Thread by @TheSciBabe

I have to watch The Magic Pill today for an article.

@sallyt, send popcorn. Or xanax.

Should I live-tweet this as a teaser for the article?

I'M THREE MINUTES IN THEY JUST IMPLIED THAT CROCODILE ATTACKS WERE BETTER THAN GETTING DIABETES HOLY SHIT. #themagicpill

Seven minutes: I think they just implied that the fact that they're a family of emotional eaters is the reason why one of this woman's granddaughters is autistic and another one has celiac. Oh, and this woman in her 70s (?) is forgetful. All from sugar, obvs.

#themagicpill

It's a movie about the keto diet.

And there's a kid with epilepsy. My sincere sympathies, but...

KETO WAS INVENTED TO TREAT EPILEPSY DON'T YOU DARE FUCKING PRETEND THIS IS A NEW DISCOVERY YOU ASSHOLES.

#themagicpill.

Comparing seizure medications to heroin.

#themagicpill

"We have 40,000 years of research because this is a 40,000 year old culture."

Oh, so you have epidemiological data that was meticulously recorded before the dawn of language? Amazing. Go on then, let's see it.

#themagicpill

"The way you managed to do before white person came was actually the right way," said about aboriginal culture by a white guy who's teaching them how to eat.

Oh look, white savior complex only took 15 minutes!

#themagicpill

"Good food is food that is grounded in the tradition of Aboriginal people. This is the Yolngu way of cooking."
"And how might that translate to the rest of us?"
*Stuttering* "Umm, it's basically...meat and vegetables. Okay?"

GROUNDBREAKING!

#themagicpill

"The fact is that processed food is not natural." -David Perlmutter, guy who's made a living telling you that all natural wheat is killing you.

#themagicpill

They're reforming the diet of their very young child with autism (possibly with sensory issues, definitely a picky eater) & epilepsy.

Seizure medications became common because true keto is difficult. For a child with autism & sensory issues.... WTF?

#themagicpill

Listing off "evil" ingredients in artificial vanilla flavor.

Most of these are in natural vanilla flavor too. Artificial vanilla flavor just has the main component of vanilla (vanillin) minus the many other compounds in the vanilla bean.

The BS is endless. #themagicpill

BITCHING ABOUT GMOS, I KNEW IT WAS COMING.

Only an hour and 11 minutes left of this. @sallyt, is it too early to ask for a bonus for this article to cover an extra therapy session?

#themagicpill

"High fructose corn syrup in everything"
"Obviously we will never again eat cereal in our lives."
"Bread is worrisome."
"Wheat is perfectly crafted to make you fat."

ATTACK OF THE FIFTY FOOT BAGUETTE! RUN!

#themagicpill

"Wheat is in all breakfast cereals."

Hi, I have celiac disease and this is what we call "blatant lying."

#themagicpill

"Of the 60,000 products in the supermarket today, 59,000 have wheat."

Citation or gtfo.

#themagicpill

OH GOD THERE's AN HOUR AND TEN MINUTES LEFT. #themagicpill

"We went from a diet that was 90% meat and fat to suddenly relying on grains and legumes."

Nina, that's not a thing that happened. That's called magical thinking. It's bad science. But I guess it works for your little "documentary."

#themagicpill.

"By taking the fat out, you guarantee that people have to shift over to high carbohydrate foods."

You know that protein exists, right? Also, people can do this crazy thing where they just eat less of everything. Breathe deeply, it's hard to accept, I know.

#themagicpill

"Olive oil is good but this [points to canola oil] is poison."

Canola oil has a higher level of healthy plant sterols than olive oil. Don't go overboard on either, but go ahead, fact check me. "Poison." Only if you disregard the definition of "poison."

#themagicpill

"In order to make packaged food, you need a fat that's solid and stable. So everything on a supermarket shelf- cookies, crackers, chips, needs a hard, solid fat."

Citation needed. There are a ton of products like chips made in canola & vegetable oils.

#themagicpill

"Vegetable oils are toxic. They're foods we could not have manufactured until the industrial era."

Guys, iPhones are from the industrial era too, so they're toxic.

Also, if vegetable oils are toxic, do they not consider olives to be vegetables?

#themagicpill

"Cells in your body are in a fatty membrane. If the fatty acids are unnatural, the membrane can't function which begins disease. Your body doesn't recognize vegetable oil as unnatural and it goes into those membranes."

Not sure where to start with this bullshit.

#themagicpill

Cue card break

"Eat whole foods, organic, healthy fats (olive/coconut/animal fats), eggs, avocados, pastured animals, wild/sustainable fish, bone broths, organ meats, fermented foods, fast intermittently, no processed foods grains/legumes/dairy."

Relinquish joy.

#themagicpill

"We're suffering diseases of overconsumption."

This is the first correct thing that I have ever heard from Pete Evans.

#themagicpill

Perlmutter explains a ketogenic diet as a diet that's "lower in carbs and higher in fat."

No. A true ketogenic diet is 1g protein per kg weight, 15g carbs, the rest of your calories are fat. Otherwise, you will convert protein to carbs. This is for epilepsy mgmt.

#themagicpill

"Being in a mild state of ketosis is a really good place to be."

You stupid motherfucker.

#themagicpill

They mentioned the girl with autism was non-verbal. Suddenly she's talking a lot and this is before the diet. Funny how that works.

She also does not like the diet because, shockingly, a child with autism/sensory issues has issues with a diet.

#themagicpill

"She starved herself for the first five days that we tried her on this diet."

You are truly heroes for putting her on this diet.

#themagicpill

"This child has been on the ketogenic diet for 6 months while coming to therapy here and has had improvement in many of his autism symptoms."

Oh, so it's all the diet and not the intensive therapy at the center? Good to know he doesn't need your help, doc!

#themagicpill

"All of that sugar you eat turns into fat."

Oh, but eating fat indiscriminately without tracking quantity is just fine because fat in the form of fat is healthy?

Citation needed.

#themagicpill

"Ancel Keys has unshakeable belief that saturated fats cause heart disease."

You mean evidence and research, right? Sorry, it seems that your script had an autocorrect issue.

#themagicpill

Oh look. Bitching about the seven countries study.

Ancel Keys did not cherry pick his countries. 7 countries had quality data available. There eventually was more data available from 22 countries total. They still correlated with higher rates of heart disease.

#themagicpill

Just to clarify, Ancel Keys definitely got some things wrong, but he was not a low fat evangelist. Low saturated fat, perhaps, but if anything, the dietary habits he recommended sound a lot like moderation. He recommended a balanced diet with up to 35% dietary fat

#themagicpill

"Dementia is being called type III diabetes because of its links with diet."

Nobody anywhere in medicine is calling it this and the link is, at best, due to how insulin is processed in people with an already abnormally functioning pancreas.

#themagicpill

Giant eight year study on a low fat diet showed minimal effects on decreasing cardiovascular disease risk factor.

Probably because very few in studies stick to their diets. Just ask the nice folks at NuSi how their DIETFITS study comparing LF to LC went.

#themagicpill

"The results [of this one study] that a low fat diet didn't help health had to be ignored or suppressed."

Kinda like how Gary Taubes isn't shouting from the rooftops that his own institute can't prove low carb diets are better than low fat diets?

#themagicpill #DIETFITS

"You have to take this food pyramid and flip it upside down."

Wow. They could have just shown the #GlutenFreeEbola episode of @SouthPark and called it a day.

#themagicpill

Back to the girl with seizures- "Her seizures have gone down and she's able to progress mentally. She's able to communicate verbally."

Again... keto was developed for epilepsy control. This was not for weight loss. And she was clearly speaking before the diet.

#themagicpill

"We're starting to wean her off the anticonvulsory narcotic that she's on."

Please learn the definition of a narcotic, you alarmist douche who might scare other parents into making a dangerous decision for their epileptic child.

#themagicpill

"I want people to learn the word hyperinsulinemia. Some people develop Alzheimers, I developed cancer."

Again, no causal link to Alzheimers, and it's speculative at best if the condition is linked to cancer. But hey, makes for a great scary documentary!

#themagicpill

"Cancer needs sugar to proliferate."

It's almost exactly like you don't have a clue how this works, because a sugar free diet is not going to starve your tumors.

#themagicpill

Oh yeah, the woman who claimed she cured her cancer with keto and without medical treatment? It's REALLY easy to find her website where she talks about her surgery.

Please just make my job a little harder, huh?

kosherketogenic.com/index.php/my-b…

#themagicpill

"10 patients with cancer on a keto diet for 4 weeks: higher ketone levels correlate with stable disease."

Excuse me while I don't jump for joy over a four week study in ten people while you just blatantly lied about how this woman treated her cancer.

#themagicpill

"Cancer is described in the literature as a heterogeneous disease, so no matter what therapy you use you won't get them all and the drugs fail."

Well shit, let's just try steak instead.

Side note: I want the people behind this documentary and the folks from Forks Over Knives to get into a (metaphorical) boxing ring. Because they all think they can treat cancer.

Go ahead. Hand your data to the folks at Cochrane and see how you do.

#themagicpill

"People were dying of infections like tuberculosis. The problem is that's not our situation now."

... pardon?

#themagicpill

"Diabetes is the leading cause of blindness."

Vitamin A deficiency says hello.

#themagicpill

They put a diabetic patient on keto and she lost weight and is on less insulin.

Her RD said "can you imagine, we can cure diabetes with food."

Type 2. TYPE TWO.

Yes, you can lose weight and improve many health markers on keto.
It's not magic. It's calories.

#themagicpill

MANIFEST DESTINY scrolls across the screen. "What happened to the aboriginal people of the earth wasn't accomplished with guns, it was accomplished with food."

I didn't realize smallpox was edible.

#themagicpill

Another reference to genetically modified corn being grown in the developing world.

Man, how awful that they have access to crops that can withstand the weather conditions and use a smaller amount of pesticides. Simply terrible.

#themagicpill

"Coca cola is controlling the scientists."

Drastically misestimating how much money Coke has, how many scientists there are... and how high our "pay me off to kill everyone" demand would be. This speaks more to his morals if he thinks we can all be paid off.

#themagicpill

"There's no funding, nobody wants to talk about it."

So little funding that there are 6 documentaries, tons of books, and Atkins was a half a billion dollar low carb nutritional company.

Please take the ballgag out already, your voice yearns for freedom!

#themagicpill

"We have a study showing that low carb works better than low fat!"

It's a decade old without a statistically significant sampling size and newer, more robust data shows that this is obsolete. Look up #DIETFITS.

#themagicpill

"We tend to overconsume carbohydrates but it's because we overproduce them."

A lot of carbs in this country are for animal feed, and though the % of our diets coming from animals has dropped, our calories from meat/animal fat has increased since the 1970s a lot.

#themagicpill

"There isn't a single multinational corporation on the Earth that wouldn't benefit from people consuming a carbohydrate based diet."

Tyson chicken? Atkins Nutritionals? Trump Steak... wait...

#themagicpill

"Undertakers are making out like bandits."

Good news, keto makes you immortal!

#themagicpill

"Cattle are populating feedlots and they're fattened up by grains, we should think about that."

Yes, your anatomy and how you process everything is EXACTLY like a cow. Your extra two nipples are coming in any day now.

#themagicpill

Here's the token vegan-turned-keto-devotee. Of course. Is there going to be a hardcore keto athlete too? It's the docu trifecta: a cancer cure, a convert, and an athlete.

#themagicpill

"The most destructive thing we've done is agriculture."

Aah, there it is. The most #FirstWorldProblems thing I've seen in the doc, from the vegan convert.

It's doubtful that anybody who's ever been starving will complain about agriculture.

#themagicpill

"We don't know what goes into making that corn or soy."

Ask a farmer.

#themagicpill

"A cow will die in 60 days from eating corn."

Did you people fact check nothing?

#themagicpill

"That is how we lived for 2.5 million years as humans on this planet."

But homo sapiens haven't been around for 2.5 million years. Move the decimal point over... there you go!

#themagicpill

Documentary producer: "they always say take this pill, take that pill, nobody ever says first to change what you eat."

I've never had a doctor not say to me "adjust your diet" when I've been overweight. But hey, bullshitting is a theme here.

#themagicpill

The doctor being charged with professional misconduct in South Africa for promoting a LCHF diet was declared not guilty.

From what I know of the case, I agree with the verdict. I don't have any problem with the diet, I have problems with misinformation about it.

#themagicpill

Apparently one week without bread changed everything about the health of the woman in the Yolngu tribe.

Again, I have celiac disease. It takes six months out of your system until you don't feel ready to punch all the wheat in Iowa. But hey, editing!

#themagicpill

Aaaaand end with a shot of the girl with autism who is having less seizures and they're trying to portray as having her autism treated but really, reducing seizures is helpful in increasing cognitive ability. #spin

HEY I SURVIVED WATCHING THAT SHIT SHOW!

#fin
#themagicpill