What the Movie Reveals About Keto Hearts – TFP #024 | Jennifer Isenhart

Tell me who you are and what you do.

My name is Jennifer Eisenhart, and I'm a director and writer of documentary films.

And as a matter of fact, you are directing a current film that we're about to release.

Let's roll the trailer.

The new report is shedding light on the risks associated with some popular aiding plants.

These dyes that were very low in carbohydrates raised the risk for ad cholesterol, and

that is a risk factor for heart disease.

If you have that much fat, a bad cholesterol goes up, increasing your risk of heart problems.

All over the world, people are looking for ways to live a healthier life.

People who suffered sometimes for decades with chronic illness, and then a simple change

in diet turns it all around.

My symptoms all improved dramatically.

It literally felt like the lights had come on.

Changing my diet had such a night and day of fact all my mental health.

So many people have found their solution in a ketogenic diet.

This diabetes is completely under control.

There's some medical conditions, and for some individuals, it seems to be a lifeline,

and yet they have this one problem.

Those in the best shape I've ever been in, yet one lab number was saying that this was bad.

My life changed like that.

Modern medicine believes that ketogenic diets can also kill us.

Straight out, LDL cholesterol causes heart disease and stroke.

The cholesterol went through the roof.

My LDL is way up.

Was the highest I've seen it.

We're doing everything right, why is this happening?

There's an assumption that if someone starts a ketogenic diet automatically, you increase

your risk of heart disease.

I just knew how good I felt, but I didn't freak out a little.

I was really scared.

But what if modern medicine is wrong?

What if this isn't a medical problem, but a scientific opportunity?

What if we take a look at healthy people and see if cholesterol matters the same?

So this is kind of the big, money shot.

Well, what the heck is going on?

I have to know if this is a problem.

Wow.

What a revelation.

Earth's shaking in the world of health.

It paints somebody with completely fresh eyes.

He's now outside, starting this sort of up-and-medicine.

There's no money without industry, and there's not an industry for a ketogenic diet.

I'm hoping that this change is the science going forward.

There was a joy in her that I hadn't seen in a very long time.

I think there's a paradigm shift happening, but we're at the very beginning of it.

People need to understand what they eat, affects everything.

A lot of time has passed, and now we're back.

I think it'd be about two minutes and 12 seconds.

Two minutes and 12 seconds, so now everyone's seen it, or at least they've seen the trailer

before they've seen the movie.

How has your experience been?

Just give me the top level view.

How has your experience been playing this movie together?

It has been a marathon, not a race.

It has been amazing.

It has been insightful, it has been endearing, it has been educational, it has been world

travel, it has been learning things I didn't know before, translating science.

It's just been so many things all wrapped up in one, which the film is really.

Has some twists and turns.

You never know, as a documentarian, once you start filming, where things go, you may have

an idea of where you think they'll go.

It was quite a journey, right?

Yeah.

Four years.

Yeah.

We started in 2022.

February of 2022, I got a call from this guy named Dave interested in doing a film about

cholesterol, and it sounded really interesting after the last film we did, kind of made

sense as a next project, and yeah, it's been a long and interesting journey, definitely

has had some ups and downs.

Nothing like what you've gone through though, Dave.

I mean, I just am kind of vicariously experiencing and following as you have gone through this

project of your study, and it's just been fascinating to kind of open the curtain and

get a look inside of what really goes on behind research and science.

Yeah.

Now, as of the moment we're recording this, the campaign for the release of this is still

getting worked out, but the main thing is, is when we turn this around, it shouldn't

be too long after this podcast errors that people can experience the film for themselves.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The official premiere date, March 14th, at your conference in Las Vegas, I guess we're

at a theater nearby, but during the conference weekend, the coastside conference weekend,

which I think is going to be great, because we're going to have an audience of folks from

the conference and just some of the top VIPs in this space, which is amazing that you've

collected or the collaborative science conference.

So it's really exciting place to release the film and it's going to be, it's going to

be kind of a bit of deja vu, though, right?

Like, we've been here before, I think we did this last year, but, you know, there's new

findings, there's new information that we were able to wrap into the film, of course,

and so that'll be fun to share.

Yeah.

Let's go back to that fateful call.

We were introduced by some mutual friends of ours.

I think it was literally Brett Sure, who did the official, hey, Dave, you should connect

with Jen, because I was about to see quite literally the first findings within the data

for our study.

Yeah.

So our study is on folks with this triad, this combination of three things, high LDL,

high HDLO triglycerides, which broadly tend to be lean mass hypersponders, which are

at the center of my research.

And here we had a hundred scans, a hundred that had been completed literally in February

of 2022.

And I was like, okay, we're finally going to get chance to see it.

Oh, man, if we were going to do a documentary, now's the time.

And Brett's like, hold that thought, connects you.

But I was already of the mind, and I think I even said this to Brett at the time.

I was like, listen, my understanding is this is not how documentaries typically work.

You don't, you don't snap your fingers and a whole team just shows up and they're like,

we're starting now an entirely new documentary based on this new data.

Thank you for giving us a few days notice or a week notice to get this whole thing rolling.

Yeah.

It's usually a lot of pre-production, right, getting something set up before.

Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, that shoot was like just right out of the gate, you know, but at that time

we hadn't even decided that we were going to do the film project with you.

And, you know, when we first spoke, it was like, well, this is really interesting.

Brett connected us and, you know, because I had interviewed Brett for fat fiction and the

film that I released in 2020 on the history of the U.S. dietary guidelines and kind of

the miserable failure of the low fat diet, so that's how I knew Brett.

And he connected me with you and you called and I think it was literally like the next

week, like it was like seven days before you were going to get the preliminary results

from the study.

And I remember my husband, Tom and I were talking about this and I said, I don't care.

You know, if we end up doing this documentary with him or not, I just, I want to help

him out.

I want to get this shot for him because he needs it if he's going to do this film.

And so we just jumped in and we, we helped coordinate a freelance crew that was a trusted

crew that we knew down in Los Angeles and we, we got you that camera crew for that preliminary

data release.

And then after that, you know, we were talking more and I was like, okay, this is really

cool.

Now, how much did you know about cholesterol yourself before you started filming?

Well, not nearly as much as I know now.

I mean, I wanted to do more about cholesterol in fat fiction.

I knew that it was kind of the piece that holds people back with low carb and ketogenic

diets, you know, historically and, and still to this day, you know, that's the criticism

of low carb and ketogenic diets, they're going to raise your cholesterol and give you

heart attack and, you know, sure, you may drop 50 pounds and feel the best you've ever

felt in your life, but you're going to give yourself, you know, heart disease.

So I knew that, that I needed to include that in, in fat fiction and if you watch that

film, there's a very small section about cholesterol because it's such a, it's such a big topic.

It was hard to go, like if you dive in, you got to dive deep as you have.

Yeah.

And so we had a very short section about cholesterol and in that film and, and I knew that it was

a bigger topic and I knew that it needed more attention.

And so it was just very interesting when Brett reached out and you reached out and it was

like, yeah, this, this does deserve to be an entire film because you can't unpack

it in a single segment.

It's hard to unpack it in an entire film.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yes.

That's, um, you know, one thing that's a fun fact to share for anybody watching this,

wondering about the film, I originally had intended for it to be a lot more

sciency and to really get into how the mechanisms work and maybe have more,

you know, deep, mechanistic, 3D animation and, um,

really early in, you brought up that we should consider a lot more of the personal

stories while I was kind of leaning a bit heavier on the science side because,

yeah, as you were looting to, it's a lot, it's a lot to unpack.

And so that brought forward a pretty interesting challenge.

Could we successfully have a lot of the personal stories like mine where you're

getting this new lease on life seemingly from going low-carb, but you're facing

this fear of the high cholesterol, but also get into the science itself and still

be faithful to what we need to explain.

Do you feel like we pulled that off in the movie?

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, we worked very hard at that, right?

Dave, I mean, you and I had so many scripting sessions together, um,

for people who don't know, Dave and I co-wrote the film and, um,

and, you know, we spent a lot of time getting that right.

And I think we did, you know, I really did.

I put, but to be fair, I, my writing part was mainly on the technical.

This, the writing is very much a, a gin, eyes and heart production.

I mean, you are one of the most prolific writers and just you're so good with

words and, and shaping a lot of my narration.

I feel like you got me well enough to write in the words that I would typically use

in the style, but often more concisely and careful.

Like I OCD too much when I'm trying to write even for myself.

And so, um, no, I, I appreciate that I got a writing credit.

I definitely worked really hard, especially on the science parts.

But, Jen, I, I can never say enough how amazing of a writer you are.

Oh, thank you.

I really appreciate that day.

It was, it was a fun project.

It was a challenging assignment.

I will say that because the science is very technical.

And yet, you know, we're wanting to present this information so that, you know,

the average person can understand and follow and have it make sense.

And how could it relate to their life?

And what can I take away from this?

And so, um, that was really challenging.

And then also to put it in your voice.

You know, the first thing I did was went to your YouTube channel and just,

listen to as many of your videos as I could, but I wanted to get your voice.

You know, I went, this was, this was a first person, you know, account of you going

through this experience.

And, um, I wanted to make sure that we told it in your voice, but told it in a way

that the layperson can follow.

And so it was a challenging assignment, I will say, um, but it was, it was, it's great.

I mean, I love how it turned out.

I love that we did include the people stories, you know, because that's, people

learn from hearing story from other people, you know, that they can empathize

with and relate to.

And that experience and so many people, as you found when you, when you dove into

this research, you connected with all these other people that were experiencing

the same thing you were.

And, um, so I think it was really valuable and illustrative to travel around

and do the future stories that we did.

I really like how that came together.

I think it, it, it's not just that human connection.

It's also, it's so important when you can watch people's stories that, that you,

that you can relate to, you can relate to what they're confronting and what they're

dealing with.

And I think that the, I think that the film does such an excellent job.

Those stories are amazing to prove, to prove that it's happening all over the

place too, because that was something that was really interesting.

It's like, oh, you know, this, uh, figuring out that you weren't alone,

making all the connections that you made via social media when you first started

diving into this research, that there are a lot of people that are experiencing

this exact same thing that you're experiencing to the point that I don't think

that that was even realized how many tens of thousands of people actually may

be, you know, lean mass hyper responders or borderline, you know,

experiencing this situation when they adopt a ketogenic diet,

all the metabolic health markers improve, except for this one risk marker.

And, and proving to the audience and hopefully to clinicians that this is,

people do feel caught.

They feel caught between health, good health today or a heart attack tomorrow.

What, right, am I choosing the right thing here?

And so I think that the personal stories really exemplify that and show

people that it's real.

It's not just an abstract idea.

It's affecting people's daily lives and how they choose to manage chronic

disease and, and their health.

Now, one thing I think a lot of people don't realize is the editing process

is probably a hundred times what people think it is.

Like they, they think, oh, it shot, you know, you spent X amount of time filming

and you spend about that amount of time editing, not true at all.

Yeah.

There has to have been at least, and I'd say this without hyperbole,

at least 25 different variations, I myself ended up watching by the time

we ended up with our final iteration, right?

And that's just me.

How many times do you think you've seen a variation of the film watching it back to back?

Oh, gosh.

That would be difficult for me to count.

I was watching it again this morning.

Yeah, we're preparing another export of it this morning.

At least a hundred times, at least a hundred times.

Yeah.

Yeah, no, every frame, yeah, you cannot miss these, especially in a topic like this.

It's so important that we get everything right.

And, you know, to that end, having script consultant like Dr.

Bretcher, who's been reviewing all our scripts, plus Dr.

Bretcher, he's been so patient and supportive.

And so that's been wonderful.

But yeah, editing is not for the faint of art.

It takes a lot of time and attention and consistent dedication.

Shout out to Bill Crumb.

Yes, shout out to Bill Crumb, the editor on this film.

He just did a fantastic job.

And he's, he also has been working on the film for four years.

You know, we started, of course, as soon as we start shooting, we start making

selects and we start making cuts and we start thinking about, okay,

what's, what are we going to use from this?

What else do we need?

And so the editing process actually starts pretty early on.

So yeah, I said this to him at least a handful of times.

I said, I'm sorry, you have to keep staring at me.

Well, a funny, funny thing.

Bill actually retired in December, the end of December.

He and I have had actually a 30 year career working together.

But excellent.

This was the one that put him out to pass.

He had already planned to retire, but he couldn't retire because I had to have

him finish the mastering in January.

So I kept calling him like, I'm sorry, Bill, you can't retire.

And you know, fortunately for us, he's a really good support and you stayed with it

and finished it all up.

I, so we're not going to get into all of the elephants in the room.

But the events that followed the April 7th paper necessitated us doing a little bit

more work on the film, or I really should say you and your team doing more work on the film

mostly.

But I'm going to say, as I've told you privately before this point, I think it's at

least two or three times better than what it was last year.

And that is a, that is a testament to Bill in particular.

When there's time, you get, you get feedback and the feedback you take, this isn't,

this is another thing that I really think people need to understand.

Good filmmakers, they don't assume they're right at all times.

They're listening, they're listening to what their audience says.

And we've had some significant edits that we thought we were on the right track.

And then no, it turned out that the people listening, watching, we're saying, no,

totally understand this part.

I'm kind of getting lost here or this period is a little bit slow.

And they're really the bigger editors at the end of the day.

If we've got the time to make it, right?

Yeah, that was actually a wonderful opportunity.

We were able to do a large audience test and actually gathered feedback from the test

audience.

And we were able to act on quite a bit of that feedback.

And I mean, one of the cool things that came out of the audience test was that people understood the science.

So that, I was really happy about that because it's, it's tricky, you know,

you start talking about cholesterol and lean mass hyperresponders and lipoproteins and all of that,

you know, you can lose people.

But the feedback from the audience test was they really got the science, which was great.

But there were a couple of areas that people gave feedback about maybe the pacing,

the opening we changed the opening we actually cut an entire new open for the film,

which I love sizzles.

I love the new, yeah, yeah, so the new open.

And then the new data that came in after, after the release of the paper,

we were able to fold in to, to the ending.

So, so we have a more complete reporting of the data,

including some interviews with some people who showed regression.

So that was, that was a great spoiler.

I know, I think, I guess I am saving a spoiler, but I think it's already been spoiled.

It's, yeah, it's fairly wide news.

Yeah.

I've said this to you many times before, but I want to say it again, which is just that this has also been one of the

best collaborative experiences I've ever had with anything.

Without question, as should be expected, with something so big, so massive,

create a process.

You're going to have some headbutting here and there.

There's definitely been things where you and I were just in strong disagreement,

couldn't quite come together.

But at the end of the day, I think that it's important there be one person who's,

you know, truly the director.

That's you.

So at the end of the day, as much as I may have strong opinions,

there are some times where you're like, this is, it's got to be one of our calls and it's going to,

you however, have always been very receptive, you've always listened to feedback,

and we, we have a great film.

It's amazing.

Yeah.

It's been a great collaborative experience for me too.

And Tom, my husband, you know, he's, he's the director of photography on this and,

and there's a lot of the fieldwork and support to me.

Yeah, yeah, he's fantastic.

Yeah, no, this has been a great collaboration.

I agree, I agree.

And especially for a project of this size and scope and length, you know, like the duration of

just the four years of working together, I think it could be really easy to run out of patience or

just, you know, get frustrated.

Part of it is just that you don't, you don't have a thing that's already happened or a thing

that's already there and in its complete state or, you know, it's, it's a moving target.

There's a lot of things that are changing on the fly.

And that also becomes challenging for a budgetary standpoint, right?

Yeah.

Because we're trying to figure out what we can pick up shoots for, what we can't.

And frankly, there's been a number of times where we thought something was going to get more exciting

or there'd be more interesting questions of a conference or things along those lines that

turned out about to be the case.

That's documentary, though.

I mean, you just shoot, you shoot the cameras rolling.

So much more than you, yeah, then you're able to get into the film and that's the

particular challenge of documentary filmmaking, you know, narrative film making,

you have a script, you're planning every scene, you can shoot for your script,

the documentary, you shoot a lot of stuff that ends up on the floor, you know.

But that means, that means the editing process is even that more important, right?

For these selects, for example, you need to get going on that.

You don't want to get to, you know, halfway of, half of the filming is done

and then you don't have the, the pieces you want to start constructing something.

Oh, yeah, yeah, you have to be working on it from the get go right out of the gate.

You know, planning, planning, adjusting plans, you know, shooting,

and planning more pickups, you know, all of that.

It's just, it's a work in progress at all times as you move along.

And then, you know, here we're following a study that's in progress that's having ups and

downs and challenges and successes and, you know, capturing all that as well.

Yeah. One, one thing I really got to really compliment you and your team on is setups.

Whenever there was going to be any kind of interview, even if you were using the same shared space,

you just, I don't think there's a single time where you use the same like chair setup,

same lighting setup. Like I said, it could be one giant room and there'd be three different

places with rearranged furniture with it and it would always be a long process to get the thing

constructed. Yeah. Then shoot the shot. Even if the vast majority of the shot is like, you know,

something's back here, but it's fuzzy or there's a little bit of a difference.

It, and it really enriches the film because it feels like every scene is a different scene.

And it helps construct together this like tapestry that feels so inviting to engage with.

Yeah. And we did travel to a lot of different locations too. I think the one time we shot

primarily in one location was at Kosa in 2023. And we did shoot a variety of interviews in that one

location. And yeah, I mean, that's, that's just our style. You know, we shoot a lot for the

national networks and, you know, Tom does all kinds of work for national shows and that's,

he's very good at that. He's, you know, always thinking about. When he's on the scene, I mean,

he's just like, let's put this over here. Let's get that over here. He's also constantly thinking in

terms of how to best arrange the lens against what the setup is. And it's just, it's so much fun to

work with the pros because you guys just have it nailed down. I'm super lucky because I think

sometimes I take that for granted because I'm so used to it that just being able to walk just

just having the, you know, the confidence of knowing that the shot's going to look great.

And then I can focus on questions and script and content and, you know, think of bigger things and

not be worried about, you know, how the shot's going to look. And that's such a luxury to have that.

What was perhaps one thing that sticks out in your mind as something serant if it is, it turned out

better than you thought or a happy accident, for example. Oh gosh. Let's see.

Well, I was really happy with how the graphics turned out. Yes. Graphics are, I think they worked

out so well. And we were concerned because 3D medical animations are insanely expensive.

Yes. And I was shout out to the graphics team. Yes. I really want to capitalize on what you're saying

because I think both you and I, we were looking at the cost of doing these like true 3D rendered

graphics and the time investment and all that sort of stuff. And so you had found this team.

What's the name of the company? They're called Verve. Verve. And they do a lot of medical

animation. And they, they actually typically usually only work in 2D. Right. So they usually do

more 2D animation. But we start talking to them about what we wanted to do. And we wanted to do

some elements in 3D. We definitely wanted the human body, the brain, and the organs, you know,

as we were talking about them to be in 3D. And they were so great. They just said, oh yeah,

we can do that. We can absolutely do that. And then further down the line as we're giving updates

on the study. And it's more like, you know, results and graphs and such. Then we kind of move

into 2D space. So that was our little budgetary savings there. But they just gave everything

such a nice clean look. And then they ended up doing the new open 2. And we went back and

remastered the open. We had both my parents are graphic artists. Did you know that? I only recently

learned that. I did not know that. I don't know how I didn't know that until just like a couple

months ago. I'm the apple that fell a bit from the tree, but not too far from the tree. I really do

good brand awareness. And I know you know this from working with me for a long time now. And that's

what I love about our graphics. I feel like we've got a nice, I think it's called brand philosophy,

but basically there's there's rules in the way that we display things and how we try to. And so

I think it gives it this nice clean look. Yeah, consistency. Consistency is huge for me.

And we did it. I'm so proud of our graphics. So I agree. I think it was a huge.

A lot of these things I feel like you have to, I don't want to say get lucky,

but definitely things just have to work out. Like you and I working so soon without having

known each other. It's a huge risk. Yeah, you don't know. You don't know how well you'll connect

with other people, particularly if it's a huge project. Same thing with the graphics company.

Yeah, we did with times running out. So we need to like get these things going. Yeah, definitely

take a leap of faith. But we had, you know, we have a production company as well. And we do a lot

of other production work as well. And we had worked with them on other projects previously.

And had been really pleased with the results and the basically customer service, you know,

working with artists that are responsible and, you know, take your feedback and all these

things that we're talking about, you know, like, you don't always find that in creatives.

Sometimes it's challenging. But so yeah, I was really happy with that. And you said, what

serendipity, surprise. I thought of another one was Dr. Bernstein. Oh, yes. Oh my gosh. So

Dr. Richard Kay Bernstein, you know, is a pioneer in research for type one diabetes.

And we were filming with a family that had a young boy that is managing his type one diabetes

with a ketogenic diet. And basically, as that shoot was getting set up, I realized they were

following his protocol, Richard Kay Bernstein's protocol. And I was like, Richard Kay Bernstein. I

think that guy is over on the East Coast. I think he's over there. And so I reached out to Dr.

Tro Collegian. Yeah. And it's a hill marry. It was. We know that Dr. Bernstein is not, there's a

reason you don't see him in interviews. There's a reason you don't see any other documentaries around

them. It's because he's he's actually a very private person. Yeah. He does like these videos

for social media. But generally speaking, the other factor is that he's, you know, his,

the immunity is a concern. So you want to be he needs to be sure given he was more compromised

early on in his life. Right. To maintain good health. But put again, it felt like a hell marry.

I'm like, good luck. I think I even said this to you when we were trying to do I was like, good

luck if you can get him. Yeah. I was like, it would be so great if we could get Dr. Bernstein.

You know, we could add that to the story. And so thankfully, Tro knew, knew him and helped connect

us and we reached out. It was like two weeks before we were over there. And he agreed to do an

interview and spend a day with us. And I think that was one of the very happy, you know, it wasn't

really an accident. I can't say a happy accident, but it was a happy alignment that that fell into

place because there were also some really great parallels between you and Dr. Bernstein.

As well. But I thought, you know, he was trained as an engineer who went back to medical school.

And I guess differently got went back and got his medical license. But I just I that it tied a

bow on the whole film. I feel like that story. When I got a spoiler, but there's a great little

thing with Bernstein at the end. Yeah. But he is the OG. He is. Yeah.

He hats off to him for all that he's done for all of us. Yeah. First person in the world to be

testing his blood sugar daily. Yeah. Yeah. Multiple times a day. Yeah. Multiple times a day.

First person in the world. You know, I think that's just amazing. And then here we have this other

engineer probably the first person in the world to be testing his cholesterol daily multiple times

a day. And so the parallels were very interesting and serendipity that that that all came together.

And I think it's a neat part of the film that I think people will enjoy. I'll concede if I have

to pick on one thing that I wished we could have gone we tried to, but we couldn't get it together

was we didn't manage to get a story on somebody with epilepsy. There were two families. I already

told you about them that I was kind of in communication with before, but it just didn't end up working

out. Yeah. But if we ever do another film by golly, we're going to because there's a lot of amazing

stories there. And yeah, the story I got from the epilepsy teens and I talked to quite a few.

Quite a few of them said, no, we just don't see that happening in kids with epilepsy.

The extreme rise in cholesterol and I was surprised. And I asked, well, you know, why is that? Do

you think? And they said that they thought it was because a lot of times the kids will use the

diet for a period of time. And once they get the seizures under control and they're very stabilized,

they can oftentimes transition off or bring back more carbohydrate. So that was the answer they

gave me anyhow. And yeah, I, what I, what I know is common thing is they'll, they may add

cholesterol and medication for children who see a rise in their, their LDL cholesterol as they,

because it's already kind of a bit standard. Right. There's just more medication that tends to be

involved. Right. For people compared to say those with type 1 diabetes, type 1 diabetes, it can be

thought that it's just more about the monitoring. Less about the specific medication. But with

that, with epilepsy, there tends to be a lot more medication in play. And therefore, the doors

a bit more open for that scenario. Adding in something else. Yeah. Yeah. I was surprised by that too.

I was surprised that it was, I was just kind of running into dead ends. But then we found Johnny.

Yeah. And the family dealing with type 1 diabetes, which is also an emerging, you know,

amazing story of families going against the guidelines, basically doing the exact opposite of what

the guidelines for type 1 diabetes recommend and finding incredible success. And I just, it's so

interesting in the nutrition space, just running into that story again and again and again.

And yeah, the, the coffins that's Johnny's family. Yeah. There's stuff they were telling us

off camera. You were there for that. And that they, they experienced a lot of social

ostracizing from other type 1 diabetic parents. Not only that from clinicians. They, they, they were,

you know, they had clinicians borderline threatened them that they were treating their children,

that they were, they were doing the wrong thing for Johnny. And when we went and interviewed Dr.

Bernstein and his assistant, Sanham, told us that Dr. Bernstein has had to go and testify

at several court cases where when parents of children with type 1 diabetes get divorced,

a lot of times part of the trial will be that you're, you're not doing the right thing for the

child. We're, we're going to take the child away from you because a parent is treating this

child with a low-carb or ketogenic approach, nutrition approach. Right. And sometimes the other

parent doesn't agree. Get a parent maybe trying to get custody. Yes. And so they're trying to

leverage the, it's, it's really unfortunate. One of the graphics I'm so proud of that you had a

keen eye to pick up on was what Dr. Bernstein talks about with the law of small numbers. Oh, yeah.

And how you're trying to like, you know, as the glucose is going up, you apply the insulin, but hey,

if you have less glucose, taking it up, you need less insulin and then you get it into a lot more

control. Yeah. And I say this many times, I'll say one more time here, which is just that

cholesterol to me is so much more complex than glucose and insulin. Right. Yeah.

I feel a little disheartened sometimes when I'm like, wow, they can't get that part. Yeah,

they can't get that part. Man, I've really got a strong. Right. I've got a lot of work ahead of

me to try to get them up to speed on the cholesterol part. Yeah. Yeah. It was amazing how,

how low of a dose of insulin that Johnny was able to maintain with and also Dr. Bernstein.

You know, he, he talked to us about when he first started as a, as a kid, he was getting 200 units

of insulin a day. And, and at the time we filmed with them, he was down to 20 units a day. And

that was just by managing the carbohydrate intake, like minimizing the carbohydrate intake,

then you don't have to take as much insulin and it keeps everything under control. Like you're

saying the law of small numbers and it just makes sense. Yeah. It really makes sense. But yet

people in the type 1 diabetes community still run up against the, the, the clinical guidelines

still recommend higher carbohydrate diets and higher doses of insulin. And those parents,

there's a great group called type 1 grit has been supporting, you know, supporting parents and

families with type 1 diabetes. And, and it's good that they have that because they've been going

up against mainstream medical advice. And sometimes getting a lot of grief for it. Yeah.

It's unfortunate because I, I feel like we already have enough science there. I don't, I, so

in the case of type 2 diabetes, I think for most people with type 2 diabetes, there's more options

on what they can do. I do think that virtually any successful weight loss diet is going to be a

low insulin diet, you know, to quote Dr. Bigman. But in, in the case of type 1 diabetes in particular,

like you just have that removal of control of glucose within the body. Why not just have less

carbs? Yeah. That bring in the glucose. Then the control is generally easier. And I, I don't know.

It just makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. It's crazy. They had, the Coglins had clinicians telling them that

at one point they, they received a text left someone accusing them that they were going to kill

their kid with the low carbohydrate diet. And, you know, so they really had to gut check, you know,

what they were doing. And, but they saw their son thriving. You know, they saw him thriving. They

saw him taking less insulin, you know, doing so well. But that, I mean, props to those families

that go up against that and, and then maintain and continue for the sake of the health of their

children. Yeah. You know, when, when the data is on your side, that's the key. Right. And I mean,

to be sure, it's always a pursuit. You're always trying to get more data, better data.

But that, that gives me an opportunity for a good segue. How much do you now feel,

how valuable do you feel imaging is with regard to consideration for cardiovascular disease?

I mean, I think it's fantastic. I, you know, I loved what Arthur Agustin and, and Dr. Matthew

Buddha called it the mammogram of the heart. Like, why aren't we doing this? The CAC in particular,

the CAC in particular, right? Yeah, the CAC in particular, because you don't have to have the

contrast die. It's a low dose of radiation. It's a low dose of radiation. It takes five minutes.

You don't even have to change clothes. You just go lay down and they scan your heart. And it's a

great first look, first baseline. And of course, there are caveats, you know, depending on your age,

you can have greater meaning. And depending on the results, you may want to do further testing,

but for example, you know, I'm in my 50s because of this project doing this film with you,

I decided, well, I think I'll go ahead and do a CAC. And I just went and had one done. And the CAC

was zero. So I feel pretty confident that I'm what that means is there was no detectable

calcification because the CAC is a score. And if it's a positive score, if it's a non-zero,

that means there was some amount of detected calcification. Yeah. Now, to be sure, as should

always be caveated, there's even if you feel like you're as healthy as an ox, you may go and

get a scan. It turns out that you do have a positive one, which means that there is calcification.

But that could also have a lot to do with what your prior lifestyle is. If you're in the process

of trying to improve your lifestyle, it's not a bad idea to get one, to just know where you're at.

Yeah. Yeah. It's wonderful. I mean, because then you're not just relying on surrogate markers

for heart disease. You're actually looking inside and seeing if there's presence of the disease,

which is exactly what I learned from you. Yeah. Nothing beats the prognostic power

of seeing the actual disease itself. I mean, we just couldn't do this before. You couldn't

easily look into the coronary arteries of the heart, you know, 30 years ago, 50 years ago,

or to what degree you could require a lot of radiation. Right. A lot of testing. Yeah. So

it's really like the concept, the dream of the mammogram of the heart when they were talking about

in the 90s. That was on a lot less resolution, and that was on a much higher dose of radiation.

Today, it's about one and a half times that of a mammogram. Right. Which they want you to do every year.

Yeah. So I mean, I mean, they don't want you to do them every year, but me to do them every year.

And so, you know, any pushback on the exposure to me is, you know, there's some, there's an

ulterior motive going on there. Yeah. I think it's fantastic. It made for a great story thread

in the film as well, and of course, is a key part of your study. Of course, you're doing the CT

angiography, which includes the contrast dye, where you can see also soft plaque, which I haven't

done that yet. How many of those have you done? I've done two. You've done two. And I'll probably do

a third one. So the difference between a CAC and a CT angiogram is it's, it is still a CT,

but the reason they put in the contrast dye is because what that does is that lights up the

lumen. So it's kind of like you can see, you know, like a glowing, you know, the expansion of what

the blood is throughout the coronary arteries. In which case, you don't need to look for the

calcification. You can actually see how much the, like if there's stenosis, if there's any

pinching or anything along those lines. It becomes a lot more obvious because it's a scan

that's in 3D. There's multiple slices going from all directions. Yeah. And then from that,

they can, they can use software that helps them navigate through it. It's a lot more sophisticated

and then a CAC and would arguably be the gold standard in many people's opinion because it can

also pick up soft plaque. Whereas a CAC does not pick that up. No, that said, me personally,

I've never been more bullish on CAC. Even if it's not as good as a CT angiogram,

boy, is it close? Close enough to where if you're concerned about your heart disease risk,

but not at a point where you want to go towards the gold standard, you're not sure about the contrast

dye and so forth. Gosh, CAC is worth considering. Great place to start. Exactly. Right. And so,

in my understanding, correct me if I'm wrong, but what I've learned from working with you.

So do the CAC first. And if it's a zero, great, especially if you're my age or over 50,

that seems to indicate pretty good short term, you know, safety from heart disease. But if it

is positive, if it does show a lot of calcification, then possibly do the CT angiogram, right?

Yeah. There's some of the considerations have a little bit to do with where you're at

with your cohort in age. So for example, somebody in their 60s or 70s, depending on their

male or female, you can check the charts as to what the percent likelihood is

and what typical ranges there are. So generally speaking, for example, almost everybody in their 70s

are probably going to have a positive CAC. By almost everybody, I mean, probably I want to say

70 percent maybe. I don't know. I'd have to check the charts again, but it's very common.

To be fair, that is the general population. So if you've been on a standard American dye.

I was going to say with that correlate with metabolic health by chance.

Yeah, I didn't have to walk that cat back. I'll have to look at the charts later. But you know what,

actually, that gives me another segue, something I'm going to get a little bit animated about.

And that is the core of this story isn't just lean mass hypersponders. I would argue a big part of

this is, hey, why are we studying healthy people? Yes. Just in general, right? Because it was difficult

for us to even find comparisons with other studies to say, yeah, how much does say high LDL

matter for folks who are metabolically healthy? Or does it even show it all, right? Is there any?

And that proved to be difficult. In fact, it proved to be impossible for longitudinal studies.

Because there's just no longitudinal data until ours for metabolically healthy people.

Which blows my mind. It does. I mean, really, when I first started this project, I didn't recognize

that, that the bulk of research done in the field on cholesterol is done on sick people. People who

had heart events already. And so, of course, you know, that it made sense to that, you know,

you need to study those folks to figure out maybe how to help, how to improve their situation.

But then taking that information and applying it to everyone, that's the step that just I was

surprised by. Like, really? Okay, so we're studying sick people to come up with how we treat

healthy people. That doesn't make sense. I think it's a serious problem. Because as I pointed out

many times in my presentations here on the podcast, how you are sick can affect your

lipid profile. Okay, so already that's a confounder. If metabolic syndrome itself

has these attributes, yeah, that change your lipids. How can you then make judgments on how much

your lipids cause the diseases you're interested in? This is the problem with overall extrapolation.

If you want to apply medication to a healthy population, I think that you should do studies

on that healthy population to confirm. Yes. If that's what's warranted. Yes. Otherwise,

you're taking a bit of a leap there. Right. It only makes sense. So yeah, that was very

surprising to me because I didn't realize that when I started in on this project with you.

And that was one of the first things I learned about and learned about the, you know, the CTT

database as well, that much of the information on cholesterol research is proprietary.

And we can't even see it. That's another interesting point that we didn't get into.

So yeah, you need at least one whole film to do it to just look at the topic of cholesterol.

But preferably maybe three episodes. We could have gotten into some of this other information,

but yeah, surprising. So let's feel free to segue into a little bit more about you in particular.

When did you decide you wanted to get into film? Well, I grew up in a television family.

My father was a cinematographer and my mom was a writer and they had a production company and

they did documentaries. So I guess I sort of grew up around it. Television documentaries.

So were they shorter-form? Yeah, the documentaries they produced aired on PBS in the North,

like in Seattle, like near Seattle. So it wasn't just PBS. It was like local PBS.

Yeah, it was a regional topic that they did. Yeah, and then my dad was a new cinematographer at the

at the time when, you know, film at 11, right? Because they would go out and they would shoot

film stock. And then, you know, they would do readers on the story at 6, where the anchor would

just tell you about the story. And then they would say film at 11, because that's how long it took

to process the film, cut it together, and then they would actually have the film for the story

in the 11 o'clock news. So that was my dad. And none of that. You're working with the Reels and

all that. Yeah. Flap editing, razor blades and white gloves and, you know, piecing it all together.

Yeah. Exactly. You knew this about me, but maybe a lot of people watching us didn't,

which is that I actually had a small run at film school. But it was at a time in which I also was

doing quite well in the .com boom. And I had to pick one. A life raft to jump on. Yeah.

Oh my gosh. It's tough with film. You have to, you have to know someone. You have to just,

you know, work really hard. Do a lot of until you're discovered. Whatever you're doing, right?

You could be a PA, do like 80 projects before somebody picks you up and takes you to the next level.

If you're an actor, actress, you may have to do a bunch of bit parts. Yeah.

You have to do it before you finally get the big break, right? Or, or I thought the route I might end

up in is I just make enough money. With my engineering gig, that'll just finance my own film.

Finance your own films. Yeah. That's probably the best idea of all. Yeah. It's just that

that track kept on its own. And I never got back around to it. But, uh, yeah. I know. It is true.

It is, in fact, true that I've said many times over to friends and family that on my bucket list

of things, top of list was to be in a feature film. Now I guarantee you, you could have asked me any,

any of those times. So what's your top 100 things you think it might be? And there's no way I would have

said a cholesterol documentary that's done. Oh my gosh. Yeah. That's crazy. Yeah. I knew you'd

gone to film school. I went to broadcast journalism school. So I went to the Edward R.

Murrow School of broadcast journalism at Washington State University. He endowed the

communication school there. And so my degree was actually in television journalism.

And so I went out and worked in television as a news reporter and a producer and special projects

producers where I kind of landed. But were you in private camera? I was. Yeah. I was a news reporter

for the first five years in my career just on camera. A news reporter schlepping camera gear

all over the place. That was in smaller markets where you had to shoot your own stories.

You know, and we would literally like set up a light stand and then get the camera and focus

on the light stand and then go stand in front of it or pull it out of the way and then you could do

your stand up. You'd shoot your own stuff, right? So that's how I started in smaller markets.

And then I'm curious about this though. And working with you, you're definitely more comfortable.

It seems behind the camera directing things and putting it together. But I could so easily see

you as just an on camera interviewer. You've got a real natural style to you. Looking back to

the writing, you're very quick with good questions. In fact, to just interject this real quick,

we started getting a good shorthand process where you would write out the questions.

I would either have them on my phone or I'd have them like on an iPad and your buy or something

like that. I would try to practice stuff a little bit. I'd get pretty decent at hitting the bigger

ones at least. And then once I felt like I was kind of running out of steam with the particular

interview or interviewee that I was looking to, I would then turn to you and you might have

thought of some new ones. A lot of times those were gold. And then I might have the final set

like after that. Yeah, it's nice to be able to sit back there and listen and not be in the hot

seat, you know, because I, because you can, you can kind of listen more globally to the whole

interview. And actually a lot of times I would be taking notes. And, and then sometimes it would

just be like the answer. It would be nice to get that answer again. Maybe the person kind of

stumble a little bit or maybe there was something they alluded to that might be cool to expand upon.

And it's really nice, you know, to have someone behind you kind of listening and then filling in

with a couple of little extra questions. It's huge. We do that in our own production company.

Tom will do that for me. I usually do conduct interviews for our projects, you know, like that

fiction I conducted all the interviews. And it's unusual for me to, to, to have someone else

conducting the interviews, you know, which is interesting, but, but it worked out great.

But, yeah, that's, that's, that's a very comfortable place for me to be. And, and I just,

I found that I preferred working behind the camera and, and producing. I wasn't as polished

in front of a camera as some people are there. I mean, there are people who are born to be in front

of a camera. And I'm not one of those people. I, I mean, I could get by, but, but I really prefer

working behind the camera and putting all the pieces together and, you know, looking at the big

picture and, and that whole process. So, yeah, yeah, I gravitated back behind the camera, like,

probably about five or six years into my career. I had moved into special projects, producing.

So, when was this roughly? That was probably around 19, well, 1995 is when I moved to Boise,

interestingly, Boise, Idaho, which is, you know, at that time, it was a pretty small town, but

had a really great television station. And you hadn't met Tom yet by this point, right? No, huh.

And I started working with Bill first. When I first moved there, Bill Crom, our editor.

And he and I produced a travel show together. It was called Exploring Idaho. And we traveled

all over the state. And we did all these really cool, you know, rafting and hiking and

skiing and biking stories. It was back in the day of magazine shows. You were here with magazine

shows, like half hour show that had multiple stories in it. And we produced those, you know, every,

every month we produced a new show. A lot of slice of life stuff. Yeah, a lot of features,

feature stories and recreation and travel kind of type stories. So I was doing that. And then

I landed the job as a special projects and documentary producer, which was really directing,

I don't know, the television stations always called it producing on shows. But I was writing,

directing, putting together documentary projects for the television station.

Like a show runner.

Yeah, except that I didn't have anyone to run. It was all me.

A self runner. It was Bill and I, we were two person crews, you know. And so Bill was a photographer

editor. And I was the writer, producer, slash director. And we did a variety of documentary films

for the television stations. It was like a lot of work. It was a lot of work. Yeah, it was a lot of

work. But it was great. I mean, it's a fantastic job. I mean, I really have been super fortunate. I've

had an extremely interesting and varied career, being able to kind of always feel like I get to

like look in the window for a while of all these different topics. And it's just, it's fascinating.

So yeah, that's kind of how I got my start was actually television. So where did it take you next?

So in 2000, Tom and I, we had met and had gotten married. And in 2000, we decided to step out

and start our own production company. So we, we started wide eye productions and just started our,

our, our idea was to produce content for the cable channels. So we had done a lot of freelance

work over the years and produced, produced a lot of content like our shows were being aired

around the Northwest. We had a national cable channel pick up one of our series. And, and so we

thought, well, well, let's do this independently because that was all for the television station. So

we wanted to do it on our own. So we started our company and started pitching series to cable

networks. And, and that's kind of how we launched it. So give me some examples of the series you

pitched. Oh, he's pitched a lot of series. It's like throwing darts at a moving dartboard

because the staff changes a lot at these networks. Um, it's really, you start picking up what

they're interested in. Yes. And, and that was, I think a little bit of a mismatch for a while

because there was this phase of reality television show with forced urgency and forced

conflicts, you know, is what that's everything that the cable networks wanted. And we were pitching,

oh, we had like some great ideas. We had a show called American Music with John Doe. I know if

you know who he is, but he's a lead singer of a band called X. And I mean, we were huge fans. And

we pitched a show where he traveled around the country and met different musicians and, and like

with Jam with them and like learn about the different music scenes and different cities around

the country. That one actually had a couple of networks interested, but ultimately didn't go

through. We had another one where we were working with two brothers out of Sun Valley that were

ski racers. They were big X-game athletes and, um, really great athletes and also, you know,

just really charismatic guys. And we had a show that we put together that we were going to travel

around the world with them and do different sports with them around the world. And we pitched

that to the travel channel. And, and I'll never forget we blew back to Washington DC and met with

the acquisitions director for travel channel. And, uh, and she liked it. She said, you know,

are you pitching this to anyone else? And we said, well, we'll sit on it if you're interested. And

she said, hold it. I want to, I'm very interested. So we walked out of that meeting going, wow,

you know, this could really happen. And then like two weeks later, I reached back to her,

she'd left the travel channel. She switched networks. And that was just like

the story of our lives. It just felt like we just never quite got aligned with the right idea,

the right timing. And plus we were getting feedback, you know, well, we need more conflict. We want more,

you know, debt sort of like fake deadlines. Have you ever, you know, some of these shows,

oh, it's got to be done by tomorrow. And if we don't get it done by tomorrow, it's going to all fall apart.

That stuff was coming down from the networks. They wanted to insert that into these shows. And so

anyway, I, like I said, I felt like we were, we were throwing darts at a moving dart board. And,

and we didn't, we were small. So it would take us, you know, it'd take us several months to put

together a pitch and a, and a sizzle reel for a concept. And really you needed to have an entire

team of people throwing darts. And we only had a couple people throwing darts. This is, this is

the thing about the industry, though, that's, it's gotta be maddening. It's just that there's a lot

of work. Just to try to pitch the big thing you want to do. You can't, I think a lot of people

think you just, you know, the, the execs are sitting back on, gosh, when, who could bring us the

ideas that we're, you know, that we need in order to just, nobody has any ideas. But the reality,

they have ideas, secretary has ideas, the batter has ideas. The trick is that you're wanting to at

least cross the Rubicon enough that they can envision what your vision is. Yeah. And that it

tantalizes them. And you still have to put in a lot of work. Oh, yeah. It's a ton of work. We,

I mean, we, I think we probably did, um, formally about 20 different pitches and sizzle reels.

And then we just said, you know what? We, we don't have enough darts to throw at the moving

dartboard. Let's refocus and let's, let's come back home. And so we decided to make a film,

scenic nature film, um, in Idaho instead. Like, we have all this incredible scenery right out our

back door. Um, let's do like a planet earth style film about Idaho. And, and we'll just do it

ourselves. We'll get it done and then we'll distribute it. And so that's what we did. And that was

really Tom who just said, you know, I think this, this is going to be a better way for us to go.

And so we did that. And that film was hugely successful. Yeah. It was a, yeah, it was really,

it really was a turning point for us. Um, we distributed that, um, Northwest wide on television

stations. What year was this? That was in 2012. Then 12. Okay. So you had been at this for a while.

Yeah. Yeah. We've been pitching, you know, I mean, all the while we're, you know, we're

still doing commercial work. We're doing commercial work. We're, we're freelancing for national

networks, you know, constantly producing shows for them, you know, like we're producing segments,

I should say, whenever they would travel to our region, we would shoot and produce, um,

stories for them. Um, so we're doing the content for these national shows, but we just didn't have

our own show. Um, and so yeah, it was quite a lot. I think we spent probably a solid eight years

on pitching different ideas. Yeah. Yeah. And then finally, it was like, you know what? Let's

do our own thing. And so we did, we did Idaho, the movie. How long did it take? Idaho, the movie

we spent, I mean, um, because we travel around the region a lot, um, and we had shot a whole bunch

of footage on one of the very first red cameras that came out. Um, we had a bunch of 4K footage in

2010. I know that's like unheard of. Yeah, like we were the first company in the region, um,

to gather this kind of stock footage. And, um, so, uh, yeah, so we spent about a year and a half,

I guess, filling in what, what, what other locations we wanted to fill in. And then, um,

I just started reaching out to the television stations because we had good relationships with

the television stations in the region. And everyone was excited about it, you know, the Seattle

stations, Portland, Salt Lake, Spokane, you know, basically we knit together a whole northwest wide

broadcast of this film. And, um, and, and we just did it ourselves. So it's kind of similar to

your story. I mean, it's like, we had to just do it ourselves. It's what we ended up finally

just having to do. And then once that success happened, we sold the DVDs at Costco. And the DVDs,

like for their number one, it was, it was crazy. That Christmas, we sold the DVDs and Costco at first

was like, well, we'll, we'll take a thousand DVDs, you know, we'll try it out. And so they put

a thousand DVDs of it in their store and they sold out in an hour. And so then they were like,

well, okay, we'll order, you know, another thousand DVDs and then those sold out in an hour.

And then we're getting a call from the national Costco salespeople going, what is this film?

And, um, ultimately, I think we ended up selling something like 20,000 DVDs at the regional

Costco stores. And, um, and so that was exciting. And that led to, we have, um, six different films

in the nature genre, um, in the region and in the Idaho region and sort of Rocky Mountain region.

How long are as each film? They're usually around an hour. Yeah. So they were, they were actually

like, like 47 minutes because they were a commercial television one hour. So yeah. So they were

built to have breaks and, you know, it was a TV project. Even so, so a lot of people watching

this now may have already forgotten about physical media altogether. It's just everyone's into

the streaming space. But yeah, you have to burn those things. They have to get packaged.

Yeah. So there's some level of risk. Oh, yeah.

Putting these things together that you don't have was streaming.

We still have a garage full of DVDs if anyone wants. Yeah, that was the risk with Costco, actually,

in particular because, you know, they wanted the giant palette, you know, they want the pile,

you know, and it shows up when people walk in the door. And so they, they after the success of

the first film, the next ones, they made huge orders. And, um, and then, you know, if they don't

sell you, you have to take, take the leftover stock back. So yeah, we still have boxes of DVDs

in our garage. So when was the first time you worked your way towards Wayne to do something longer

than actual feature length. Yeah. So a feature length film, yeah, because all of the documentaries

I did for the television station were one hours. So we did stuff on salmon recovery,

methamphetamines, you know, all different topics, but those were all one hours. The first

full feature length documentary that we did was fat fiction. Yeah. That was the first one. Yeah.

Yeah, because the others were all targeted toward television and streaming release,

but television first, broadcast release first, and then streaming. And fat fiction was at that,

that inflection point of when streaming as an independent filmmaker was a viable distribution

path. So prior to that, prior to really 2017, you still kind of needed another distribution method

besides just streaming. But then streaming really picked up after like 2016, 2017, it was like,

you know, actually, I think we could make a film and actually get a return on our investment

just with streaming. So that was part of the calculus literally what I was just talking about?

Yes, it was. And it always has been as an independent, you, you have to think about the numbers as

well as the, if you want to stay in business, if you want to keep doing it, you know, you have

to think about distribution for sure at the beginning, like, well, how are we going to get this

out here? You know, how are we going to do this? And so yeah, that was the first time that we felt

like we had a viable path for distribution with a full length feature film. So we did it.

And we did. So notably, it, uh, it's main narrator is Mark Hyman. Yes.

When you were, were you writing the film before you knew Mark Hyman would be in it? Or, okay,

so you, you just had, you know, whoever that was going to be. And then when did you find out that

you could get Mark Hyman for the film? Um, after I, uh, emailed him.

That was a Hail Mary too. I was like, who would I really, who would be my number one choice?

Like, who do I think would really be a great narrator for this film? And I had been seeing a lot

of his work. And he had just at that time that come out with his book Food Fix. And I just felt

like he had such a balanced approach. Um, and I thought I think he would be great.

And so actually Nina Tishel's made the introduction for me. So that helped tremendously, you know,

Nina has been so generous and helpful. Um, I interviewed her for the film. And we, we connected

then as, you know, journalists and, um, and so she made the introduction. And of course, I think

that helped a lot. Um, and he agreed to do it. I'm curious about the interviews. So you interview

a number of prominent low-carb people today, right? Yeah. Um, how did you connect with them? Because

where you weren't that much in the space yet? No, I wasn't. But I, as a, as a news reporter and as a

writer and producer for, for television, I had done a lot of stories with nutritionists. I had

interfaced with the healthcare system and nutritionists and dietitians. And, um, so I had exposure

to that and, and, you know, knowledge of kind of what was being recommended for starters.

And then, um, when I understood how well low-carb works and how the whole story about saturated fat

may be off, that's when I became extremely intrigued. And, and, you know, my, my career, you know,

we did a lot of these, uh, nature films about Idaho that those were kind of some of our first

independent productions. But as a special projects producer for an NBC affiliate, I had done,

you know, myriad different topics. And so I wasn't afraid of a different topic. Um, so I just started

reaching out to people, you know, I just said, I want to do this. I want to, I think there needs to

be a film, um, about the dietary guidelines and, and this vilification of saturated fat, which may have

been, you know, put together on very low little evidence. And I found the whole story fascinating.

And I just started reaching out to people and, you know, people in this space are so generous.

They're so interested in getting the information out to the public that they're willing to give

you their time. And, and that's what I found again and again with luminaries in the space. All saying,

yes. And, and I'm just, Jen, the low carb community. I just, I, I feel so blessed working with

so many in it that just seemed to be genuine and good souls. Mm-hmm. They're just, they're,

there's so many, I just think there's a lot of folks who in doing me wrong, there's some spicy ones

out there, but truly, um, as communities, I've ever worked in or around go, there's so many,

just people looking to help, help others. That's just foundational, right? Like you don't become

passionate about nutrition if you're not trying to better yourself or, or help the health of your

family or your friends or your community. And so I mean, I just ran into that again and again,

I know you have to, I ran into it. I mean, Kosa, right? Kosa is a charity fundraising event spoiler.

All of our speakers, I'm just straight asking them to come on their own dime and their own time.

Like they're, they're making time in their life to fly here to Las Vegas. That's amazing.

Where I don't pay them anything, all for the purpose of trying to raise money with us together

to then fund the research. Yeah. And, uh, I mean, I'm sorry, I,

having worked in other fields, engineering, medicine, I, I would think I would have a tougher time,

just getting a bunch of them to come out. But with this community, it's been great and a lot of them

have come all three times. Yeah. That's fantastic. I think most of them, I think the

past majority of them have come all the time. Yeah. And I mean, the lineup for your conference

this year. Yeah. It is amazing. Yeah. I'm so excited to be there and to see everyone and get a

chance to talk to folks too. I mean, and see the speeches. It's going to be an incredible conference.

Yeah. But it just goes to show you. I mean, it's, it's such an amazing collection of people.

If I'm not mistaken, in fact, fiction, you also had an interview with the great Sarah Hallberg.

Yes. Yeah. We interviewed her twice. Sarah Hallberg. She's just amazing. Yeah.

And we miss her. Yeah. That was so sad. I was, I was really sad when she passed. And I know a lot

of people were, I loved her. She was feisty and so passionate about what she was doing. And I just

loved it that she, you know, she started the clinic within her hospital system for weight loss.

And she said she was given a year to research the best methods for weight loss. And so, and she

was brought up in her training in a low fat paradigm. But then she went to the research and she

started finding all the research and going, well, wait a minute. You know, low carb is far more

effective, you know, for helping people losing weight and reversing type 2 diabetes. But she got

some pushback. Yeah. And the pushback was, and you will relate to this, there's not enough research.

There hasn't been enough research. We don't have, you know, clinical trials to prove that this

is safe and effective. And so what I love about Sarah Hallberg, she's like, fine, I will do my own

study. So she didn't take no for an answer. And, you know, her passion shows through in that

broadest verta. You know, one of the things that I think people don't realize is verta

was taking some of the toughest patients, you know, some of the biggest drug. Into their,

into their study, people who had type 2 diabetes for eight years. But also like average BMI was

very high. Yeah. And a lot of people will not include those folks in a study because they're too

careful. Yes. Which again, it's, it's this weird commendium because a lot of diet studies,

or a lot of diets that are in diet studies, the participants don't adhere to them long term.

And then that's counted against the diet. But a lot of times, it's not just about the diet. It's

also about the people adopting it. Sometimes they're struggling. I know this because I have some of

these folks in my family. Yeah. Right. And you know, you've got to get it away from the whole

blame component. You've got to get it towards, hey, there's just multiple components that we have

to bear in mind. And it's not too easy to figure out. But the question is, how many do manage

even if it's for a period of time to maintain? Yeah, they have five years statistics, five

years out, people maintaining reversal. I mean, it's so impressive. And it's it's incredible data.

Yeah. And yeah, I wish there were more five year study is on everything. Yeah. So getting back

to the film, you get a bunch of these interviews booked this film. How long did it take you?

Fat fiction. So that was a bootstrap production. We were doing it in between paying projects.

You know, we we've self-funded that entire project. So one part of your day, your week is

paying the bill work. Yes. Right. Commercial stuff. Yeah. Yeah. And then on your off time,

right, you're trying to get this done. Yeah. Bills on board. Yeah. Toms on board. Yeah.

And you had any others? Yeah, we had three other, and you know, we've always usually had a

staff of around six people on that wide eye. And so yeah, it had various people helping out.

Usually three or four shooters, we usually have on staff and a couple of producers is usually

kind of our split. So was there anything, even though you'd been very experienced coming up to

fat fiction, this being your first feature like film, was there anything you ran into you weren't

expecting? A pandemic. Yeah, I wasn't expecting that. You didn't plan for a pandemic. No.

No, I felt pretty solid. You know, I just had quite a lot of experience producing shows one

hour shows. And just wasn't venturing too far in the technical. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I felt real

solid with, you know, the film, the interviews, the topic, and putting it all together.

The distribution of a feature doc, we were new to try a fan-driven, driven screening platform.

And we had that up and going, and then the pandemic hit. So then we ended up just going

straight to streaming, straight to Amazon. How far into that process with the fan-driven

screening had you gotten? Not very far. We had just had, we did like a first look screening

at low-carb Denver in 2020. And that was on March 14th. And the whole goal of going to that

conference and, you know, obviously we wanted to share the film with the people who had

contributed their time. But also we had a table and we were signing people up to host screenings

of the film at theaters near them, very similar we're doing with the cluster all code. And we have

50 sign-ups and I was so excited, you know, all over the country, you know, just from this one

conference, but then the world shut down. But wait, you said this is March 14th, 2020?

Okay. So I remember that time very, very well for a different reason.

You were, did you go to low-carb Denver that year? I almost did. I was going to say I don't think

you were there. So this is great because this brings it back to our film. We're, I'm booked to go

to low-carb Denver, 2020. And I had seven or eight interviews booked. And I had the biggies. I had

towels. I had neon tisholes. I had a whole bunch of a whole host of people. What what the planning

was is that we were going to film around the world this international tour. We quite literally

circled the globe over nine weeks. Yeah. It was 17 countries, 28 cities, 36 interviews.

Our first stop, January 8th, 2020 Beijing. Oh, gosh. Right. So of course, for people who remember,

there was a frog in boiling water effect where you, you heard of this Wuhan thing. Oh, my gosh.

It sounds like another SARS, nothing burger. Right. But their boy, they're really getting

worked up over there with Wuhan. And so I'm literally physically in China. And I'm playing

together these interviews around cholesterol for our, for this first version of the documentary,

which was going to be primarily myself and Sharon filming. We had a kit that we were traveling with.

You'll probably appreciate this. We literally were doing this full circling around the globe with

a total of four bags, two backpacks, two carryouts. Wow. So that we never had to check anything.

Yeah. One of those bags was dedicated to the film equipment. And the only reason we thought we

could do this was buy at that point in time. I think it was iPhone 11s. You could shoot with

specialized software. And lenses. And lenses didn't you put lenses on too? Yes. And we got

these moment lenses that you actually can attach to a case. And so we shot it all in log for the

film geeks. You know what I'm talking about. Yeah. So it was solid quality. Yeah. And we were

planning to do this international run of nine weeks. And then when I got back into the states,

so the nine weeks was going to be January, February, and then March and April was going to be the

national portion. And then from that, I'd have a whole bunch of interviews that I could then tailor

together. And we would talk about the story of the cholesterol code. Yeah. This is in 2020. Right.

You and I haven't met. We don't know each other. Yeah. But go figure. It sounds as if we might

have ended up meeting. Yeah. We probably would have. We're it we're it not for this thing. Yeah.

Because you I mean, almost certainly I would have gone to your booth. It's about a film. Sure.

Particularly because there's hardly any films. Unload carbon on the story of the guidelines or

any of that. Yeah. So then sure enough as we're circling the globe, it's, you know, the running joke

is it's almost like the pandemic is chasing us. Or if you're talking to my sarcastic engineering

friends, we're a patient zero. And we're the ones spreading it all around the globe. Right.

But no, we we finally get into town. And I remember it like it was yesterday.

The 48 hours after I came here, I'm doing my own research. It's a week away from

low carb number. And I go, I can't even believe I'm seeing this out loud. But I think

we shouldn't go. I think I'm going to have to stay home. I think I have to cancel. Yeah. And I

was like, oh, my gosh, I can't believe that I'm going to send all these interviews. It's such a

golden moment. But I think that that's going to be the right move. Yeah. Now a lot of people

canceled. It was like half the size of the three. It was like the third, I think. Yeah. The previous

year. And I was in, you know, talks which every Gerber leading up to that because I was like, you

know, I don't know. Maybe we should cancel the screening of the film. And you know, he was scrambling.

The hotel was scrambling. Everybody was trying to figure out what to do.

But I ended up going. Yeah. And so let's talk about the signups.

Where we have to do the obligatory mention of cholesterolcodemovie.com. Yeah.

You can sign up. That's right. To host in host or attend an existing screening. Yeah.

The way it works. This, you know, user driven version is that if you're a fan of the film,

you hear about the film and you're like, hey, I want to see it in a theater because I get the

theater experience, right? See the curtains behind Jen right here. So. Oh, yeah. That's

it. Yeah. So you get to, you get to enjoy that experience of being in a movie. I say this

all the time about my family. We tend to think of seeing a movie in a theater is like group therapy

because we always feel better after we've done it in a theater. Anyway, let's say you sign up

to be a host. You pick a place that's near you. You, you do it from the map and in the platform

that you're in. It's the same one that you were using, right? What's gather? It's a little,

it was a different company, but it's the same idea that we're doing with gather. Yeah. It's

exact same idea. Basically what's happening is these platforms make deals with participating

theaters and then what they do is they set up a kind of crowdfunding where if it hits a certain

point, then it books that auditorium that was designated. Yeah, it's no fee for the host. There's

no cost for the host, but they just they sign up and they pick a theater near them and then basically

they have to just promote the screening on social media to their friends and family and their

community. And then enough people register. And enough people buy tickets. Usually it's between

40 and 60 tickets. Enough people buy tickets. It pays the theater fees and then the screening is

booked. Yeah. So it's it's so much different than if I was a corporate client and I wanted to buy

out an auditorium on a given night and you know day and so forth. And then there actually is

that option too. If you don't want to mess around with trying to sell tickets and you don't mind

just paying the fee. Right. You can just do a buyout screening. Yeah. So it's I think it's you know

usually around $800 or something like that. You can you could buy out a theater for the night

and then you could just give away tickets. Yeah. So you're so it's just not getting around it.

This is horrible timing. Oh yeah. Epic epic bad timing for the release of that action. Yeah.

You get a booth at low carb Denver. One of the largest if not the largest at the time conferences

in low carb. You're perfectly situated. You can probably score a whole bunch of sign ups there

under normal conditions. Yeah. And then that's just perfectly bad timing. Yeah.

For when a there's not going to be a lot of people at that at that conference in the first place.

It was the lowest it had ever been attended because two thirds of people and this includes by the

way a bunch of speakers. Yeah. A lot of people canceled. A lot of people canceled. Yeah. And so it was

sparse. On the top of that they were also taking a lot of heat. They were one of the only events that

didn't cancel. Yeah. In that early March. Again during that period of time there was a lot of

uncertainty. It was it was unknown whether or not it was worth canceling events as to whether

the spread was that severe. Yeah. They had you know people sitting further away. Social distancing.

Anyway. But I can only imagine what you must have been thinking. Yeah. Because you're like come on.

This just went through years right. Three years. Three years.

Together. This is your first. Yeah. Go around with a feature. And it's not it's not like you can just

put pause on these things. Yeah. Right. Yeah. I was unfortunate. And

we ended up ultimately we spent a little bit of time waiting and wondering if theaters were going

to open back up again. If it's how you know like everyone wondering if this was just going to be

a couple month thing or what was this going to be. And we waited one month. And then we're like

you know this is going to be a long time before theaters are going to open again. So that that's

when we released it to Amazon. And that actually worked out really well because everybody was stuck

at home for the pandemic. Yeah. And so streaming just as a golden age was streaming off. Yeah.

And so in the end it actually it all worked out because then we had a captive audience on

the streaming platform and the film did very very well on streaming. In fact we were the distributor

that we work with and we're working with for the cholesterol code. She has I think 2000 films

or something like that. We were her number one film for quite some time. Yeah. Fiction did very

very well. People were interested. So yeah. So it it all worked out. It was a little heartbreaking

first. But it all worked out. Yeah. So you get to you had launched it in 2020. We connect. I

I'm actually pretty sure we connected in 2023. I know you. Oh did I say 2022? Yeah. Because you were

you were saying, for example, Kosa was in 2023. It actually was in 2024. That was the first one.

That was the first one. Yeah. Okay. I was off a year. Okay. But there's this gap. What's

happening in between when we connect at first for cholesterol code and the launch of fat fiction?

Were you thinking about doing another feature film? I was. Yeah. I was. And interestingly I was just

kind of gearing up to do a film on ketogenic diets and mental health. I was actually very

interested in Dr. Dale Bredison's work on Alzheimer's using a ketogenic diet and some early

glimmers of some of what was happening with ketogenic diets for mental health were starting to come

out. And I saw I was really interested in that. And I thought, wow, that would be a really good

piece. And this is this is pre a to put it this way. But you know what I mean when I say this is

pre bazooki. So they they I think they had just started. Right. And I kind of hadn't heard about them.

But I didn't know Matt bazooki. I didn't know Matt's story. Yes. There was no metabolic mind. Yeah.

There was. Yeah. So at least I wasn't aware of them. I'm not sure exactly when they started.

But I think it literally was maybe four years ago, maybe five. Okay. So just for the

uninitiated, the bazookis are absolutely pioneering ground breaking science across multiple. I mean

multiple multiple studies. Yes. And they're really moving the needle on exactly what you're describing.

ketogenic diet for efficacy with mental health issues. Now it's funny. Right at this moment in

time, the beginning of 2026, like actually a lot. That's already it's already bear a lot of

born a lot of fruit. I say that right. There's a lot of fruit that's come out of these studies.

That are super meaningful. And I love that in our film, we have a lot of folks who have worked

with various versions of mental health through ketogenic diet. And that's so in a roundabout way,

we got to get it. Yes. We got to get in the tidbits of what you were interested in covering anyway.

Yes. But of course, a lot of these folks are only a mass hyperspawners. They see the cholesterol go

up. What do I do if this diet is absolutely changing my life? I've had to struggle with this thing.

I mean, some of these stories, Robin's story, for example, just something you've experienced

for decades. And you believe it's just the way it's going to be. You've been told that by your

physicians. Right. Matt Bazooki, coming from a family with a lot of means, visiting I think

something like more than two dozen clinicians, trying dozens of medications and finally being

told that he was treatment resistant. I'm sorry. You know, you're just going to have to take

sedatives for the rest of your life. And I just, I like, yeah, why can't there just

at least be an interest in diet as an option? I think it's coming around. Don't you feel like it's

coming around? I think so. I think we're so far away. It's, and I don't mean to say that pessimistically,

what I'm saying is I am a big believer in the 10% rule. I think that it's not when a paradigm

is shifting. It's not like it's 5% this year, 5% the next year, 5% the next year. You're off to it.

It's usually the hardest is that first 10% that, you know, certain people that are widely trusted

in the field and so forth and they're going, you know, actually, no, I'm looking at them.

And then there's a tipping point and all of a sudden a whole lot. So it may be that we're closer

on that paradigm shift. I just, I'll just, just to get this off my chest, options, just options,

right? Too often, I think outside of medication and surgery, it's difficult to get doctors

to look at things because in their defense, they're probably brought way too much stuff, you know,

crystal healing and I should, you know, have this specialty oil or something from this particular

company. And the person bringing the ketogenic diet as being helpful to them might be the 19th

person out of, you know, the 18 before that brought things that seem so demonstrably false,

right? Okay. That said, that said, is there enough promising data on hand that metabolic health

is meaningful for brain health? Yeah. Right. And what's the harm in trying a dietary approach?

Like it's not going to harm people. So yeah, I feel like Dr. Chris Palmer's work also is really

helping move the needle, having the mechanism behind why this dietary approach works. And that is

the shift in fuel, fuel sources and that shift for the brain to be able to uptake ketones

in a state of where it can't function on glucose anymore because of insulin resistance.

So I think that information is going to help a lot. It's not just like, oh, my diet works great.

I feel great on this diet. It's like, well, why does it work? And I think those questions are

being answered in a way now that haven't been answered before in the past in a scientific way

that clinicians can can believe in, I think. Oh, I'll can see this. I tend to find mechanisms

aren't as exciting to clinicians as I thought that they would be. You sound like a man speaking

from experience. Yeah. I find almost everybody gets more interested in the outcome data with regard

to risk because then they can just take it and go. Okay. The don't get me wrong. I wish clinicians

were more interested in the geeky aspects of it. But I think a lot of that, a lot of the mechanisms

help inform the way by which to do the experiments that help us get to that data better. Right? So

for example, how low carb, right? That's a that's another pet topic because we have so much research

that's coming out that feels almost like it's designed to give a black eye to low carb

because it's labeled low carb. But then once you get into seeing what the diets are, they're

35 or 40% carbohydrates, which the low carb community would never endorse. Yeah. It's it seems

it's a it's a frustration that I feel. Yeah. A lot of times. A keto like diet. Oh my gosh,

my least favorite. Yeah. Keto like. Yeah. And like just don't say keto. That it's not like a keto

diet. Yeah. That stuff is it does seem intentional. And it is frustrating to see that. Yeah. And

that's it's a you and I have chatted about this before. It's hard to come at this kind of topic.

And it's hard to know for sure the audience demand for it. But things like how a science gets

gamified when it seems like there are certain narratives being pushed. And I feel like in the case

of low carb and keto, there's just there's quite a lot of examples. I think there's a lot of

organizations trying to save their credibility. You know, frankly, you know, we've talked about

this as well. Major organizations that have been seeing a certain thing for many years

and there's wanting to stick with that their position, you know, bolster their position.

And so unfortunately, I think there is still that kind of thing going on.

There's that saying. It's not a fun saying, but it came from scientists, which is they say science

advances one funeral. Yes. And the idea behind it being that people stick with their opinions.

It's it's hard. It's it's always fascinating to me when somebody says, well, I've been doing

this for 30 years as a way to justify why they're giving the advice that they've been giving.

Like the fact that they've been doing it for 30 years, saying the same thing for 30 years

is a way to establish almost a seniority to the idea. But that's not how science works.

Yeah, you need to be open to new ideas. The other one, the other thing that I see that always

raises a red flag for me is people who are absolutely certain. Yes. People that are absolutely

certain that this is, we know this is the way that this is. And that's always a big red flag for

me. It's like, really, I mean, doesn't science progress? Don't our understandings of things

evolve like to be so certain about about in particular cholesterol. And you know, this topic,

it's really interesting to see people's, you know, putting that stake in the ground still

and not being open to new ideas, new research, new understandings like like your work, your study.

It doesn't even need to be a value judgment. It doesn't need to be a binary, you know,

your LDL cholesterol is all the way good or all the way bad, which I feel like the internet

breaks into. I'm not saying it won't turn out to be that way, just that. I never quite understand

why people say I can only entertain one possible way of thinking of this. Yeah. Even when there's more

data that's coming that that should be considered for at least a more nuanced opinion. That's

the alarm to me to follow the money as a journalist is like, okay, there's a vested interest in this

position. What could be driving that? So what's next for Wide Eye dare I ask? Oh, yes. Well,

we are really involved in getting this film out. Of course, you know, the cholesterol code,

it's just, it's so exciting to get it out to audiences. It's going to be really cool to do

these theatrical screenings and share the film with audiences and see people rally around the

information. And you and I were going to a bunch of them. Yeah. Yeah. That's going to be fun.

So we've got a busy couple months ahead of us. After that, we may take a little breather.

We are talking about some other film projects. We'll see if any of that comes to fruition.

You know, right now is a hard time to talk about a new film project because

it's all stupid. But you know, give me, give me six months. I'll probably be ready to rally again.

So, but it's right now it's going to be fun to just enjoy the release of the cholesterol code.

I think I think we've both earned. Yeah. A nice little, you know, let's get, because don't get me

wrong. We'll see after it's released released, whenever that turns out to be what the,

what the reception is, what steps we take next. There's a whole bunch of post-release events.

That'll be fun, I think, because there will be a lot of like watch parties and other things that

will keep the spirit alive. But out about you, I wouldn't mind not scripting for a little bit.

Yeah. Exactly. It really takes a level of perseverance to put these things together.

Again, whatever you think it is, I feel like I want to just say this to anybody. Whatever you think,

putting together a film is a good film. It's just, it's so much more. It's a lot. Yeah.

It's a lot of work, attention to detail, perseverance, not giving up. I don't know if I told you this

story, but we had exported the final film. We've been through, you know, so many months and months

of work, and I was watching the very final export of the film, and I was seeing

banding in some of the graphics. Just like, what is this? And it was like three or four of the

graphics. Instead of the nice smooth gradient, they had like this rainbow banding in the graphics.

I was like, ready to click upload, you know, to the DCP house. And no, there was an issue with a

couple of them that they weren't exported at the right bit rate. And so my calling and getting

and reading, you know, it's just, and you can't let it go. You know, that's my, I mean, I just can't,

it would be so tempting to just be like, oh, you know, but no, you just can't let it go. You have to

perfectionist to the end. Yes. And that's the time when you have to be even more of a perfectionist

is when you're tired. And when you've been working on something for a long time, you know, you just,

you can't, you can't let it slip. So so anyway, they're fixed.

You'll be happy to hear. So yeah, this is not really a spoiler, but it is at the very end of the

movie. I will say that I appreciate we were able to fit in a tribute slide at the at the end

for the, for the OG. Yeah. Dr. Bernstein, I, um, naturally, you know, game appreciates game.

Bern, he's a, he's a towering giant. And he should have three, five Nobel prizes by this point.

It's incredible. The journey he's gone through to help so many people, it's like, it's incalculable.

Yeah. Just, and so I, I love that I was able to interview him. I love that, um, I don't

want to spoil it, but interesting things happen toward the end. Yeah. It's just, it means a lot to me

that we got to pay tribute to him and his incredible work. Yeah. Yeah. And his contributions

for type 1 diabetes, which are, you know, amazing heroic, really. I mean, these families that

follow his protocol, including Johnny's family. And I just have to fit in at 89. That's why I was

interviewing him. He made it to 90, spoiler alert. Yeah. He was sharp. I know. He was on it. Like,

I, the, he was asking me questions with regard to social media. Like he was like, yeah, you seem

to be up on social media. He was, yeah. And I, I was, you know, if I'm being honest, I was a little

intimidated because he really, I never, I never had any conversation with a 90-year-old, 80 or

89 or 90-year-old that was as sharp as he was. Yeah. So I kept, I just kept thinking to myself,

man, he's such an amazing example. And like, the longer he lives, the more he's demonstrating it.

Because he didn't get that, that jumpstart. No. He had, in his early life, he had to deal with

what they were doing for treating diabetes, which as he described it was getting industrial strength

insulin levels. Yeah. Which, as we talked about in the film, is very associated with cardiovascular

disease. Yeah. So I'm sure it would have been a very interesting scenario if he could have had

his own protocol from day one, if he could have been like Johnny. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Who

knows? He may still be alive today. One thing I was, one regretter, one thing I was disappointed in

is he never got to see the film. No, I know. I know. It wasn't complete. And then he passed away. And

I was, I was so sad that he didn't get to see the film. But I've been in communication with his

daughter. And I think his daughter is going to be attending one of the screen. Yeah. But yeah,

it was unfortunate that he didn't get to see it. Yeah. Um, we, we have a whole bunch of other

people we interview in the film, Gary Talbs, Sean Baker, of course, Nick Norowitz, before he became

the jogger, not he now is. Yes. And it was really awesome to get people like Arthur Agustin.

Arthur Agustin. I was so pleased to get Arthur Agustin. The founder of the creator of the coronary

calcium score. I mean, there, there are, I mean, there are many Titans in this film. Yeah.

Which again, I think it's just a testament to these people and their passion for helping others.

Because it would be really easy for someone like Arthur Agustin or Gary Talbs to just say,

no, I don't have time. Yeah. Right. But they made the time. And they, you know, shared their

expertise. And they tell this, you know, through their interviews and, and your voice over,

it tells the story so well. So I also want to fit in one more thing that I know you and I are both

proud of a lot of documentaries, kind of aiming in one direction. And they feel, and that is a

majority term. But I'll just say what they feel like they often feel like they're the most

propagandaizing. You know, they're, they're trying to persuade and they're trying to make it sound

as if this is a case closed scenario. And there's no varying voices. There's no head, you know,

nuanced, you know, recognition, things like that. And I feel like our film really strikes a

strong balance. I feel like we have a lot of interesting voices internally that have differences

in perspective, same thing with the stories themselves. I think that the stories are not entirely

ubiquitous. And I think that's important to carry across to the viewers. Yeah. Yeah. For sure.

I mean, yeah, we definitely have people who are handling the high cholesterol in different ways,

which I thought was really important to, to include. Because that's life. Everyone has to make

these health decisions for themselves, you know, but, but getting the information and finding out

what's going on inside your own body and then making the decision for yourself. Ultimately,

that's, you know, what we all need to do, right? I think the varied voices in the film as a

testament to your work, though, two days. I mean, you have done such a great job of reaching out to

people who have different viewpoints from you. And I think you have made yourself really approachable

with people from, you know, across the spectrum on this topic. And so that made it easy for me,

you know, and talking to folks and lining up interviews and working with people. But yeah.

I hope so. I do believe it's super important for science. That there's a,

it's easier than ever to be in an echo chamber today. It's really easy. Yeah, especially the

social media. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's algorithms. It's supposed to interconnect us a bit more.

But it is fascinating to me how this day and age, you know, you can find yourself in a Facebook group,

you can find yourself in a discord. And it's just like a lot of like-mindedness that can gather

together and then rip on the rest of the world. And there's this commonality where they bring

in caricatures or take screenshots to then rally behind. And let's face it, even, you know,

it's not just the trolls on the internet, even the highest levels of academia. There's that potential.

And in order to get around that, it's a skill. We've got to all develop it. We have to be

interested and practiced at engaging with others and trying to, you know, understand that a little bit

better. Yeah. And don't write the ending before you begin. Yes. Exactly. That's that science. Yeah.

So I think this is a good spot to wrap up and ask you, how do people find you?

Oh, well, they can find us on our website at wideeye.tv, our company's wideeye production,

so wideeye.tv. And then just social media, you know, we have a fat fiction on Facebook is one of

our very active channels. And actually, we've been promoting a lot of cholesterol code through that

channel. You even have this hybrid. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Cause fat fiction had the pyramid. Yes.

And cholesterol code has like an upside down pyramid. Right. So it has this nice little

symmetry going between the two. And that I didn't realize until I put the logos together. I don't know

how I didn't realize that, but that was your triad. Yeah. And fat fiction is the food pyramid.

But we like, we like fat, we like the fat fiction Facebook page. Cause I would, I would say it's kind

of the most active community, ironically, because not only they wideeye fans, but a lot of them

have gone from fat fiction into cholesterol code. Right. Yeah. It's great. Yeah. We've had a lot of

interest. Yeah. So that's probably actively where we're promoting a lot of information. But then

also wideeye.tv on X is the other place. Yeah. So well, thank you so much for coming out and

jump it on. Thanks for having me, Dave. I really appreciate it. It's been quite the journey working

with you. And it's so great to be like, have the finish line in sight. Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

It's been a fun project. Really appreciate you bringing me into this project.

Oh, thank you. Yeah.