[podcast]http://traffic.libsyn.com/llvlcshow/llvlc432-dr-kurt-harris.mp3[/podcast]
Dr. Kurt Harris rises from hiding for “Encore Week” 2011!
Welcome to Day 4 of our annual “Encore Week,” presented this year by CarbSmart.com. Every January, we start off with fresh, new interviews featuring the most interesting and popular guests from the previous year, as selected by YOU. And this “Encore Week” 2011 celebrating the best of the best from 2010 has been an awesome one indeed! We’ve already heard outstanding brand new interviews with Dr. Robert Lustig, Denise Minger, and Chris Masterjohn with one more to come with Robb Wolf to finish off the week.
Today we have for you Dr. Kurt Harris, the recently-gone-AWOL blogger at the PaNu blog. Dr. Harris was the single-most requested guest from the first half of 2010 to return for this special “Encore Week” 2011. Listen in as he accounts for his absence over the past 7-8 months, fills us in on where he’s going next with his life and blogging (YES, he’s coming back in 2011!), and hear him answer a SLEW of YOU questions! If you’ve missed hearing from Dr. Kurt Harris, then DON’T YOU DARE miss this incredible podcast interview!
LINKS MENTIONED IN EPISODE 432
– Visit our sponsor CarbSmart.com to check out the Belly Fat Cure For Successful Weight Loss products and to get Gary Taubes’ new book Why We Get Fat and What To Do About It for HALF PRICE this week only!
– Dr. Harris’ PaNu blog
– RELATED PODCAST: Dr. Kurt Harris: PaNu Means Paleo Nutrition! (Episode 325)
Hi Jimmy,
I can’t download this interview 🙁 Takes many hours and the connection brokes at 30% of the download..
Do you know when will be available to listen/save?
Best regards,
Susana
Try it now.
Ha! Nice drawn on shirt for Dr. Harris! Thanks for getting these up Jimmy, I like the hosted file solution.
Jimmy, very informative interview with Dr. Harris. Particularly that excessive n-6 may be the driving factor behind insulin resistance.
One small detail in the interview; he mentioned “statins” and “anti-inflammatory” in the same sentence when talking about cholesterol testing and heart attack risk reduction. I don’t believe that he believes that, but it may confuse people. You had a great discussion with Dr. Rosedale on the ridiculousness of those claims by statin manufacturers.
You heard correctly. Statins have an anti-inflammatory effect that accounts for their lowering of coronary events in those with established disease. This effect is incidental to their HMGCoA reductase effect. The point is that they they do not work by lowering your LDL, they work accidently in an anti-inflammatory way. This is borne out by the many statin studies that show no correlation between magnitude of LDL reduction and decrease in events, even when the statin has “worked”. The anti-inflammatory effect does not mean you should take them, though, as the side effects are still there and there is still no mortality benefit in primary prevention.
Dr. Harris,
thank you for your reply. I wasn’t expecting one directly from you. 🙂
Let me first say I’m not in any position to argue with you, I’m just trying to reconcile what I’ve heard from various respected sources.
In Jimmy’s interview with Dr. Rosedale, he pointed out that statins were designed to inhibit a specific enzyme that creates cholesterol in the liver. Dr. Rosedale mentioned how fortuitous it would be for a drug designed specifically to do one thing could also do something completely unrelated. Unless, the inhibition of cholesterol production by the liver also has an anti-inflammatory effect? If so how? I bring this up as a common sense question to ponder and don’t expect a detailed response. 🙂
Again, I appreciate the insight on n-6. I guess it is well known that n-6 is inflammatory. I’ve been wondering whether excessive insulin or leptin would intrinsically cause the cells to become resistant to them, or whether there’s some other driving factor that exacerbates the signaling problem.
BTW, I always point interested people to your Get Started page. I had converged towards similar conclusions. Saves me from having to create a page. 🙂
Here is just one recent review article that has free access.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2694580/pdf/nihms89194.pdf
It is fortuitous that there is an anti-inflammatory effect and it is also quite true. This is actually very common with drugs. It’s called a “side effect”.
That statins have anti-inflammatory effects is not really controversial. What is controversial is if you believe, as I do, that the beneficial effects are limited to the anti-inflammatory ones. If you do not believe in the lipid hypothesis (I don’t) then there must be some explanation for statins effects. This is not to say these anti-inflammatory effects are a reason to take them, however.
Kurt G. Harris, MD and author Gary Taubes are beyond any doubt the most influential men in my life at the present time and the impact of what I have learned from them upon my daily life is enormous. I shall always be in their debt. Kurt’s link to the NIH article on the Pleiotropic Effects of Statins was a real eye opener for me, and here is why: By way of background in order that you see from whence I come, I am a 78 year old Caucasian and retired banker. In November of 1982 endured six by-pass grafts on my coronary arteries using sections of my Great Saphenous vein and two of my mammary arteries. I had no elephants sitting on my chest symptom; only indigestion and pain down the back of my left arm, but an angiogram became my treadmill to the bypass table. I have been taking simvistatin for years, ostensibly to lower my LDL test values. I began with 20 mgs, then 40 and for the past four or five years 80 mgs/day. I have had no detectable liver damage or muscle pain from this dosage, but in the back of my mind, I have always wondered if I might be taking too much? Am I being victimized once again by well meaning physicians, cut from the same cloth as those who brought us the “high cholesterol precipitates heart attacks” hypothesis and the “fat is bad” notion which sentenced me and many other Americans to years of low fat diets which never worked? We were hoodwinked, as Gary and Kurt make abundantly clear; not by intentional evil doers, but by well intentioned researchers, physicians and gullible senators who misinterpreted the research results and acted upon it in such a way as to recommend to the general public a low fat high carbohydrate lifestyle. This has resulted in the obesity epidemic so prevalent today.
Over the years I flirted with the Aitkins diet which seemed to be working for me, but reading all the anti-Atkins print and “Low Fat Diet” books scared me into rejecting ketogenic diets, which were condemned by what seemed the majority of physicians and even our government and the leading health organizations like the A.M.A. (I still have many of these books which no longer occupy a prominent place on my book shelves. Among them are: Low-Fat Living, by Robert K. Cooper, Ph.D.; The McDougall Program For a Healthy Heart, by John A. McDougall, M.D.; Renewal, The Anti-Aging Revolution, by Timothy J. Smith, M.D.; Reversing Heart Disease, by Dr. Dean Ornish; and, Turn Off The Fat Genes, by Neal Barnard, M.D. These learned doctors certainly know more about medical matters than I, a lowly Navy Hospital Corpsman during the Korean War.) Whom was I to trust and believe? In the recent past I read Gary Taubes’ Good Calories, Bad Calories (three times, and counting). It was my epiphany, and more recently I acquired his “Why We Get Fat.” All the pieces of the puzzle fell into place for me and I am now convinced it was “All a Big Fat Lie,” as Gary set forth in his article I read in The Best American Science and Nature Writing (2003).
Now I am enthralled by the on-line blog of Dr. Kurt G. Harris which led me to the link to the Pleiotropic Effects of Statins. For almost 20 years I have been taking statins and as far as I can tell have suffered no adverse consequences. Avid record keeper that I am, 42 blood lipid panels have been tested between 7/19/91 and 1/7/2011. My average Total Cholesterol over this period was 193, with a high of 264, and a low of 121; my average LDLs were 98, with a high of 169 and a low of 39; my average HDLs were 72, with a high of 82, and a low of 35; and my average Triglycerides were 184, with a high of 307 and a low of 73. Over this period I have taken ever increasing doses of Simvistatin, which might explain the blood lipid levels even though I followed the SAD meal plan and for a long time the Low Fat approach. For the past few years I have been overweight, but not in the morbidly obese category. At 5’ 9” my weight shot up to 206 through the December holidays, but since January 1st, I have followed a ketogenic diet and during the month of January lost 16 pounds. I realize much of this was water, but I do test and show a moderate amount of ketone bodies in my urine, so I know I’m on the right track. When I reach my ideal weight say three months from now I will add back in a few more complex carbohydrates to level off, where I intend to remain the rest of my life. I do resistance exercises three times a week, and play a little golf.
My expectation was to see my LDLs go down and my HDLs go up simply because of the new way of eating, and I was anticipating the possibility of asking my cardiologist if I could reduce my simvistatin dosage accordingly. Table 1 on page 28 of the Statin Pleiotropy lists 12 highly desirable side effects of Stain drug administration independent of its effect on Cholesterol. Now I wonder, why would I want to go off a drug I tolerate so well, and which has such promising beneficial side effects? Naturally, I want to do what is in my best interest, who wouldn’t? But which is the most reasonable?
As an aside, my wife who is now 76 had a lipid profile as of 9/30/2010 of Total Cholesterol 261, Triglycerides 84, HDLs 84 and LDL (Calculated) of 164. Her GP doctor insisted she start simvistatin therapy with 20 mgs, which she was not able to tolerate, and discontinued. Her doctor, however, is still insistent. Gary Taubes in his “Why We Get Fat” book says on page 187: “For women, HDL levels are so good at predicting future heart disease that they are, effectively, the only predictors of risk that matters.” My wife’s HDLs are quite high and when she was 65 she had an unexplainable feeling in her chest which led to an angiogram. It showed she had a 10% blockage in just one of her coronary arteries. We reason that if in 65 years she had only a low level blockage in one of her coronary arteries, why assume she will suddenly develop arthrosclerosis? What are we missing here?
The evolutionary approach to what foods we developed to eat appeals to me. Sequencing of my Y-Chromosome puts me into Y-Haplogroup N1c1, which means I carry the TAT and M-178 mutations, among others. The human groups today with the highest percentage of this Haplogroup are the Sami and Finns in arctic Scandinavia. They were hunter-gatherers who followed their reindeer herds from Siberia up into Arctic Scandinavia, after the glaciers melted at the end of the last ice-age, 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. I’m happy to report that when Moses was bringing his tablets down from the mountain 6,000 years ago, my direct male ancestors were probably having a nice reindeer steak dinner, with fresh caught fish and a few berries, and had been doing so for a few thousand years. I should, therefore, do fine on my new diet plan, don’t you think?
In closing allow me to repeat my joy at the writings of Garry Taubes and Dr. Harris; they furnish the inspiration and motivation I need.
Sincerely,
Don Blankman
The Villages, Florida
Thanks Jimmy, I was able to download this excellent interview quite quickly. Been looking forward to this. Encore week has been fantastic.
Hi Jimmy,
many thanks for your extra work to put these new interviews available for us 🙂
And a special thanks for putting my question to Dr. Kurt Harris. 🙂
Great interview!!!
Best regards,
Susana
Dear Kurt
I have been under the impression that added nitrates to cure meats is strongly linked in with cancer – could you please elaborate on your view?
Great show – your no-nonsense approach is refreshing.
Kind regards,
Viktor
Nitrates in bacon are trivial compared to what you get in vegetables. Forget about nitrates and cancer. It’s nonsense.
Just wanted to update you on the pronunciation of Nueske’s bacon. Since I personally know the family, they pronounce their name “Nesky”. It is great bacon.
So noted. They should put that on their website. Everyone one I know in Wisconsin who eats it pronounces it the way I did: )
Jimmy, I really appreciate that you allow your interviewees to speak without interruption.
Kind regards from Australia
Great Interview Jimmy! Thanks.
While I somewhat agree with Dr Harris’ comments regarding the uselessness of lipid panels, try telling that to an insurance company when you are applying for health insurance.
I am well aware of that issue and there is nothing you can do about it if you want to buy life insurance. They should allow using coronary calcium scores to waive the cholesterol. There is still no need to submit at your doctor’s office, however. Your body, your money.
I assumed you meant life insurance. I have never had any of my 4 health insurance companies over the years demand lipids.
I was talking about health insurance and every application had questions about cholesterol i.e. have you ever been diagnosed with high cholesterol, or is your cholesterol over 240, or have you been prescribed or taken medication to lower cholesterol in the last 12 months. Even if you don’t buy into the whole cholesterol thing or don’t take medication, it will be in you medical records and they do check. Hell, one company even sent a nurse for an in-home physical. High cholesterol by itself won’t necessarily keep you from getting insurance, but they will jack the premium by as much as 50%.
PS – They also look at taking meds to control it as a negative, so you get dinged either way.
So you have confirmed that refusing to have it checked is a good idea. If they do not require it (most don’t in my experience – I just got health insurance at age 50 with no labs at all through Humana) – then you can honestly answer NO to whether you have a high TC can’t you? And you won’t be on statins either will you?
This is exactly my point. It can’t be in your records unless you pay someone to measure it. So tell your doctor not to. Your money, your body.
Jimmy, Kurt –
Fantastic show guys. Especially interesting to me was Kurt’s take on “checking under the hood” via bloodwork. Pragmatic…and sensical insight; just what we’ve come to expect from Dr Harris.
It’s good to have Dr. Harris back!
Dr. Harris’s comments on the ability of milk products to be highly insulagenic left me worried. Is it not advisable to use any butter and cream during low-carbing? How the insulin affect the ketones production? One of the reasons why I follow a low-carb diet is the migraine prevention. If high insulin is caused by any milk product,it it better to awoid it?
The point was to NOT worry about the insulin effects of milk proteins, not to start worrying about it. High insulin is from insulin resistance, not from eating foods that demand insulin. Read the blog for more on dairy products. Eat all the butter and cream you like. I do.
Dr. Harris, you suggest not worrying about insulin spikes because the problem is insulin resistance and not the insulin itself. Shouldn’t people with insulin resistance avoid insulagenic foods anyway?
In the interview you also mentioned that some “may” be able to repair their insulin resistance (ie. Richard Nickoley). Other than eliminating omega-6 and fructose and eating a clean PaNu style diet, what else can be done to increase the odds of repairing one’s insulin resistance?
Thanks for the excellent interview Jimmy! This was my favorite podcast thus far, I feel like I learned a great deal of new information in this latest interview from Dr. Harris and I can’t wait to learn more on the PaNu blog about what he has learned from his extensive research during his hiatus.
I am following a synthesis of the updated PaNu recommended 12 steps and the Jaminet’s Perfect Health diet and am feeling so much better! I kept trying to do various low carb plans and LC paleo for the last 2 yrs and it just was not working for me, but because of this new research I have included safe starches like white rice and tubers back into my diet and I finally feel like this is something I can stick with for life.
For me going too low carb led to heart palpitations, low energy, feeling depressed, inflammation in my knees, never feeling full, insomnia, etc.
Can’t wait to hear your upcoming interview with Paul Jaminet and I was also hoping maybe you will do an interview with Dr. Emily Deans from http://evolutionarypsychiatry.blogspot.com/ soon as well. She is the best blogger I have found so far discussing mental health from a paleo perspective. Thanks again!
Better get him back on here, Jimmy…he’s in hiding again! Anyway, good podcast. The about-face on Taubes/insulin was interesting.
We missed him at the Ancestral Health Symposium, too. I know a LOT is happening in his life right now.