to a central scotoma, central blind spot.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:58:13] But, Chris, did I hear you right? The dry form is the most common, 80%. And traditionally, did I hear this correctly? Vitamin therapy was used.
Dr Chris Knobbe [00:58:23] Mm hmm. Still is.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:58:24] Wow. Tell me what vitamins we’re talking about.
Dr Chris Knobbe [00:58:28] So the Arabs formula vitamins are really the mainstay, and that’s the age-related eye disease study vitamins. And so that’s just vitamins E, C, beta carotene, zinc and copper. That’s right. And there’s very… I don’t think there’s really any benefit to those. In fact, I think they could be considered harmful.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:58:51] Really?
Dr Chris Knobbe [00:58:52] More I can I would suggest that there may be more harm… Do more harm than good in our overall.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:59:00] Okay. Interesting. Interesting. Okay. So I’m guessing that really the treatment isn’t really that great for this.
Dr Chris Knobbe [00:59:10] No, not at all.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:59:10] This degenerative disease is not an awesome one, right? Yeah. Right. So just because we’re using vitamins doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do for the… Why do you think that’s bad? What? What is it? You know, you mentioned those then doing more harm than good.
Dr Chris Knobbe [00:59:25] Mm hmm. Do you mean mechanistically? What’s going on?
Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:59:29] Well, you know, I would have thought all the vitamins, they’re going to enrich the flow of circulation, detox the area, regenerate. The vitamins have that kind of association with the mind. I’m just intrigued that it’s doing more harm than good.
Dr Chris Knobbe [00:59:46] Well, it would, you know, purely B…, you know, speculation on my part to say Ron, because I don’t know, the exact mechanisms, but I would speculate that it’s the wrong way to get them. In fact, you know, for the most part, I don’t think that supplements are the way to go with vitamins and or minerals. Either one I think that they best need to come through a whole food matrix. They… So minerals are very, very poorly absorbed through and when given in an inorganic matrix, in other words, when given in a supplement-type form, right? And vitamins and it’s you know, it’s that’s a complex topic. But I think it’s… There’s dangers in giving large amounts of single vitamins that really don’t reflect what would be in the food, for example. So like if you were to consume get vitamin E in food, right? You have four different kinds of tocopherol and four different kinds of tocotrienols, right? So you have eight different forms of vitamin E that you would get through a natural food. But if you… But when given in a supplement, they give one alpha-tocopherol, right? And so this alpha-tocopherol then could compete with the other tocopherol and the other tocotrienols, perhaps, there’s something wrong with this, though, because obviously, you know, these supplements, the only reason that they ever gave macular degeneration patients, this group of supplements was because this is primarily what was being used to try to prevent heart disease was vitamins, E, C, beta carotene, zinc and copper I think was, you know, it was roughly the same things. And so they just followed in their footsteps and, you know, tried to, you know, tried to use this for macular degeneration.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [01:01:58] Hmm. Well, I mean, this is a perfect segway into the discussion about ancestry, your other foundation, the Ancestral Health Foundation. And you’ve mentioned ancestral diets. And I’m really interested… I agree with you read the supplements and I’m reminded of one podcast we did with Professor Fred Provenza, who wrote a wonderful book called Nourishment. And he made the point that even the humble strawberry has 5000 active components, most of which we don’t know what they do. But there’s something about nature’s laboratory that has put them all there for a reason. And your point about the four different, like, different forms of vitamin E? Tell us a bit about the Ancestral Health Foundation and the Ancestral Diet.
Dr Chris Knobbe [01:02:48] Well, so well, first of all, the Ancestral Health Foundation is a non-profit organisation that we developed. We started, we initiated, started and so I really I work for two foundations that one and cure AMD Foundation which is, relates to age-related macular degeneration. But these are non-profit organisations and our goal with these organisations really is to do research and to spread the message about ancestral diets. And so what are ancestral diets? Well, they’re the diets of our ancestors and it does and we all have obviously different… From different countries and different continents. We have very different diets. But those all… But these different diets as Weston Price showed in the 1930s, they all have some commonalities and to me, I think it’s easiest to review what these diets don’t have. And they don’t have that ancestral diets don’t have added sugar in significant amounts. Certainly, they don’t have refined flours and they don’t have any vegetable oils or trans fats. And so whether those diets are, you know, mostly fish and rice and vegetables like the traditional Japanese diet or whether the diet is, you know, primarily sweet potatoes like the Papua New Guineans of Tucha Centa, or whether the diet is milk, meat and blood of the cattle. They herd like the Maasai of Kenya and Tanzania, or whether the diet is coconut, fish, starchy tubers and fruit like the Tokelauns’ traditional diet. All of these diets share one thing in common they’re all from, you know, nature’s laboratories. And so they’re from their natural foods, first of all, that exist in nature and they’re not processed, right? And they’re all low in omega six. We’ll come back to that, right? And so, you know, Weston Price found that the native traditional diets contained ten times more fat-soluble vitamins as A, D and K2, primarily four times more water-soluble vitamins as all the B vitamins and C and one and a half to 60 times more minerals than did the American diets of his day, which was the 1930s. So right there we just… We can understand that native traditional diets are nutrient-dense diets. They’re rich in vitamins and minerals. And this is what we constantly overlook. You know, it’s like being a, you know, a football player or a basketball player or whatever, you know, that, you know, your coaches will say fundamentals, fundamentals, fundamentals, right? And this is what we have to get back to with our diets if we want to be healthy, is we need to go back to the fundamentals. And the fundamentals are ancestral diets and they don’t have to be your own ancestors’ diet. If you know, if I’m an American, but if I want to eat like a 19th-century American, it works. But if I want to eat like a 19th-century Japanese from Japan, that also works. Or if I want to eat like a South Pacific Islander, that will also work for me, you know, because those diets I’ll share the fact that they’re nutrient dense and they eliminate the nutrient deficient and toxic foods.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [01:06:38] Yeah, well, Chris, I mean, that’s just a wonderful note for us to finish on because I was going to ask you, maybe you would add a few tips to our listeners because they’re listening to this and they’re thinking that I think you’ve just outlined really that… Actually, one question I will ask you finishing taking a step back from, you know, we’re all on a health journey together in this modern world and taking a step back from your role in foundations and the doctor, just as an individual, what do you think the biggest challenge is for us as individuals on that health journey?
Dr Chris Knobbe [01:07:14] You mean the biggest challenge for us personally or as individuals?
Dr Ron Ehrlich [01:07:18] Yeah, personally as individuals.
Dr Chris Knobbe [01:07:21] You know, it’s interesting. That’s a great question and I’m not sure I really know the answer, Ron, but I’ll tell you that as individuals, I think that my experience tells me that the majority of people, even if they understand this knowledge, they will not… They’re not willing to change their diet to remain healthy. I think they just don’t realise how dangerous, you know, what they’re doing is that they’re playing Russian roulette with their diet and their health and… But I would say that 85% of the population is not really willing to go to any significant lengths to change their diet, typically. And that’s a sad fact. We need to change that but… So that I mean, that speaks to the, you know, to the fact that, you know, it would be best if we could change our food supply, you know, and get rid of the vegetable oils, for example. But I don’t see that ever happening.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [01:08:27] Hmm. Chris, thank you so much for today. I have been so looking forward to this conversation, as I know we both have. And I will have… We will, of course, have links to both these wonderful foundations that you are such an integral part of. Thank you so much for today.
Dr Chris Knobbe [01:08:43] Ron, can I mention one thing?
Dr Ron Ehrlich [01:08:44] Sure.
Dr Chris Knobbe [01:08:44] Yeah. So the latest book I have is called The Ancestral Diet Revolution.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [01:08:49] Absolutely. Now, we should actually let’s let’s just stop there for a moment because I do want to… Look, I have that in my list of questions and I did want to mention that, too, because that’s your latest book. I know you wrote a book in 2019 Ancestral Dietary Strategy to Prevent and Treat Macular Degeneration. But your latest book, The Ancestral Diet Revolution. Tell us about that.
Dr Chris Knobbe [01:09:17] Well, yeah. So the Ancestral Diet Revolution is our latest book just came out a few months ago. And it’s all about everything we’re talking about focuses on the dangers of of seed oils and processed foods. And we have over 80 graphs in that book and about 40 tables. This is the huge majority of this book is original work will publish a lot of this evidence in scientific papers but it’s in the book now. And I would encourage people to get this book and this is a shameless plug for the book but…
Dr Ron Ehrlich [01:09:56] That’s okay.
Dr Chris Knobbe [01:09:57] But I want to say that we either profit from this book. Neither Suzanne Alexander, who’s my co-author on this, neither of us profit from this book. The royalties from the book go to these non-profit organisations that we work for, which we also don’t accept any compensation from. So we’re volunteers and we do this because we believe in this mission. And we know we feel like we’re on the right trajectory to help people and to change lives and to prevent chronic disease. And so we just ask that our listeners, whoever they are, viewers, that they give this some attention. And, you know, if they believe in this, spread this message. So you never know the life you saved may be your own or your family members.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [01:10:48] Well, that’s that’s a wonderful note to finish on and totally support that. And we will have links to that book and your foundation’s Chris on this website. And thank you for all of the work you are doing.
Dr Chris Knobbe [01:11:00] Thank you so much, Ron. It’s been a pleasure. I really appreciate it.
Dr Ron Ehrlich [01:11:03] Well, there was just so much in that podcast worth going back and listening to, making notes. And also, I would suggest importantly, to get Chris’s book, The Ancestral Diet Revolution. And a lot of what he talked about, there was just a taster of the many pearls that he has with him in that book. But, you know, the focus on omega six fatty acids, you know, which we hear about, you know, omega three is anti-inflammatory. Omega six is pro-inflammatory. And in nature, there is a balance between inflammation and anti-inflammatory processes. The process of living in the world creates free radicals and the more polluted and unnatural that world is, the higher the rate of free radicals that occur, radical oxygen species. And that is why it’s often said that we need antioxidants, to help deal with those free radicals. And when our diet is predominantly omega-6, our diet is predominantly inflammatory. But I love Chris’s four Pillars of Hazzard because it’s not just the inflammation, it’s the oxidative stress that these oils cause. Yes, the inflammation as well. They are toxic. He talked about them being mutagenic and hemogenic and a whole lot of other toxic processes that go on, but they are also nutrient deficient. So that’s really important. And what an amazing statistic about macular degeneration. Between 1851, when the instruments became available to assess macular degeneration. So this isn’t oh, we never looked at macular degeneration in the late 19th and early 20th century. Not true. Between 1851 and 1930, there were a total of 55 cases. By 2020, there were 196 million cases in that year alone. So something serious is going on here and when you hear your doctors say there’s no evidence to support X, Y, or Z, particularly when it comes to nutritional medicine, I think it would be fairer for that doctor to say, I haven’t read the evidence, but it’s there and it’s there in Chris books in spades. So I would suggest you read that book. Join his foundation, particularly the Ancestral Health Foundation. If you don’t have macular degeneration and if you do or you know somebody who does, I’m sure that would be another foundation to choose. We’ll have links to those foundations to Chris’s book in the website. I would encourage you to join our subscription model on the podcast. We’ve got some great additional resources for that where we curate over… The over 400 podcasts that I’ve done and or join our Unstress health membership where we dive even further into these health issues and create a wonderful and supportive community. I hope this finds you all well. Until next time. This is Dr Ron Ehrlich. Be Well.
This podcast provides general information and discussion about medicine, health and related subjects. The content is not intended and should not be construed as medical advice or as a substitute for care by a qualified medical practitioner. If you or any other person has a medical concern, he or she should consult with an appropriately qualified medical practitioner. Guests who speak in this podcast express their own opinions, experiences and conclusions.