She's done a number of different documentaries about Idaho, about salmon, about nature and now she's taken on the topic of nutrition. Specifically the nutrition of fat in the dietary guidelines, how we've been led astray as a country and sort of what are some of the details about that.
And really this film has a message of hope and it about what we can accomplish with a broader look at nutrition, specifically focusing on low-carb. And there are wonderful interviews with physicians and a lot of the preeminent people in the low-carb world and some actual footage of doctors and their patients and this message of hope of what a doctor-patient interaction can and should look like and the power that all this has.
So, in this interview we talk about her personal experience, her motivation for making the film, but also we have to be honest with ourselves, and the nutritional community as a whole and certainly the low-carb community has some mythology and has some just accepted beliefs about what the dietary guidelines say or what we think about vegetable oils.
And a documentary like this has to sort of toe the line; how much of the details do you do versus how much of the general picture do you portray. So I think this interview talks about some of that and hopefully you'll enjoy this to hear some of the process that Jen and her company went through in making this film and then also the reach it has and how it can impact people and help people.
So, enjoy this interview with Jen Eisenhart and make sure you check out our YouTube channel for Diet Doctor and DietDoctor.com where you can see all of our information to make low-carb simple to see how you can incorporate it into your life to transform your health, and even reach your clinicians and your physicians with our CME course and our material specifically for clinicians. Thanks a lot.
Jen Eisenhart, thank you so much for joining me on the Diet Doctor podcast today.
And I want to hear some of the background from you, what got you interested in this topic, specifically? And give us a little bit of your process on how you came to this journey of making this documentary.
And actually at one point I went through diabetes testing as a child. It was thought that I maybe had diabetes because I would have these hypoglycemic events. But I also really loved sugar and so I think I was just getting myself really buzzed on sugar and then crashing. So, I didn't really have so much of a weight struggle as I just knew that I had trouble with sugar and I decided about two and half years ago to take a sugar detox class.
And during that class, in fact the first night of the class, the instructor who was a nutritional therapist said, you know, not only do you need to cut out sugar, but you need to be eating a lot more fat. And that surprised me- including saturated fat, you know, was the message.
And I had spent my career working as a news journalist and, you know, I can't tell you how many interviews I did over the course of my career with nutritionists and dietitians, you know, just warning of the dangers of saturated fat and of fat in general. I grew up in the low-fat era and so I experienced that whole phenomenon that surrounded that era. So I started digging into this information, I started doing more research of my own and I just realized that there really hadn't been a comprehensive film done about how we kind of got the story so wrong about that.
And other films had kind of touched on it in various ways, but I felt like, you know, really stepping through the history and also the science in a measured way could be a valuable thing for a lot of people.
Now they may not think so, the people who put these on may not think so. So how did you approach it from that standpoint to say how you wanted to do this in terms of, you know, propaganda versus science? And I guess the hardest part of the question is how do you get out of your own bias as you're going through it, to say, "Am I hitting the right checkmarks?"
Another thing that we did is we didn't accept any food industry funding which as a small production company I can tell you it's a very difficult thing to do to, you know, not take those dollars that could potentially influence the way the film came out or could give a perceived bias to the film.
So we intentionally did this as a bootstrap production, you know, we did a couple of Indiegogo campaigns, with individual donations that come in through an Indiegogo campaign. So we intentionally didn't accept any of that kind of funding to keep the film as unbiased as we possibly could.
So we tried to raise that bar and produce a piece that we could be proud of, but not just that that we'd connect with the general public... a lot of time and attention was spent to the script in writing it in a way that was accessible to a broad range of people who might not want to read a nutrition book. You know, my dad is a perfect example. He is somebody who would love to watch a documentary like Fat Fiction, but he's not going to pick up a book, a nutrition book.
He likes to read, but he is not going to pick up a nutrition book and read about, you know, how he can get his health back. But he will watch a film. And so those were the people that we really tried to direct the film toward.
And so I think it's very tough for a filmmaker, for you, to really walk that line because you have a point you're trying to make. I guess you have to be careful in how far you go to make that point. So did you have anything to be a check and balance on you as you were going through that? That was a kind of maybe hard question.
I mean these are options... we very intentionally didn't want to get into that fight because- And that's actually one of the things that I really appreciate about Diet Doctor, is presenting options for people who have all different kinds of ways that they like to eat for ethical reasons, religious reasons... So, we very intentionally didn't want to get into that fight.
But I think that someone could accuse the film of being biased, because we do present the low carbohydrate diet as a great way to reverse many chronic diseases.
But yeah, we went down and spent three days with Brian and filming with him and filming with his patients. And it was so wonderful, I mean, just as you described it, so hopeful. It was so great to see a physician becoming, you know, more than just a health coach, but a cheerleader and the team is winning, you know.
He was in the back of the room and, you know, had tears coming to his eyes, you know, just hearing and witnessing his patients talk about what he's done for them and for their lives. I mean, I know he knew that at a certain level, but I think it kind of hit him all at once to hear his patients lined up and talking about what an amazing change it's been for their lives.
So she had to do it very quietly at first because she saw that there's some pillars of the low-carb community being attacked and threatened with losing their licensure, you know, over practicing this. But she continued, you know, and here's someone who's just really bravely helping patients in her own small community.
And so it was pretty neat to connect with her and hear her story and then also hear the story of her patient Judy, who was so wonderful, who spent so much time with us and shared her story with us and who is still on her journey, but is doing really well. So that was a neat experience. And the other really fun thing was the continuous glucose monitor experiment. That was really fun.
One of the gals on the first day on the low-fat week, I mean, her blood sugar shot up over 200 and she was worried about that. She was just like, I don't know if I I'm going to make it the whole week. She did end up making it the whole week, but she didn't enjoy it very much.
Which is a lot of what we do with the documentary, is we reach out to the top experts in the field and we interview those people and we tap into their expertise to share with the film. Then we also did our own research and looking at some of the studies, for example, the Minnesota coronary experiments and going back to those original documents and looking at that information in order to tell that story correctly.
And I've learned a lot from her about mistakes I've made just in the way I verbalize, you know, what the dietary guidelines are, how they influence the food pyramid, whether it's a low-fat diet, and so I'm curious as you've gone through this, has some of that kind of now processed in your brain too to say, "Oh these are some misconceptions that we have"?
And I felt like we really stepped through that pretty well in the film and that it wasn't one single thing. But I think maybe our use of saying that low-fat diet is maybe what triggered Adele- And in my mind we were discussing the net effects of the era of the low-fat diet and all that, you know, like the dietary guidelines were kind of the match that lit the flame on this series of things that coincide with the launch of the obesity epidemic.
And I think Zoe Harcombe said it pretty well. She said, you know, it's not causation. We can't say that it definitely caused it. But sure as anything, we need to look at, you know, what happened around 1980 and what could've caused this. And so that's what we attempted to do, was to step through the various things that happened during that era, and how that impacted or may have contributed to the obesity epidemic.
So it was destined to fail from the beginning especially once the process food companies came in and said, we are going to lower the fat in your diet, people are going to be hungrier, we can market low-fat, healthy foods that are now high in carbohydrates, high in sugar, high in seed oils. And people started eating that, you could say indirectly or directly, because of the environment that was created by the dietary guidelines.
They did, but what happened though was the focus became low-fat, and the formularies for all those processed foods just included more sugar. Because when you take the fat out of food, you know, as Sarah Hallberg said in the film, instead of tasting like cardboard, at least it can taste like sweet cardboard. Yeah, I loved that one.
But I've heard you say that no, you've been on records saying, "I don't think it was a conspiracy theory."
And what she found were compounds of aldehydes, toxic aldehydes, that are, you know, just not good for us. So, her research was a lot of what we set that story upon. And then we also looked at the Minnesota coronary experiments and, you know, the interviews with you and Nina and Andrew Mente, who is an obesity researcher involved in the PURE study. And so, yeah, that's how we structured that story.
And I think this brings up an interesting point for a documentary like you're trying to create. You need to know where to draw that line, like where are we getting too much into the weeds? And we're going to start to lose people. And it's too much detail, but yet enough detail to satisfy people that we've really looked into this and are answering it appropriately. So that's a hard role for you as well, isn't it?
And so that was a terrible recommendation to make to the general public. And Jason Fung goes into that in detail in the film. And so I did want to include that in the film. And I understand there is still some debate about the healthfulness of processed vegetable oils, but I definitely think it was worth discussing the fact that when we first were told to switch to those, they were trans fats and that was not a good thing to switch to at that time.
I think it would be pretty tough to unravel that at this point, because they affect our school lunch programs, they affect food programs for the elderly, for the military, there's all these food programs that we're involved in.
And if we just eliminate the dietary guidelines, well, then how would we decide how could- you know, what would be the means by which we then decide how these food programs can formulate the food? So it feels like it would be pretty tough to unravel that. So I think pushing for a true low-carb option in the dietary guidelines would be a good thing to focus on.
The reviews on the Amazon platform where we get most of our viewership, have been amazing. You know, people talking about how finally now my father-in-law gets it, you know, he's never understood it until he saw your film and you now he finally understands it, he's gone low-carb and he's cut his insulin medication in half, you know, already.
And there's just review after review after review like that of people who are able to receive the message through a film form that maybe they hadn't been able to receive prior to this. So that's been really exciting and I am just so happy that the film could have that kind of positive effect. And that's been the majority of the feedback on the film. It's just been overwhelmingly positive.
We're definitely in support of the film, putting out more clips and more information on social media just to help people find the film and support the film. We have so much great material. I mean, just the interview that we did with you, I was just talking to our editor about that today... There is so much more material that didn't make the final film, so we talked about maybe doing some other little clips that could be helpful and informative and support the film, so we'll see.
But we've switched to doing some virtual watch parties on a platform called FanForce TV and that has been fine-tuned and is working pretty well. We did one just last week with the Nutritionist Down South who hosted a virtual watch party with a whole bunch of her clients. And what's fun about that is everybody signs up, watches the film altogether at the same time and then we've had people participate in a Q&A afterwards.
You've participated in a couple of those, which we really appreciate. And that has been really cool because then after the film plays people can ask more questions and get even deeper understanding of how they could adopt this kind of lifestyle. So the virtual watch parties have been pretty cool and those are on FanForce TV and you can find out how to host a watch party on our website.
