>> Dr. Terry Simpson: This is it, episode 100 of 4Q. Over the past 99

episodes, we have gone from the blue zones to the

bird flu, from Kellogg's enemas to cholesterol

chemistry, and from goat gland hucksters to the

microbiome. Today, we are celebrating the best and

the worst. The scientists who changed medicine and

the scammers who tried to sell it back to us in a

bottle. Welcome to Fork, you Hall of Fame and

shame. I am your Chief Medical Explanationist, Dr.

Terry Simpson, and this is Fork U Fork University,

where we bust myths, make sense of the madness,

and teach you a little bit about food and

medicine. I'm going to start with Ancel Keys, the

most misunderstood scientist of today, but not of

his time. Ancel Keys gave us the Mediterranean

diet long before influencers turned olive oil into

content. Ancel Keys didn't guess. He measured. He

didn't speculate. He studied. Keys built one of

the most careful and longest running cohort

studies in all of medical history. He and his team

went village by village across seven countries,

collecting everything people ate, sending those

foods back to laboratories for precise nutrient

analysis. Every year, they perform blood work,

EKGs, physical examinations. They comb through the

hospital charts of the patients, death

certificates and medical records, not for months,

but for decades. That is science the hard way.

Observation, precision, patience. For critics like

Gary Taubes, who claim Keys left out countries,

that accusation only proves he never read Keyes

actual papers. Keyes didn't study nations. He

studied cohorts of men in villages within those

nations, following them year after year to see how

the diet and diseases progressed. Keyes wasn't

chasing fame. He was following evidence. Even

without today's molecular tools, his data pointed

straight to what modern lipid science later

confirmed. Apolipoprotein B, the protein that

escorts LDL cholesterol, is actively transported

into arterial walls and starts atherosclerosis,

the root of heart disease. So when modern

influencers dismiss Keys with a tweet or a podcast

rant, remember, they've got microphones, Keys has

data, they have followers. Keys left us with the

foundation of, ah, preventive cardiology. And if

you want to honor him, drizzle olive oil instead

of conspiracy. And I owe a Special thanks to Dr.

Harry Blackburn, who worked with Keys at Minnesota

and still shares stories from those early days of

the seven country study, a labor of love that

defined modern nutritional science. I'm going to

go back in time now to Dr. Frederick Banting and

Charles Brest and the children who woke up. I want

you to picture this. 1922, the University of

Toronto, Dr. Banting and a medical student named

Charles best discovered how to collect insulin out

of pancreases of lots of animals. They purified

that insulin. And then Dr. Frederick Banting, in

one of the most amazing moments in modern

medicine, went to a children's hospital. Here,

children had slipped into a coma, and families

were simply waiting for them to die from what we

now know as type 1 diabetes. Instead, he went by

those children one at a time and injected insulin.

And the children woke up, and the children were

able to live normal lives because of this

remarkable discovery of insulin. Their parents

were able to hug them again, talk to them again.

And many of these children lived in their 70s and

80s, when they were expected to die as teenagers.

I want you to think back to the 1920s, when people

said, oh, they could feed, and their, uh, food was

much better then, and those parents fed them. But

diet alone didn't stop death. Good science did,

and it still does a century later. Banting sold

that patent for a dollar because he thought it

should belong to everybody. Too bad modern

pharmaceuticals don't do the same.

In one of my favorite episodes about Dr. Kinehara

Takaki and the first vitamin. So decades before

anybody knew the word vitamin, There was a

Japanese surgeon, Dr. Kinohara, and he had noticed

that sailors were dying of what we now know as

beriberi on long voyages. Dr. Kinohara was a very

careful surgeon. He had been initially trained in

eastern surgery, but he became retrained in

western surgery, actually going to london and

learning at St Mark's Hospital. He even studied

with people like Charles mayo, who was actually a

fellow student of his. When he went back, he used

epidemiology, and he learned epidemiology from

John snow himself, the guy who discovered that the

broad street water pump Was the source of cholera

in london. Those principles of epidemiology

brought kitahara back, and he noticed that the

sailors who had a more vigorous diet, balanced

diet, didn't suffer from symptoms of beriberi, and

he attributed to what became later known as

thiamine. Had Dr. Kinohara lived longer, he would

have shared the nobel prize for the discovery of

thiamine. But unfortunately, he died. But his

careful discovery, his careful research, his

careful epidemiology saved more people in the

japanese navy than anything else, because more

people died in the Japanese imperial navy from

beriberi than any died from bullets. And he's also

known for bringing Japan into modern medicine.

Next, I want to come back to someone who's a

contemporary of mine, Dr. Leonard Hayflick. He

unfortunately died a few years ago, but he was the

original longevity doctor. In 1961, Leonard

Hayflick, a PhD, wasn't studying nutrition. He was

studying life itself. He was looking at cell

cultures. And he discovered that human cell

cultures divided about 50 times, stopped, went

into senescence and then ultimately died. That

became the Hayflick limit. And that simple

observation has rewritten biology. It proved that

aging isn't mystical or mental. It occurs at a

cellular level. Each division of a cell uses a bit

of our genetic clock until the cell retires from

service. He wasn't finding out about food or

supplements. It was truth. It became the

foundation of regenerative medicine and cell

biology, showing us why cells repair slow and

rest. Learning the first bit about telomeres, if

there was ever a real longevity doctor. That whole

science started with Leonard Hainfla. No ring

light, no powders, just a microscope and the

courage to question dogma.

Speaking of modern nutrition, two decades after

Keys came the DASH diet and the Portfolio Diet

teams. Um, DASH stands for the Dietary Approach to

Stop Hypertension. And that came from a dream team

of scientists. At Johns Hopkins, it was Dr. Lauren

Sepel who led the NIH. At Pennington Biomedical,

Dr. George Bray, Donna Ryan, Catherine Champagne

built the menus. And at Harvard, Dr. Frank Sachs

crunched the numbers. Their 1997 study proved that

a diet rich in fruits, vegetables, whole grains,

low fat dairy and low salt could lower blood

pressure without weight loss. Then there was the

portfolio diet. Dr. David Jenkins and his team

from the University of Toronto, again, like Dr.

Banting and Best, they discovered about fiber and

how it was the first drug tools used against high

cholesterol. Their combination of soy nut soluble

fiber and plant sterols cut LDL by up to 17%.

Culinary medicine at its finest. And yet some will

say, we need more salt. The DASH team proved

otherwise. Unless, of course, you're selling a

mango flavored electrolytes on TikTok.

And now let's talk about a place where surgery

became science. If you ever find yourself in

Edinburgh, skip the kilt shops and go to the

Surgeons Hall Museum. There you will find where

Lister showed how antisepsis improved surgical

outcomes. There you will find where Sime, who was

actually not only Lister's chairman, but father in

law, careful anatomy left dissections on

operations that we still use and I have used to

this day. There you will find where James Young

Simpson discovered how chloroform couldn't be used

as an anesthetic in surgery. And you will find a

Young medical student named Arthur Conan Doyle

studied under Dr. Jose, that sharp eyed

diagnostician who inspired Sherlock Holmes. That's

where medicine learned to observe, deduce and

prove. And from those halls the art of observation

became the science of evidence. It was the

birthplace of modern diagnosis and the foundation

of modern American education. We'll be touring

that museum on my TikTok channel this November

because understanding where science began and

where medicine and surgery begin as it's important

to know where it's going. But hall of Fame we also

have the hall of Shame.

We're going to start with Gary Brecke, the

biohacking Hypebend Every generation has a snake

oil salesman. Ours just streams in high

definition. Gary Brecke calls himself a biologist

who can predict your date of death and move it for

a fee. No medical degree, no doctorate. He has a

bachelor's degree and some borrowed scrubs. He

went to chiropractic school but apparently never

finished. He sells hydrogen water bottles,

claiming that There are over 1400 studies proving

it's the best in the world. There aren't that many

studies. He says that cold plunges melt flat. They

don't. And if they did, every Alaskan fisherman

would look like Thor. He and his buddies yuck it

up online on his podcast, calling it science, but

it's show business with a pulse oximeter. Then

there's Dr. No, she's not a doctor. It's actually

just Barbara O', Neill, the preacher, not the

professor. She's more Seventh Day Adventist than

scientists. She claims that cayenne pepper can

stop a heart attack and cholesterol is a

pharmaceutical plot. She charges thousands of

dollars for her seminars while ignoring decades of

research. The Crestro that I use costs $0.70 a

month. I'm pretty sure she's the only one making

money off of that.

Now to the shirtless salesman of supplements and

scams. Compare the scientists between the

Mediterranean dash and portfolio diets to today's

influencers and you'll see two different species.

The researchers spent decades on data. The

salesmen spend minutes on marketing. There's Paul

Saladino, the carnivore who discovered fruit when

steak stopped selling. The salt slingers hawking

electrolyte powder for $39.99 a bag. And Dr. Uh,

Gundry, the never shirtless but always pedantic ex

surgeon selling bean guard for 60 bucks a month.

And of course, who can forget the liver king whose

muscles came from a needle, not cow liver.

Scientists understand the chemistry and biology

and scammers understand lightning and marketing.

And so keys with the Hitchens of his day and able

to slay nonsense with a sentence. But most

scientists aren't showmen. They're too busy doing

their work. The scammers pretend their wealth came

from helping people, but it comes from powders and

placebos. So next time someone with a six pack on

a Shopify account say they reinvented nutrition,

remember, science doesn't need an affiliate link.

And that brings us to the Rio Heroes. The heroes

that you may know in your community today. They

were the doctors, the nurse, the therapists, the

healthcare workers who showed up every day during

the pandemic before we had a vaccine. While the

supplement salesmen surfed and sold powders, these

people suited up and saved lives. Give your fellow

nurse and doctor who were present at that time a

handshake at the end of 100 episodes. Here's what

I Science doesn't need to be sexy to save lives.

Our job, our mission, is to build the bridge

between real scientists and you, the public. My

background's in science and medicine, but my

mission is to bring you the quiet truth from labs

and hospitals, but not under a ring light. And

it's my joy to share the work of people whose idea

of glory is a pat on the back from a colleague,

not a link on Amazon. Because around every life

saving discovery is a scientist who will Never

trend on TikTok, but they're the ones who actually

change the world. That's what Forku has always

been about. Separating noise from nutrition, hype

from health, and reminding you that evidence

always outlasts the algorithm. This has been Fork

U Fork University, researched and written by me,

Dr. Terry Simpson, all things Audios and

production by Simpler media and the pod God

himself, Mr. Eboterra. For references and more

episodes, visit forku.com and

yourdoctorsorders.com and remember this. I am a

board certified physician, but I am not your

physician. This podcast is for education, not

personal medical advice. After a hundred episodes,

thank you for listening, for thinking and being a

part of this journey. Here's to the next hundred

and to science over salesmanship. Hey Evo, you've

been here for all 100 episodes of Fork you and a

few of the episodes and our trials before that.

Who are the heroes and quacks in this enterprise?

And thanks for making me sound better than I am.

It has been truly my pleasure, my friend. Oh, and

if I'm the hero, can I wear a cape? It.